Shane Dorian, a bow hunter and surfer recommended by Ben O’Brien, shares his harrowing near-death wipeout at Mavericks (1:10 underwater) and breath-hold training progress from 2:15 to over 5 minutes. His shift from surfing to hunting began after wild pigs ravaged his garden in New Zealand’s steep terrain, where he now hunts introduced species like Himalayan tar goats with precision. Dorian contrasts hunting’s primal, tax-funded conservation role with urban activists’ disconnect, citing Hawaii’s sacred land protests and Australia’s shark attack controversies. Solo backcountry hunts—facing lightning storms, altitude sickness—reveal his love for solitude, while his nine-year-old son already hunts wild boars with a 30-pound bow. The episode ends with Dorian’s return to CrossFit, yoga (including his wife’s "booty yoga" with twerking), and his Instagram (@ShaneDorian), blending gritty wilderness survival with unexpected humor. [Automatically generated summary]
The crazy is, you know, it's funny about sharks is I was, I was, there's, you know, growing up, I always thought, you know, the only real sharks I had to worry about were, you know, great whites.
And, you know, I was born and raised in Hawaii.
That's where I grew up surfing.
And, you know, I always thought like great white sharks are always in like really cold places.
I don't really have to worry around home.
And, They've been finding a ton of great white sharks around where I live now.
They're all over Hawaii now.
Great white sharks are actually warm-blooded, so they can actually...
They can totally adjust their body temperature to be able to totally survive and thrive in warm water as well as cold.
She actually surfed some of the biggest waves all year last year.
She got towed into a place called Jaws on Maui and was surfing 50-foot waves with one arm, you know, getting pounded by giant waves, and she paddles into some huge waves with one arm.
Uh, usually a pretty, pretty short amount of time, but it really varies.
Um, you know, the, the, the worst thing about surfing really big waves and the, we've had a lot of people die surfing big waves and it is super dangerous.
Um, the thing that kills people is getting held under for two waves.
So if you fall on a wave, like if you take off on a wave and you fall and you're underwater for a super long time, and this has happened to me a Really far.
And then you start, you know, the wave holds you under and is rolling you along the reef towards the shore.
And you're underwater near the bottom or at the bottom.
And then the wave just starts to dissipate and lose a little bit of power so you can finally start swimming up.
And then the next wave is, meanwhile, it's on its way.
And you're swimming up, swimming up, and the wave's coming at you.
And you don't get a breath and the wave takes you straight back down.
The only reason I know that is because I had a terrible wipeout at a big wave place in Northern California called Mavericks.
It was my first trip ever there, and I was having this awesome trip.
It's one of the best big waves in the world.
I always wanted to go there, but I was pretty scared of it, and I ended up going there.
The first day I was there was super good.
I had a blast.
I didn't fall once.
I just had a dream session.
Caught all these big waves.
Thought I was killing it.
Next day, it just absolutely smashed me.
I took off on a wave.
Ate shit down the face, got sucked over the falls, held under forever on the reef, and I was swimming towards the surface, and the next wave was like a 50-foot face, broke right on top of me, shoved me straight back down to the reef, and as I was swimming up to try and get a breath, I was doing those involuntary, you know, when you're going...
Like that.
And I was like, shit, I gotta get a breath now.
And then all of a sudden I was at the bottom.
And yeah, it was really scary.
It was the scariest time of my life.
And meanwhile, there was a woman on a boat and she was filming the whole ordeal.
My board was like, they call it tombstoning, where you can only see half your board and there's a leash, right?
And you're connected to the bottom.
And the board was like this.
And you can only see half the board for like, and the next wave passed me by and my board was still like that.
Holding your breath for a minute while you're struggling, and also your adrenaline's kicking in, you're freaking out, and you're realizing that you've got to get some air soon.
There's a big connection between jujitsu and surfing.
A lot of people that I know that love jujitsu also love surfing, and they do it all the time.
And that breath thing is something that comes into play in both situations, because if you're in a bad position, Like if someone's choking you or something like that, you can relax and stay calm and kind of barely get out of things.
Whereas if you freak out and you start hyperventilating or panicking, you just have to tap.
You run out of gas, you run out of air, and then the choke sinks in deeper.
Some people are just really good at surfing and for some reason that like Hicks and Gracie is a famous example He's really good at yoga, which is also really big for controlling your breath and staying calm and Regulating your heart rate and then he's also, you know, obviously a master jiu-jitsu, but he loves surfing and I think in some way those things are kind of connected that you have to maintain some sort of control over your physical body and Yeah, for sure.
I mean, if you think you can hold your breath for...
Like, if right now you try to hold your breath and you can only make it a minute, for sure you can hold your breath for three.
100%.
It's all in your mind.
If you believe that you're going to be fine, your body tells you that you need to breathe.
For that course, I think the first day I tried to hold my breath, And I'm in relatively good shape and I never ever practice holding my breath at all But you know, I've you know pretty good lung capacity because I I was training all the time, especially at that time The longest I could hold my breath the first day was like two minutes and 15 seconds or something like that And then by day the end of day three I was holding it for five minutes and 34 seconds.
Yeah, it's crazy that they figured out, like, you know, I mean, technology for every single thing, but they don't have some sort of, you know...
I was thinking it would be so, you know, like with...
In this day and age, like, we can do the craziest shit with technology.
Like, why can't they put buoys around a surf break with, like, some weird magnetic thing that shoots down to the bottom of the ocean at that, you know, where it's like 30 feet deep, you know, like a half mile out from the break, and then everyone can swim there, everyone can surf there, whatever the hell it is.
I can go down the beach no matter how shitty of a day I had, no matter how much stress, whatever.
Like if my kid's getting a bad report card or I had to pay my taxes or whatever the hell it was, I can just put on my trunks, drive down to the beach, grab my board, and I'm good.
As soon as I hit the water, I'm fine.
And that's how I am with bowhunting and people who don't Bowhunt, they don't understand that.
They're like, why the hell do you do that?
What do you find good about that, being out in the forest for days at a time?
Well, obviously I've never surfed, but the bowhunting thing is so difficult and so primal.
And I think it hits some weird ancient switches inside your DNA from back when people needed a bow and arrow to survive.
And when you were hunting an animal...
It's so primitive.
There's something about rifle hunting that's not nearly as satisfying.
Rifle hunting is all exciting, and it's way more effective, and you certainly have more success, and there's more range to it, but it's not nearly the same feeling.
There's a switch that goes off that I think is a part of being a human being from the thousands of years of us shooting bows and arrows at things to stay alive.
That reward is like triggered somehow or another deep inside whatever it is that makes you a person.
You work so hard for that opportunity, whatever it is, an elk or a deer or whatever the hell it is, and you bust your ass and you're on your hands and knees in the hot sun.
You know, you're over there freezing your ass off in the dark waiting for it to get light and you pack all your shit from the trailhead for miles and all this hard work and all the thousands of arrows you shoot at your target and all of a sudden it comes down to this millisecond where the elk stops in front of you.
And you're sitting there full draw and it's like the moment of the truth, you know, and it's It's super technical and really difficult, and a lot of people suck at it, and that's why it's so rad.
Yeah, it's very technical, and that is something that I just never took into account when I saw people shooting bows and arrows.
I'm like, oh, your left arm straight, your right arm pulls back, you make sure you aim, you let it go, and it seems kind of like a rifle.
With a rifle, what do you do?
You center the reticle, you squeeze the trigger, make sure you don't jerk it, and you're good.
There's so much more involved in the anchoring of where the string hits the corner of your mouth, where your hand rests below your jaw, making sure that your elbow's not too low, not too high, your back muscles are pulling.
It's even more so when you spend all that time in the mountains and you bring it home and you care for that meat, make sure it's not dirty, make sure it's not spoiled, make sure it's taken care of perfectly.
You go in my freezer and I'm actually kind of a slob in a lot of different areas of my life.
I don't make my bed a lot of times or whatever it is.
Now, when it comes to the meat, it's perfect.
Total nerd alert.
You go in and it's like everything's packaged perfectly.
Everything's a perfect size.
Everything's itemized, like cut, date, animal, species.
Well, there's a deep respect for that animal that I don't think people who just buy their meat at a grocery store, I don't think they could ever understand it.
I think you can kind of intellectualize it and you can kind of imagine what it's like, but I don't think you could ever really understand it.
I moved from the beach where I lived my whole life up to the mountains and I bought a piece of property and everything I planted got dug up by wild pigs.
So there's wild boars all over the property and my wife started getting pissed and And I didn't know what to do.
I wanted to plant fruit trees and all this stuff and everything was getting knocked over and smashed by all the pigs.
And so my buddy was like, dude, shoot him with a gun and shoot a couple and they'll beat it.
And so he gave me this shotgun or whatever.
I shot him with a shotgun and immediately gave it back to him.
I was like, I'm not a gun guy.
I'm not into the loud noises and I just was over it.
So I gave it back and I didn't know what to do.
I didn't know if I needed to fence my property.
I didn't want to do that because I didn't want to mess up their natural...
I didn't have a pattern either.
They were there long before I was.
And my next door neighbor was a bow hunter.
He had an extra bow.
So I would go over to his house and have a couple beers and shoot arrows.
Once I could group some arrows, he said I was ready to go hunting.
And he took me boar hunting.
The first night, all these pigs were there, and I totally blew it.
I got to full draw, and my arrow fell off the rest, and ding, ding, ding, and they all ran.
I made a bunch of noise, but that was it.
The next day, I went and bought a used Matthews bow down at the, you know, like down at the bow shop, and I started...
Building tree stands by my house and, you know, trying to like throw bait down for the pigs to come.
I hunted there this year, and we hunted in some places that I didn't even hunt.
All I did was take pictures and stare at the mountains.
It was mind-boggling how incredibly beautiful it was.
We were hunting these mountain goats called tar.
They're from the Himalayas.
They're these hairy goats with this big giant sable fur thing and really small horns and they live in like these glaciers and these like vertical cliffs.
Maybe like a thousand foot cliff at the top of like a five thousand foot mountain of like a granite cliff, like a little step ledge in it that's like six inches wide and that's where the tar would be standing, one tar.
Yeah, I was with Remy Warren and we spotted one and it's not like, you know, like where I come from, like you go hunt axis deer, you could see a thousand deer.
We're looking at something that just doesn't even look real.
We're looking at these goats that are walking along the face of this cliff, and the cliff is almost 90 degrees.
It's almost up and down.
And these things are somehow or another finding footholds where their whole body, like the side of their body, is slammed up against the side of the mountain, and they're making it up this cliff.
When I was hunting those goats in New Zealand, those tar, just below where they were, there was these rolling hills, really steep still, but it was rolling hills with grass.
They choose to be on the rocks because they actually eat some weird stuff that grows...
It's really hard to appreciate how hardcore that kind of hunting is unless you do it.
I'm going to piss people off when I say this, but 98% of the hunting that happens in America is like, park your truck, walk to your tree stand, get in the tree stand, play...
We play words with friends until the deer comes underneath the tree stand, get the full draw, and, you know, you got your tag filled, which is great.
I'm sure it's a blast.
And I like tree stands and all that stuff.
But that kind of hunting is just like, it's weird how hunting is clumped in to like, oh, you're a hunter.
And that's all people sort of need to know.
You know, there's like so many different kinds of hunting and so many different ways to do it, different weapons, different approaches, different, you know, it's like crazy.
Like some people are shooting animals at, you know, 1500 yards with high-powered rifles.
They want to be as far as possible.
That's the goal.
And for us, it's like we want to be as close as possible.
And it's really interesting because Remy, you know, Remy's a really good athlete and he's also just a really smart guy.
And what he does is he tries to mimic all of the behavior of predatory animals, like wolves, and he'll do, like, him and a bunch of his friends were doing some sort of, like, a chase the same way that a wolf would chase down an elk.
And one of the things that he did was he put on a ghillie suit and he crawled up to these antelope and just slowly creeped his way up to these antelope.
And as long as you're patient and you move slow, like, he got within, like, seven feet of fucking antelope.
Like, there's this big-ass fucking 300-pound bear, and it's not making a single sound as it's walking, because they have soft pads, and they're predators.
So they're just fucking creeping.
You know, and that's kind of like the idea of the approach.
I'm from Hawaii, so I don't know anything about bears.
So I think they're all like yogi bear.
They're coming to grab your jam and hang out and camp with you.
They want a hug or something like that.
I went hunting.
I did a do-it-yourself, over-the-counter tag elk hunt with my buddy from Hawaii.
We were in Colorado.
And we hiked into this area and we're all excited.
We didn't know shit about elk hunting.
I didn't know how to call them.
I didn't know what they did.
I didn't know how they worked.
I read some articles.
I didn't know what the hell was going on.
And so we drop off our stuff and we've got about an hour to hunt and then we're going to come back and set up our little camp there at like a creek.
So I do a big loop.
I come back a little bit early.
I'm like, I'm going to set up my tent and stuff.
And I get to one side of the creek and my friend's across the creek setting up his tent and getting our food out, like salami and whatever else kind of food we had.
And I was just about to like yell out to him like, hey, did you see anything?
I was like maybe 60 yards away from him.
And I looked to my left and there's a bear, a big bear, big black bear, standing on his hind legs.
It looked like one of those targets, you know, those big old targets you shoot.
One of those things.
And he was just staring at my friend.
He had no idea I was there.
The bear didn't know I was there.
And my friend had no idea the bear was there.
He's sitting there like butt crack hanging out, like getting all the food out and this bear just staring at him from across the creek.
I read this story on a bow hunting magazine, and it was a story about this guy and his son, and they were hunting elk.
I'm not sure which state, but the son was in the front, and he was set up, and the dad was in the back, probably 60 yards back, and the dad was cow calling, and there was a bull there, and he was starting to come into the call.
And so the kid was standing there waiting for his shot, and the dad was sitting there cow calling behind him.
And all of a sudden, the elk runs off, and they thought the wind had waffled on them or something.
And right behind the elk, like 50 yards past the elk, was a giant grizzly bear standing straight up, staring at him.
And the kid started getting nervous.
The bear started hightailing it straight at the kid.
And the kid turned and started running at the dad.
And as the kid and the dad went to full draw, he had a bow.
It was archery season.
He had no gun.
So the dad grabbed his bow, got an arrow on, Somehow had the clarity to get to full draw.
As the kid passed his dad, the dad made a perfect shot on the bear.
The bear right then catches up to the kid, dives on the kid, and starts mauling him and ends up dying on the kid.
And there was a picture in the article, it was incredible, there's a picture in the magazine of the kid and he's covered, covered head to toe in blood.
The bear died on him, like a heart shot, blood all over him.
People are so strange, our detachment from wildlife, that when you're actually around them, even just around an elk, like, when you're around an elk and elk are calling and they're making those crazy sounds, you're like, what the fuck?
I was in California at Tahone Ranch last year, and these two huge elk were smashing horns.
They were both like 360-class elk, which is like, for people listening, just enormous antlers, six points on each side, thousand-pound animals just running at each other.
Head-butting each other and stabbing each other.
And while we were there, they found one enormous bull that had been killed by another bull.
Been stabbed in the side and punctured his lungs and was just laying there.
Please, if they decide 50 yards to make a mad dash you, he's got a boner and this chick got scared off and he decides it's you that scared off and just go spear you.
They have no problem.
Do you see the one where there's a guy sitting on the side of the road as a photographer?
There's a real recent one, and they actually wind up euthanizing the elk, because this elk fucked with this dude for like, the video's like 10 minutes long.
The elk's just like headbutting this guy, and the guy's sitting there, trying to cover his head as a spike, a really young bull.
And this photographer's just hanging there, and this bull starts headbutting him.
First of all, It's really like one of the best animals, like from a conservation standpoint, it's one of the best animals to kill because they don't have any predators.
And so if you don't kill them, well, the only thing that kills bears is other bears.
So where we hunt in Alberta, there's a giant population.
I mean, it's not uncommon to see 20, 30 bears in a day.
Well, it decimates not just the moose population, the deer population, but the crazy thing is, it's bad for the bear population for there to be this many bears, because the boars eat cubs.
Fall is supposed to be the best, because the fall bears are eating berries.
I've only killed spring bears, but spring bears taste really good.
Like I was saying, from an ecological standpoint or from a conservation standpoint, it's probably one of the most important animals to kill, other than, say, white-tailed deer, because there's 2 million or so, what was the number?
Like 1.5 million car accidents in the United States alone.
200 people die in the United States every year from hitting deer with their cars.
When the sheriff talked about it, oh, I thought he was retarded!
It is like a comedy!
I think it's a comedy, and I want to talk to Werner Herzog because he's supposed to...
Apparently we're in contact with his people and we're trying to work something out because he's got something else that he's promoting, but there's no other documentaries that he does that are funny like that.
Nature's just decided, like, there's just too much shit in this ocean, and so we're going to just develop this insane thing that doesn't even get to sleep.
I was on a plane when that happened, and I was landing in Honolulu, and I turned my phone on, and I had all these crazy messages from all my friends, because it's a really small world in the surf world.
That was no accident that this giant great white shark was within a couple feet of him.
Yeah, look at that.
Everyone's like, oh, it wasn't trying to attack him.
It didn't mean anything.
That great white shark is that close to a human being.
It was having a real good look, you know, I think.
I can't even imagine what that, you know, just looking there in the thing, like looking at the eyeball, it would have been right there like staring at him, you know.
And he said he was just hitting the thing as hard as he possibly could.
When I buy my tag for Colorado, I buy it for $600.
$550 goes straight to conservation.
That's awesome.
That's why there are so many animals.
That's a really healthy system of how to increase populations, how to take care of habitat, how to hire more park rangers, how to buy more land and make bigger reservations and bigger conservation areas.
People don't like it because it's one of those weird kind of gray area things where it just doesn't make you feel comfortable thinking that the money that has come...
First of all, the only reason why there's elk in all the habitats that they're at right now is because hunters introduced them to those areas.
They were decimated by the turn of the 19th century or the 20th century.
So in the early 1900s, there was very few elk left in this country.
So the Rocky Mountain Elk Federation spent considerable amounts of money, resource, man hours, moving animals into these areas like Kentucky.
Like Kentucky has like a huge elk population now.
There was nothing there just 30, 40 years ago.
Nothing.
Zero.
So they've figured out a way to not just maintain populations so hunters can kill them, but they've also reintroduced them to areas where they didn't exist before.
I understand it for people that are animal rights lovers, but I just wish they had a more balanced perspective and they understood what all the pieces that are in place are.
It's an uncomfortable thing for a lot of people to think that the people who want to hunt and kill and eat these animals are the ones that love them the most.
Well, there's not enough money I mean, if they really wanted to do the kind of work that the hunters are doing, they'd have to have some stream of revenue.
And the stream of revenue that is coming from hunting is all coming from tags.
It's all coming from the sale of hunting gear and products.
And there's just no way they can match that.
There's no way.
There's millions of hunters.
Millions of hunters that are contributing literally a billion dollars.
It's probably more than a billion dollars a year that goes to conservation.
Yeah, it's a very enjoyable, deeply rewarding experience just to be out there trying and attempting it.
And when you are successful, it makes it that much more rewarding because you know how difficult it is.
Especially when you're doing it with a bow and arrow.
I mean, you have to get within...
I mean, if you're really fucking good, you could shoot something within 90 yards, but for the most part, you're trying to get somewhere within 30, 40 yards.
So I guess the taxes is the billion, the 7.1 billion.
The rest of it is tags, which is $2.9 billion a year.
It's amazing.
It is amazing.
Again, it's the people that live in the cities that are disconnected, and I was one of them.
I mean, if you talked to me, if you got a hold of me, you know, 20 years ago, when I never even considered hunting, and you asked me about, like, hunting, I'd be like, assholes shooting an animal.
I mean, that's the funniest one is like vegans with cats.
More than 1.42 billion dollars through state hunting and fishing license.
Wow, that's incredible.
1.4 billion dollars in conservation comes from hunting and fishing license sales.
608 million from other revenue, 749 million through excise taxes, paid solely by sportsmen.
That's amazing.
Yeah, that's where the money comes.
That money's not going to be replaced by people who love animals.
And that's also...
There's a lot of people that think of hunters like the characters in a movie, like an Elmer Fudd, like some asshole who hates animals.
But when you listen to really good hunting podcasts, like there's this guy Jay Scott, he's got a really good hunting podcast, and Cody Rich has the Rich Outdoors, and Steve Rinella has the Meat Eater podcast.
Which is my favorite.
You're listening to really intelligent, really smart, well-educated people that understand a lot about conservation, the environment, the animals they're pursuing.
And when they're talking about tactics and strategies and details and all the different areas that you're hunting, all the different places where you're putting in for tags, you realize this is a complex...
System that they're trying to navigate in order to be successful.
It's fucking very very difficult and it's primal as fuck.
The whole thing is like it's a wild experience and like literally wild and many different levels.
Yeah, and just that yeah, I just I don't know I can't get enough of it.
I swear like I I I feel like I I like I measure my success Not so much now because my kids are a family guy and that's basically all I care about is my kids these days.
But I swear, it's like I measure my success by how many days a year I spend in camouflage.
That's how I know I had a super good year, is if I went hunting a lot.
I swear.
And if I don't hunt for a while, my wife will call my friend and be like, dude, you've got to take Shane hunting.
The surfing thing, even though you're on a board that's made out of composite materials and you've got wax on it and all this jazz and it's all created by a factory.
But there's something about you're introducing your life or your being into the natural world of the ocean.
And you feel something.
Like, they say that the ocean has some sort of an electromagnetic, like, feel to it.
Like, there's something about the ocean.
Because it's essentially alive.
You know, it has living things in it, but there's oxygen in the water, and that's how these plants grow, and when there's dead spots, that's why these fish die.
It's not just like an ecosystem, it's almost like a giant living thing.
And you're swimming around in that thing, sort of absorbing its life force.
I swear, surfing a lot, being in the sun, being in the ocean a lot, and not sitting there frying yourself or anything like that, but just spending a life in the ocean and in the sun is just good for you.
I know people who are in their 50s and 60s and are healthy.
They look young.
They don't have tons of physical problems.
I don't know.
I think it's good for you.
I think spending time in the outdoors, whether you're in the mountains with your boat or whether you're in the ocean doing whatever you're doing is just good.
No, all those things are, I mean, you're living a very natural life in a lot of ways in that way, you know?
And, again, there's also the satisfaction element.
Just like the people who grow a garden can kind of, and I have a garden, I get it, is there's a connection.
Like, if I grow some tomatoes and some kale and I put together a salad and I'm eating that salad, I'm like, I know, not only do I know where this came from, I was there.
I put the seeds in.
I watered it.
I made sure it got fertilized.
There's something deeply satisfying about making your own food that you grow or that you go and get as opposed to going to a supermarket.
If you do a side-by-side comparison with someone who didn't hunt, they may not feel the same way.
But because you packed it out, you put all the time in on the target, you did all the hunting, you looked forward to it for six months, that hunt, and that's the best tasting steak you're ever going to have.
Because you have the pride of knowing that you did it all yourself.
Yeah, it's certainly a very very different feeling now living in Hawaii and Being a white guy What is that like because people say weird things about I've never found Hawaiians to be racist or rude or weird But I've heard crazy shit and I've always wondered like if that crazy shit is from like rude Americans that come over there and like are disrespectful or act like they own the place or well There's a little bit of both.
There's, you know, I mean, I grew up, I mean, I was born and raised in Hawaii, so I saw a lot of this, you know, like in high school and, you know, like in elementary school, like if you're a white, like everybody wanted to be a Hawaiian when they were young, right?
Like everybody in my school, like if you're a white, you kind of wish you weren't.
So there was a thing, it was called Kill Haole Day, and it was always the end of the year, and it was like, I don't even know if they actually practiced it when I was a kid, but it was still, it was a thing.
And it was a thing where, like, Hawaiians would be like...
This is it.
We're almost out of school.
Let's beat up some Haoles or whatever.
It didn't really happen when I was a kid, but there was a thing called Kill Haole Day and people would talk about it.
But times have definitely changed.
And the other thing is there's a huge difference between a white dude who was born in Hawaii and a white guy who moved to Hawaii.
So if you're from Hawaii, Born and raised in Hawaii is totally different than if you're a dude from Orange County that moved to Hawaii when you're 18 and then next to you you're trying to talk like the Hawaiians and stuff.
That's when people freak.
That's when people lose it.
When a dude rolls up with the Hawaiian stickers on their truck and jumps out and is trying to act like a local dude.
Yeah, it's just like, I don't know how to explain it, but it gets a little complicated.
But if you show people respect, you know, if you're chill, if you paddle out in the water at a localized break and you're mellow, you don't have a bunch of ding-dongs with you, if you paddle out by yourself and you show respect and you're mellow, then everyone gives you respect.
If you get off the plane at my house, and you get a convertible Mustang rent-a-car, and someone's going 45 and a 55 in a lifted truck, you don't pass them.
You know what I mean?
If you pass them, they'll chase you down, and they will.
They had their awesome system of the people in the mountains.
They trade with the people at the beach for food and sustenance and that's how they live.
You know, there's the mountain people, there's the ocean people and nobody owned any land.
There was no concept of owning land.
People just shared and got along and they had their system that worked.
You know, it was a gnarly time too.
There was a lot of Gnarly stuff that was going on.
It was like a radical time to live.
If you did something bad, you're executed and all kinds of crazy shit like back in the day.
But, you know, when the white dude showed up, when Captain Cook showed up and the missionary showed up in their boats and they were trading a musket for like a hundred thousand acre ranch, you know, it was like, shit got crazy in Hawaii.
And you can feel that nowadays.
I mean, there's a lot of Hawaiians that are getting pushed out.
You know, all these people live in different places on the mainland and make a bunch of money, and then they retire in Hawaii because who wouldn't, right?
Everybody wants to live in Hawaii.
But they bring their money to Hawaii, it drives the value up, and then the Hawaiians can't live there anymore.
They get pushed out to these areas that are less desirable, that are...
And they can't make money in Hawaii.
So there's a lot of resentment.
There's a crazy dynamic in Hawaii, and you feel that.
It just seems odd because there's so many of these multi-million dollar vacation estates that are by the beach and that's like some crazy fuck you CEO type money that you have to have to have one of these things.
How weird is it?
These people, they come to this place and they occupy this spot, but there's a bunch of people that have been here and their ancestors have been here for a thousand plus years and this is kind of their area.
There's every single one of those guys in the Fortune 500, all the CEOs, all the guys from every big, giant tech company, they all have houses where I live.
Well, I got that text from you this morning, the text that you sent me.
Fuck L.A. traffic.
That's all it said.
It's just you realize, like, this place is the exact opposite of the Big Island.
I mean, this place is some strange sort of magnet for weirdos, and everybody's just getting sucked into this giant population center, and you try to get anywhere, even in the middle of the day.
I mean, you were here at noon, so you're driving around at 11 a.m.
You'd feel 11 a.m., everybody's at work, no big deal.
Jammed, bumper to bumper.
You should go out at 4 just so you want to kill yourself.
People judge me on who I am as a person and what I do and how I, I don't know, I feel just like it's a little bit more, It's just a little bit more real, I guess, and just, you know, more down to earth where I live.
But I also don't live in like the, you know, I live in kind of a small town.
So it's like coffee farms and ranches and it's pretty chill where I live, you know.
I don't know, I should look it up, but the Big Island of Hawaii, there's like all these like climate zones, and they always say that, I forget the exact numbers, but it's like out of like these certain sort of climate zones throughout the world, like the Big Island has like 11 of the 13 or something like that.
So, like, if you get in your car and drive for, like, two hours, you'll go through, like, if you just, like, happen to, like, go to sleep and wake up, like, 15 minutes later, everything looks different.
Go to sleep, wake up 15 minutes later, everything looks different again.
It's, like, it changes so much, you know?
It's wild.
It's, like, lava field and desert and, like, a dryland forest and there's, like, a rainforest and jungle and it's just bizarre.
I try to go every year to the observatory, Keck Observatory, when there's no moon, so you can see the stars, just to freak myself out.
Because I went once, many years ago, and it just changed my world.
The one experience, it was like literally being on a spaceship.
It changed the way I looked at the world.
For people who don't know, there's all these light diffusers, these diffused light lamps all around the Big Island so that it doesn't give any light pollution to the Keck Observatory, which is one of the biggest telescopes in the continental United States.
It's not the continental United States, right?
In the U.S. In the world, I think, even, the Keck Observatory.
I mean, the land where those telescopes are built, it's considered sacred land by a lot of, I mean, basically every single Hawaiian group that there is.
But there's a designated area within that sacred land that is designated for astronomy and all that stuff.
But they have all these giant telescopes that are owned by different countries.
China has theirs and the US has theirs.
Soviet Union, whatever.
All these big countries span all these billions of dollars to make their telescopes, and there are some of them that are completely obsolete, and they're not even being used anymore.
So instead of taking those four or five down that they're not even using anymore and building a new big one, they just wanted to build a whole other big one.
So there was a lot, people were up in arms about it and it was going to be the largest building on the big island as well.
So people were just up in arms about it and there was all kinds of, you know, people got super activated and really started protesting the whole thing and blocking the road and people were getting arrested and all my friends were involved and everybody was against it and protesting.
But it seems like if they have telescopes they're not using anymore, maybe it's just a financial issue where it costs a lot of money to break them down and put a new one in the place and it's not as financially efficient as starting a new one.
When I, yeah, when I, I don't speak Pigeon, but when I'm having beers with, with, with, with the, you know, when I'm at home and I'm a couple beers deep, then yeah, it starts like slipping out every now and then, but yeah.
Well, I would think that, like, activities, like for you surfing, obviously you would meet other surfers, bow hunting, you'd meet other bow hunters, you'd find common ground, you'd make some friends if you had to move to a place like that.
But if you don't have like a real obvious thing that you like to do, that other people like to do as well, I would say that would become a real issue.
You don't want to, like, move somewhere or live some life where you don't really know what's going on or don't know why you're doing what you're doing.
And just the sharpness and the quickness and the pace that people's brains work in comedy or even just in L.A., just the pace of how quick people are thinking and talking and acting and being and living.
And then you go to a place like Hawaii, it takes most people like three or four or five days or a week to just chill the hell out and relax a little bit.
In a lot of other places, you kind of sort of can't do it.
It's very illegal, or the areas aren't large enough to just really get out.
But yeah, I do the tent.
I do the super ultralight thing.
I bring my own water.
We're all being a...
If there's water in the area, I'll bring a pump.
A whole deal.
Ultralight bag, ultralight tent, ultralight all my sleeping gear.
A lot of times I'll do the bivvy thing where you hunt all day and then you sleep wherever it gets dark.
And that's the best.
But just what you were saying about being alone to think, finally.
It's like, I don't know.
It's like we're so used to being entertained all the time.
And that's something that people are addicted to.
Whether it's your phone or even if me and you went hunting.
A lot of time, I'd be your entertainment, or you'd be my entertainment.
But when no one's entertaining you, and you're by yourself, and you're just out there, and you're making your own fires, and you're waking up, and you're doing your own hunt, and you're not relying on a guide or a friend, or, okay, I'm gonna hunt over there, you hunt over here, and you're just doing your own thing.
And even if you're not even hunting, just being silent, you're not talking to yourself, so you're not talking to anybody.
You're not talking on your phone, you're not communicating with anyone.
And after four or five days, I did this at home.
I did a hunt where I left my house, had my wife drop me off, and I did this long walk over this giant mountain.
Bad idea.
But it was awesomely fun.
And I camped out for like four days and I ended up hurting my leg really bad.
I like pulled a muscle behind my knee.
And I was planning on going back and having my wife pick me up again.
And halfway there, and normally you have no service in this area.
It's like a black zone.
And so I hiked to an area where I found service and I couldn't walk back.
I was too screwed up.
My knee was too screwed up.
Anyway, I called my friend who had access to a ranch.
At the very top of this ranch, I could walk to it.
But he was telling me that when he goes off to these trips, because he does most of his hunt solo, and that's really where he detaches and centers himself, but he says he comes back after being out there for eight or nine days, and he He hasn't said a word in eight or nine days and he says it just feels weird to talk to people.
So it was a lot of hiking, a lot of walking, and...
Just being by yourself and then the snow component for somebody from Hawaii.
It's like it was snowing every day and I was cooking in my tent and eating and snowing and elk were coming in at night and screaming their guts out.
Then there was like a crazy lightning storm and wind storm.
I had to pack up my tent in the middle of the night.
I thought it was going to blow over.
I thought trees were going to hit me.
I had to go into like a dense pine forest.
And reset up my tent in the middle of the night during a lightning storm.
I had to call my wife in the middle of the night and like, you know, let her know exactly where I was just in case the shit hit the fan.
But that type of stuff is, um, you know, a lot of bears in that area and lions and a lot of shit.
So, um, those types of experience for, I didn't ever had those kinds of experiences before I started hunting ever.
I never saw that, that kind of country.
I never, I never put myself in those kinds of situations.
And, and, Until I found bow hunting, that's the reason.
I was never like, I'm going to go hiking.
I'm not a hiker.
I need to have a purpose when I'm hiking, right?
So I'm basically like a hiker with a bow these days, and that's what gets me out to these kind of places and had some of the best experiences of my life just because I found bow hunting.
Well, those woods and where you're going, these places where you're not going to run into any other people, there's a feeling that you get from those environments.
It's almost like a loneliness in a way.
There's awe, right?
Because it's so beautiful and so incredible.
But it's also humbling in a bunch of different ways.
One of the ways it's humbling is because this woods doesn't give a fuck about you.
If you die, it's like, so what?
Grizzlies keep fucking eating, elk keep having sex, and screaming their heads off, and birds keep flying, and that's just how we've always done it, dude.
And that's another perspective enhancer, to realize, like, you're so goddamn lucky you have a roof overhead, and that, you know, you can listen to the radio in your car, and that you can get around, and it's easy, and you can talk to people on your phone.
When you're out in just the woods, woods, no cell phone service, no nothing, there's nothing.
Until you've been head to toe soaking wet in your boots and your socks and your pants and your rain gear and everything that's supposed to keep you warm and safe from the elements is soaked to the bone.
Well, that's when the right gear, you know, there's a lot of hunts that you don't really need the right gear for some hunting.
But in that backcountry stuff or in real steep mountains or stuff where you have to walk far, if your shoes are wet and your socks are wet, you're going to get the gnarliest blisters and you won't be able to walk anywhere.
That's why I'm really fascinated by companies like Kuyu that spend all this time developing the most technical gear, like the lightest weight, the best at absorbing wind for their tents.
And they go through great lengths to engineer their products to make sure that it's just...
I mean, it's a giant company that just makes ultralight gear for hunting.
It's kind of crazy that there's a company like that.
Yeah, but you can see why when you go in the backcountry hunt and you don't have the right gear, that's the last kind of hunting you're going to do like that.
Right when I got into bow hunting, I got bored of feeding pigs and having them come to my house and having them come to my tree stand.
I got bored of that pretty quick.
It was super fun at first, and I loved it.
It was really good learning, and it was a blast building tree stands by myself.
But I super quickly got bored of that and wanted to do something else.
I wanted to go walk in the mountains all day long.
I ordered Cameron Haynes' Backcountry Bowhunting book.
This is right when I started hunting.
I had no idea who Cameron Haynes was and I just was geeking out on everything hunting.
I did some research, found that book, ordered it.
It changed my life.
It's funny because I told Cameron that.
I told him that I got his book and it fully inspired me.
I ordered the ultralight tent, the right one.
I did all this research on which one to get, which one was lightest, which one was the driest, which one was the best to cook in, which one had the biggest vestibule.
I ordered the right stove and all the right ultralight Plates and forks and camp cups and sleeping bags and the little towel that packs up tiny and the pillow that packs up tiny and the right backpack and all that stuff.
It's funny because when you're shaving ounces it really adds up.
It's like a difference between an 80 pound pack and a 40 pound pack if you get the right gear.
I got so geeked out on the ultralight thing that I started looking at all of ultralight hiking websites and getting all the tips.
like instead of just bringing like a little spork you know one of those like little sport the ultralight sporks you cut your fork in half or even like in just one-third so you just had the fork just a fork part so like you you'd you would shave off those ounces of the rest of the fork you just be the part where you just ate you know and your toothbrush you cut it so it was just the part that goes on your teeth yeah that's what Adam does he was telling me he does that pretty funny but that's ridiculous I'm a manly man I
You know, you don't think you need that much stuff to go on a backcountry hunt, but a lot of times you put every single thing you're going to put in that pack and it's a lot of stuff.
I bring nuts, like macadamia nuts and almonds and pecans and cheese and jerky and stuff like that.
Especially if there's water, that's a game changer.
If there's water where you're going to be or even anywhere near where you're going to be, they'll bring a stove every time with oatmeal and freeze-dried meals like mountain house meals.
And then when I leave hunting, when I leave the mountains, like, say I go to Colorado and I hunt for a week, and I'm like...
I lose 10 pounds and get all super skinny and like mountain man style.
I get out of there and I just want like a bacon double cheeseburger or like a big giant, not like the kind of the fast food place, but like a big, like a third pound burger with a ton of bacon on it with like blue cheese and avocados on it.
I mean you would get really good at preparing for these things.
So you must have like undergone like a transformation where you started off sort of kind of like trying to figure it out and then as you got better and better and better you got more and more streamlined in your approach.
Do you feel like you have it down to like a science now if you want to do something like that?
Find an area, like say if you draw a tag for an area, you get an overhead, this is not for you, for people listening, obviously, but you get an overhead, Google Earth will give you, it'll show you where the peaks and valleys are, and it's amazing.
It shows you the canyons, it shows you water sources, and you see from a satellite image, so you can literally see elk, like sometimes, on Google Earth, which is incredible.
They're getting, I mean, if you're in Arizona, you know, and you're in the, like, mule deer hunting in the desert, you got a great shot at charging up your shot.
And you can leave it in one place for, like, a few hours just sitting there in the sun, yeah, for sure.
But as far as the hunting goes, like, I've gotten better at, like, the planning and the backcountry gear, but that's all, like, I think you learn that pretty quick.
But you find out if you're a shitty hunter right away because you come home with no meat all the time, right?
It's very easy.
It's like finding out if you're good at the stock market.
You know right away.
You get that feedback.
You lose a bunch of money all the time, right?
It's the same thing with bow hunting.
I love going hunting because I didn't grow up in a hunting family.
I have no background in it when I was young.
So I don't have those...
The instincts that someone would have.
I have really good friends that grew up with a bow in their hand.
And their dad did.
And their grandpa did.
And their great grandpa did.
Actually, one family in particular.
But they're so good at bow hunting.
I love bow hunting with those guys.
Guys like Adam Greentree.
Guys like my buddy Justin at home.
My friend Jason...
On Lanai, who hunts Axis deer.
They're like half deer, half human.
They know how to hunt, how to kill, when to move, how fast you can move, when to slow down, when to run.
It's just, I love it.
I'm absolutely obsessed with trying to learn to get better at it.
But I hunted for years, and then recently, my friend was filming, and as I would shoot, I would punch a trigger like crazy, and I didn't even realize I was doing it.
And it got worse and worse, to the point where I ended up giving my releases away and stopped hunting for about four months.
And all I did was go and shoot.
I put this target right outside my front door, like a hanging bag target, and I would...
I'd walk up to it, draw my bow like one foot away from it and just practice releasing over and over and over.
When you learned how to use a thumb trigger and use back tension, is it something you got from YouTube videos, or did you have someone show you how to do it?
So, as I'm settling, you know, I get to full draw, I get my anchor, I start settling the pin, and I look at my bubble level, and once my little checklist is online, and I'm on the animal, as soon as I feel like my pin starts to relax and steady...
I spell the word lock and squeeze at the same time.
I think, I forget his name, Joel something or another.
But he suffered through target panic himself, and he's a SWAT guy, and a police officer, and developed a whole system, understanding the impact bracing, and a whole system.
I haven't read it.
He's got a book on it, and he's got, there it is.
And he's got Joel Turner, and he's got a whole website dedicated to controlling target panic and developing a whole system.
Yeah, I have to check it out, too.
And it's one of those things where, you know, no matter how long you've been doing it, it's possible that this shit could creep into your brain, which is weird.
Like, people have been successful hunting for years and years, and then all of a sudden they get target panic, and they're fucked.
Yeah, Randy Ulmer has a couple of good videos on how to handle it too.
And he says you should use a back tension release to get used to it.
Or a hinge release, and what that is for the people who don't understand what we're talking about, there's another type of release that doesn't have a trigger at all.
And what you do is you draw back, and just by moving your hand, you're sort of curling your pinky down and making a fist, it goes off, but you never know when it's going off.
It goes off completely unanticipated, and that helps you deal with this tension issue.
And it worked really good for that hunt, that specific hunt.
But we hunted in this awesome terrain with these crazy rocks and cliffs.
There was not one bush.
There was no bushes there.
There's no trees in this area.
It was just like you had to use the rocky...
The rocky outcroppings and just the basic terrain features to get close and we ended up sneaking down on this bedded group of deer that was at the base of this cliff.
To me, I love hunting in the mountains where it's cold and beautiful and I'm looking at a big valley or over the ocean in Hawaii where you can see the ocean and the whitecaps and boats going by.
It's just beautiful, right?
Beautiful wilderness.
Where those bulls live, it's like...
50 million flies on you and mosquitoes and a swamp and it's like there's snakes and slugs and spiders.
I was hunting with another buddy in Australia, and we were hunting in an area that had crocodiles.
And every day we had to cross a couple little areas that had water.
And I just, I didn't even think about it because I'm not like, I'm not around crocodiles, right?
And he just, after the first day, he didn't really worry about it too much.
After we crossed, he goes, hey, if I'm not with you tomorrow and you cross here, make sure you throw a bunch of rocks in the water right there to make sure there's no crocodiles.
Because if they, if a human passes by an area where there's crocodiles over and over and over, they pattern them and they will sit there and wait.
They actually wait for whether it's a rabbit going by every day or a human or whatever it is, a dog, a cat, and they will sit there and wait just underwater.
The fact that they could just stay underwater for hours without breathing, they slow their heart rate down to like a beat a minute or something stupid.
And I'm like defenseless, like mentally defenseless, because I don't even know, I don't know how to react to snakes, I don't know what to do, I don't know where they live, I don't know what they hide under usually.
I don't have any snake background, so I'm not like looking, oh god, no thank you.
Vantage Point Archery makes these little two-bladed, same ones that Adam uses, but they're all machined out of one piece of steel, so they're very strong.
They're just super reliable heads, and they fly well.
Like Muzzy makes a hybrid, and then there's those Gravediggers, where it's a fixed head blade, and then two other blades open up behind it, which is actually probably even better than just a regular fixed blade.
So the reason I brought it up is because those mechanicals are really good, especially on axis deer, because...
Even if you make a perfect shot, like if you're just an incredible archer like someone like Cameron Haynes, you're 40 yards, you're just rock solid, not nervous, you can make the perfect shot.
That animal could be completely spin around into 180 and you hit him in the other side or you hit him and, you know, you can make a gut shot even though you made a perfect shot.
It's one of those hybrid blades where it has a large fixed blade, but then it has these two really big expandables that go to an inch and three quarters.
So the 5 is the fastest one, but it's probably not as easy to shoot.
So with all speed bows, I think the shorter the brace height, the faster they go.
But my understanding is, and I'm not the super archer guy, but my understanding is that the longer the brace height in general, the more forgiving the bow is to shoot.