Adam Greentree, a bowhunter and wilderness photographer, contrasts Montana’s elk hunts—where wolves complicate ecosystems—with Australia’s feral threats like dingoes and invasive species. He details brutal encounters with grizzlies and saltwater crocodiles, dismissing de-extinction as impractical while praising traditional hunting’s mental clarity. Greentree’s raw meat diet from disease-free Australian game contrasts with a failed South Africa buffalo hunt, exposing industry dishonesty. His 80-pound bow and minimalist survival skills highlight nature’s indifference, where hardship deepens appreciation for wild experiences over modern comforts. [Automatically generated summary]
So I killed that bull in the afternoon, packed out a decent load of meat that night, went back in the first morning, the next morning, to pack out the rest of the meat, and was going in there looking, thinking there could be a bear on the carcass.
And sure enough, I seen a bit of brown hair in the creek bottom.
I yelled at him the second time and he jumped up and...
He disappeared like that.
Like, scary.
This is thick timber.
A lot of deadfall and everything.
And he just disappeared through that.
And it actually got me thinking that if you didn't see a bear coming from a distance, handgun, bear spray, whatever you've got, you'd be in serious trouble.
Because he just left that scene dead quiet and in a flash.
At the end of that hunt, I was talking to the fishing game warden in the area, and a big grizzly had gone into another hunter's camp on the mountain and just absolutely destroyed his camp.
Now, I don't know if it was the same bear or a different bear, but on three occasions, a big brown bear or grizzly come back into my camp.
And each night that he'd come in, he'd get a little bit closer.
So the first night he circled camp about 50, 60 metres away.
The next night he circled camp about 30 metres away.
And the third time he came in, he'd come right into the back of camp, like 15 metres away, let out this gnarly growl.
And at this point, my buddy Grant Hughes has come in to help me pack out some meat.
He's in his tent, I'm in my tent, when you hear this bear walking in through the snow and lets out a growl.
I didn't want to go...
Like, Grant, did you hear that?
Or, Grant, there's a bear in camp.
I didn't want to let the bear know that I'm in the tent, man.
I just laid there dead quiet.
I had the handgun sitting on my chest, loaded, ready to go.
And I laid awake for like three hours.
Like, you heard the bear walk off.
And I laid awake for three hours, and I get up in the morning, and I'm like, dude, did you hear that bear?
And he's like, did I hear the bear?
Holy shit, dude.
I didn't want to move or make a sound.
He had the same idea as me.
He didn't want to give away his location.
And I'm like, yeah, it took me three hours to get to sleep.
Meat was hanging up probably a good mile from camp, because we had a few different drop points, because it was a four days hike out of meat.
So we had different drop points along the way, and I never wanted to take any meat in the camp except for what I'd be eating each night.
Which cooked meat might smell pretty good to a bear, but I was more concerned about the scent that we would be carrying on our boots from meat site to meat site and then walking back into camp.
But that bear had already been in the camp.
He knew where we were and he was doing his rounds obviously every night.
It's like we were talking about our pal Cam Haynes in this 200-mile run he just did.
And when there's a challenge in front of you and you find out that someone has done it before, you start going, hmm, man, maybe I could do 200 miles...
He's like, there's something fucked up about people's brains where when you find that someone's doing something like, I have zero desire to take five months out of my life and walk from Georgia to Maine.
I started thinking about it, and I'm like, shut up, stupid.
You're not fucking hiking to Maine.
Stop it.
But part of me was listening to this guy.
It was on the Rich Outdoors.
You've done Rich's podcast before.
It's his podcast.
One of his buddies is a trail guy, and they were talking about lightweight gear and how they pack stuff.
The difference between what a guy uses for hunting and what someone uses for, like, just these long, long, long, long hikes, where they essentially wear the same clothes for five months.
Well, I mean, I guess you maybe get a chance occasionally to wash them somewhere, but everything is, like, the lightest possible stuff that you could have.
And when you do this, say, if you're going to go out there and you're planning on how many days?
15. I wanted to do at least half the month in Montana and I wanted to do the other half of the month in Idaho.
So 15 days and a little bit of the trip's got to be unprepared in a sense.
When you're doing 15 days, that sort of hunt because the country's like straight up and down.
There's no other way to do it.
There's no, I'm going to drive to the Ridgeline or I'm going to walk a decent trail to the Ridgeline or take an ATV and it's just all on foot, straight up and down country.
So And to have a little bit of roughness to a trip like that, where you are roughing it, that's a bit of the appeal as well, and the experience in doing it.
I was just talking with the guys at Hoyt, and they were asking, what's the essentials that you had in your pack that you wouldn't go without?
And I'm like, well, how about I tell you about the stuff that I wish I had in my pack and that I didn't go without?
So, like, I've got a synthetic sleeping bag as well.
It weighs a little bit more, but I could jump in that sleeping bag wet at night and wake up in the morning and dry.
little bit of the difference and it will dry out the next day and uh it doesn't get never carries any weight your synthetics so i just had like a small uh hoodie a little hoodie and i had some undergarments and that was about it for the whole trip but as far as like sweating in your clothes and getting your stuff wet wool maintains body temperature better It does.
Yeah, it does.
Next to skin is really good.
So Under Armour's got some really good next to skin clothing.
And I'll get wet in that next to skin clothing and stay warm because it's similar to a wetsuit.
A wetsuit's designed to have some liquid in it and the liquid gets warm and keeps your body warm.
That next to skin clothing's the same where it's sitting right on your skin and it's going to stay warm like that.
I don't want to say yes, because everyone will go and do it and get sick and sue my ass.
But I've always had an iron stomach, and I think it's from just doing all that sort of stuff as a kid.
You sort of grow with that, and I think your body's...
its own defense against against things like that a massive believer in that actually it's the same with being dirty you know like like personal hygiene is obviously a big thing but um you know i'll eat a i'll eat a chocolate bar with with elk blood all over my hands after skinning or deboning an elk and i think that's perfectly natural and normal in that sense um i've never been sick i've drunken some silly looking water like that
but i just think if you're at the top of the mountain where the water's first coming out of the hill out of the rocks then you're safe because there's nothing along the line there like a an old animal carcass friggin wolf shit sitting in the water or something like that to make you sick right It's coming right out of the ground.
And then because I went in there when it was stinking hot, like it was cooking, like it was the hottest weather you'd have.
You wouldn't even imagine having a fire in that weather from risk of a wildfire, you know, starting the bushfire, to, you know, it hailed, it rained and it snowed, everything got wet.
It was safe at that point to have a fire.
And then a lot of the cooking that I end up doing was just over the fire.
I was saving my gas each night.
Um, cause I would have ran out of gas before those 15 days were up if I was using just that one canister the whole time and that you'd end up having to pack out, go into town, buy the gas and then pack all the way back in.
You'd end up losing two days cause it was a, it was a full day walking out with no weight at all.
Like just speed walking down the mountain, trying to get out of there was a full day.
So, um, Yeah, I've got my reactor.
I've got my water filter, but like I said, I never used it.
I've got a small one-person tent, a mattress, a really good sleeping bag.
It's actually overrated for the conditions, but I always think you're better off going overrated.
You get some bad weather like I had, and you've got an underrated sleeping bag, and you're not getting sleep.
You're going to miss hunting hours for sure.
Then I've just got a couple of knives.
I've got a full safety kit, bandages.
I've actually been carrying, I didn't use them on this trip either, but a little water filtration pill, which is always handy.
So you didn't have to carry your filter kit every day.
If you come across some decent water that was down low, you could just put the pill in.
But where a lot of people go wrong with the water filtration and the pills is you still require both if you come across dirty water because the pill's only going to kill bacteria within reasonably clear water.
It's not going to kill the solids.
So if you're scooping up dirty water, putting a pill in and then drinking it, anything that's within the solids of that water, you're still going to get sick from.
So in a sense, you still need the two of them if you're doing a hunt like that.
The water filtration is awesome because it's 99.999% of all bacteria that's going to filter out of your water.
And then if I did get a hot day, this was the plan, it never ever happened.
But if I did get a hot day and I came past a stream...
I was actually going to wash some clothes in a dry bag, just a bit of water in the clothes, and then hang them up.
I just never got that break in the weather.
I wanted to hunt every day and every minute of light, so I'd just get up in the morning and put wet clothes on if I didn't dry them on the fire that night.
There'd be some days where I'd just have a snack in the morning for breakfast, like an energy bar, an actual energy bar in the morning.
And I'd go all the way through and I wouldn't hike back in the camp until 11.30 at night because I was trying to stay out where I thought the bulls were.
And I'd have a quick dinner in camp that night and that was it.
And I wouldn't even feel hungry throughout the day.
Yeah.
I think just from being so active, and obviously good water intake whenever you can, there was never a point where I'm like, oh, far out, I'm starving today, you know, I'm not going any further until I eat or anything like that.
And I'd suggest for anyone that wants to do a backpack hunt, like a do-it-yourself hunt, is study Google Earth.
And I would do a radius.
I'd look for a radius with the least amount of roads, any sort of infrastructure around it, like the most wilderness-looking area.
Even away from trailheads.
I hate being near a trailhead or where there's a trail that people are going to be walking in on or anything like that.
Like, I mean, real backcountry.
You've got to bush bash it to get in there.
Just find...
Do your research, find the area with the least amount of activity and then put a dot in the middle or roughly in the middle and that's where you should set up camp.
Get in there, live with the bulls or whatever animals you're hunting, get in there and live with them.
I think not being afraid to fail on a hunt's the big one because, you know, a lot of people, well, there mightn't even be any bulls there, but, you know, who cares?
It's going to be an awesome experience anyway.
And it's a place that you can tick off the list.
Oh, I'm not going back there.
There was nothing there.
And then next year, try the next spot or the next week, try another spot.
Um...
I had hunted around that area previously, so I knew there was elk in the area.
I just had never been that far back in before.
And I'll tell you the truth, it nearly completely failed on me because I went days and days without hearing or seeing an elk.
But the sign was there to say they were in there.
It's just that the grizzlies and the wolves were hunting that area so hard that it shut the elk up and pushed a lot of them out of the area.
There's heaps of doubt, and there's always that...
It's like you second guess yourself.
This was a stupid move.
You shouldn't have came in here.
You need to change spots.
But then it's like, but at the same time, you're experiencing this for a reason.
This is how hunting should be.
Hunting should be hard.
Hunting should never be, unless you've done your research, going into a place and there's just like game walking past you everywhere.
There should always be, because that's the hunt, right?
Finding it or going through the hardship to find it.
Tracking it, finding where's the better spot within that area.
So at the same time that my mind's like, you know, you've made a bad decision, this is a crap spot to be, there's the whole experience of like, no, this is how hunting should be.
It should be difficult.
You should have to work your ass off to try and find the animal.
And when you actually do find the animal, how much better is it?
because you know it's just like if if you hunted for 11 months and you didn't see a bull you found a bull you had a shot and you missed but then the next one you get how good's that next one that you get you know if that was the case and it was very similar on this trip where i put in all that effort didn't see an animal one opportunity a bull comes in like i end up calling that bull from like a mile away you could just hear him coming up this canyon and i did that shot and dude i teared up
I was crying because I knew how much had gone into it.
And it's not just the effort, but obviously I'm away from my wife Kim and the kids.
I'm away from the kids for a month now.
There's all that sacrifice, there's all the hard shit, there's all the effort.
There's walking in, there's putting up with that absolutely atrocious weather, and then finally one opportunity comes up and you kill that animal, as well as killing the animal.
That's a hard thing to do.
Man, I balled up.
I was crying.
I think I cried a dozen times.
Every time I thought about it, when I was standing over the bull, I was crying.
Well, there's a lot of elk in Montana, but Montana is so huge.
I mean, it's such a massive, massive place, and the amount of wilderness that you're encountering, if you have herds of elk all over the place, it's super likely that you could wind up in a spot with nothing around you for miles and miles around.
What's weird is what we were talking about before the podcast started, you were talking about Australia and what you call the greenies, which are the green people that want to, they don't want animals to die and they want this population to explode, but there's not a balance.
And that was the idea behind reintroducing wolves.
Was to create a balance because there was a lot of animals that were living in the Yellowstone, greater, you know, Yellowstone area.
And so they introduced these wolves.
But the problem was they had an agreement when they introduced these wolves that when they reached a sustainable population, they reached a certain number, several thousand wolves, then they would open up a hunting season on them to try to control the population.
But as soon as they reached that number, the people that were involved in the relocation of the wolves and the wildlife protection people and all the people that are like really animal rights advocates, they backed out of it.
And they said, no, we don't want any hunting on any of these wolves ever.
And so there's this big battle.
And a lot of states have opened up hunting seasons on wolves, Montana included.
But still, there's a battle.
There's a battle to try to control the wolf populations.
My issue is that humans, in a sense, are the ultimate predator, right?
And that everything should be not controlled, but, you know, what's a good way of saying this is that being the apex predator that we are, we've obviously got a part in the whole food chain as well when it comes to things like that.
And I can see, you know, we were talking before about the wolves being introduced to control the population and the numbers, but there's obviously got to be a point where the wolves are controlled as well, right?
Well, that was all done early, early on in North America because of cattle ranchers.
So what they would do is they would shoot wild horses.
They had a huge wild horse problem.
And the wild horse problem is actually re-emerging.
There's quite a few wild horses in North America, and they're trying to figure out what to do with them.
And it's really controversial.
It's kind of interesting.
But what they would do back then was they would shoot these wild horses and then they would shoot a wolf.
They would shoot like one of the alphas and they would take the wolf and rub it and take its scent glands and rub it all over the dead horse and then fill the horse up with strychnine.
So the other wolves would come around, they would smell their missing alpha friend and they would eat this horse carcass and they would get the strychnine and die.
So doing that, they extirpated wolves from the majority of the American West.
That's how they killed them all.
But then they realized that they did a terrible thing by doing that, and so they started reintroducing them.
There's a balance somewhere.
Obviously, I love wolves.
I think they're cool as hell.
But there is a balance.
But the balance is real tricky.
There's a very small number of them in Washington State, but the small number of them, the small number of wolf packs, have started attacking cattle ranches.
And they're killing these cattle.
And so these ranchers want these wolves killed.
And so they've decided to kill some of the wolves.
And it's a huge controversy in Washington State because they're like, look, there's not that many fucking wolves.
And you guys are going to kill these wolves because they're killing the cattle.
But you're going to kill the cattle, too.
If you want to have cattle, this is the price you pay.
But I'm sure you've seen how they run cattle out here.
But it's, you know, these animals, if you're going to let them wander around like that, roam free, which is nice because they're essentially almost wild.
They're free-range cattle.
They're eating grass.
It's the healthiest cattle you can eat.
But wolves like to eat them too.
And so it's real tricky.
It's like, where do you draw the line there?
There's not that many wolves, and these wolves are eating these cows.
But to the ranchers, each cow is worth several thousand dollars every time a wolf kills a cow.
Instead of killing the wolves, maybe they should subsidize some of these ranchers.
I mean, if these wolves are killing, it's only a certain amount.
As long as they've taken some measure of protection to try to keep the wolves away, but to ensure a healthy wolf population would ensure a balanced ecosystem.
They can't bring it back to where they used to be, because where they used to be, there was no wolves.
They don't want to kill the kangaroos, but for the better...
For the better benefit of kangaroos, there has to come a point where the numbers need to be controlled, otherwise they eat their self out of land and home, they get diseases, and it takes weeks to die, like a suffering death.
I'll tell you this cool little story when I was in Northwest Territory, like just above the Arctic Circle.
The first time I've been into that country, like the Mackenzie Mountains.
And I was actually hunting moose, but I had a wolf tag as well.
And the very first morning, like, we get up out of the tent, we walk out up the river.
I'm with a guide, Byron.
And I see, like, a pack of wolves coming down the river.
So they'd been hunting that area.
I think it'll end up being day three.
They chased a caribou up and down the river, like, just to a lavering sweat.
Then they chased it in the river and they surrounded it in the river.
And that caribou, and it was a bull as well, got to the point, its whole body was quivering because it's been really hot and then it's been chased into this freezing cold river.
At that point, the wolves just left it and they all went up and sat in the sun because they were all wet as well.
They went and sat in the sun and they got all dry and then it was like Mother Nature just took over from that point.
They got the caribou to the point where they knew it was going to die and left it.
It couldn't hold its own legs up.
It ended up laying down in the river and drowned in the river.
something that like elk if they sniff it stays in the dirt forever so they basically shit it out stays in the dirt forever an elk will go along grazing and eat the grass and this spore attacks the elk's lungs and it shrinks the lung capacity so it's it's it basically makes the elk tired when they're running for the wolf to grab them at a later date Wait a minute.
Well, a lot of people are always like, oh, that's crazy.
It's actually not that crazy when you go out and experience.
That sort of thing's happening all the time.
It's just that people are so disconnected because they're not out there experiencing it.
I was telling a story about, we've got a wedge-tailed eagle at home, and I can hear this pig squealing like, I'm like...
Like, my ears just can't pick up where this pig squealing's coming from, and it's going straight over the top of my head.
There's a wedge-tailed eagle with this pig, and it flies it over.
It knew exactly what it was doing, and flies it, gets it up real high, and it drops it perfectly over this rocky outcrop on the mountain to open it up.
Like, that's like me and you going, I need a steak knife to cut into this meat.
It's crazy that technology's brought us this far, where we can look at a video right now at that sloth, but to tell you the truth, if you hadn't travelled the world, you wouldn't even know that animal really existed.
Yeah, and that country's pretty known for mountain lions as well.
Two or three years ago when I was in there, we got fresh snow and I went right up high.
Big mountain tracks.
And that's just because there was fresh snow.
I'm sure there was fresh mountain tracks everywhere I walked every day, but it's just that there was fresh snow and it left the tracks perfectly in the snow.
How many times do you walk past a mountain lion and it's staring at you?
Or how many times has there been a mountain lion off in the distance looking at you?
And then every now and then you'll get a weird feeling like I'm being...
It's a funny sense, you know, and I hate saying about it because people will say, oh, bullshit.
But I'll get a funny feeling that something's looking at me.
And if I stop at that point and have a look around, chances are I'll find a deer or a fox or something staring at me from up on the ridge or in the timber or something like that.
Happened with Shane Doran.
You had Shane on the show a long ago.
Shane was out hunting with me just before he'd come on your show.
And I stopped, and I'm like, ah, dude, I've just got this weird feeling of being watched.
And we looked around, and then, yeah, there's a buck, like, looking behind a tree, staring straight at us, you know?
So it's like, it tickles a sense, that's for sure.
Yeah, the move forward is an interesting way of looking at it, because I don't think technology necessarily is having us move forward, but what it's definitely having us do is move different.
We're interacting with each other less in the physical sense and more in the digital sense, and we're way less likely to interact with the rest of the wild world.
I mean, the wild, that's a weird term too.
Like, I've always felt like the word outdoors.
Like, I love the outdoors.
Like, how fucking weird are people that we call the whole world outdoors, but are, you know, like, We're so used to being in these shelters that the sheltered life is normal, but the outdoors, out of the shelter.
Probably grow your own vegetables or drive or walk or horse ride the day into the town to get vegetables or whatever it was.
And...
Washing your clothes.
Sitting there with a scrub and brush and washing your clothes over a board would take hours and hours.
Now you just throw it in a machine.
I'll come back and get it when it's convenient for me and pull it out.
So you get to do a lot more in today's world, but there's so much to do that a lot of people don't get to do what we do and go outdoors and experience that or appreciate those things because they haven't had that hardship before.
The mountains can be a hard and miserable experience, but it makes you appreciate the things in modern life that aren't hard anymore.
It's a perspective enhancer because it's a reality check because you realize, wow, what a strange world we live in that we need shelter and we need fire and we need all this stuff in order to survive.
But without that stuff, when you're out there as minimalistic as you've done it, like doing it with a small pack, which is Just a few days worth of food and sleeping under a cloth house, a little tent, you know?
I mean, that's a perspective enhancer because it gives you this real appreciation of what people have actually accomplished.
But most folks are not doing that.
And so they get really detached from where their food comes from, really detached from the world itself.
And it's not It's not their fault.
It's just the environment that you're accustomed to.
We're all accustomed to supermarkets and restaurants and being able to just get a bottle of water.
I went to Africa a couple of years ago and was in a real poor village in Mozambique.
And everyone's still smiling.
It was an unseasonal year and it was really cold.
So we go through this village and a lot of these villages have never seen a white person before.
And we go through these villages and it's three o'clock in the morning and they're all standing around a fire.
And I said to the guy beside me, the local guy, I'm like, oh, do they all start work early?
And he's like, no, they're not.
They can't sleep.
And I'm like, what do you mean they can't sleep?
And he's like, well, it's really cold.
They don't have blankets or anything like that.
So they get up in the morning and they start a fire and they all huddle around the fire to get warm because it's freezing.
And it's not that they don't have the money to buy blankets.
There's no blankets.
There's no friggin' blankets for sale.
It's as simple as that.
There's not like, oh, they don't have the $20 to buy a blanket.
There's not even the resource for there to be a blanket available for them to buy.
There's babies crawling around in dust that's like 6, 7, 8 inches thick, the dust, around the village, because, you know, they all walk around the village and create a lot of dust.
No one's complaining there.
That's what they're used to and they're happy.
Throw someone from our society in that, man, they'd be miserable.
They'd probably cut their own friggin' wrists.
And I come home from there thinking those people have got it that hard, that's what they're used to, but they've got it that hard and they're still smiling.
It was a bit of a check for me.
I've got power, I've got running water, and I've always been appreciative of these things anyway, but...
We've got power.
We've got water.
We've got, in Australia, we've got Medicare, you know, like real good health services.
We've got everything like that, and people still find something to complain about.
And it's just because they haven't been through a real hardship in their life that they don't realize.
It could be a hell of a lot harder than this.
This isn't even hard.
It's easy.
It's just what we're used to, and we're used to complaining about it.
One of the strange things that we've created by creating houses that have electricity inside them and easy access to food and shelter, sleep in a nice comfortable mattress.
By doing that and by detaching ourselves from the natural world, I think we remove just a little bit of the mystery of being alive.
I mean, when you're walking through the woods and you're seeing that grizzly bear who's sleeping on the carcass of that elk, that bear has been living like that probably for, if you ran into an 11-foot bear, how many years is he?
And it's not a senseless way of saying it, because I believe hunters, or the hunters that I've met, are the most compassionate people that you'll ever meet.
Because it is a hard thing to take an animal's life, but I know it's part of the process, you know?
It's not like I'm just, let's just go out and kill an elk.
Yeah, we got an elk killed.
I'm totally not that hunter at all.
Nothing turns me off more.
I'm not that sort of person.
I'll have a quiet time with that animal.
I'll put my hand on it and everything and just be thankful.
I know it's an animal.
I know the meat's going to be used.
I know I'm doing the right thing.
But it's still, that's the human emotion part of it, you know?
And that's what, in a sense, that's why I got upset when I killed that bull elk, you know?
It's like, it is a beautiful creature.
I understand that's definitely a beautiful creature and it's a hard thing to do.
Well, it becomes this super complex system that has everything in place.
It's got a system to dissolve bodies, and the bacteria dissolves what the animals don't eat, and there's just this really complex pattern that's in place that's been in place forever.
And what you're doing as a hunter is just going into it and becoming, for a brief period, Week or so, you're becoming a part of that system.
Or a month.
Or a month for you.
And you're acquiring your food that way, which I obviously, and you obviously think, is way better than going to a fucking supermarket and hiring some supermarket hitman to do the work for you and feeling that you're guilt-free.
There would be 700 other workers just on the slaughter floor part.
So that meat was passing 700 people's hands, mouths, the whole lot, through a...
I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with this, because the population of the world demands that.
Not everyone can hunt now.
So I don't have an issue with slaughterhouses or anything like that.
But I'm saying that meat goes through a way different process, I would have to say, for a better word, brutal process, where...
Those animals get herded on to a truck, like a semi-trailer, driven to the slaughterhouse, put in small yards, pushed through a gate to go past all those people's hands that are cutting the meat.
That's before it even gets to the point where it's going to get cut up for packaging.
And then, obviously, it gets sent out to different grocery stores and then sold from there.
The way you get trichinosis by eating something with trichinosis, the horrific nature of pig farming, of domestic, the way they raise it, these factory farms, it's horrible.
But I'm always like, no, you really need to be successful in this type of life, which is the outdoors experience, whatever.
Being a good father.
Like, that's the sort of...
The work shit or whatever.
Who gives a shit?
Leave your job tomorrow if you have to to go and do something that you enjoy in life, right?
That's the end story because you're not going to get to your deathbed and be like, oh, I really wish I pushed and got that better position at work or whatever.
You're never going to do that.
You'll always be like, I wish I did...
I wish I went and climbed friggin' Everest or whatever it is.
That's what it's going to be, but we all get caught up in this trap is, no, I've got to have the newest car, the nicest house, we need to live in this suburb, I need to be the CEO at work, I need to do that sort of thing.
I'll see an advertisement for a car or something like that and be like, I really like that car.
But then there's another part of me that clicks and go, you don't need that frigging car.
Why do you want that car?
That car means you've got to work longer or work more.
Or something else to maintain or something like that.
Are you going to want to get that car scratched in the bush?
That's another thing.
I'm like, no, I've already got a car.
Just be happy with what you've got.
You're an idiot.
If you go and chase that, you're an idiot.
Just be happy with what you've got.
Life's good.
More outdoor experience.
More time for your kids.
More time for your wife.
Whatever in that sense.
That's a whole modern society thing.
Indigenous Australia...
Not all of Indigenous Australia, but most of Indigenous Australia because it's so young to our culture, you know, because Australia was only discovered in...
Maybe Jamie can look it up because I don't know the exact date.
I probably should.
Indigenous Australia don't seem to have that desire.
They're just happy with what they've got.
And it's something to be envious of, that they're just happy with that, that they're not going to waste their life going and chasing silly things, you know.
And even if you leave them behind for your family, I mean, they're only going to enjoy them until they stop living.
But it's like the masterpiece is enjoying your life to the utmost and having the most success with your family, with your friends, the most relationship success, the most harmony with the people that you come in contact with.
But that doesn't seem to be rewarded the same way in our world as someone who's got some baller house and a fucking helicopter picks him up and he's got golden underwear.
And it's not even the stories that I'll tell you or Cam or Antonio or one of my friends back home.
It's not even those stories.
It's the stories within myself and the experience within myself.
That's where the real value is.
That's the real currency of this world is what's inside me right now and how I feel after doing this trip.
Man, this trip was miserable.
I won't lie to you, but it's an enjoyable miserable.
How do you work that shit out?
How could being in the snow, being wet, flogging myself out for 16, 17 hours every day into the dark of night and getting back in the camp, being miserable, how could that be enjoyable?
Because the second you get back to camp, you're like, oh, a fire.
That's awesome.
Second you lay down, yeah, I'm just like, oh, it's so good to lay down.
It's like you've got to go through hardship to find the good shit in life.
I really do believe that you have to go through some difficulty to appreciate good stuff.
Like, if you're born into, like, a...
Some super wealthy multi-billionaire family and you've got a Ferrari when you're 16 and you fly around everywhere in private jets and you live in a giant mansion.
I just don't think that you can ever appreciate the difficulty of life.
I lived on the streets for some time and I really believe that put me where I am with my family.
I absolutely adore my family.
I'd do anything for my wife and kids.
I'd cut my own arms off and sell them if I had to.
That's because of the hardship that I had when I was growing up.
My business is very successful today and I believe that's because I didn't have anything growing up as a kid.
We were poor.
We were very poor.
We had nothing.
We didn't do Christmases because there was no money to do Christmas.
And coming from a broken family like that to now having my own family, I know how to treat them right because of how we were treated so wrong as kids and how my mother was treated.
I know how to treat Kim or it's how I'm proven that That shit don't fly in my house.
This is how it actually is.
You love your family to death.
You do absolutely anything for them.
The biggest thing that I'm proud of in life is having the family that I've got today.
But, yeah, that is an interesting thing how people come from, a lot of folks that come from abusive, alcoholic families, they wind up being really considerate, really compassionate, and really dedicated to keeping on the straight and narrow.
You know, I have my friend Maurice, he grew up with an alcoholic grandmother who raised him, and they used to...
They used to lock him in a room and just leave him there where they would go out drinking and he couldn't get out of the room.
There was no food.
He was always hungry and never drank in his whole life.
People who grew up in that sort of abusive, substance-abusing family, they grow up and they're clean as a whistle and they don't have nothing to do with it.
They get it kind of, but they keep asking questions and we work it out.
What does that mean?
We've had conversations about what to do if someone's being mean to you.
My daughter was like, someone's being mean to me at school.
I go, well, how are they being mean to you?
She's like, well, they said something mean about my hair.
I go, well, do you like your hair?
And she's like, yeah, I like your hair.
I go, do you think they really think there's something wrong with your haircut or are they trying to make you feel bad?
She goes, I just think they're mean.
I go, well, they're probably trying to make you feel bad, right?
And so why do you think they're trying to make you feel bad?
Well, a lot of it is because when kids are little, they realize that they can affect someone.
And maybe they don't even understand that it's going to have a really bad feeling on you, but it's like a toy that they can play with.
Like they can say something mean and you react and they realize it.
And this is something that people have to get through.
I go, what you should do is realize how that makes you feel and decide you're never going to do that to somebody else, especially not someone who's your friend.
So we have these long conversations about feeling, about communication.
And then I explain to her always that whenever I tell my kid about something, I always say, whatever you've done, I've done it worse, and I'm dumber than you.
For sure.
When I was your age.
Especially my eight-year-old, who is the...
The middle child, but she's very curious and very interested in progress.
We talk about things like getting smarter, and one of the things I always say is I go, you're way smarter than I was when I was eight.
When I was eight, I was really dumb, and I did a lot of stupid things.
But also, I was a boy, and I think I was a little more reckless and impulsive and a little crazier.
But I'm like, so anything you've done, like if you don't tell the truth about something, or if you blame somebody else for something that you did, I did it all.
I did all those things.
So I'm not mad at you.
It obviously worked out for me.
I'm here.
I'm alive.
I'm healthy.
I have you.
So it's going to be okay.
So no one's going to not love you if you make a mistake.
It's totally a part of being a person.
There's no way to navigate this life without making mistakes.
So by having those kind of conversations with them, I think I alleviate at least some of the anxiety.
Because kids are always worried about how you feel, about what they've done.
I think, I mean, again, like you were saying about how being in the woods and then coming back here, like, wow, I could just hit a switch.
I think, you know, having that perspective and being out in the wild, it's one more thing that gives you this sort of greater picture of how bizarre and amazing life really is.
Kim's got a little business, Pretty Little Party Co.
And she gets so busy, she'll get caught up with it that she'll get to the point and she's like, Fuck, I've just got to slow down.
I've got to do less.
I've got to do less so I can actually fit in more things, but more things that I enjoy.
Yeah.
But at least she's got that outlook.
At least she gets to that point and she's like, yeah, okay, I'm getting too busy.
I'm actually losing quality time with whatever in life that she enjoys.
Yeah.
I used to be the same at the business because I'd put in these crazy hours with the business.
I practically built the business so it could support itself and I can walk away and go bow hunting.
But to get to that point, I put in a few years of just...
I'd be up until 1 o'clock in the morning doing things for the business and trying to keep it growing and then...
How big do you want it?
Because the more shit you have in life, business, all those sorts of things, the less time you actually have in life to do the things that you want, right?
So I got to the point and I'm like, well, I don't really want the business to be any bigger than it is now unless I get in some other managers and things like that.
And it's just finding that point, okay, stop, because you're really not enjoying life anymore.
I used to do all the UFC pay-per-views, and I used to do the Fox events too, and I cut it back to only North American pay-per-views, no more Fox events.
You can only see it online in China, but it's gonna be huge.
I don't know, man.
There's definitely a line that you cross between not doing enough and then doing the right amount and then doing too much and knowing how to pull it back.
But it's also a strange place in that what they've done in America with reintroducing wolves, what they've done in Australia, what I think is really bizarre, is feral cats and foxes to deal with some of the- That shit never works.
Well, that was what I was going to bring up, because when I was in Australia, you gave me some of your Australian bowhunting magazines, and there's fucking pictures of dudes posing with cats.
Well, people are very, very infantile with the perspective on the ecosystem.
Like the idea that you could just, oh, we've got a little problem here.
There's a little opening.
I'll stick a slot in there, just shove a predator in there, and it'll fill that opening.
They didn't consider all Cane toads are great stowaways and can be easily transported in your goods and luggage.
When you are packing up to leave from an area where cane toads are present, it is important to thoroughly check that you are not accidentally carrying a cane toad.
Now, if they had wanted to introduce that, if they wanted to take the DNA from a Tasmanian tiger and reintroduce it, wouldn't they have to have something that was like a similar animal and reintroduce it?
Well, isn't that what they said they were going to do with the woolly mammoth?
Like, there was this Russian scientist that were thinking about reintroducing the woolly mammoth, and they were going to use the DNA from a woolly mammoth from some, you know, fossilized something or another, and they were going to combine it with the DNA from a regular elephant.
Yeah, the city in the Northern Territory, which is all part of Arnhem Land there, is Darwin City, and the river runs right into the city, and there's crocodiles right in there.
So guys will go out...
a good idea to jump in the river for a swim and yahoo and they'll get snatched so they catch all these crocodiles and they release them like you know miles and miles away and these things come straight back into the same spot and they're like these this is what i'm hearing about these bears right yeah they catch these problem bears and they release them where near i'm hunting unfortunately But they catch these problem bears, and they release them miles away, and then a week later they show back up to the same destination.
One of the things about saltwater crocodiles that's so terrifying is a friend of mine was telling me that they were on some sort of a boat, and they were deep out into the ocean, miles out, and they saw a saltwater crocodile swimming out there.
All of our native animals, you can't hunt any of our native animals in Australia.
Everything we can hunt, there's 27 or 28 species, are all introduced.
They're an invasive species, like a feral pest.
That's why we're allowed to hunt them.
It's not like the American system where you're hunting your natives, like your whitetail and elk and everything like that.
And that's why we don't have a tag season, or we don't have any seasons at all.
In New South Wales, they've just introduced a season in the last couple of years, and there's one species of deer in Victoria, the lower part of Australia, where you need a tag for.
That's it.
All those other species you don't need a tag for, and there's no season.
It's like I was saying, the same people that are like, you can't cull the kangaroos, you know, you can't hunt the kangaroos, you can't shoot the kangaroos.
If you can protect that, if you can figure out a way to, like, move in on them, juke them, fake them, get them to move, get a hold of one of them paws, arm drag them, I'm going to film it.
Oh, there's a great video, um, these two kangaroos are fighting in, like, a suburban neighborhood, and they're in a street, and one kangaroo, he gets like a, like a, what you would call, like, a vice grip clamp, like, in jiu-jitsu you would use, or wrestling, you would, like, clamp, you, like, you scoop the back of someone's neck like this with one arm, and the other arm comes down, and you clamp down like this, this is it.
So, there was one on the road digging the other day.
Well, the other month now, because I've been away for so long.
And me and the kids, whenever we see them on the road, we'll move them off the road.
And the kids got out, and you can actually...
All those spikes are super sharp, but you can actually touch them because it's taken up so much room on your hand.
Like, you know, there's 100 spikes on each hand.
You can actually touch them.
And we moved this thing off the road, and the kids were even normal about it.
They were like, oh, yeah, cool, kidna, you know, because they've seen them 100 times.
And I was like, anyone that wasn't from Australia, though, that was seeing this for the first time, this animal with a beak, when I started thinking about it, and these turned back claws, like their claws turned back like that.
I wouldn't have normally even thought that you could eat it, but he killed one, and then braised it, and then slow cooked it, and it was like a pot roast with potatoes and carrots.
But there's people at the turn of the century, like Rinella is amazing in his knowledge of the history of animals in America and the history of hunting in America.
But apparently, many, many, many years ago, beaver trapping and beaver pelts were so valuable that the richest man in the world, in like the early 1800s, made all of his money from beaver pelts.
And once they came up with felt, like for hats and stuff like that, because the gentlemen wore felt hats, they didn't need beaver as much anymore, and beaver kind of fell out of favor, and people stopped doing that.
That sort of history behind animals, you know, when they've got that value on them, and there's just an open slaughter is what seems to drive a lot of things to extinction.
I think a lot of people think that's still happening today.
Like hunters are still that sort of person.
Whereas hunters are the ultimate conservationists now.
And the system that America's got in place is the best system anywhere in the world where there's a tag, there's a season.
They manage and regulate the population.
So let's just say elk, the numbers were down the following year.
Well, there'd be less tags available.
It's as simple as that, and that's why it's such a good system.
In Australia, we don't have that system in place, but in a sense, it's pushed all the responsibility back on hunters.
Like I can tell you now, Australian hunters are some of the best hunters in the world because they've got to conserve and they've got to manage their resources, their self.
There's nothing in place to say, well, we're only giving 500 tags away for that area this year because numbers are down.
Hunters, as much as we are conservationists, we're not going to go out and just slaughter the numbers, you know.
They're an introduced species into Australia.
They are bad to the environment if the numbers are too big, and hunters treat them like that.
We're not going to go out and wipe out the whole population.
Hunters are very good at, you know, there's only 20 bucks in this area at the moment, because there should be a certain buck to doe ratio.
There's only 20 bucks in this area at the moment.
We're not going to kill 19 of them.
There's going to be one buck left.
You know, we're going to kill the oldest buck in that area.
There's only 20 there.
Let's just kill the oldest buck in that area.
That's a good population.
It's sustainable.
They're not damaging the environment in that number.
And I think there's a big difference there between the American and the Australian hunter in that sense that you guys would do the same thing.
Don't get me wrong.
If there wasn't a tag in place or a season in place, today's society would do the same thing because we've learned from the past.
Also, the money that we spend on gear, the money that you spend on outfitters and trips, that money and tags in particular all goes to conservation, to preserving the habitat of these animals.
And a lot of these animals, especially like white-tailed deer, there's more white-tailed deer here in America today than there were when Columbus came here.
I got myself into it, which was really, really weird.
Hoyt were asking me the same thing.
They're like, oh, so did your dad hunt?
And I'm like, no, you know, like I come from a broken family.
I seen a bow up in a store and I was like, what's that thing?
Because it was like a compound bow, you know, I'm like, what's that thing?
And he's like, oh, it's a bow.
And so I ended up buying the bow.
And when I bought the bow, he gave me, like, it was just a black and white magazine.
Like, I was only 17. I'd run around with, like, a fiberglass pole with a string bent on it before and used to make my own arrows, like Robin Hood stuff, you know.
But never had seen anything like that.
And the magazine he gave me was a guy with a massive big water buffalo on the front cover.
And I'm like, you can kill things with this?
Yeah.
The majority of people that never hunt have been like, so you can kill a rabbit with one arrow, but if you're going to shoot a buffalo, it must take 20 arrows.
So I was like, at the time, he must have shot it 20 times or something like that to kill it.
No.
A rabbit's got a pair of lungs, a buffalo's got a pair of lungs.
You put a hole through both of those lungs, that thing's dead in the same amount of time.
Well, now I've shot a bunch of buffalo, you know, and it's just like, that's the craziest thing, isn't it?
It was just like, it was a guy in a magazine with a buffalo dead, and I was like, you can kill things with that.
And now I'm like this full-blown hunter, you know, and it's just...
That's why I was, I actually was a big part of a bowhunting forum in Australia for many years, and I just like, if I had that when I was coming up through bowhunting, The time, energy and money that I would have saved by just getting the right information straight off the internet, like being able to do research or even going to a club and there's 20 other guys at the club that you could at least get information out of.
I never had any of that.
But shit still got killed.
And that's what I always say to people.
You don't need the best of everything.
If your budget can only afford you...
You know, some recurve bow and some cheap arrows, I guarantee you're still going to be successful with that gear if you put in the time.
There's no doubt about it.
So, I just had this cheap bow, cheap arrows, probably didn't even wear camouflage at the time, and just went out into the outdoors and just worked it out myself.
So I'll go out with my—I've got the Hoyt Defiant there, and I'll sight that bow in, and, you know, I'll just shoot once a week or whatever— You know, if I can shoot daily, I will.
But with traditional gear, you had to shoot daily.
You had to have...
I'd have 50 or 100 arrows every single day just to keep the skill level up.
And it was the same shooting a bow that was open sights.
You know, no sights or anything like that in fingers.
You had to constantly shoot that bow to be accurate.
But like I said, hunting, I used to kill just as much back then as I do with today's technology, but I've got to spend less time with today's technology.
Well, you're also in Australia, which is very different, because what you're saying is you can hunt all year round, you can shoot things every day, you can shoot as many animals as you want.
I like shooting the deer while they're fat, so before they go into the rut, because they go into the rut fat and they come out looking like a greyhound, you know?
Yeah.
They just lost so much condition.
So I like to shoot a couple of deer before the rut.
And they've also got a lot of fat on them at that point, which is really good for making sausages.
I like making my own sausages.
I'll fill the freezer with that, and then I've just got a list of just family.
Like, put friends aside, I've just got a list of family that will take the meat off me, which is really good, because especially with the deer, a lot of the deer meat gets all used.
Some of our big mountain bores and things like that...
I'm not a big fan of eating them big rank boars.
It's super, super gamey.
But it still doesn't go to waste.
It's dog meat or it goes back in the mother nature right there and then.
The rut is a crazy thing, man, and most people aren't aware, but deer and elk and, I guess, stags and a lot of those other animals, they only have sex once a year.
They're just like, oh, I've got a big red stag, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And so many hunters that aren't educated in that sense, and I'm not having to stab at them from not being educated, they shouldn't have to be in that sense, are looking at that going, oh, that's what you can expect when you go to New Zealand or Australia.
that's the fake currency of a red stag in australia and new zealand free range red stags aren't like that if you shoot a free range red stag like that in australia or new zealand that's going to be the record right that's going to be the absolute record that's not the true that's not the example of what you can expect if you come to australia or new zealand and hunt free range isn't that the that's the difference between free range and fair chase and these high fence operations and
There's another big issue in America where they have these feeders and these people, they put a blind outside of a feeder and then the feeder goes off at a certain time and these people sit in the blind and wait for the feeder to go off because the deer are programmed to come towards the feeder when it's going off and you just whack them.
In South Africa, and I understand parts of South Africa because it has bred animals that are on the brink of extinction, and then it's good for them because they're there now.
But it's just not for me, that closed-range hunting.
Everything's closed-range.
I absolutely hated it because I just want an animal that's there naturally, Or has not been genetically bred or brought in or anything like that.
And before I got there these guys were like, what size buffalo do you want to shoot?
And I'm like, well, we'll just see what's big for the area.
Like, that's all you can do.
You can only shoot the big animal for the area.
If you're after an old animal or a trophy animal, you can only shoot what's big for that area.
So usually I spend the first half of the trip understanding what's a big animal or an old animal for the area.
Then you'll hunt it for the other half of the trip.
They're like, what size buffalo do you want to shoot?
Well, let's just say, what's big for the area?
Oh no, we'll just bring one in on a truck.
Before you get here, you just tell us what size you want.
We'll bring it in and release it.
What the fuck?
If I'm going to do that, I'm going to go to a farm and say, can I buy that cow and cut it up for meat?
well we didn't see a bull for 10 days um that outfitter he'd never been to that place or or he'd never taken other hunters there or anything like that and i got there and and the whole time he was like yeah no you know this is a real good area you'll tag out straight away you'll see hundreds of buffalo every day and like i said 10 days later we hadn't even seen a bull so um yeah it's it's it's a horrible industry over there in that sense it's it's And I can be at blame as well.
I should have done more research on that outfitter.
But I won that hunt for a charity auction.
It wasn't the sort of thing that I was, like, you know, researching for weeks and weeks trying to find a good outfitter to go to and shoot a Cape Buffalo.
There's an amazing documentary on it from Louis Theroux, who's a wildlife or rather a documentarian from the UK. Great guy.
Who's been on the podcast a couple times and talked about it the first time.
But it's all about these African high fence hunting trips.
And he was over there for a long time and got the guy to kind of explain exactly what's going on over there.
But it was just really bizarre to see people, you know, They had these lions, and they had them, like, right there.
I mean, there was two sets of fences, one fence and a fence right behind it, and they took a dead calf, and they throw it over the fence, and they watched the lions tear it apart.
But you look at the lions, you look at the people, you can go hunt those lions.
They just let one loose, they take it out, and it's all high fence.
But they were explaining that these animals were on the verge of extinction just a few decades ago.
And because of these high fence operations, now they're thriving.
But they're thriving in these bizarre conditions where they're fenced in and people hunt them.
So there's a funny line there where there's a couple of different types of poaching, you know, and it's that one that's commercial and they're just slaughtering everything, elephants, lions, whatever.
And, you know, what's really crazy is for a lot of people, that's their dream, to go to Africa and hunt the big seven, you know, or the big five.
There's this movement of people acquiring all these trophies and going to Africa and shooting all these different animals, and that's the way they do it.
They go to these outfitters that can guarantee they can get in front of these animals.
But Australia's industry is built on having excellent access to excellent numbers of game.
So if you book a hunt in Australia, it's not like someone's gone, you know, there's a big industry here, so let's just make up a business, Australian hunting safaris, and let's just get people in.
We don't have game, but they're going to come anyway because we're known for hunting.
You book a hunt in Australia, I guarantee you, it's going to be out of place, as long as you do a little bit of research.
But practically everywhere has big game numbers, and that's why they've started the business on a hunting outfit, because they've got so much game, and they're like, oh, this could work out really good for hunters.
There's a ton of game here.
Come along.
So it's not like that in Africa.
A lot of those places have really got nothing.
You know, it's arid lands, and you fed all this bullshit that the hunting's gonna be unreal, and it's not at all, which is what I experienced.
Now, how many people, though, are willing to do something like what you did in Montana, or what you and Cam did in Australia, which is probably even crazier, because you didn't even bring anything with you?
No, we did, because I was like, it'll be part of the experience.
We'll have to catch buffalo, we'll have to kill.
We're going to kill.
Come on.
And we did, you know, but the buffalo that we killed was so tough.
I think it might have been Cairns' first bull that he killed.
It was so tough that you just chewed the meat, you got the liquid out of it, and then you had to take the meat out of your mouth because you couldn't break it down.
I don't think they eat the guts, just the meat and everything around it.
They'd probably eat the organs and things.
Same with fish.
They'll just throw a fish straight on the fire.
I've done that plenty of times.
That's good eating like that.
So it won't be scaled and the scales act as like the protective barrier between the ashes and everything getting to the good meat and cooking the fish better.
It seals in all the flavour and taste and the juices.
Once the fish is cooked, then you just sort of wipe the scales off and it's beautiful, clean flesh right there.
It was nice because you'd get a wind each night, but it was horrible because you were near a lot of water and a river mouth, and the mosquitoes were...
As soon as it started getting dark, mosquitoes would be in plague precautions.
Your arms would go black.
covered in mosquitoes if you didn't put something on.
Like I said, we had to go light, so I only had one tiny little tube of like an insect repellent.
And those mosquitoes are that brutal that you'd put that, you know, and they'd stay off you for like two minutes.
Cam didn't even have a net.
So I had a hammock, and I'd sleep in a hammock, and I had a net over me, but my back would just get smashed by mosquitoes because my back's just laying against the net, no mattress or anything.
I'd wake up in the morning just agonizing, wanting to scratch, and Cam was the same, you know.
In a sense, I think it was essential to get in the water at that point to get rehydrated, you know, just for skin intake.
And...
The water was the same temperature as outside.
Like, you'd go into the water and you couldn't feel that you're going into liquid because the water's that hot as well.
It's just been boiling in the sun.
But to lay in there and just chill out in the mud, and every now and then you'd, because it's all muddy bottom, every now and then you'd sort of push the mud out and it would release some cooler waters that sort of hadn't been cooked by the sun.
It'd be like, oh, ha, ha, ha.
That's what I mean.
You really have to go through that shit to appreciate things in life.
And one of those things that I just appreciated in life was pushing through the mud and getting a little bit cooler water, you know?
It's like, oh, this is paradise.
And then two seconds later, you're like, oh, this is as uncomfortable as shit, you know?
Well, the fact that people lived that way and struggled through those kind of environments and those kind of temperatures for untold years before they ever figured out ice.
Yeah, I mean, I've seen those things, and you just go, okay, so people live up there, and they hunt those things, and then they live down where you are, and they hope for cool mud.
So the big issue with the cattle industry, especially in these northern parts of Australia, is these scrub bulls, these feral cattle, don't have any respect for fences.
is they'll just walk straight through a fence into a farmer's prized cattle and start breeding with his prized cattle.
And then all those calves that he gets aren't the purebred cattle anymore.
So it's really bad for the industry. - So they knock the fence down to get some cow pussy? - That's pretty much it.
So they're a big issue. - Which is probably what would happen in America if those cows that I saw wandering around, if they were allowed to have balls and roam free They'd eventually become just like that.
I shot one last year or the year before with Carl and it comes straight at us and Carl's carrying a big gun like I shot it with a bow and Carl lifted up the gun and he shot this bangtang as it was charging and it literally dropped nine feet from Carl.
Like it just looked straight at him and just hammered straight at him.
I got a second shot off as it was running and actually broke its leg which made it stumble.
And then it just comes straight back up and kept coming to Carl and he pulled the gun up and he shot it straight between the eyes.
Yeah, then it's got a decent insert behind it, like 92 grain insert, and then a nice heavy shaft, and then let's just talk about the 80 pound bow.
With that 80 pounds, I can find a rib on the way in on the buffalo, and I can find a rib on the way out, and that arrow's still just going to bust straight through there.
Hey, if you can, Jamie, if you go back a little bit, you'll see some dead buffalo pictures.
Around that time, I was taking some star shots when I was in Arnhem Land.
There's no light pollution anywhere up there.
The stars with the naked eye, the aperture and everything can come back so much further on those nights because even with the human eye, it's just crazy.
So yeah, if any of your listeners are into the outdoors and not necessarily killing, because obviously Adam Greentree Bowen has got a lot of harvest kills on it.
If you're just into photography, just go to First Man Image.
When you do so much, it's the best way to capture a memory because I can look back on the photos now and go, that's right, how cool is that, or whatever.
Sometimes I do so much and I get carried away with doing so much hunting that it's like if I didn't take a photo, I'd actually forget that moment because there's so much happening.
And I just love showing it to my kids and friends and people that are interested.
I used to hate the idea of someone's going to go through life and never find this connection.
And that's the big push for me to promote bowhunting.
I've written for the Australian outdoor magazines for like 12 years now.
And a lot of people think it's like a self-promotion.
Like, I don't care.
I don't care if I didn't have any viewers at all.
As long as people were getting that exposure, I was putting that out there for people to go, oh, I should try this.
It looks cool.
This dude's really enjoying it.
Here's the benefits in it and going and doing it because it drives me nuts just thinking that someone should have that connection.
They just don't know it yet because a lot of the guys, especially the older guys that I've introduced to bowhunting, Have always been like, man, I would have never known about this before.
And they've just got...
Now I can't imagine them as anything else but hunters.
Because they just thrive on it that much and it's done so much for their lives.
Or just the outdoors.
Some guys that get into it try and be like, it's not for me, but I really love camping and being out there in the wilderness.
Yeah, there's so much concentration going on that it cleanses your mind.
And if I can shoot bows for an hour every day, man, it just alleviates stress in some sort of a strange, like, you know, for lack of a better word, zen way.
What you were talking about earlier, like going out to the wilderness, no technology or anything like that, what it does to the mind is it frees the mind.
Yeah, and even people that aren't into hunting, I totally understand that.
And like I said, I've been really paying attention a lot to people that do these long-term hikes and also overlanding, people that just go on these crazy adventures.
Like, they get off the beaten path and they develop these vehicles that are capable of driving over adverse conditions, and they just...
Figure out a way to live.
Out there in the desert or out there in the mountains.
It's fascinating to me because there's a longing, I think, that people have to get away from the concrete, to get away from the electricity, and to just feel the stillness of the actual world.
encumbered on and just uncompressed by by civilization and buildings and language and and When you're out there, man, I've never done what you've done, but when you're out there for 11 days, you don't even talk to anybody for 11 days?
He's got to have his own campsite and shit like that.
He can't jump in if a bear's trying to eat me.
Someone's a pre of the dog.
I can't even help you from a bear, huh?
So that sucked, but I've had trips where you don't talk to people for days and days on end, and just the fact of coming back into civilization and opening your mouth feels weird.
Listen, dude, there's a very small handful of people, even in the hunting world, that are doing what you're doing, that are taking those kind of crazy adventures and just diving into it.
It's awesome, man.
I was really blown away by those Instagram stories and following you every day.