Cameron Hanes and Joe Rogan celebrate Utah’s record elk hunt, contrasting ethical bowhunting—targeting older bulls (8+ years)—with urban deer overpopulation and media distortions like vegan documentaries. They defend hunting as a disciplined, nutrient-rich pursuit, comparing its meritocratic struggle to ultramarathon running, where Hanes’s extreme training (e.g., 238-mile Moab race) mirrors Rogan’s obsession with precision. Highlighting $1.1B in U.S. conservation funding from hunting licenses, they critique trophy bans (like B.C.’s grizzly ban) and industrial agriculture’s ecological harm, urging natural understanding over ideological divides. Hanes’s backcountry ethos and Rogan’s guided tours aim to shift perceptions, proving hunting sustains wildlife and human resilience alike. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, but especially the scenery, just the mountains that they live in there, they're rugged, they're beautiful, and, you know, the Quakies haven't even turned yet.
There was too many moments with Elk that I couldn't film because I was just so engrossed in the idea of getting it done and the hunting aspect of it that I didn't want to pull my phone out and be taking pictures every five minutes.
Yeah, I took a few here and there, but there were so many moments that I'm so glad that Under Armour filmed this whole thing.
So we're going to have a film of it that's going to be released online, so people are going to get it.
A chance to check out how just incredible and epic and maybe just get a tiny sense of what we talk about when we talk about how amazing it is to do this.
Well, it's a short film and it's really almost like a mini-documentary of how you're trying to balance your life and training and running and competing in these ultra-marathons and then also working a full-time job and then also going out and bowhunting.
Yeah, and like you said, hopefully gives a glimpse for people that haven't experienced it or aren't hunters maybe, just to see everything that's involved in the hunt and how powerful it is and just the wild animals out there interacting with each other and then how we fit in that formula.
It's one of those things that I really think our words, like people will be intrigued by the words, but I don't think we're ever going to be able to put it in their head, what we experienced.
Because there was one point in time where Jameson and Colton and I were together in the woods, and I just stopped, and as we were walking towards this elk that was screaming, and there was a screaming elk all around us, and you hear these cow elk that are making this meow.
And he could not just be satisfied with his 30 cows.
With 29. I think he had more than 30. It was so hard to count.
They were everywhere.
But he could not be satisfied with the cows he had left.
He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Where you going, baby?
And he went chasing after her.
And when he went chasing after her, these other cows that were left behind started going, meh.
They make this noise like they want some dick.
And when that was happening, this other bull behind us was like, I felt that bill.
I'm the man for you girls.
Well, fuck that dude.
I'm right here.
So he starts screaming and then the other bull starts screaming.
So he decided it's too much.
And so he takes all of his cows and he moves them over the top of the hill.
And when he moved him over the top of the hill, We went after him, and when we went after him, he turned around because he thought we were that other bull.
I mean, it's unlike anything I've ever heard, and I've elk hunted a lot of different places, and that's the...
You know, if you, and I said, if you're an elk hunter, I said one morning, I think it was the morning that it was snowing and we were in on bulls, you know, crazy rut activity, amazing footage, cold, wet, elk hunting.
And I'd said, told Mark and the guy said, if you're an elk hunter, this is as good as it gets.
The market hunters essentially almost wiped out the elk.
And at the turn of the century, there were very few elk, very few deer, and then they had established some protocols and some wildlife conservation ideas in place in order to try to revive them.
They've done an amazing job since then.
Foundations like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, what they've done is move elk into areas where they had been extirpated.
So they had been driven out of the area, essentially extinct in this one particular region.
We talk about this every time about hunters and conservation and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, but those are the groups that have fought to protect elk and elk habitat, and that's why they're doing so well.
So I think, in fact, here's a gratuitous crotch shot.
Yeah, I mean, so amazing so that they actually have to hire people to kill them in some places where they get too close to urban environments and they have a ton of car accidents.
This is one of those subjects where whenever we're talking about hunting, like there's one way that we normally talk about it when it's just like you and I or maybe some other hunters where we talk about how great it is, how much we love it, how great the meat is.
And then there's a way that you talk about it in public where you have to sort of temper that knowing there's a bunch of people that are listening that That are going to get very emotional, that are maybe anti-hunters, and some of them where it gets really weird also eat meat.
I read the comments on social media and it's like, you tell me don't read them, but I think you do too.
But anyway, and it's just some people, it's like, I saw one today and I think you mentioned that I was going to be on.
Somebody said something like, Joe, for his whatever, I can't remember, intelligent or in tune or something you are, I can't believe you hunt, you know, or can't, whatever.
unidentified
It's just like, Check that dude's Instagram for a cheeseburger.
To me, I think if you are in tune with actually how the world and nature and how we live and what we need, the more in tune you are, the more accepting you are of hunting.
Not the more you slight it, because it's how it works.
It's how we survive.
It's, you know, life eats life, and it's just like, it seems weird for people to think that, oh, I'm evolved past that, and I'm smarter, more intelligent, and you're a Neanderthal.
Well, what they're trying to do, and I understand it and I appreciate it, what they're trying to do is move past the idea that we have to be cruel and that we have to kill animals and that we have to live off the suffering of other living creatures in order to survive.
So this is like the vegan idea, right?
So what they want to do is live off only plants and not participate at all in any sort of slaughter of animals or any sort of cruelty.
And in theory, it's a great idea.
It's a great idea because nobody wants to be cruel.
I want to be ethical, Quick and merciful when I kill an animal because that's a hundred percent the opposite of how nature works Well, this is one thing that you have said to me in private when we've talked about it You know we were saying that what you train for and what you strive for is so that in that moment You can make the most precise shot and kill that animal as quickly and as ethically and as efficiently as possible And that that's how that's on your mind every time you release an arrow every time Yeah,
And it's also the reason why human beings are here today, the reason why we survived is because of hunting.
Does it mean that you can't be a vegetarian, you can't go vegan?
No, it doesn't.
You can do whatever you want to do.
But the reason why human beings have made it to the top of the food chain is because we consumed animals.
It's one of the primary reasons.
That biologists believe that our brains evolved past that of lower primates, is that we figured out fire, we figured out how to cook meat, and the nutrients from that cooking meat along with the complex problem-solving issues that come up in hunting are one of the reasons why we evolved.
Because to be smarter and more clever than these animals that are faster than you, smell better than you, hear better than you, see better than you, stronger than you, They have more endurance in you.
These elk run up that mountain like it's a joke.
I was huffing and puffing.
I mean, I've been running a lot since we did that Keep Hammering 5K last year, and I realized what a pussy I am.
And then, you know, times that we've hunted together, too, I've just been really out of breath.
And even though I work out doing other things, I realize, like, You have to run hills.
There's no way around it.
So it helped me a lot.
That was very nice to see.
It was very nice to see a big difference in my endurance now where I can keep up.
Whereas before it was like a huge struggle because every day we were doing 10-12 miles.
But these elk go up there like nothing.
Like it's nothing.
So for a human at one point in our evolutionary past to figure out how to beat these things at their own game, trick them and get meat from them and survive and then develop strategies for that and then teach other people in their community these strategies and this evolved and this This is the reason why you and I are talking today on microphones that are powered by electricity,
that in this room, that shelter in this city, this complex series of buildings that we've built a lot to protect us from the environment and from other animals.
Listen, I've been doing this for almost 30 years now.
1989, I killed my first bull elk as a spike bull.
And so since 1989, so this is 29 years of bow hunting, and I go into this season Just like I go into every season and I wonder, is this going to be the season where I have no success?
Because it could happen.
It's that hard.
Because I've killed before and had success for all these years, it doesn't mean anything right now.
It doesn't mean anything to an animal that I was pursuing in Utah, a big bull.
That big bull could care less about, oh, he's had a lot of success over the years.
It means nothing.
So I always wonder, is this going to be the year where I can't get it done?
And it completely changes your relationship to your food because all your meat that you're getting in your house is coming from your success bow hunting.
So when you are entering into a season and you're wondering whether or not you're going to get success, you're literally worrying whether or not you're going to be able to provide for your family the way you have been And it's not like we're starving.
Right.
But it's like this is the way you've chosen to acquire meat, though, in this ethical, humane, wild way.
People love to say, you know, that meat is terrible for you and you're going to get cancer and heart attacks and diabetes.
People keep repeating that.
Stop saying it because it's not true.
You're wrong.
I know you like to say that because it sounds good and it sounds like a really good argument for people that eat meat.
It's absolutely untrue.
And if you go back and look at the real studies, The only thing that they've shown is there's a connection between cancer and processed food.
There is a connection between preservatives, nitrites, and a lot of the things that we use to make processed meat.
So if you're talking about things like hot dogs and processed meats and, you know, kind of like beef sticks that you might get at the gas station, yeah.
Eat enough of those and your body's going to revolt.
It's not good for you.
But wild game meat is some of the most nutritious and healthy things that you can put in your body.
And that's just a fact.
And so people that keep putting these comments on Cam Haynes' Instagram page and occasionally on mine and all these different...
They always want to say this.
Cam, you're going to get cancer.
Good luck with your heart attack.
It's not true.
And every study that has shown that it is true is bullshit.
They've all been debunked by actual science.
If you look at the real people that are putting together these documentaries that show that meat causes diabetes, they are fools.
And it's not true.
It's been widely debunked.
What they are is proselytizing vegans.
They're vegans who want everyone to become vegan, so they're distorting truth in making documentaries that have no basis in actual reality and science.
And if you just Google, like, what was the most recent one those guys did?
I just want to tell people, like, just do some research.
Read some of the actual studies.
Here's what's bad for you.
A sedentary lifestyle.
A sedentary lifestyle is terrible for you.
Sitting in your office chair, sitting in your cubicle, eating too much, bad for you.
High carbohydrate diets, bad for you.
Getting too fat, bad for you.
Drinking a lot of alcohol, bad for you.
Drinking sugary sodas, bad for you.
All those things are way worse for you than an elk steak.
Way worse.
So if you're eating any of those things or doing any of those things and you say, good luck with your heart attack, Fuck off, because you don't know what you're talking about.
Since we're talking about that, one thing that I think we have to be careful on is slamming, I guess, the beef industry.
Because we're not trying to do that.
People always say, there's cattle ranchers out there that work hard, that do it right.
And there is factory farming, which people, I feel like almost...
I've been guilty of it, maybe, throwing around factory farming, almost like a vegan will throw around, good luck with that heart attack.
And there's a lot of ranches that do it right, that have the cattle out there free-ranging, and the only time that they're in a small enclosure is when they are killed.
I agree and the same thing can be said with chicken and same thing you'd say with Poultry with turkey.
There's a lot of free-range and there's more of an emphasis I think that's one of the reasons why people become more and more interested in hunting today.
They're more in tune.
Yeah Well, but people are more concerned with the ethics behind how their food is raised.
You know, there's a lot of farm-to-table restaurants that are opening up, which are really amazing.
You can go, and you can, you know, and there's a place near me, and you get these eggs, and they're dark yolks, like a dark orange yolk at this restaurant, and they have, like, grass-fed beef that tastes healthy.
We've gotten into this crazy situation as human beings where we're getting food that is in a lot of ways tasteless because it's been engineered to last forever on a shelf.
We've gotten this meat that's gotten super fat because they're pumping them up with antibiotics and feeding them grain until they, you know, just become these fat unhealthy things that are in no way resemble a wild creature.
But I think that was also probably the way it was cooked.
But what was really weird is the difference in the connection with that, right?
Like when you sit down and you cook an elk steak...
You remember where you were when you shot that.
You remember how hard it was to get to that elk.
You remember the stalk.
You remember maybe several blown stalks where the wind shifted on you and the elk spooked and took off and how difficult it is and the intense success.
And that's another thing that people don't like, the idea of the happiness that comes with success when you kill something.
And it's not like, oh, we murdered something, so we're celebrating.
But it's so hard.
We talked about the difficulty.
You achieve something of...
Great difficulty, when that animal's dead, and then you're skinning it, you're cutting the meat off.
I mean, you know, I took out the tenderloins of the bull I killed, you know, and smelled it, made sure the meat, always just making sure, because that is the fruit of the labor right there, is that meat.
So, you're holding a big slab of steak.
And like you said, you remember everything, but mostly what I'm thinking of there is how clean it is, how pure it is, does it smell good, smells perfect, and that's just kind of the process.
It goes in the meat bag, it goes on my back, it comes off the mountain, it goes in the cooler, it goes to the processor, it gets cut and frozen and wrapped, and then I cook it.
That's a lot of steps.
We go to the airport, we say, yeah, can I get the sirloin?
You have no idea who did the actual killing of the cow.
When you go to the woods, and you come out with an elk steak, and you kill it, and you're wearing a Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation belt buckle, and you're Cam Haines, like, people can look to you.
If someone was outside protesting you, like they found out we're doing this podcast, and you're like, you son of a bitch, we're the ones who put out the petition, we want to get you banned from Under Armour, you're a terrible person, you're a trophy hunter, you're out there killing animals.
All around them is dead animals.
Every gas station is filled with beef sticks, every restaurant is filled with dead animals.
Every supermarket is filled with dead animals.
In this area where we're at, there are a hundred places that you can walk to inside of three minutes that have dead animals in them.
I guess to some people, some people are getting it.
You know, there's some people that would protest out here.
It wouldn't matter what justification you had.
They were never going to see it.
And that's fine because we're all different.
You know, we all have different passions.
So that group of people, whatever.
But there's a people in the middle that we have, they have heard and they have thought about it and they have You know realize that does make it actually makes sense and those are the people that Want to know what it'd be like to be a provider for themselves to go to go into the mountains and and to come Loaded loaded out with you know a pack full of meat and so those are the people I guess we're talking to we're never gonna get the extreme people No,
I mean and that's always going to be the case with all arguments There's always going to be radical people on all sides, you know, and I think Our job as human beings, communicating to other human beings, is to try to relay our own experiences as clear and as honest as possible.
And that's why I always try to look at it from the other point of view.
I always try to look at it from people that I think are good people that become vegans because they're good people, because they want to have no cruelty.
And I think they just have...
A perspective that I don't share.
And that perspective is I've actually been involved.
I've gone through the ritual of the hunting.
I've gone through the trials and tribulations of hiking many, many miles and trying to find these things and trying to figure out the wind.
If it's somebody they want to hate, it's me they hate.
I'm sitting there with a dead elk.
But hunting is such a roller coaster.
It's like everything is magnified.
The success is magnified because it's so hard.
The failure is magnified because it hurts so bad because you've worked so hard.
I mean...
I just it took me I started like I said in 1989 it took me to 1996 to kill my first six point bull elk in the wilderness and it would have been we wouldn't even have looked at it on this last time it would have been like ah there's a little bull I mean but when I when I got that six point bull elk I felt so proud I'd finally achieved I mean that's that's the bull on this buckle right here is a six point and I thought I finally did it But in between
there had been so many disappointments and devastations and in the wilderness.
I remember one time I'd been in there by myself.
I think like day eight.
I was in this dry creek bed and here comes these cows come across.
Here comes this big bull.
I don't know how big he was.
He's pretty big for their 320, 330, which is a scoring number.
So that was nothing, essentially nothing more than a flesh wound, but I remember sitting there looking at my arrow, looking at the little bit of blood on my broadhead, and, I mean, eyes welling up with tears, because Eight days just there but working all year towards that moment and having that opportunity at 43 yards and Being inches off because inches further to the right back would have been double long dead bull biggest bull ever all the hard work paid off to being devastated so
people see the success Some 20 years later or whatever it's been they don't To feel as disappointed as I was.
To wonder if all the work was worth it.
To hurt that bad.
They don't see that.
But that's why hunting is so powerful.
That's why hunting has changed my life.
Because it's so difficult.
And because there's those ups and downs.
We do a better job of sharing the complete journey now than...
Back in the day, you'd just be like, hey, I killed this bull.
That's it.
You'd go to the archery pro shop.
You'd put your picture up of the bull that you killed, and that was it.
Now, we're a little more in tune.
I see all sorts of people on social media now, and they show their picture of their bull, and they get down.
You read the caption.
It's about providing for their family and pure protein in their freezer.
So...
We're doing a better job of explaining it, but still, until you've been there, it's really hard to grasp what it all means.
Well, to me, it's a lot like jujitsu in that way, too, where if you talk to people who train in jujitsu a lot, they understand how difficult it is and they understand the struggle and they understand that in that struggle, like all struggles, I think people need struggle.
I think it's very important.
You get better not just at the jiu-jitsu or not just at the bow hunting.
You get better at being a person.
And I feel better today.
After this trip in Utah than I felt before I left.
I feel energized because of how difficult it was to hike those mountains up and down and chasing those elk around and having things blow out and getting back to the lodge and being so tired that you could just barely eat your food and then I'm passing out almost like as I'm done eating.
And then I crash and the alarm goes off at 5 o'clock in the morning and then you're out there in the dark doing it again.
And then to have success.
So to understand that you can push through things and you can get better.
And you can practice things and you can get better.
It's a discipline, but It's discipline like almost no other because it's not just a discipline It's a discipline that also sustains you and your family and it's a discipline that involves like real critical moments of life and death Like when I was drawing back on that bull and I'm looking at this bull through a very small window where I could shoot Between these two trees, 32 yards away, and Colton, who was the guide, paused this bull.
And to do it, and to do it successfully, and to have that elk die in seconds, and have that elk wander off 20 yards, like seeing it bleed out of both sides, knowing this is it.
And this is probably, no, not probably, definitely.
Unless he falls off a cliff, this is the cleanest, fastest death this thing is ever going to have.
We would go back to the lodge, and it was, you know, you and me and our buddy Ben O'Brien was there and was lots of laughs, and we were having a good time.
We'd all eat dinner together and just shoot the shit.
When you're in the woods and you're camping, you're still in the woods.
There's no...
The lodge is civilization.
There's electricity.
There's hot water.
You can take a shower.
When you're in the woods, you stay in the woods.
When you camp, you wake up, you're in the woods.
It's a more immersive experience.
And then there's the next level, which is what Adam did.
In the woods by himself for many, many, many, many days before he had success.
And then there's...
Video of him after he shot that elk 20-whatever days in when, you know, he's like, it's finally over.
It's finally over.
It's like, that guy just went on a vision quest, you know?
Bowhunting means, I don't know, if you tried to explain, what does bowhunting mean to you?
You couldn't do it with words for somebody like him, you know?
And I would lump myself in there.
It's like bowhunting defines who I am, who he is.
But, you know, I know I've done seminars before and I've asked people, okay, if there's 100 or 200 people there, how many people have stayed out in the woods, in the mountains by themselves for one night?
I think any experience in nature is good for people.
I think we spend entirely too much time in cities, entirely too much time indoors in buildings and artificial lighting and all that stuff.
I think any experience in nature at all is good for you.
It's just good to be grounded, literally grounded, like to feel the ground and to understand that this is the wild world.
This is the real world.
This other thing is this Nerfed out thing that we've sort of concocted as human beings.
But the more time you spend in there, the more it reveals itself to you.
And there's a weird, empty loneliness to true wilderness.
Like when you're at the top of a mountain, and you don't have any cell signal, and you don't see a building anywhere as far as the eye can see.
We're nowhere near city when we're out there.
When you sit up there, and you look out, and you hear a coyote howl, and you see an eagle fly overhead, and you hear an elk bugle, there's nothing like it.
It's the real wild.
These things, they don't know you're a real thing.
They don't care.
They care if you get close to them, they'll run away.
But what they're there to do is what they've been doing for thousands of years.
You talk about how, you know, we got to LAX last night, and I'm just walking around going, and I don't 100% feel this way, but I'm like, I told you, I'm like, I hate people.
There's a thing that happens out there where you're clearly defined by your ability to perform under pressure only.
Yeah.
If you go out there and you're some famous rock star or something like that, here's some guy who lives in a giant mansion and flies around in a private jet and you own an island, but you choke when you're going to shoot a bull and you shoot it in the dick and everybody knows you're a loser.
Out there, it's like the people who get respect, hunters get respect.
I mean, if you...
If you can navigate, if you can see elk, if you can read blood, if you're blood trailing, you got woodsmanship, you can unravel a blood trail, you can start a fire.
You're here.
It doesn't matter about how much money you have or who you are.
If you can't do any of that stuff, well, you're lower.
To me, it was incredibly important to be able to perform during crunch time.
Because I wanted the respect of the people that also do it.
I wanted, and to get that, it was very important.
To be able to, in that moment, and I spent so much time thinking about it, going over podcasts and All that Joel Turner stuff about target panic and about closed loop and open loop mind systems and how your brain functions under pressure and thinking about all these different things.
When you're looking at a 900-pound forest horse with spears growing out of its head, and it's screaming, and there's one shot, you have one opportunity.
And by the way, you only have one tag, and if you wound an animal, it's over.
If you just shot it in the ankle and it starts bleeding, guess what?
Your tag's over.
The money that you spent is done, you failed, and that thing lives to be an elk and lives another day.
I never really understood until I hunted with you.
Because when you would run up the top of a fucking hill, when an elk would go over the top, and you'd run up the hill, and I would just be struggling to go a quarter of the way, and I'd have to take a break, and then I'd go a little further and take a break, and you were over up there, and you weren't even out of breath.
And then I thought about it, I'm like, okay, I get it.
And, you know, I don't, for me personally, because I just feel like I'm okay at bow, I'm decent at bow hunting, and it's like, just the fact that I was even here one time seems surreal, but I just, I want to think, I don't know, I was thinking about this earlier, is because of bow hunting, I know people will say, because again, I read the comments, but...
I mean, I was listening to Brian Barney's podcast, the Eastman Elevated podcast, where he took a couple of buddies, when I was actually cutting up meat today, I was listening to this, took a couple of buddies with him on a public land hunt in Montana.
And they got into some elk, and it seemed like they had an amazing time.
It was the same sort of thing.
It was an amazing adventure.
It's available in a lot of different forms to a lot of people.
And there's a lot of people that go, oh, you know, this is bullshit.
Joe gets to do this, and Joe's lucky, and this and that.
Literally, there's always going to be people that are luckier than you.
And some of it is luck and some of it is courage.
Some of it is putting your ass out there.
Some of it is trying things.
One of the things that I always like to tell people that I think you should do is do shit that's difficult.
It's very important to struggle.
And it doesn't mean bowhunting.
I like yoga class.
For the same reason.
I go in there, it's me and a bunch of housewives, and they're kicking ass more than I am.
I mean, I watch these ladies, and I watch their mental strength and fortitude while they're grueling their way through this 104 degree temperature, holding these poses.
I'm watching the sweat pour off their face, and they're not complaining.
They're just You don't get to know yourself without struggle.
You don't get to know your boundaries unless you push them.
You don't get to know who you are, really, unless you're tested.
And so those are the people that drive me crazy because everything you just said is so true, but there's so many people that would rather stand on the sidelines and say, oh, must be nice to be able to blah, blah, blah.
When you were talking about running, you were involved, and someone was behind you, and they were running right on your tail, and you're like, oh, let's see how this works out for you.
It's like, there's no way a regular person is going to keep up with you in a race.
It's just not going to happen.
Let's see how this works out.
But that's just because they're not getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning.
I follow your Instagram.
You're fucking running before work.
You know, you're running a marathon a day for people that don't know.
You're literally preparing right now.
While Cam is in the middle of bow hunting season, he takes a little bit of time off of this fucking insane preparation, which is good because it allows his body to heal, but he's going to compete in the Moab In October, that is 238 fucking miles.
It's a straight race.
It's not 238 miles over the course of a month.
No, no, no.
It's 238 miles from beginning, ready, go, to the races over, 238 miles.
Specifically is you see how there's no shade so that's what what we call that is it's exposed you're exposed the whole time to the Sun and That that looks at Candace right there.
Who's a race director.
She's running this in this trailer right here So this is her brainchild basically and She must be a savage.
She is she's a total stud.
I mean she's she's look at this terrain.
She's run a bunch of done really well in hundred mile ultras This terrain is fucking magnificent!
Right, so being exposed like that, that just sucks everything out of you.
The sun can just sap you.
Keeping your skin covered as well as you can, keeping hydrated, keeping fueled up, that's just the name of the game.
It'll be, you know, my Under Armour fat tires is what I'll be running in because that much pounding for that long, the cushion for my body is important and imperative, basically.
Okay, so you get a good amount of cushioning and also a good amount of traction, right?
Because basically the fat tires, the reason why they're named that way is because essentially the bottoms of them are like a BMX road racing mountain bike tire.
But it's just unusual for someone who's an endurance athlete who does like these long, you know, 200 plus mile races to actually be packing on a lot of muscle.
It's one of the reasons why whenever someone would talk about UFC fighters not being able to make the weight or, you know, whatever, you know, complaints they have about not being able to make weight.
I'm like, my friend Cam...
Literally, you make your body eat itself to drop down.
You were at 180 plus pounds before you started, and then when you went to run the Bigfoot 200, you were burning 3,000 calories and eating 2,000, right?
It's just all scar tissue holding that thing together?
Let's see if they can find a video, Jamie.
Because I've seen a video of him doing...
David completed 2,588 pull-ups in 566 sets for a total of 4.6 pull-ups per set, 1,000 pull-ups in 2 hours, 48 minutes, and 2,000 pull-ups in 3,034 minutes.
But at 13.5 hours in, he felt something in his wrist snap and was not able to go on.
An x-ray at 10.30 confirmed a partial tear in his forearm.
He believes that you should only, like, if you can do sets of more than five, that what you're doing is bodybuilding.
And that you should do five with very clean technique, take a big break, and then do another five, and then just keep doing it for long periods of time.
Like, ideally, maybe some people don't have the time to do those kinds of workouts, but he believes you should do, like, with five to ten minute rest in between workout sets, and just do a bunch of sets like that.
And I've been doing that for a while now.
And I feel less sore, less fatigue, I can do it more often, and I just feel like you make better progress that way.
I think there's something to it.
I think we have a lot of meathead ideas in our head of what you're supposed to do as far as working out, as far as going to failure all the time with heavy weights.
Because if all you're trying to do is massive amounts of weight like a lot of these guys do, well then they're going to push their body quite a bit more than I am.
I see guys all the time do things that most people would say you should never do.
And they have a lot of success.
Nobody's going to say you should run a marathon every day.
They're gonna say that's a good way to get injured and that's too much in your body.
You're not you're not getting the most out of your body Nobody's like when I lift I try to do tons of reps, you know at least 20 reps per set But you're doing lighter weights.
Yeah, you're not trying to go to failure with heavy weights Try to go to failure with everything if 20 doesn't get it then I'll do 40, you know, so it's but you know You're not trying to go to failure with like 305 for bench.
Did you ever get your blood sugar checked to see if you're ketogenic?
Hell no.
It's interesting because I feel like it's very important to talk about that everybody's body is different.
You know who's a great proponent of this is Rob Wolf.
And one of the really interesting things about Rob Wolf is a scientist and a very, very smart guy when it comes to nutrition and health.
Writes a lot of books about paleo diets.
But one of the more interesting things that Rob does is he will eat the same thing as his wife And they'll both test themselves, test their blood, and he'll do it on video.
And his wife is consistently more adaptive than he is.
Like, they're eating the same thing.
But his body, for whatever reason, doesn't perform as well processing carbohydrates as hers does.
Yeah, that's one thing Nick told me the other day, because I was just like, we lifted, and I'm so weak.
Weak, because I was running so much, right?
And so we did just a few quick calculations and if you run a marathon a day at my weight it was and then just living because just living you're gonna burn 1700 calories a day for me then plus the 3300 or something that I'd burn when running a marathon so it was like 5000 calories and I was eating three.
Yeah, so he said I needed to just ramp up the fats, you know, so I started hammering nuts, avocados, things like that, and I actually did, I was feeling better.
Yeah, I think that's the big part of the ketogenic diet that people get wrong, is that your ketogenic diet is primarily fats, and then you have an adequate amount of protein, dependent upon how much activity you do, You obviously do a lot of activity you would need more Protein than most and I think you would also probably need more actual carbohydrates than most yeah and still stay in ketosis I think if that's probably one of the reasons why you were so tired and you felt weak but also I think This thing that you're doing,
Well, I think that with the level of output that you're putting out and the amount of focus and dedication to these things, the amount of obsession to performing at a 200-plus mile race...
Any whiny bullshit that you hear is just so much more magnified than what I hear.
If I hear whiny stuff from a grown adult, I'm like, Jesus fucking Christ.
We live in a world where if it's cold out, you press a button and it gets warm.
We live in a world where water, the thing that keeps us alive that people struggle to find in most of the free world, comes out of a fucking, you have a lever in your sink, in every sink, in every bathroom where you can just drink fresh water.
But that's why I'm just confused as to why you don't have a group of people that you're close to that are also ultra-marathon runners that you can compare notes with.
So what happened is he was a high jumper and a long jumper.
My daughter was doing pole vaulting last year and they kind of hurt.
My dad was an awesome pole vaulter at South Eugene High School.
He was the first athlete inducted into their Hall of Fame.
They did that right before he died.
Which Hall of Fame?
In the South Eugene Hall of Fame, that high school there in Eugene.
Anyway, so these coaches at where my daughter was doing pole vaulting, they said, you know, after a few different practices, they'd heard about, you know, her and me and who her grandpa was.
And so he comes up and he's like, he goes, was your dad Bob Haynes?
I'm like, yeah.
And he goes, Yeah, he was a legend around here because they went to high school together and now they've been coaching and he just said that everybody knew Bob Haynes and he could do things nobody else could do.
I think where he would have had his success was in high jump and he could high jump 6'4", and what he did at that time was called the Western Roll.
And so you just kind of roll over the bar and then he'd competed against Dick Fosbury and he invented the Fosbury flop.
So you'd go with your back to the bar and then kick your legs over.
And so they would compete and my dad earned a scholarship at Oregon for gymnastics and then Oregon State for track when they had track and ended up dropping out of both schools and They said that he could high jump 6'4", doing the western roll, and they said, well, we're going to teach you the Fosbury flop, and we should be able to add 8 to 12 inches onto your jump.
So that would put him at 7 feet.
And that would have been up there with Dick Fosbury.
And...
So my dad ended up dropping out of school or whatever happened and I was born and then my brother was born.
You know how life gets in the way.
And then meanwhile, Dick Fosbury went to the Olympics and won the gold medal.
So it's just who knows what would have happened.
Fact is, he was an amazing athlete.
If you just want to sing just in high school, that's fine.
But he was a D1 athlete in two different sports.
I don't have that potential.
What I have is just a hard work ethic.
That's what I translate.
Without the athletic talents maybe that he has, I might have the work ethic That might match a talent and that's what I've used to do ultras because basically that's just being tough I mean I think I think it's just grinding and and put in miles and training and Then getting where everybody else wants to quit and pushing through in the races So you don't like have a few friends like I know what was the woman's name that runs Candace you
And so it's the same course with the same goal is cover 100 miles in under 24 hours.
So if you do that, you get the buckle and it says 100 miles one day.
And that's like the gold medal for an ultra runner.
So they have that same thing for horses and Gordon Ainsley was He was in the horse race his horse came up lame and he said well i'm going to finish it on my own on his on his feet jesus and so he did that and that's where western states endurance race or run began because it's like well let's just let's just do this on our feet what a animal that guy was right yeah and he still competes in the western states right now he's old how old is he but he can't break 20 he
can't even break 30. so you can get a buckle 100 miles one day if you break 24. if you break 30 A cookie?
No, you get a buckle just as Western States Endurance Run.
But if you don't break 30, you get nothing.
So he's tried for...
I think when I ran it in 2010...
God, what was he?
60-some, probably?
He, at the 30-mile cutoff, he was at like the 90-some-mile cutoff.
I hadn't run 30 miles by June, so I'm like, okay, I'm just going to say this is just a training day.
Tomorrow I'll go home, rest up, and maybe I'll do another long run, and that'll be good back-to-back.
Because that's what you need for the 200-mile races is most of your running is you're beat to shit.
So, I mean, you've got to be able to push through.
So the back-to-back training days are key.
So at 30 miles, I was about at 6 hours.
And I'm like, God, maybe I feel awful, but maybe I'll quit at 50. So I got to 50 miles and I'm like, God, okay, maybe I'll run 12 hours.
So at 12 hours, I was at 61 miles.
And it was at 9 at night.
The race starts at 9 in the morning.
9 at night, I was at 61 miles.
I'm feeling awful, but I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to be such a pussy if I quit.
Not because there's anything wrong with running a 12-hour race and getting 61 miles.
That's awesome.
That's hard.
Super hard.
But for me, my goal was 24 hours.
I signed up for the 24-hour race.
So 12 hours isn't 24. So I'm like, well...
I got 12 hours to get 39 miles.
I just did 61 miles in 12 hours.
So I could just milk it out and still get my 100, which was my goal.
24 hours, 100 miles.
So I thought, well, I got 12 hours to get 39 miles.
And it was the worst 12 hours of my life.
And I barely got it.
I mean, it was...
So I did 61 in 12, and then it took me...
Took me 12 to get to 39, but I got 100 miles done, and it was, you know, wasn't trained up, wasn't ready, but had all these reasons, and I was running, thinking of all these excuses I could say, and I could say that I cramped up, and, you know, this is a good example of why you shouldn't What not, you know, push your body past his limit, and I could just get all these kudos for being smart, and everybody would just say, it's okay, you did great.
The reason 200-milers aren't as fatigued is the 100-mile group was due to pacing.
The Tour des Gants, how do you say that?
G-E-A-N-T-S. Tour des Gants.
Runners averaged 3.4 miles per hour during the course, while the 100-mile runners took a faster 4.5 miles per hour pace.
Rich Roll was saying that, was that when he runs ultra-marathons, like when he was training, that one of the keys was never get his heart rate over 140 beats per minute.
Yeah, and Under Armour had an ultra at Mount Bachelor in July, and And I didn't, like, July 20-something, so it was about a month after the 24-hour race, and I didn't take a day, I think I took one day off.
So I ran every day from the 24-hour, trying to beat my body up, and then I went into that Ultra, and I ran that.
I don't know.
I took the wrong course for a couple miles, so I think I got seven.
And then the next day I ran the South Sister, which is...
It was 16 miles with 5,000 feet of gain so I got really good mountain back-to-back days there with no break after the 24 hour and then Went, then took a little break, I think a day, and then started trying to get really at least a half marathon a day.
But then I went on a run, I think of nine days where I did a marathon every day.
And so at that time, if you had asked if I had a chance to win Moab, I would have said, yeah.
Because my confidence was amazing.
Because I've never been able to do that.
And maybe I'm not being realistic about it because there could be, you know, Jim Walmsy show up who knows what he could run it in.
So maybe it's not realistic, but at that time I had confidence.
Now, after not running that much and being gone hunting, I don't know.
I feel like when I'm eating, you know, those elk are amazing animals, powerful, strong, endurance, you know, everything I would like to be as far as of taking on anything that happens.
And, you know, when you eat it, how could you not have confidence or feel better?
Yeah, I'm You know and part of it is I've never like I said I never felt special so I always feel like I should appreciate having a good job and I I'm loyal to to where I work and so I feel like all this Opportunity and these things that I do and being on you know your show and all that could go away tomorrow And then if I quit the job, I'd be like, oh my god.
I knew it I'm a freaking loser and I quit it the best job.
I've ever had in my entire life That's an interesting way of looking at it, but yeah It's Part of your strength is the fact that you can endure, right?
And there's not a lot of resources out there, but there's a lot of people that are listening.
There's a lot of people that they're hearing all this, and they're like, wow, this sounds crazy.
I want to get involved in this.
And again, a lot of what we're talking about, like I was talking about Brian Barney's podcast, he's hunting public land, over-the-counter tags in Montana.
You could go get them.
They don't cost that much.
You pay your license fee, you buy a tag, and you can go out into the wilderness.
You just need a tent and a backpack and a bow and arrow and some guts.
It's one of the few countries in the world where we have literally millions of acres of public land that are all yours and mine.
I mean, I was wearing that backcountry hunters and anglers t-shirt yesterday that says public landowner.
We're all public landowners.
And it's a very, very important thing to support.
And it's an amazing resource.
So yeah, where we're at in Utah is super rare and not a lot of people get to go there, but guess what?
You can go to Idaho.
You can go into the backcountry in Idaho and get amazing public land hunting.
If you're willing to hike in and go deep, And you go to Google Earth and you could go and look at all these basins and mountains and you could go online and ask people.
There's ways to move around.
There's ways to do this.
But getting started is insanely difficult.
And I've been thinking about this.
Maybe we could do something like you know how they have that total archery challenge that they did in Utah over there I was there is awesome amazing right so maybe there's like a Gathering that we could put together like maybe once a year maybe during the offseason Just once a year where people can get maybe fitted for a bow You sign up for this in advance,
and maybe it's a couple-day thing, like maybe one or two days, where you go through an introductory course of archery, understanding it, and then maybe someone can talk about shot placement, and maybe someone else, like someone who does a lot of soul hunting, like Remy, or maybe even Adam, can talk about, like, woodsmanship and things that you can learn, and here's some books you can read, like your book, Backcountry.
I mean, we've done gatherings, you know, Wayne at the Bow Rack, we used to do this Bowhunters, I can't remember what we used to call it, but six or seven hundred people would show up at the Bow Rack in the parking lot, big tent, and we'd do things.
We could do it out where I practice out at his property, you know, and get together and have people in, and it would just be, it would be amazing.
My book, Backcountry Bullhunting, I wrote in 2006. Cases of that go out every day.
I mean, before I left on this hunt, I sat at my kitchen table and signed books for cases of books because those are all going to be gone when I get home.
I don't understand how the fuck you have time to run a marathon and then sign books and then practice bow hunting and then do 100 reps of fucking this and then hang out with your family and then eat dinner and go to sleep and then work a full-time job and then...
Andy, for people who don't know, he's been on the podcast before, and he's a retired Navy SEAL who has the world record in the distance of one of those fucking crazy flying squirrel suits.
He's a maniac.
He's a real maniac.
And he's become completely obsessed with bowhunting.
And this is why he became obsessed with bowhunting as well.
It's like he recognized the things that we were talking about, and he decided to start it, to start the process and see what it was like, and then immediately became obsessed.
He was talking about, like, one time he went with an outfitter, and he just hadn't been practicing enough, he felt like he was fine, and he's just fucking missing.
But it's like he needed to have that wake-up call that even though he's John fucking Dudley, world-class professional archer, if you don't practice, it doesn't matter.
Arrow doesn't care.
The animals don't care if you think you're a bad motherfucker.
It doesn't care.
You have to have 100% dedication, 100% focus, all the time.
And that was one thing that I really loved about this week.
Is that even though, like, there was times that it was kind of, it was exhausting for sure.
And there was times it can be kind of frustrating when you're on an animal.
Like, I didn't feel frustrated like I wanted to quit.
Yeah, yeah, it does, because you get a TV show's 21 minutes, you got some sponsors you got to mention, you get a few minutes of hunting, and oh, here they killed something.
There was a time where Jameson and Colton and I, before I killed that bull, we were standing there dead still for five minutes while cows were just staring at us.
Just staring.
And you're not moving.
Your feet are going numb.
Your knee hurts because you're kind of leaning on the side of a hill.
And you can't move.
You just got to stay.
And they're just looking right at you.
Because for them...
Look, for me, it's a pursuit.
It's a discipline.
I don't want to say fun.
It's exhilarating and intense.
It's amazing.
I'm attracted to it.
For them, it's life and death.
And they don't have a language.
They don't have a brain that processes all these variables.
So, when you have an 8 to 10-year-old bull that has a protection of the herd, but also has been around for 8 to 10 hunting seasons, that's a smart animal.
San Carlos Indian Reservation, and he talked about this big bull there that knew he was being hunted, circled around them, came in from the backside of the hunters to look at them.
Because that bull had been around and knew what was going on so much, and so they were able to track him and see what he did, and he went around behind the hunters.
These animals, imagine.
I mean, this is where they live every day for 8 to 10 years.
Yeah, but you started to talk about the trophy hunting aspect and what people, you know, when they have that trophy hunting moniker that has negative connotation.
And that's what, we talked about this a little bit last night on the way back from the airport, the grizzly hunting in British Columbia.
Yeah.
They're stopping that in November.
There'll be no more grizzly hunting.
They were killing 250 bears a year out of 15,000.
So they're basically just managing the population.
You know, you have to take a certain amount of animals out given the habitat and the carrying capacity of the land.
And you're going to also destroy the economy that comes with hunting.
The economy that comes with hunting those undulates, because they're going to get devastated by the overwhelming population of grizzly bears, and the economy that comes with hunting the grizzly bears.
In managing them, what they're going to have to probably do is what they've done with mountain lions in California.
What people don't know, because mountain lion hunting is outlawed in California, so what they do is they hire hunters to kill mountain lions.
And they've killed...
I believe they killed almost 100 last year.
I think it was like 97. Most of them, they find pets in their body.
They find their primary food source, more than 50%, is dogs.
Well, what they're saying up there, and I did some research on it, just because I want to know how this works, because why it's being stopped is just public outcry.
And the new government in British Columbia said, in this day and age, you know, the public just can't stomach grizzly trophy hunting.
So the public, what the hell does the public know?
The public doesn't even, they're not even out there.
That money is now no longer going into the economy.
Now they're going to have what they call problem bears.
Now problem bears are bears that attack people, which is very frequent.
Bears that attack animals, livestock, bears that encroach upon people's established residences and communities and start eating garbage cans and killing pets and things along those lines.
Then they have to hire people to go out and kill these bears.
And that's going to cost thousands of dollars a day.
You're going to have to pay for equipment.
Dogs, they usually have to track them with dogs.
These dogs have to be trained.
You have to get specialists who know what they're doing.
There has to be more than one because they need backup because you're dealing with a thousand pound animal.
That's another thing that you know people don't like that idea of using dogs to hunt animals But that's one of the more effective ways to find these animals It's one of the best ways they use in a lot of states to find mountain lions Yeah, and people think it's fucked up and cruel the only effective way to hunt mountain lions to be to be honest I mean you can gamble you might see one have a tag.
That's one of the things that Aaron Schneider talked about in the podcast, where he was standing in the wrong place when they opened up the pen to let the grizzly dogs out, and the dog just leaped and slammed him in the chest and just about knocked him unconscious.
And the number, episode 282, and there was another one in there.
But 282 is, I think, the big one.
It's about predator management with bark.
Bart Lancaster and that's the one where they really talked about they talked about guys who live there in British Columbia who are talking about how you know when he's not home and he has to go somewhere he has to leave his dog with his wife if his wife goes riding a horse he has to bring the wife has to bring dogs with her because there's so many fucking grizzly bears out there they have to have something that's gonna protect him warn him and these these dogs are not just pets they're also a first line of defense To let them know that there's danger in the area.
They're just sitting there eating tofu and talking about spirituality.
And then they pass these bans and they upset the entire balance of nature.
They upset the economy.
The economy of hunting, of conservation, all these things get all lopsided.
And I understand where they're coming from.
I understand the sentiment.
But a lot of it is entirely based on The images that people have seen in movies, in Disney films, and the anthropomorphization of these animals where you attach human characteristics to these ultra-predators, these enormous monsters of nature, which are amazing.
I can speak for myself, but I know I'm speaking for you, too.
We don't want bears to not be there.
We don't want wolves to not be there.
They're amazing.
I'm glad that they exist.
They're fucking awesome.
I mean, to be outside, I've never heard a wolf howl.
Well, I did once.
I did it with Hawkridge in BC, but they were like way in the distance.
I heard wolves howl.
But to see them and be there when it's happening, I saw a grizzly bear once in Alberta.
And this is the other thing they talked about on the Gritty Bowman podcast where they really emphasize the difference between a biologist who's not in the field and all these different people, whether it's the hunters themselves or whether it's the guides or whether it's the people that are outfitters that are there.
24-7, 365. They can give you more data.
They understand the real numbers.
It's very difficult when you're dealing with, especially something like British Columbia, intensely wooded area.
To get a real number, I mean, there's no, like, you can't just pull up the social security numbers of the bears and find out how many of them are still alive.
Well, that's another important thing that Adam found out.
When Adam Greentree was on this crazy walkabout that he was doing for the last month, he found mountain grizzlies.
What he believes, and he says, and I know that he's a very smart guy, he's been around a lot of animals, he believes there's 100% mountain grizzlies in Colorado.
So, once you take the science out of it and the people with boots on the ground actually weighing in on...
Hey, Kate, here's how many animals there are.
Here's how many we need to kill.
Once you do like they did in B.C. and the government just decides that the public can't stomach it anymore because they did some poll at Starbucks in B.C., right?
So thankfully, here in the United States, we do have a great system for wildlife management.
And our government, except for here in California with the mountain lions, trusts the professionals, the biologists, the people out, you know, boots on the ground, as I said.
And we...
We trust those people to allocate tags, to give us numbers, to help manage the hunt seasons and how many tags are for each area.
People are going to sue against it, but The the idea is not to kill all these animals the idea is not to To satisfy the bloodthirsty urges some fat redneck that people have in their mind as being the Stereotypical hunter that they see as a bad guy in a movie right like in a movie It's always like, remember the scene in Wolverine where there's the bad guys who killed the bear and he goes and fucks those bad guys up?
There was an article that was written by a guy from Zimbabwe, right after the whole Cease of the Lion thing, that was in the New York Times, that it said, in Zimbabwe, we do not cry for lions.
When they made lion hunting such a dangerous proposition for people that do it because you're going to get ostracized, people are going to show up at your house and protest like they did that dentist guy.
Now they have to hire hitmen to go in there and shoot all these lions and they make no money.
So instead of making $50,000 per lion, which helps the community, helps fund their schools and gives them money, and there's been a lot of articles written about the lie of conservation when it comes to lion hunting and how little of it actually goes to the people of the community and how much of it actually goes to the outfitters.
But you know how much of it goes to the community if you don't have hunters?
Most of them just are, you know, hashtag activists or, you know, internet people that are just posting pictures up on Instagram and Facebook and getting people riled up and starting petitions.
She decided to roll down her window to get a bit of a photo, and the cat said, thank you, just reached in, grabbed her, pulled her out of the car, and killed her in front of everybody.
I'm glad for this forum to talk about things like this because I know we've made an impact because of you and you reach so many people and you're Wearing an Under Armour Hunt shirt right now with a big bull on it and a Hoyt bow hunting hat.
And it's just like, I feel like there's been education happening for a few years now.
And we're slowly turning the tide.
And people do care more about where their food comes from.
Kind of the process of, how'd this food get to my...
Not everybody's thinking that, but a lot of people are.
And it just feels like, also like, bow hunting is just...
And I always tell people, even if you want to eat plants for the rest of your life, you never want to kill an animal ever, just try archery just for meditation.
It's an amazing, relaxing thing because to release a perfect arrow and have it hit that bullseye is so difficult and involves so many different things that you have to manage and control that in doing that, it sort of cleanses your mind.
Jed owed me a hundred bucks, but I let it slide because Under Armour paid for the hunt.
I think what's important about podcasts, and it's not just for hunting, I think it's important for almost every really difficult, complex, nuanced subject, is you have to discuss all the aspects of it.
And you can't do that on a regular television show.
You also have to remove a lot of the...
Unrealistic programming that we have in our head because of anthropomorphization of animals attaching human characteristics that we've seen in Disney movies and all of our lives.
Animals have been our friends.
We've had teddy bears that are our friends.
Polar bears are selling us Klondike bars and Coca-Cola.
We have all this in our head that these are these cute, awesome things, which they are awesome.
They are beautiful.
But we don't know what they really are.
We have an unrealistic idea of what they really are.
We might see them in the zoo.
Oh, there's the bear in the zoo.
Hi, bear!
This is not what they really are.
And unless you have real-world experience in where they really are, Like I was saying to Tom, the guy who owns the ranch.
Like, if people could go and experience that, and just be...
I think you would get, like, one step closer to an understanding of that this whole world is this wild collection of things that are interacting with each other.
Maybe they should trust people who've been there, who've done it, who understand, who aren't bloodthirsty killers, but actually have been out there and know how it all goes together.
It's okay to trust people like that and not think that hunting's bad, hunters are bad.
It takes time, but I've got a lot of messages from people and I've talked to a lot of people in real life that have said to me that they've changed their thoughts on what hunting is by listening to me talk to Ronella, listening to me talk to you, listening to me talk to Remy and John Dudley and all these different people where you get a sense.
Of like, oh, these are like really good people.
And these are people that are experiencing this wild thing.
And it gives them like this itch.
Because I can remember before I ever hunted, for years, I had this weird itch about it.
Where I'd been fishing most of my life.
You know, I always would go fishing.
But I'd never been hunting until 2012. But before that, I always had these thoughts about it.
Like I'd always sit around and I'd go, man, what was...
Like, that's gotta be the best way to get meat, right?
It's gotta be the healthiest for you.
And I would buy, like, I would always order, like, if they had venison in a restaurant, I'd always order it, or, you know, elk, or, you know, bison, or something like that.
I'm like, wow, it tastes different.
And that's farm-raised bullshit, you know?
When you're buying venison in a store, you're not getting a wild deer.
And being involved in this for so long, I can say I do a lot of different things.
The ultra running community is not a hunters.
I mean, those are pretty green people.
But I can say that for me, the best people I know, my closest friends, the people I can count on for anything, like I said, are hunters.
And it's like, hunters, I think...
Just have a different perspective on life, death, struggle, and where that's driven home for me is the death threats I get.
There's comments right now on a couple of my photos from people that said, somebody said they hope I get home and my family gets in a car crash and I get there just in enough time to where the flames are burning them and they're clawing at the windows.
That's the kind of stuff people post on my photos today because I hunt.
And I think that's, when you get to the elite of anything, you get to people that have exceptional character, that have allowed them to get really, truly great at any pursuit.
And you're talking about guys like Lee Lukoski or Remy Warren, you're talking about the elite of the elite, right?
If they were doing anything, they would be amazing at it.
And I think that, when you're talking about the character of those people, those are people that have overcome incredible odds to become very good at something that's insanely difficult, which is bow hunting.
And I think a lot of these people, the problem is, First of all, there's an anonymous communication on the internet.
That's a problem.
The problem is talking to people in person.
You get social cues.
If I say something mean to you and I see I'm hurting your feelings, you feel it.
You're trying to reach out and hurt someone.
You're not even in the room.
You're throwing a bomb.
You're closing your eyes and throwing a bomb over a bridge.
You're not seeing them.
It's a bad form of communication for the human animal.
Unless you commit to only being nice and kind or friendly or funny online, unless you commit to doing that and never trying to reach out and attack someone and hurt someone, you're using this whole thing wrong because you're taking advantage of this weird little loophole that exists in communication.
They don't understand that we are here for a very temporary short amount of time and the more we embrace the richness and complexity that is life and the life eats life struggle and the less we finger point and more we try to look at our own Footprint, our carbon footprint, and just the sustainability footprint that we leave on this world.
And in my eyes, there's no more sustainable way of living than supporting conservation through buying tags and supporting it through buying outdoor equipment.
What is the number of percentage of taxes that go from when you buy hunting equipment that goes straight to conservation?
Gun and ammo taxes result in $1.1 billion for wildlife and conservation each year.
$1.1 billion.
That's just gun and ammo taxes.
Forget about bows and arrows and hunting equipment and clothing and all the different factors that play in different pieces that contribute to conservation.
It's an amazing amount.
And you're not getting that from people who are philanthropists.
You're not getting that from people that just want to be nice and contribute to animals.
And that you didn't have to be a conservationist first and then hope that your kids or their kids could be hunters because the world would be in more balance.
It's worked so well, but it's been represented so poorly.
I think up until recently.
I didn't understand what it was until I became involved in it.
So I'm very thankful for people like you and people like Steve Rinella that opened the door for me.
And then I feel like as much as I preach about this and much as I'm redundant as fuck and annoying to a lot of people listening, I think I have a responsibility to share what I've learned.
And to communicate about this, even though people get mad at me.
And I think the closer we can get to a real, true, organic relationship...
With life.
With all life.
Plant life.
I mean, I fucking hate the idea of pesticides.
You know, I hate the idea that we're spraying things on certain plants to kill them so that we can grow other plants.
Like, large-scale agriculture, when you look at a giant cornfield...
Ladies and gentlemen, that is one of the most unnatural things in all of life, and it is one of the weirdest things we've just accepted as being natural.
It's not natural, and it's one of the reasons why they have to dump nitrogen into the soil and all kinds of other shit and pesticides and use Roundup and use giant machines to grind up all this stuff.
I'm not saying you shouldn't eat wheat, but I'm saying All of this is unnatural.
Cities are unnatural.
All this is unnatural.
And the more we understand about the true nature of our interactions with this life that we are surrounded with, the better off we'll all be.
And it doesn't mean finger pointing or saying that you should watch your family die in a fire.
That's not helping anybody.
They don't understand.
It's just digging in on both sides.
It's sort of the same thing that people do in politics.
You know, the right hates the left and the left hates the right and nothing gets done because everybody's just digging in and supporting their side.
And it's just, we all need to realize that this life that we're experiencing is far more nuanced and requires far more research and far more understanding of all the different pieces that are moving.