Joe Rogan, Steven Rinella, and Cameron Hanes explore the ethical and practical extremes of hunting—from Rinella’s six-carat ruby-and-black-diamond bear claw necklace to Rogan’s gold dog ring—while debunking misguided studies linking wild game to cancer. They dive into archery tech, like Garmin’s banned release aid, and long-range precision, critiquing urban-driven ballot measures (e.g., Colorado’s wolf hunting restrictions) that ignore rural realities, such as elk populations plummeting from 16,000 to 1,000 after wolf reintroduction. The trio warns hunters must unite or risk losing access to all forms of the sport due to progressive overreach, stressing fair chase and transparency in an era where social media demonetizes raw hunting footage. [Automatically generated summary]
I have a tooth that got knocked out and it's like one of those calves.
And one time we were drinking and I, when I was younger, we were drinking and I was trying to open up.
It used to be that company that made tequila that had like a sombrero for a lid.
And I was opening one of these bottles and broke that fake tooth off.
And all night I'm going on about how I'm getting the gold.
It's gone, you know, and all night I'm like making a plan, talking all this, and I woke up in the morning and looked in the mirror and I just wanted a white, a regular white tooth bag so bad.
My old man told me that during the war, guys would carry around dental picks.
And he fought World War II. He said during the war they would carry it around and they would go and get the gold out of Germans' teeth and save it up in a bag.
And there were certain guys who were just into it.
I remember as a kid I asked him, would they ever get it from an American?
He obtained them instead from horses, donkeys, cows, and human beings.
According to his account books, 1784, emulating some of his affluent friends, he bought nine teeth from unidentified Negroes, perhaps enslaved African Americans at his beloved Mount Vernon.
The price was 122 shillings.
Yeah.
I mean, imagine eating with that fucking monstrosity of lead in your face.
So he's got that in his mouth all the time, just getting lead poisoning.
Get me some fucking gigantic dude who's been swinging a battle axe his whole life.
They actually used the Achilles tendon, though, because it's much thicker than the original ACL. It's like 150% stronger than an initial ACL. I would do that operation again in a heartbeat.
I've always told everybody, I've had my knees done both ways.
I had my left knee done with a patella tendon graft, which was the most painful and took forever to recover from.
And then I had my right knee done with a cadaver graft.
It was way easier.
I went to a party five days after the operation with no crutches, no nothing.
It's like there's so much propaganda that that is good for you.
And there's so much evidence that it's not.
not in this mindset that these fucking people have where they're just like they believe the China study, they believe meat causes cancer.
I've had conversations with people.
We try to be rational with them.
Like, if meat really caused cancer, do you know that 95% of the people on Earth eat meat?
Like, well, look at all the cancer.
Yeah, but look at all the other food they eat.
Do you understand how epidemiology studies work?
When they have these arguments, no one ever takes it to this rational conclusion.
Do you know how they work, the epidemiology studies?
No.
If they say there's been a correlation between high consumption of red meat and cancer, people eat red meat five times a week are much more likely than people...
What are they eating with it?
They don't take that into effect because it's not a real study.
I was talking this the other day with my buddy Seth where people also have a tendency to...
There's so much conflicting dietary information that people also will find something aligns with their aesthetic.
Or that aligns with their political sensibility.
Meaning, if your general tendency is to be opposed to Meat production, certain agricultural practices, and you see an article where it says, you know, high meat diet correlates with cancer.
You understand the building blocks of human beings and, like, what's necessary to promote, you know, all the things that you need that only come from animal tissue, B12, collagen.
There's, like, there's so much stuff that you can get from meat that you're just not going to get from anywhere else.
So whenever I see an athlete That starts going on a vegan diet.
I look at it the same way as like a snake handler.
Yeah, but the vegan diet thing, it's just so unfortunate that people have been...
It's such a...
I get how you could come to this sort of idea where if you just eat vegetables, then you're not as responsible for killing.
But one of the real problems is, well, first of all, there's a real problem of farming.
Especially industrial monocrop agriculture.
Goddamn, they kill a lot of things to get that crop out.
They kill everything that's in the ground when they're using the combines.
They use people to kill groundhogs.
They're killing all the varmints and gophers and everything gets fucking killed, right?
We all know that.
Ground nesting birds, fawns get chewed up.
There's a lot of things that happen.
But then on top of that, there's emerging evidence that plants have intelligence.
That not only do they have intelligence, but they communicate through the mycelium in the ground.
And that they share resources.
Like, they allocate resources towards plants that need it more.
There's evidence that they communicate with each other.
Like, for instance, the acacia tree, which There's trees in Africa where when giraffes eat them, if they're downwind, the other trees that are downwind will start producing a potent chemical that makes their leaves taste like shit, so that they know that they're getting chewed on by, you know, oh my god, there's a giraffe in the neighborhood, start tasting like shit.
And so they release chemicals.
I mean, how insane is that?
Not only is it that, But they have now shown that they can play recordings of insects eating the leaves.
And if they play those recordings next to the plant, the plant will start producing those toxic chemicals that make them taste bad.
It's a bunch of things that they don't understand because they don't have noses.
They don't have ears.
How does the sound of caterpillars eating leaves change the chemical structure of these plants?
How are they knowing, okay, time to let loose the poison.
How are they getting it because they're downwind?
But it gets so bad that animals, some animals that try to eat them, they wind up starving to death because they don't want to eat this stuff because it tastes that bad.
I can see where you're going with this is that sometime down the road there's going to be some tough decisions for people who are looking for general wealth, like not wanting to harm.
Like, you know, I'll hunt all manner of stuff, and I used to work as a tree surgeon and would fell trees, but at our place in southeast Alaska, which is in the coastal rainforest, and we're in an area of old growth where our stuff's at, I'm in no way condemning people to do.
I would not be able to put a chainsaw on one of those trees.
See if you can find that, like, the oldest tree in Scotland.
It was a crazy, gnarled-up-looking, fucked-up tree.
I might be wrong with the age, but it was crazy old.
And I was like, whoa, how do you know?
How do you know how old this is?
When you go to Europe, Scotland was amazing.
I took this trip with my wife, and we went to visit these sites where they have these stone circles that are older than Stonehenge, and they're right in front of this dude's house.
Like, this dude has a house, and then there's a small street, like a two-lane street, 5,000 years old.
No, I understand that, but then there's some people who take that to, I'm just trying to, I don't know, reason with myself, because around here we've had people chain themselves to trees.
Yeah, it's just, it's weird thinking about, I understand what you're saying, and I totally get that.
I would probably, I think, I've never cut down a tree, I've never been a tree surgeon, but I would probably feel the same about maybe a 400 or 500 year old tree.
It's a tough one looking at those trees, but it does seem like...
You know, some of those trees you look at, it's like you're looking at, it almost seems like some approximation of God, you know, and look at some of those old trees, man, just astounding.
But I mean, I guess my point is, it's like you got people, whatever their passions are, they will go to the ends.
We defend hunting till the end.
That's our passion.
That's what we love.
But yeah, it's like all these different factions of people that, Man, you'd have a hard time saying you're wrong and believing that because that's just what they believe.
You know, the one thing that I never really thought of until I started hunting was the spiritual aspect of hunting.
It's a part of it that it's almost indisputable.
When you experience it, like when you first experience it, when you first start eating an animal that you, like the first time you ever took me hunting, when we were in Montana, and I remember when I was eating that mule deer and we were sitting over the fire, and I was like, this is so different than any meal I've ever had in my life.
It's so different.
I feel so connected to this animal.
I know how difficult it was to do this.
I know how insane their life is, that this is this wild creature that is 100% gonna die soon, no matter what.
If it's next year or the year after or the year after that, it doesn't have much time left.
And if you can move in while, you know, dip your toe into the wild and extract that thing out, to me, that was like, oh, this is the best way to eat meat ever.
This is 20, 30 times better than just getting a steak from a store.
I remember when we were sitting around the fire and you're like, what do you think?
I'm going through that with my kid where my older kid's very interested in bow hunting, but it's just, I'm like, man, you have to appreciate the level of discipline, dude, that you got to shoot, right?
Like, I'm perpetually rusty.
Like, you can't be like me.
And I actually pulled the plug on him this year where I said...
If you shoot every day, like he'd been shooting throughout the summer, I said, if you shoot every day prior to this week, we're going to go bow hunt.
I said, I want you to shoot every day prior to the week.
And he didn't do it, and I said, we're not going.
And I'll see if next year that impacts him, but it's like the discipline.
It's unfortunate, but I think, you know, there's no way to teach someone that.
There's no way to really like get it into their head how hard it is unless they're in the field and they're drawing on an animal and then they realize like unless there's some ways to mitigate that like you've had Joel Turner on which you have you've had him on right?
There's a thing that happens when you're in a high-pressure situation that I recognize from martial arts and from a lot of other things, where you do not have full control of your faculties, and your body is operating on anxiety and adrenaline, And when it's completely unique, like a bow hunting thing, where you have Hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of preparation and thinking about it for seconds of action.
And it boils down to this one movement where you're like, yikes!
If you don't have a strategy for managing your mental state while that's happening, the odds of you flinching or moving or doing something stupid are really, really, really high.
And Joel Turner went through that for like fucking 15 years.
He couldn't kill an owl.
He was always choking.
And then when he became a SWAT instructor, he's on a SWAT team, so he was telling me this one story where he had to shoot this guy that was holding a young girl hostage.
And I think it was with a weapon, I forget, a knife or something.
And so he has a headshot while this guy is holding onto a girl.
And he had to figure out, like, what is the mental process that allows people to flinch and panic during these moments?
And he realized there's a difference between open loop systems and closed loop systems.
An open loop system is something like Swinging a baseball bat.
Like, once you start swinging, you're just swinging.
You're just, wah!
You know, you're swinging.
And unfortunately, with a lot of people, that is the initial reaction.
Because we have a tendency of making things work out in our head the way we want them to.
And then when it doesn't work out like that because we haven't put in the time or we don't have a process down, and maybe you hit the animal bad, maybe you miss, maybe just shit the bed, and then you're just like...
God, what am I doing?
But up until then, you're like, you're the baddest person ever.
No one blows a shot with a bow and comes away saying, I don't know what happened, I did everything right.
Because you fall into, like you're saying, you fall into this despair and guilt and you're trying to review in your head.
I've accidentally landed on a thing that's not fail-safe, but somehow when you're saying keep the pin on them, I've landed on this thing like, remember your elbow, remember your elbow.
And if I remember to like, Because when I'm shooting, just practicing, there's always this thing of sort of consciously being aware of having my elbow raised.
And that makes everything fall on the line.
And so if I know I'm going to get a shot, and I can think, like, if you'll do the part...
I'd be curious if some dude started, like if some dude at 60 years old, you know, some dude at 60 years old started bow hunting, are they going to wig out like a 20 year old?
That when you force yourself to do things you don't want to do, when you force yourself to get up in the morning and run in the cold and get in the cold plunge and all these different...
It literally grows larger.
This part of your brain that is able to do things that are uncomfortable Got it.
That you don't want to do actually grows larger.
And it seems to be that that's a muscle just like every other muscle.
Not a muscle, but a thing that is more robust with use.
And if you're a 60-year-old guy that's just been working in an office and listening to the boss and driving home and, you know, there's no stress.
Not stress, but no high-pressure, decision-making, in-the-moment choices that you have come accustomed to managing and dealing with and negotiating.
If you're a person who's fucking gone to war, maybe you've had some crazy high-pressure job and you're 60, you probably got fucking ice water running through your veins by the time you're 60 years old.
You've seen it all.
It depends on the human.
But for most people, there's a guy like Derek Wolf.
You met Derek Wolf?
You got him on your podcast?
I mean, you're talking about a guy that has fucking played professional football at the highest level, and even he says it's the most exciting shit that he's ever done.
I've told Cam so many times, dude, I've done a lot of shit.
I've fought, I do stand-up comedy, I do so many live things that are high-pressure.
Nothing is like elk hunting.
There's nothing like that moment when you're drawing and that thing is like in the field and it drops his head down at 50 yards and starts eating and you draw back and you got the...
You're like, is this happening?
Is this really going on right now?
It's so pressure filled.
It's such a novel and unique moment that unless you have a bunch of those moments, like, I'm at the point now, you know, 10 years into bow hunting, where when I draw on an animal, I can keep my shit together.
And now, to me, it's just like making sure I'm steady and the shot's good.
There's nothing weird going on.
There's no weird wind.
And I just go through my process, and I'm very confident now.
But it's numbers.
It's numbers.
I always tell people, like, the more things that you can shoot, the better.
And you can shoot pigs.
You can shoot things that people have to kill.
You know, if you can go to Lanai, where you can get, like, multiple shot opportunities on axis deer.
That kind of situation, that's, for me...
The difference between how I feel in September during elk season and some years where I feel great and super confident, it's always that I went on a couple other hunts.
It's always.
So you get that experience.
This is how I used to feel fighting, too.
A couple times I got injured.
And I couldn't fight for like six months, and then I'd fight but it was almost like it was like brand new again.
Like when I'd be in there like, whoa, this is crazy.
The first time you see people fight, they're in a panic.
It's like you can't believe it's actually happening.
You're like, are you ready?
And you're like, yes!
And they get out there and if you're an experienced person, it's one of the reasons why champions have such a massive advantage.
They have such a massive psychological advantage because they're the champion.
You'd see guys when they would fight Mike Tyson, they had already lost by the time they got in there.
They look at him like, oh my god, what is happening?
Is this real?
Their whole world was like that big.
And they were just in full panic and they just couldn't fight.
But isn't that also the case with bow hunters where you've been hunting your whole life hoping to see a 200-inch buck, and then one day you're in the mountains and this mule deer steps out.
You're imagining, taking the photo, smiling on Instagram, you're imagining, you see this wide mule deer buck, like, this is crazy, this is a real one, I can make this happen, you're like, everything is just full panic!
Clay Newcomb just did a bear grease episode about a guy, a poacher, and he interviews the guy at length, and this guy played softball on an army base, they had like an athletic complex, And a couple times he sees this giant buck, and people were aware of this giant buck.
And he was trying to figure out if it was possible to kill it, as he calls it, kill it right or kill it legal.
And one day he just happens to have his bow in his car and sees it, not anywhere he's supposed to hunt.
And the way he describes it, he describes it like he was out of his body.
And he shoots it.
And the minute it falls over, he thinks, you'll never get away with this.
You probably weren't totally ready for that at that moment.
But if you have a certain level of proficiency and a certain amount of experience in mitigating high-pressure situations, then I think you could get through it.
I've been teaching a lot of people to shoot a bow for the first time on the Lift Run Shoot show that I do.
Joel Turner isn't going to tell them anything.
There's so many basics you have to get before that.
But as you said, once you get that routine down and you're kind of more seasoned, then I think that closed loop, open loop, then that would make more sense.
It was so attractive to me when I first started shooting a bow.
I was like, God, there are so many.
You get lost in this.
There's so much going on just in your yard when you're shooting at a target.
There's so much mental and physical, and there's so many things that have to align.
I have a checklist that I have on my phone That before I go hunting, like when I'm on the plane flying to wherever I'm going, I look at my notes on my phone and I go over my checklist and I bounce it around in my head.
Like if I was going to go on like one of those- And you take way more than you need.
If I was going to go on one of those backpacking mountain hunts where you're carrying your whole camp on your back and you're walking in for fucking 20 miles, I'd be the guy that has the 80-pound pack because I threw in extra batteries and extra broadheads in case this happens.
He was being obsessive out there with his rest, just like wrenching on it for hours and changing and doing all this and end up stripping something out because he's like got too crazy on the rest.
Or a whitetail hunter, they're shooting at 20 yards.
So if you're going to be shooting long distance, a fletch going through with all that contact through the whisker, basically, that's going to impact long distance.
So helical, for people that are listening, there's an angle that the fletchings are placed in that accentuates the spinning of the arrow, which makes it more accurate and, you know, that's what you want, right?
So some people don't use that.
They just have straight up and down fletchings, which is still good.
You know, you can still shoot very accurately with straight up and down fletchings, but most, like, really good archers prefer a helical.
Where I live on Lake Austin, there's a buddy of mine who's one of my neighbors who's a fisherman, and he said, man, you should have been here before they brought carp.
He goes, there's all sorts of vegetation in here, and the bass were everywhere.
But now, he goes, if you can get a camera and look at the bottom of this lake, it looks like the bottom of a swimming pool.
There's so many non-native, there's so many invasive species that were unintentional, but the fact that for the most part, The common carp was they were doing everybody a favor.
Me and Roy used to be addicted to carp hunting because we'd go...
They'd be spawning in the spring after we poured concrete.
He had a construction company.
We'd pour concrete, then we'd go and go try to get carp for bear bait.
So before they outlawed it in 94 in Oregon, we'd get carp, catch these giant carp, have a wheelbarrow, get them all back.
Put them in a, like a 55 gallon drum, put the lid on it, and then we'd make stink.
So we'd call, we needed some stink to get the bear bait going.
Because if you got that rotten carp in a gunny sack, and you put it way up a tree where they couldn't get it, that stink smell would go for five miles down the draw and then all the bear would come in, right?
I just remember this one time we had a bunch of carp and 55-gallon drum.
After a while, that kind of builds pressure.
We weren't really thinking about this.
So we go to take that lid off and it freaking explodes.
I was living in Seattle for a while and we would fish smallmouth and perch and stuff in Lake Washington, which is like right downtown.
And I was in this neighborhood where they have these apartment buildings that are on pilings.
So there's just full-on apartment buildings out over the water built on piers.
And they would cast shadows, and fish would collect there, and you'd be in a boat, man.
Besides being out in some dude's front yard under their dock, you're fishing where you're right here almost looking into the window of someone eating breakfast, but you're cast right there, which felt much more intimate and kind of creepy.
Kyle Douglas, who's one of the best of the best archers.
Yeah, it changed my shot quite a bit when I started pulling really hard against the wall.
Really hard.
You know, I pull fucking hard.
I have that locked in.
And it also changed when I stopped using a resistance attention release.
Because Dudley had me on what's called a silverback.
Which is, I think, one of the best methods for learning how to shoot, because you have a safety.
You pull, and then it's all tension-based.
So when you have the safety on, you can pull it hard, and then when you release the safety, you just pull a little more, and it goes off.
And you can set it to like two, three pounds, whatever the amount of difference.
Say if you have a 70-pound bow.
You set it to 72 pounds or whatever it is when you're at a full draw, whatever the drop-off is.
So they have this resistance setting where you can tweak it in your yard at like five yards or you're right in front of the target and you get it to the point where it's at the back wall and then you just pull a little more and it snaps and breaks.
And it makes for a perfect release and I used that forever.
But then when I really started pulling hard in the back wall, I was making it go off When I didn't want it to go off and then when I switched releases then I'm like oh that's definitely the most because you're much more steady when you're like when I'm fucking locked out I'm locked out like I'm engaged in my back when I'm shooting at something I am everything is locked out you know and I find that to be way more stable.
But then I was listening to this one guy and he said, if you were going to lean against something and want to be totally stable, wouldn't you lock your arm out if you're leaning against a wall and you want it to be completely rigid?
Most, like, I just, I know this, well, I shoot with it bent.
We teach everybody to have it a little bit bent, but Wayne always references this poster of these premier Hoyt shooters, and they all have the exact same form, and they're all slightly bent.
It's funny, hearkening back to the old days, I just had Waddell on the show, so me, Wayne, and Waddell were shooting at the Bow Rack, and we all have still trigger releases.
You know, nowadays the cool thing is the handheld, right?
When you hear about people that can't get the pin on the target, they can hold like six inches under the target, but once they rise up to the target like, everything starts getting shaky.
When I bring it up, like if I bring a crosshair on something, the crosshair is going to go, if I bring the pin up, it's going to want to sit just left so I can still look.
And then I got to go like, now I'm going to bring it over where it belongs.
But if you're going to allow rangefinders, why do you allow rangefinders?
Because you don't want people guessing.
Well, there's a lot of guessing when you're gap pinning.
There's a lot of guessing.
When you range an animal at 50 yards and then he takes three or four steps, there's a lot of guessing.
And you're just going to hold high or you're going to do something.
With the Garmin, all you do is just press that button again and you get a new pin.
And it's perfect.
And the other thing about the Garmin that's really fantastic is If you can't range, like say if you're at 20 or you're at 40 yards and you range him and then he walks out and you're pretty sure it's like 50 or 60, you can also press a button and you get a full range of pins.
So you get 20, 30, you get 5 LED lights.
You know, instead of just one.
So there's an advantage of that too.
So if you're in a situation like we were at when we were rattling and the bucks just come running in and you know that's 20 yards or 30 yards, like you just pull it up and you got your pins.
And you can do that.
Or if you're at 60, like I shot the Neil guy, you can hold it and then you get a pin.
And in the end, you kind of be like, well, why is it even on your mind?
In the end, if you look where it's gone, in the end, they made the right call.
In open country, they made the right call.
Other things I think that you might look and try to picture where it's headed and then maybe come back and correct.
There was a time, I remember the first time Montana came out with anything about two-way communications.
It was no two-way communications in the field the first year.
People are like, if I'm hunting with my 13-year-old and my 80-year-old dad, I can't give them a radio so that if they have a problem, they can get a hold of me?
And like, oh, yeah, I guess we didn't really mean that.
And in the next year, there's a modification.
In the next year, there's a modification as they try to gauge what's going on.
on but i think that as technologies come in there's a tendency to to want to pump the brakes to ascertain what's going on like look how long some states waited on on trail cams yes Right.
And like no one when trail camps came out, no one imagined they would be cellular.
And so then you got to then you develop a big user group and you develop a big resistance and it just becomes a much different conversation.
So I think that in those cases where you see a sort of.
But you'll see a thing that doesn't entirely make too much sense.
I think that's part of the gamble and struggle of getting it right.
Another thing that I think is winning out is they used to say, well, you can't have dogs hunting deer, of course.
And then people have been like, but I want a recovery dog.
The dog doesn't do any good until I've already wounded the thing.
And once I've wounded it, why would you do anything to impede me getting it back?
And they kind of are settling in on a, yeah, you can't run deer with a dog in most states, but they're coming around to saying, but for recovery, you can track a wounded deer with a dog.
And so you have – there's a sort of compromise gets struck.
They changed, but it might be to what Steve was alluding to.
It's like you try to course correct, or they didn't want to get too far down the road before they tried to come back, because that user group was established, and we'd been doing it, and now they fight back on that.
A large part of it is a desire to protect archery seasons.
You can kind of hold them out as low harvest.
Limited efficacy, high-opportunity hunts, right?
And a state will run a bow season, and then the general firearm, and everybody gets down to the real serious business of killing.
And you can look at the archery harvest, and the archery harvest winds up in comparison being...
I don't want to say negligible, but in comparison, it's a blip in the harvest.
And so the desire to limit bringing in crossbows, certain technologies, be like, let's keep it simple, traditional, low-efficacy, low-harvest, and then allow for greater length of seasons and greater opportunity.
And if you get to, and I know it seems impossible, but if you...
Can you use technology to get it up where your harvest rates really start to spike, you're going to have the same thing you run into in other areas where you start being like, hey, we've got to limit the opportunity pool.
Because these guys are too good.
If you look at a general raw number, just generally an archery elk hunter has a 10% chance of success.
It fluctuates, but generally there's a 10% chance of success.
If that became 2030, You're going to pay for it somehow.
That's what, you know, a lot of detractors of archery will say.
And I don't want to say, I mentioned earlier that maybe you just eliminate bow hunting if you want to be, you know, more efficient with killing, just make a rifle.
I believe archery is just as deadly and just as ethical as rifle hunting.
I believe that that's the way to go.
It certainly is for you.
But the success rate is lower, to Steve's point.
And what the guys back home have said, the detractors of bowhunting, is that, and this could just be old boy talk, the bowhunters are killing all the big bulls.
Got up, set up, got there, first shot out of this gun, had the wind gauge up there, and I'm like, okay, the wind's going here, I'm going to hold on the left side of the steel, boom, 990 yards, first shot, smacked it.
And I'm like, I fucking never shoot!
I can hit this steel this big at 990 yards?
So, to your point about this long range thing, that's changing the game too.
Well, now everybody has shooting sticks and, you know, bipods and all sorts of different things that they used to set up to make them more stable or prone.
See, I hesitate to say anything, because I don't want to give anyone ideas, but if you were going to try to, like, I can't even think if you were going to try to regulate...
Well, I'll put it to you this way.
So, we have muzzleloader seasons, okay?
A lot of states have muzzleloader seasons, and just very generally, a state's big game hunt would go archery.
And then general firearm, and you go into late season muzzleloader.
And states will regulate muzzleloaders down to whether you have powder, so loose powder pellets.
They'll regulate it down to open sites or no open site.
They'll regulate it down to whether you have a projectile that's true to bore.
In that case with shooting the 990, it reminded me of...
You do all the calculations on your phone.
And then you set the scope to whatever this says.
The scope has...
Not just magnification, but also like you're changing the zero of it.
So, but you're doing it based on the distance, based on the load, based on everything else that goes into the phone.
The wind was not the greatest because you could check the wind at the gun, but when you're a thousand yards, so that's why you needed that flag out there.
Right.
To set the scope to hold right on, that's all done on the phone on an app or something.
But again, it's, you know, social media, it makes it seem like, for anybody, that people are, everyone's successful, everyone's killing bulls, and it's just not the case.
It's just not, success rate is still 10% on bulls with a, well, not even just bulls, elk with a bow.
I once saw a graph, it was a diagram or something, and it showed in Michigan.
Average age of fur trappers, people that held a fur harvester license, the average age every year of someone holding a fur harvester license actually went up one year.
No one knew.
unidentified
It's like these same people, and they're just, you know.
They throw in lynx, but you can't It's not even legal, but they love putting this trophy hunting moniker out there because it's really easy to hate trophy hunting, which isn't even legal.
I read this article from Colorado Sun or something like that, where they want to eliminate people who kill mountain lions and just go cut their head off.
in a ballot measure because if they can if you can set the precedent if you can use that what a great tool because people are going to say oh i don't agree with that you know i don't agree with that kind of hunting right um which uh would have widespread implications because um as demonstrated here with this deer here uh there's a lot of parts of it that i don't throw away and i keep sitting around yeah
so is this a trophy or is it an emblem or what the hell is it right but if i kept it does that mean that i'm now captured under your definition right right yeah what is trophy hunting yeah yeah and then the bringing in the wolves thing is pretty wild Because there's no precedent.
I definitely detect that there's a complete disinterest in what hunters think about it, and they think that That for someone to come in and argue, by doing this wildlife measure, you're impacting, like, you would like this animal on the landscape for viewing pleasure.
I like certain animals on the landscape for hunting, consumption, eating, whatever, and there's a conflict here where by doing this, you're going to lower—by increasing your likelihood of having viewer pleasure, you're having a potentially— Really negative impact on my use of natural resources.
I think that they would look at you as though you're ridiculous or evil or don't have a point in saying that you want to limit predation on a resource you rely on.
And they don't accept that as a reality.
I haven't encountered a lot of really, really forceful wolf advocates that are serious hunters.
There's a trend there.
The thing that bothered me most about the Colorado reintroduction is that while the ballot measure was going forward, wolves showed up on their own.
I would have imagined, even if I was on, and I'm not anti-wolf, but When they showed up on their own, I don't even know if it's legally possible, I would have halted that whole thing.
Because the social friction is so much less if they walk in on their own.
Diane Boyd, who is the Montana wolf specialist for many years, she even came to believe in hindsight that the Idaho-Montana reintroductions were Ultimately were unnecessary.
And that you would have gradually achieved the same thing with wolves walking in on their own and had a very different societal perception of what was going on.
People would look at it as a natural dispersal, a natural occurrence, and not a government action.
I just think they're the fucking coolest animal of all time.
I really do.
I just look in their eyes, photos of them.
If I come across photos on my Instagram, I'm always like, holy shit, look at that thing.
They're majestic.
But...
Their numbers have to be banished.
And as uncomfortable as that sounds for people, wildlife biologists, they have an understanding of the carrying capacity and the resources of the land.
For a long time, these people have painstakingly researched these numbers.
They know exactly what they're doing, but when it comes to this game of reintroduction of animals, the first step is they say there's a carrying capacity for the amount of wolves.
This is the number.
When it gets to that, we will agree to open up a season on wolf hunting.
But every time that happens, there's lawsuits.
There's lawsuits to try to stop that hunt, and then the wolves get larger and larger.
And then you have larger and larger populations.
I was looking at a graph the other day where they showed reintroduction of wolves to the Yellowstone, the amount of elk that existed, and now the amount of wolves versus the amount of elk.
And it's pretty shocking.
It's a giant drop.
And they're so good at hunting.
They're fucking amazing.
But hunting wolves Is insanely difficult.
It's really hard to do.
They're really fucking smart.
They're really aware.
Their senses are light years beyond what we can even physically imagine an animal to be capable of doing.
In our minds, like we know that deer could...
I remember I was watching an episode of your show where a bear winded you guys like fucking 500 yards or something.
Like, it's incredible.
Their noses are fucking amazing.
Their senses are amazing.
I don't think we really...
It's almost like looking at the size of the universe.
Like, you know it's 13 point whatever billion light years across.
You don't fucking...
That's just going in your head.
The kind of power that the senses of a wolf have.
I don't think we could even really fathom it.
So our thought is people are just going to go in there and wipe out the wolves like they did before.
Every night, not every night, many nights I'll check and y'all get notifications, like the other night I got a notification, whatever the hell, 313, whatever it was, unit had hit its quota, region 5 had hit its quota, I'm talking about in Montana, whatever region hit its quota.
At this point, we've hit at, it is a...
There's a stable population of wolves across a big chunk of range that are managed as a renewable natural resources, that are managed as a big game species.
There is no problem.
It still gets litigated all the time, but the whole idea that they're going to be pushed back onto the ESA, onto the endangered species list, the state doesn't want that.
That'd be the worst thing that could happen to the state.
They're not going to shoot them into oblivion.
It's like, we have wolves on the landscape.
And you could have the extremes of people that want to live in a world where there aren't any.
That's not realistic.
You lost that fight.
You have extremes where people want to live in a world where there's as many as possible and there's no regulation on them, which isn't extreme because we could live in that landscape.
But right now we're living in a landscape where there are wolves on the ground, there's a healthy population, there's hunting for them, there's an equilibrium emerging.
And it's very livable.
But in Colorado, if hunters saw that there was a pathway to finding the extent of it, they would probably feel a lot better.
But right now, they're like, we're going to lose 50% of elk.
We're going to lose 75% of elk.
This is going to get litigated.
It could be 100 years from now.
We could have 90 years of full recovery objective.
And I've heard they want to turn Colorado into a...
Almost like a viewing state like you know how they do the safaris over in Africa where there's no hunting you're just out taking pictures that's what they want Colorado to be so they want low numbers of elk and deer so there is no hunting so then they can say well we don't really need hunters and by the way do you guys need guns now i i don't know if you need guns because you said you needed them for hunting so that's a big portion some people say yeah we want our everyday carry for protection a lot of people say we want to hunt With no hunting, you don't need guns.
So there's this big diabolical plan.
You could say, is this what's happening?
But all I know is that where there's wolves, there's way less elk.
Well, if you do it right, like one of the things that we learned when we were hunting with Jesse last year, like diver ducks, which people normally say they taste like shit because they eat the stuff on the bottom of the lakes.
No, like, you can, there's, man, if you have imperiled populations of pronghorn or imperiled populations of mule deer, and you go in, like, during calving season, like, In the right areas at the right time, you can move the needle on recruitment.
Does you now and then, if you have a ranch, and you now and then see a coyote and get it, are you doing effective predator control?
Probably not.
That does not mean that you cannot...
Done in a timely fashion, like I said, surgically, a timely fashion with the right approach at the right time, you can absolutely move the needle on wildlife recruitment.
You see it in Alaska, you see it in Arizona, you see it all over the place.
I now and then get suckered into doing an interview.
And I did an interview about a contentious issue.
It was about states banning...
I knew the minute the journalist called me and he's talking about banning wildlife killing contests.
And I said, can we please say hunting contests at least?
Do we have to say wildlife killing contests?
And I'm like, you know, my buddy Doug has a doe derby.
Where they're in an area where they're trying to lower deer numbers for issues of disease transmission, habitat improvement, and he has a little derby where you win some prizes because the state is explicitly trying to encourage Dough harvest?
Is he having a wildlife killing contest?
Or is he having a derby as a management tool?
Right?
Anyways, I do this interview and shouldn't have done it because the quote they pulled for me was not the right quote.
But I did want to say one thing about the mountain lion hunting.
As I say that I will kill a coyote just because I think it's to kill, I didn't kill a lion in Colorado because one of the biggest benefits to using dogs is identifying If that's the animal you want to kill.
What happens now, like in Oregon where they outlawed running lions with dogs, is if you kill one, it's just one you saw and you don't know what it is.
You don't know how old it is.
You don't know male, female.
Because you don't have time.
Right.
But that's the only way you can hunt them.
So now they have, the season is open all year.
It never closes in Oregon.
There is no dog.
So lion numbers are going way up, deer numbers going way down.
That's kind of what happens.
Where dogs are allowed or baiting for bears allowed or even hunting black bear with dogs is allowed, you're killing the animal that should be killed, the older male generally, and you're identifying it, you're taking out the right one.
Without those measures in place, as hunting a dog is a tool, without those measures in place, it's not nearly as controlled.
And it's not like people are just going out there just going to kill any lion up the tree, just like I didn't kill one because I didn't see an old male lion.
Yeah, that's one argument that I... People like to lump, kind of an aside, but lump hunters into trophy hunters or meat hunters, which I think we would all agree, you can be both.
I take every ounce of the meat from the animals I kill.
Every ounce is more valuable than gold to me.
And I take all the antlers, the hide, I got claws.
That's all part of that memory of that hunt.
I'm honoring that.
That memory and that harvest, essentially.
But I'm also sharing that meat.
We eat the meat every night or every day.
And it's like, we're both.
We're not just...
Because I meet people and they say, well, you're not a trophy hunter, are you?
When you hear in the gun control debate, people about trying to close the gun hole loopholes or trying to put it that they should be subject to FFL transfers.
But like when my dad died and I got my dad's guns, we didn't do an FFL transfer.
I shouldn't speak to that, but I know that there's, I don't know about, on long guns, there's a restriction, a magazine restriction.
What's interesting is for hunting waterfowl, Federally regulated migratory waterfall.
There's always been a magazine restriction in the field.
Three rounds.
And then, as they're trying to lower snow geese numbers to protect Arctic habitats, they've gone in and undone.
They've made an exception to allow unlimited capacity magazines to hunt snow geese.
So it's one of those weird areas where you see a real reversal of a time-honored tradition, which is three rounds in your gun, to make it that people can kill more snow geese.
Yeah, but I have a long history of being a public person, and I understand it from a different dynamic.
Because there's just a thing that happens with men.
Where they become jealous of other men and hateful of other people's success and then they look at other people for whatever reason as anytime they do something it takes away from them or they look at someone getting attention and somehow another it takes away from them and they focus entirely on that person's success.
Or who that person is, and they try to find flaws with them.
It's a natural thing with jealous, weak-minded men.
I've heard it as a vessel that poisons the thing that carries it, or a substance that poisons the vessel that carries it.
That's the best way to look at it.
It doesn't do you any good, but it can do the opposite.
It can do the opposite if you have a good mindset.
If you have a good mindset and you see someone and you're envious, that can be fuel for your success.
As long as you manage it in your mind like almost everything else that's complicated, you have to manage it in your mind as like, This can fuel me and be a fantastic resource.
When I see someone's success, I get inspired to work harder.
So if you saw a comet coming up and they were kind of in your wheelhouse and nipping on your heels, you'd be like, I'm going to have that son of a bitch on the show.
That's all I worry about—or not all I worry about, but with hunters, we just— We have a hard time giving other people credit, being supportive of each other, some of us, and so with this disjointedness, that's what I get worried about.
This gets out there in the zeitgeist, people hear it, they recognize their own failings, their own shortcomings, and their own thought processes, and then they realize this is not admirable.
Man, I know we had Dan Gates join us at a live show, and we got him scheduled to come on the podcast.
As voting starts heating up, we start nearing the date for the initiative in Colorado.
I'm familiar with Howell.
I was introduced to Howell by my colleague Giannis, who's a supporter, and we've done some things to support them, but man, that name, I probably met him, but just right now I'm spacing it if I am, so apologies to him.
These weak people have to understand that we know what they are.
We see right through them.
And you're not admirable.
Not only are you not admirable, you're not respected by your peers.
Everybody knows you're a bitch.
Nobody likes a bitch.
And when you're a man and you can't recognize another man's success or you see a man and you measure yourself up to him and you fall short and so you start shitting on that person, everybody knows what you're doing.
Every man knows what you're doing, especially every exceptional man.
They know 100% what you're doing.
So you have to live with that.
And that's how it's a poison that ruins the vessel that carries it.
It's not good for anybody.
And it's just a thing that people do.
People have always been jealous of other human beings throughout time.
But you gotta understand, for your own personal benefit, that feeling It can be changed inside of you to fuel.
And it will make you a better person.
It'll make you better at what you do.
It'll make you understand that competition is critical and vital in order for you to reach your full potential.
You don't reach your full potential if you're the king and everybody else is a pussy.
Because then you're like, well, I'm the king.
Everybody else is just a bitch.
I don't have to be any better.
But if you're a king around other kings, you realize, wow, these guys are all fucking getting up earlier than me, working harder than me, thinking smarter than me.
Being more effective, recognizing their shortcomings, fixing them, talking about it with other people that do the same, and growing from each other.
You know, we have, like, in The Mothership, the comedy club that I own, when we get together in the green room during the shows, we're always breaking down bits.
We don't, like, hold secrets.
We don't have, like, trade secrets.
I don't want to tell anybody how I write.
I tell everybody how I write.
I tell everybody how I correct things.
I'm like, this is a thing that I've noticed that helps me.
Here's a thing that I've added.
I started listening to my recordings and doing this afterwards.
When I get home, I always do.
If you just do that one hour every night, just think over time.
And then my other friends have said, I started doing that, dude.
You're right.
I just sat down for 10 minutes.
I had a new bit.
I wouldn't have come up with that bit if I didn't do that.
Like, yes!
Yeah, now we all learn from each other.
But if you see this one guy that's out there that's putting in all this extra work and succeeding, and you just start shitting on him, everybody knows what you're doing.
You know what you're doing, motherfucker.
You know, in your heart of hearts, you know you're being a bitch.
And you can live with that if you like, but I can't.
I'm allergic to that feeling in me.
I hate that feeling.
I've experienced it.
I know what it is.
It'll still bubble up every now and then if someone's killing it.
I'm like, wow, that guy's doing so good.
I'm gonna fuck him.
You know, like that fuck him part of you is always there.
It's like I try to squash that fucker as soon as it comes up like a weed.
I pull it out right away.
But if you don't do that, it's not good.
It's not good for you.
You never change people's opinions.
If someone is doing exceptional work and doing an exceptional job of being very unusually successful, and then you start picking on all the little flaws in that person, and people are gonna look at you.
They're gonna go, But you're kind of fat and lazy and you fuck up all the time and you're always drunk and you've got this problem and that problem.
How come you're not looking at your own self with the same scrutiny that you look at this extremely successful person?
It's because you're jealous.
That's all it is.
It's a natural human instinct.
But that feeling can be repurposed.
That thought can benefit you.
That feeling of comparing yourself and coming up short.
What you're supposed to do is going, what do I need to do so I don't have this feeling anymore?
Well, I need to work harder.
I need to work smarter.
I need to do some things that I'm not doing that maybe make me uncomfortable.
You know, to your point last night, I saw two of the funniest people I've ever seen, Shane and Tony, both putting notes in their phone from comments that were made in the green room.
And I was trying to explain that to one of the managers.
I was like, the reason why we have to, like, when comics get together, like, we're at the comics bar and we're all just talking shit.
Like, if someone is sensitive and they get in that and they start complaining about jokes that are being told, hey, you've got to leave now.
Because this is literally how we spar.
Like, this is what we do.
If you're complaining that someone is making fun of this person or picking on that person, creating an unsafe work environment, okay, well, you can't be here.
It's like if you go to the gym and you're trying to be a boxer and you're like, everybody's trying to hit me.
Like, that's what they do.
This is how you get better.
You hit each other.
You don't like being hit?
You can't be here.
You can't fucking be here.
And this is the reality of what we do.
And the only people that really truly know that are the practitioners.
The ones who are doing this very difficult thing.
Look, With stand-up comedy, there's a lot of hunters.
There's a thousand of us on Earth that are worth a fuck.
It might be less.
I'm being generous.
It's probably 500. It might be 250 that I want to see.
On planet Earth!
250 comics that I would go out of my way to see.
That's not a lot.
Like, we gotta fucking stick together.
There's so few of us.
You'd be shitting on this guy because he's selling out arenas.
But it does create a situation for a woman comic that if a woman comic can navigate that, they become undeniable.
If you can navigate all those preconceived ideas that people have about you before you go on stage, but yet you still succeed at making them laugh, that's black belt shit.
That's high-level comedy.
That's what Whitney can do.
I've seen people look at her when she gets on stage, and they're like, she's hot!
She's hot!
And then she starts killing, and they're like, goddammit, she's fucking funny.
And then after a while, you just give in.
They're like, wow, she's fucking great!
And then you're laughing, you're just enjoying yourself.
But it's much more complex.
Whereas a fat guy gets on stage, and he's already funny.
He's funny-looking.
Big, fat, stupid-looking guy, and he starts talking about himself being fat, and then, you know, you got a lot of leeway.
If in Colorado they lose this ballot initiative about hunting bobcats and hunting mountain lions around this definition of trophy hunting, and America's hunters get together in the green room and workshop what went wrong, I think they're going to determine that what went wrong is not...
Identifying with and fighting for people who are engaged in a specific segment of the activity that you're not engaged with.
And needing to come into the awareness that as this plays out, this will get around to impacting you.
And if you're a public land hunter, and there's a specific unit, and there's, you know, that's allocated 150 tags for a specific unit, and everybody's in there hiking out, and one guy shoots this big-ass bull, that's a big-ass bull that you're not going to be able to kill.
And so there's a different level of competition, because...
Even though it's a renewable resource, it's a limited resource, and there's also exceptional aspects of that resource, like an enormous animal, a very unusual, rare outlier of an animal, that if someone kills it, now you can't.
So there's that competition.
And then there's also the fucking dick measuring thing, where guys are taking grip and grins.
You know, one of the things that's really disturbing to me is the numbers thing.
You know, I was talking to a friend of mine who was a guide, And he was furious because this guy, who is this well-known hunter, shot a mule deer.
I don't know many people that if they said, hey man, we're going to go on family vacation and we found this sweet spot, but then we got to thinking we should actually go to family vacation in a shitty spot.
Now, it crosses a line, and I do understand when people are killing high-fence animals in small properties, and they're making it look like this is a wild animal.
If you have a- 15, 20,000 acre high fenced property.
I'm like, okay, what are the odds those animals, unless it's a mule deer, it's a migratory animal, what are the odds those animals would ever get out of that 15,000 acres in their normal natural life?
As long as you're not feeding them, if you're not like, I'm standing over a feeder waiting for them to show up at 5 p.m., as long as it's not that, it's just hunting.
And when people start talking about private land versus public, I understand the appeal.
And I understand that public land should be available to everybody, and I agree.
And I think it's an amazing thing that we have here in America, where we have these resources where any person can go to a place where you can get a general tag and go to public land and hunt.
I think it's amazing.
But you're also dealing with animals that are acting in a very unnatural way because they're highly pressured.
So if you have a lot of hunters and a lot of pressured animals, you're dealing with an animal that's not acting like a wild animal.
You're dealing with something that's being constantly harassed.
I think the best case scenario is human beings interacting with absolutely wild animals in a way where these animals aren't acting as Natural as they would be as if human beings didn't exist.
That's best case scenario.
Yeah, and if you can get to the most remote places That's where you can get that in the most wild places.
Because I remember, here's how much I wanted to protect my...
In that same logging country, I would go out and the road would end maybe...
I don't want to drive out to the logging unit because that's going to spook all the deer, especially in the headlights before it's light and you're out there waiting.
So I'd park like half a mile back and walk out there.
But I didn't want anybody else driving out there, so I'd park in the middle of the road sideways, leave my truck there.
It's like, I'm not saying you can't come out there, but you're not driving.
It's a collision of husbandry and animal husbandry.
Of hunting and animal husbandry where you're using the sort of harvest tactics of hunting, but you're employing a lot of the principles of animal husbandry.
I mean, when it was like a ball of fur, dude, and she comes squirt.
Well, I'm kind of simplifying it, where there was a forky I didn't know about, and she got up right next to this forky, and then the lion blew out, and kind of first tried to roll that forky, and then sort of sprang out of that and tried to get the doe.
The first three or so deer I got, I got on when I was a kid.
I killed the first deer when I was 13. The first three or so deer I got, I got all on private property.
And then I killed, I went into the White River, kind of the, we used to call it the White River Swamp, but down on National Forest land and killed a fawn one October with my bow.
And People didn't celebrate public land hunting then.
It was like you were slumming it.
You were there because you didn't know any farmers.
If you went out on public land in Michigan and you went to anybody that was on public land and said, hey, do you want to hunt the farm over there?
No one is like, out of principle, by God, I'm staying here.
They would go to the farm.
But when I did get that fawn deer, which I killed over a bait pile in the White River swamp, It felt good, man.
You know what I mean?
I was aware of having did this thing that I would have regarded as almost semi-impossible to pull that off.
Yeah, I get why people would think a certain way because it's very similar in a lot of ways to bow hunting versus rifle hunting.
If you see someone that kills a big bull with a rifle, you're like, yeah, that's a big bull, man.
That's awesome.
But if you see someone that kills a big bull with a bow, you're like, whoa, that's a bigger deal.
It feels way different.
As someone who shot bulls with rifles and shot bull with a bow and arrow, you cannot compare.
The way it makes me feel, when I make a perfect 52-yard shot and I watch that arrow go into the crease behind the shoulder and you watch that bull buck up and you know you got him, you're like, woo!
It's like there's nothing like it.
There's nothing like it.
There's nothing.
I was hunting with Evan Hafer from Black Rifle Coffee this past October.
We were both elk hunting at this ranch.
And I shot this bull.
And it was like on the fifth day of a six-day hunt.
It was a lot of huffing.
There was a lot of fucking missed opportunities.
A lot of getting winded.
A lot of shit went down.
But when I finally snuck in, and it was a long-ass stalk, it was like...
It took me an hour and a half to cover about 40 or 50 yards because the elk was bedded and I was barefoot.
I was just in my socks and I was just slowly creeping, slowly creeping.
And every time he'd move his head, I'd stop.
And I was slowly creeping.
When I finally released that arrow, and it hit that bull, and I heard that whack, and the bull literally ran 30, 40 yards and piled up, the woo that I let out, you could have heard it a fucking mile away.
They heard it on the other side of the canyon.
They were watching with binoculars, and they heard, whoa!
Well, until you've experienced success, it's very difficult to justify the work and it seems insurmountable.
And for a lot of people that don't have someone like you or someone like you taking them out, it's almost insurmountable because there's so many things you have to learn.
It's not intuitive.
It's something that you have to figure out through trial and error or you have to read a lot or watch a lot of videos and absorb all that information.
But he has a program where he'll take you, he'll teach you how to shoot, he'll teach you how to hunt, he'll teach you how to butcher, teach you how to cook.
The whole thing.
He'll take you through the whole process.
That's so valuable.
If there's something that you can do, and especially with a renewable resource like PIGS, Yeah.
But that's so valuable, where someone can take you through the whole process, and there's not a lot of that available, unfortunately.
And even if it was available, it would be very difficult to screen applicants to make sure that it's even worth taking your time.
Because if you've got a guy and he's 50, 60 pounds overweight and got a bad knee, and you want to take him on a mule deer hunt in the mountains, we can't really do this.
You're going to have to lose weight.
You're going to have to get in shape.
You're going to have to figure out a way to be able to get to where these animals are.
I think the truth, like, there's an area, and I don't think everyone needs to get there, there's an area of expertise or a level of expertise that I think is admirable, and it's, you know, you learn how to hunt some particular spot, and that's your hunting spot, and you get it really figured out, and that's a wonderful journey, and that's really good.
I think that getting to the point where you get that place and thing that you're comfortable at, And then you go and be like, okay, I'm going to take whatever it is I learned there and try to apply it to something totally different.
And figure that different thing out.
And get where you're good at these spots and these things, but you become good at deciphering, figuring out, and being able to move into totally new things and carry that accumulative knowledge into these new spots.
That becomes pretty fun.
And I regard that as being, not better, but a high level of expertise.
Well, there's also variables that maybe some people that are successful in other disciplines don't recognize as they enter into this new world that there's different parameters.
Like, for instance, if you got someone who's a successful whitetail hunter that hunts out of a tree stand, a really good archer, But they're used to shooting a 65-pound bow with a 350-grain arrow, and they're used to shooting these animals that are fairly small.
And then you take them on an elk hunt, and you're like, hey, that setup, this three-blade mechanical with a 60-pound bow, you're shooting a fucking enormous animal with huge bones.
You might not even get through the ribs with that thing.
You might center a rib, and that's a wrap.
You have to recognize you're dealing with a totally different thing, and you can't just be weak.
You have to be physically strong.
You have to be capable of making it to...
You're not going to sit in a tree stand.
You've got to change everything about the way you approach it.
Yeah, you got very successful with this one aspect of this thing, but you've got a whole new thing now you have to apply it to, and if you don't, you're going to wound animals.
You're going to have problems, or you're going to just not be successful at all.
I remember the first time I went out with a guy deep dropping for swordfish, so I watched a guy catch a couple swordfish in 1,300 feet of water, and I realized I knew nothing about fishing.
But nowadays with fishing, you know, Steve, I sent you that thing the other day where the guy had a screen on his phone and there was some sort of a camera attached to his line.
Yeah, not like ice fishing with a camera, but he has a camera of He's casting and has a camera watching fish interact with his bait while he does a retrieve.
But what guys could conceivably do, like in Oregon, as I'm talking about in Western Oregon, glassing those big, huge logging units and finding deer is an art.
I mean, it is hard to pick those things up.
But if you could just put, you know, and find the thermal register of it.
When I say support it, I mean I feel that if you had a regulation...
I feel that...
That if someone wanted to say, we'd like to open it up that people could hunt with a spear, I would probably generally say, okay, because I don't think that this is going to be a thing that reduces opportunity.
Well, it caused a stir because it was discussed publicly.
It was a social media thing.
And it gets into this weird area where some people have a really hard time with people exploiting hunting on social media because they say that you're kind of like...
You're bastardizing this beautiful thing and you're making it just like showing things on Instagram.
Just like all the other things that you show off on Instagram.
Your private jet or your big house or your fucking yachts and shit.
And I was always, you know, was always, am always bummed to not get something, too.
Like, I'm trying.
But we'd be, you know, back in the early days, we were making 16 shows.
So you weren't gonna, you know, if you went and spent a week busting your ass and you didn't get something, it wasn't, the option wasn't there to ditch it.
Like, we were gonna make something out of it.
And in the end, it was great.
Glad we did it.
But, uh...
I've never gone in the woods hoping to be unsuccessful.
And in that 22 minutes, too, there's also sponsor obligations when it's on TV. So it's not even 22 minutes of hunting.
You have to have the tips and tactics brought to you by Mosler or whatever.
So it's like you get down to the hunt, you can't really say why the hunt is important to you almost.
It's like it doesn't give you time to develop that story.
So it's a big benefit to us with social media.
Now we don't need approval by an editor.
We don't need the channel to approve how long this thing is.
We put it on YouTube and then we can tell the story of the hunt in a more honest and relatable fashion, hopefully, and explain why it's difficult and people understand it.
I remember our senator in Montana got dinged on one of the social media platforms for having a picture of him and his wife with a pronghorn.
And his account got taken down.
And the minute...
Humans became aware of this or like the right humans became aware of this.
They did like a very quick reversal.
So the way we'll generally look at it with putting up video content is we'll try to avoid demonetization because Being demonetization meaning you cross some line, right?
But the thing is, I haven't found it to be like...
It's not like an onerous process.
I feel that it's pretty...
If you compare it to other channels of distribution, I have not found YouTube to be dramatically over-restrictive, especially compared to any kind of...
Especially compared to any kind of network parameter.
They might be bad, but they're not bad compared to anybody else.
It's kind of a weird situation where, although there are many, many video platforms, YouTube essentially has an overwhelming majority of people into the point where it's almost a monopoly.
And if you have things like that that are very valuable to people, like, I want to see where the arrow hits.
I like when I see blood pouring out of an animal because I know that that's a lethal shot.
That's what you want.
It might be graphic to some people, but if I see a rage hit behind the shoulder on a deer and I see that blood squirting out as soon as the deer starts moving, I'm like, that guy got that deer.
That's a dead deer.
That's what you want.
It doesn't seem awful to me.
It seems better.
Because that's a lethal shot.
That's a successful hunt.
That's what you're trying to do.
To pretend that's not what you're trying to do...
Boy, that seems insane.
And if you're doing it only to protect the ignorant, that seems insane too.
It's like you don't have to watch those videos.
And if you're going to allow those videos on the platform, you should allow those videos to be a realistic depiction of what everybody's trying to do, which is a lethal shot on an animal.
And if you hit a lethal shot on an animal and you hit it in the vitals and you use a strong arrow with a great broadhead, you're going to get blood squirting out of it because that's what you want.
The last thing you want to see is an arrow hit an animal and no blood comes out.
Some of the hunting networks used to have self-imposed...
Restrictions that they felt were cleaning up hunting for the sake of non-hunters looking in.
And it was counterproductive because they would have a restriction that they didn't want to see raw meat.
They didn't want to see bare bone.
And so it created this sense of, when I say counterproductive, if you were looking in on it, watching it, there was no acknowledgement of what happens to it later, which created the sense that maybe nothing.
That was the best decision ever because it addresses that part of it, which was kind of like, it's impressive that you foresaw what might be a challenge for us, you know, explaining hunting.
So that was just like brilliant to come up with that.
But to our defense, that was never a thing.
We just knew, I mean, I read this old article, my first deer, I killed that spike that I said when I was 15. I wrote this little thing for the school newspaper and said I got 37 pounds of hamburger from it.
And I don't know why, because I don't know why I said that.
It certainly opens people's eyes up that are non-hunters, and I think it's a very valuable addition to this whole video depiction of what hunting is all about.
And also, you're a really good cook, so you'd get really...
Involved and make some pretty cool recipes and, you know, you cook for your staff and you've got episodes like that where you cooked all these different preparations of different wild game.