Michael Waddell, a hunter-turned-Joe Rogan Experience guest, blends Bigfoot speculation with Graham Hancock’s ancient civilization theories, like the Ark of the Covenant’s hidden power and Mayan ruins discovered via LIDAR in Campeche. He contrasts urban misconceptions—like trophy hunting stigma or politicians’ hollow authenticity—with rural traditions, emphasizing hunting as a survival skill, stress reliever, and cultural bond. Waddell’s journey from Georgia turkey guides to global elk hunts reveals how genuine passion trumps manufactured personas, whether in media or politics, while framing self-sufficiency as the real trophy in an increasingly disconnected world. [Automatically generated summary]
No, and especially some of your guests you've had on, and on top of, I mean, even myself, and now you spend a lot of time in some pretty desolate places, and all the trail cameras, we should have gotten one picture.
I agree, and I'm always, it's still, you know, the conspiracy of that, I'm still, every time I check, especially when you get in those deep, dark places out west and all throughout the country, and even the south, I'm thinking, maybe just this time.
I mean, I was thinking back and even listening, you know, like you had Rinella, of course Cam, a lot of my hunting buddies and people I look up to as well, Remy Warren, all those guys.
And you start thinking about the amount of time we spend in the woods, and we don't even see a mountain lion.
You talk about the wolves.
All these wolves are starting to be reintroduced, and you still don't see them a lot of times.
They're there.
But then again, you capture them on trail cameras, you know, in the middle of the night.
But yet Yeti or Sasquatch, only Jack Link's beef jerky has seen him.
I mean, they know there's a thing called the Gigantopithecus that lived somewhere around 100,000 years ago that was a bipedal hominid that was 8 to 10 feet tall.
I was dug deep into that and then went, because of hearing him on the podcast, and went and watched, just finished season two, watched season one soon after I'd seen him here first.
Well, once you realize, first of all, that there's real physical evidence that something happened around 11,800 years ago, that the Earth was most likely pounded with asteroid debris.
And it probably fucked civilization up pretty bad, and it can happen again.
I mean, hearing his perspective on it and how he researched it, and it's from the standpoint, there's, you know, as we know, politics and everything gets involved in everything.
And it's just almost like he was a journalistic, really smart, intellectual guy who was intrigued.
It's just a good approach the way he studied it to me that made it even more compelling.
And then the findings he did find, I don't know, I was very intrigued by that.
Yeah, because in Ethiopia, there's a specific church in Ethiopia that has always been rumored to be the place where the Ark of the Covenant is stored.
And there's these guarders of this, these people that are guards of this area.
And they all develop cataracts.
They all have like radiation poisoning.
And they're guarding this one particular area.
They won't let anybody look at it.
They won't let anybody talk about it.
And Graham got fascinated by this.
And then he started doing a deep dive into history and historical accounts of the Covenant and the Ark and all these bizarre stories that have lasted throughout history.
And the real evidence that there was really sophisticated societies that lived thousands and thousands of years ago when we kind of assumed that people were hunters and gatherers.
Egypt is a great example of that.
Like, whatever they were doing there was Fucking insane.
Well, you know, when you really start digging deep into it, it's very fascinating.
This one particular place has been protected for so long and all these people that have supposedly seen it describe something that's, you know, Trump apparently has like a model of the Ark of the Covenant at Mar-a-Lago.
And that whole covenant was pretty cool based on how, you know, God had said, look, you know, had an intervention saying, this is how big it's got to be.
It was built out of a certain wood, inside and out, gold, the handles, everything was there to hold the commandments.
But then I saw something to where, I don't know if Jamie...
Jamie and Mike could probably pull it up, but where some people speculate it could be under the Catholic Church.
All that ancient civilization stuff is so fun because it is really kind of a mystery, you know, and it's fascinating when, and I'm sure you've been hunting before and you found arrowheads.
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This is a dude I know who has a ranch out here, and he finds them all the time.
It's Comanche territory where his ranch is in the hill country.
And he, every day...
Go to that guy's page, Whitworth, J.W. Whitworth.
J.M. Whitworth?
J.W. Whitworth.
I think it's J.W. But he's got incredible arrowheads.
He's, like, just obsessed with finding them on this ranch.
And this ranch apparently was just overrun by the Comanche.
It's very fertile and rich and, you know, soil is great and a lot of, you know, water habitat, a lot of deer.
And so they must have just camped there and lived there for a long time.
Yeah, because a lot of nerds, a lot of archery nerds, they get real good at it and then just leave them scattered around places or pretend they found them.
But all the heads we would find would be tiny little, almost like bird points is what I felt like I wanted to call them.
I heard them called before.
And supposedly what they did was, is they didn't necessarily, weren't trying to kill the buffalo.
They would herd them and they would just kind of peck them with the arrows and then they would run the buffalo off of this cliff.
And so It would basically die coming off the cliff.
And it was so cool, across the valley, you could still see all those stone rings to where, supposedly, the ladies or the squaws would sit there and look back.
And as soon as the men basically had, you know, whatever amount of buffalo, I guess, over the drop, they would come and butcher.
And the men would go back and, you know, smoke the peace pipe and relax.
Remy was telling me about this one site where they had a buffalo drop and the pile of buffalo was so large and there was so much decay that it actually created a fire.
It just really stretches your mind and your imagination to imagine living like that back then.
And that these people, while, you know, Rome was being built, the Colosseum, Europe, all these different places in the world, these people were living the same way people lived tens of thousands of years ago right here.
And now it seems like we're so far removed from it, but yet as we talk about it, that romance hadn't left.
And even getting a chance to chase a bull elk, there's still some amazing rural wild places out there that you can kind of revisit.
And that was the first thing I noticed is all the Native American pictures you had.
I hunt a lot with Native Americans, a lot with the Navajo Nation.
I've become like family, or they become like family to me.
I go out there every year and The resources they have.
You know, I know Cam hunts a lot, you know, as a muscalero and different places.
And I don't know, man.
And even sadly, even amongst the natives, some of that culture is being lost with them more.
And so we even go out every year and do a hunt with their kids.
take 15 to 20 Navajo youth hunting every year out there with the Navajo Game and Fish.
And they have a lot of mentors, Gloria Tom, who she's just stepping down, but she was the kind of in charge out there.
And we would go and work with people like Jeff Cole and that whole Navajo Nation, the families, and we'd take just their kids, the kids of the Navajo Nation hunting.
And sadly enough, they're like a lot of kids in America eating Little Debbies and playing It's like, man, you've got 17 million acres in your backyard.
Come on, bro.
You're supposed to be the damn eagle.
You've got to fly and dip down.
I'm even out here at your room, and me too.
I have all kinds of Native Americans.
My heroes were Native American hunters, like Ishi, who taught Pope and Young how to Bowhunt.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Issue out of California.
I think he come back and he basically taught those guys who were doctors.
He introduced them to bowhunting.
And then Pope and Young, as we kill an elk, we think, oh, is he big enough to go Pope and Young?
So basically Pope and Young were two guys that basically just kind of revolutionized archery as we know it a lot of times.
I mean, obviously throwing around names, you got to talk about Fredbear and stuff like that.
But prior to that, there was an Indian named Ishi out of a California tribe.
And I'm not good enough at remembering exactly what tribe that was, but there's a lot of cool information that you can read.
Obviously, if you ever get your hands on Saxton Pope and Arthur Young, any books, it's fascinating.
Like my favorite book of all time is called The Adventurous Bowman.
A friend of mine, Jeff Johnson, who's a writer, gave it to me, and I read it all the time.
And even my kid, I read him that book at night, you know, and this talks about their first venture into Africa and when they went there, when they hunted grizzly, when they hunted elk the first time.
And so these guys were kind of based on what I can assume seemed to be pretty much city slickers who had basically a patient called Ishi who taught them how to hunt.
And pictures of him, you can still see him.
He looks like he's dressed at a Ted Nugent concert in 1969, you know.
Jumping off the amps.
And so now that's become, similar to Boone and Crockett, Pope and Young is an organization that's formed around celebrating certain animals that are trophy aspect.
And if you get, say, a white-tailed deer that nets 125 inches on the Pope and Young scale, you can enter them into the Pope and Young record books.
And every category of species, like elk, bear, caribou, moose, so on and so forth, has that.
And so it's just kind of to celebrate...
A lot of the heritage of archery.
And so Pope and Young, a lot of people don't know it, but that basically is the basis of what it come from.
But it starts back to, guess what?
A Native American, these arrowheads, they passed it on.
And so now we're kind of carrying on that same tradition.
And so as a student of the game, it's like, it's so cool to talk about a...
And there's another thing, and it's crazy to think about this.
Another thing I read and heard told, because obviously, you know, you travel around and it's always trying to figure out, you know, what's fact or fiction.
But I'd listen to Casey Means on this podcast.
We're talking about our food.
Supposedly, Ishii, who come in, who was actually living very primitive, but come in and once he started hanging around and got westernized, quickly got fat because I don't know if Little Debbie's is around then.
Just around a lot of people, and all of a sudden he was trying to fight Probably viruses and diseases and getting an abundance of a certain food he wasn't used to.
And supposedly, I think he got a little heavier and less healthy just being around.
It's just so interesting that if it wasn't for guys like Pope and Young and Fred Bear, I mean, how many people were evangelizing bow hunting back then?
I mean, how many people were making it something that was, you know, because as soon as rifles came along, the way everybody looked at it was, oh, rifles are better.
You can shoot something further.
It's easier to do.
You hunt, you hunt with rifles.
But to make that choice, this decision that there's something more connected, more spiritual about archery and bow hunting, if it wasn't for those people that were promoting it, people like Fred Bear, who was so articulate in the way he would describe things and the way he would describe The benefits of just archery practice, about how archery just removes your cares.
If you could just concentrate on that target and just practice archery, it cleans your mind.
And to think back of where it was to where it is, but then you think about the rifles and the technology we have there.
But keep in mind, I'm sure, you know, in those people who are really hunting for substance, Absolutely.
If we leave tomorrow and we can't go and get us a nice steak dinner, or we can't go to the grocery store and buy us some chicken or ribeye, whatever it is we decide to eat, well, absolutely.
If we're like, hey, Joe, your wife and my wife is wanting us to kill a few squirrels, and we're going to have squirrels and gravy, and my wife makes some good biscuits, it's like...
Why don't, you know, let's leave the Hoyts at home.
Let's take a.22 and a.410.
Let's just go get us a mess of squirrel.
And so I think probably they looked at it that way.
And once that came about, and then it slowly becomes somewhat of a, I hate to even say it as a sport, because I don't look at it as a sport.
It's a discipline, but I think to know that we're still going back and celebrating that and still talking about issue and Pope and Young and the Fred Bears and what they set forth and even people like Chuck Adams, who was always one of my heroes.
Cam and I were talking a lot about that in Texas, just...
Golly, Chuck Adams was hunting these elk and always had that little green beanie, shot those XX78 Arras, and man, you wasn't nobody.
It was like, you know, all the kids and even me, you know, I was this little chubby white kid that thought if I bought Arras Jordans, I could jump higher, and Michael lied to me, man.
You're a liar, Jordan!
I can't jump any faster.
I can't run any faster.
But, you know, Chuck, when I saw those arrows and I'd see that bow, I'm like, man, I gotta have that.
I want to be like Chuck.
You know, I want to be like Fred Bear.
And so it's just amazing to see and to see that we still are celebrating it.
Yeah, well, it has a very deep connection to the human mind.
There's something about archery that I think it's because as human beings evolved, you know, we developed the bow and arrow, they invented it, they refined it, and that was how people hunted and got their food.
I think there's a genetic memory of that that's inside of our heads.
Because there's something eerily satisfying about hitting a target with an arrow.
You know, it'd be a Meade property, which was Timberland or Georgia Power Lease.
There'd be 10 of us on 500 acres or sometimes more than that.
And so, you know, everybody took a.30-06 Remington semi-automatic, you know, scope on it with over and under sites.
And we'd meet up at Uncle Morgan's barn, me and my dad.
Scott Steiner, my Uncle Tommy, and Uncle Jeff.
Where are you going?
Hell, I think I'm going to go to the boat seat.
I'm going to Holler 1. Nobody talked about wind or nothing.
It was just a bunch of old guys high-fiving.
We would walk back there and hunt with a rifle.
As soon as you heard a rifle shot, you're like, that was Uncle Tommy.
I bet you he's got a big one.
It was just so amazing, that part of it.
I still go back and do that.
From a culture standpoint to feel just that feeling and vibe of being standing there in a pair of Kmart boots with some old walls coveralls draped over with them old white long handles, you know, that we thought we could go to Antarctica in.
In reality, it was just some cotton.
As soon as it got wet, she froze to death.
And just the thought of that, of being literally, in my time, 11, 12 years old, just being one of the men with a.30-06 on my shoulder, climbing up in a pine tree in a tree stand built out of leftover lumber from my dad's construction job.
And I remember we got our first bow, my dad and I. My dad had an old browning bow and he had a couple old recurs when I was young and he pecked around with them and then I remember I was 13 and I was working with him on a job site and That's my summer job.
My dad was a carpenter, and so I'd go work, and man, he worked the cornbread hell out of me too, you know, just to show me how to be accountable and just what it was like to work, and he paid me $2 an hour.
So he said, you need to pick out something as a goal, figure out what you need to save your money for.
You don't need to blow it on something stupid.
And I said, well, I don't know.
And at the time, some of my buddies, we were saving up wanting skateboards.
Well, at the time, we lived on a dirt road, so I'm like, what am I going to do with a skateboard?
You know, I... I was like, I got to go into the city to use a skateboard.
So my buddy, Jackson Bishop, we called him Boo.
He lives in the city and we hunted together.
He said, I'm behind me.
He was working with my dad and I too.
And he ended up saving his money and bought him a really cool skateboard.
I remember he built it and went and had posters of it.
Well, I ended up deciding that I need to get me a bow and arrow.
So I went and bought me a Martin Pro Eliminator.
Bow from Big Buck Trading Post paid $200 for that sucker.
Those guys right there, their books that they wrote, if you wrote those same books now, like if you and I went on a hunt and we said, hey, let's just write an article and present it to Outdoor Life and publish it just as we saw it, which is so cool about what we do here is having a chance of conversation and kind of air out anything and everything.
And obviously, culture has changed the world.
I mean, these podcasts.
But back then, you know, you had articles.
Well, they'd write these books.
And it would be so, like, I would read it sometimes, the same page, two or three times.
It'd be like, you know, Saxon Pope talking about Arthur Young talking.
You get crucified sometimes for the people who don't understand hunting, even ethically hunting and making a good ethical shot, whether it's a bow or an arrow or a rifle.
And back then they were like, all right, let's go try to hunt some African lions.
I don't know what it's going to take to kill them, but we'll see.
I can't imagine now that, you know, Joe and I plan a hunt trip here and you go home and say, hey, man, just me and Waddell was talking and me, him and Cam were thinking about running to hunt hogs.
Well, how long are you going to be gone?
You know, it's Christmas time.
It's like, well, two days.
We're just going to drive down or fly over here and do that.
Can you imagine, hey baby, I think I'm going to Africa and we're going to try to hunt some lion.
Go to the Mongolia Elkhunt, because it's so fascinating.
They stayed in a yurt, so they stayed in one of those felt tents like Genghis Khan used to live in, and they traveled in the woods, and it looks like you're in Wyoming.
Yeah, I'm always, the more I travel, like, seeing this that Pedro's done, I hadn't done that extensive of traveling, and I've never, if it ends with a stand, I just stay out of it.
Yeah, Rinella's done it, and so I went down there with actually Troy Link of Jack Link's Jerky, and he's a big hunter, so we all went down there, kind of for the adventure, and to say, yeah, we hunted the jungles.
And dude, amazing, you know, you got all that Mayan civilization and all this stuff that I saw, even Graham Hancock, but what people don't realize, we're out in the middle of this jungle, and I'm walking around, and the guy I'm with, he don't know English, and I'm like, and Cohen Stone, our producer, he's standing there, and I was like, dude, this is a...
This is one of those pyramids.
Like, we're walking up and I'm trying to figure out if I can hen call because nobody had ever figured out if you can hen call to these oscillated turkeys.
I get to looking around and so finally I'm tapping this guide on the shoulder and I'm like, bro, you know, Mayan?
So I only knew about the ones that was on the postcards.
When you're out there having a corona on the beach and somebody trying to sell your engraving to your wife in some ring or something, I'm like, oh my god, dude.
And I wanted so bad for a turkey to respond and to put my back against that.
And so I did a little video and I was like, man, this is insane.
But when would I have had a chance to see that had I not been a hunter?
So that gets you down the rabbit hole of like, well, what was this?
And what is that calendar?
And I wonder what Graham Hancock is.
So when I'm seeing some of this, I'm like, dude, I was in that area.
I didn't go to see that particular piece where he's talking to this authority.
But I did go, you know, 30 miles south of there or 100 miles.
And I had a chance to work a turkey around one that's not even been excavated.
They uncovered the hidden complex, which they have called Valer...
Valeriana?
Valeriana.
Using LIDAR, a type of laser survey that map structures buried under vegetation.
They believed it is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America.
The team discovered three sites in total in a survey the size of Scotland's capital, Edinburgh, by accident when one of the archaeologists browsed data on the internet.
And we ate plenty of that, but it was always a fallback to where you understood the good Lord's renewable resources and how to hunt them.
So taking an animal for table fare wasn't anything at all to even cheer about other than You know, almost in the blessing of blessing your food, like, thank you, Lord, for giving us this opportunity to have a place to hunt.
So it would be a chance to go put a fish basket out.
I remember my papa taught me so many things.
He made corn liquor and just country as a damn chicken coop.
Oh, wow.
And I look back, he passed away when I was 12. Both of my granddads did.
And we're just, like, sprinkling some, like, seasoned salt over these back straps and cooking them over the fire.
And we're eating them with our hands.
And I was like, I'm doing this for the rest of my life.
This is, like, one of the greatest moments I've ever had in my life.
One of the greatest experiences.
I've felt so tuned into it.
I was like, this is something I've been missing.
Like, this is...
And it's a whole new world.
I explained it.
I was like, it's like you're in a different dimension.
The first time...
I shot a deer, was on that show.
So I'd never hunted an animal before.
I'd only been fishing.
And the first time I'm looking at that deer through the crosshairs of that rifle, and I'm just calming myself to squeeze a shot, and I squeeze off the shot and the deer drops like a stone, And I was like, oh my god.
I'm like, this is what I'm doing forever.
And then once I started eating it, I was like, oh, this is my new thing.
I'm like, I'm obsessed.
I was obsessed.
And then obsessed with all I had been missing.
Just the experience of being in the woods is so different than anything The way people think of hunting, unfortunately, we've been poisoned by movies where the hunters are the bad guys.
They're always douchebags.
They're always poaching animals and harassing people.
Hunters in movies, it's a trope that they've always been cruel, evil people.
People who buy burgers from McDonald's will look down on someone who hunts an animal in the woods.
Correct.
Our brains have been distorted.
Our perceptions have been distorted by media.
And I realized that being in the woods hunting.
I was like, first of all, this is very difficult to do.
Mule deer hunting in Montana in October.
Freezing cold in the Missouri Breaks.
Fascinating!
Just the whole, the environment is so unforgiving and doesn't give a fuck about you, the quiet and the isolation out there, and a weird kind of loneliness.
Like, not loneliness, but a realization of where your place really is in the natural world.
that was the other team look did I say I'll take it bro he lives in another dimension Theo lives in a neighboring dimension and he just comes and visits us.
Theo and I went to the UFC two weekends ago, last weekend, two weekends ago.
We were in Vegas, and then after the fights, we went to dinner.
And I swear to God, the dinner, it was an hour and a half of me and Theo crying, laughing.
You could do a special of Theo just walking around.
Maybe after a mushroom or something, just let him walk around and just describe what he's seeing.
I mean, our producer come back and I saw him way a ways.
I was tired, man.
I've been hunting a lot.
He said, man, we're going to go take an adventure, walk around the ranch, you know, farm.
It was down in South Florida.
I come back, our producer was laughing.
He said, man, I can't even tell you all I heard and what Theo was saying.
He said, I've never laughed so hard.
I said, I can only imagine.
I can only imagine.
But yeah, man, I don't know.
It's just like that part...
I think that's the most beautiful thing for me, coming from where I come from, and even, you know, seeing all the different people from all these cultures.
And there's so much, and I've completely understood this too, there's so little that separates us all from the most rural country guy to the most urban city guy, no matter what race, ethnicity.
It's amazing how there's so much entertainment in things.
If you just open your mind, not pretend to know it all, to want to learn, Because there's so much you can teach me, so much I can teach you.
And it's just amazing.
And it's definitely given me a whole lot better perspective.
And I don't know, that's been probably the coolest part of what I've had a chance to go on an adventure and a journey is to be able to...
You know, meet somebody like Brewer who's like, you know, he didn't really, was not intrigued with hunting.
It was more the conspiracy of what was going down and like, dude, I went to go get some chicken breasts and some chicken wings to watch football.
You couldn't find any?
The government, Fauci, is making me learn.
Waddell, teach me how to kill a turkey.
You know, on the other hand, first morning out.
Jim kills one.
And so, you know, you've hunted enough, you and Cam, where, you know, you get an elk, and it is a reverence.
It's not like you—everybody reacts different.
But, you know, if you played a good era, kind of the Ted Nugent, the spirit of the era, the spirit of the wild, and that era goes in there, and you've worked for it, you've practiced, and when you know it's a good ethical shot, and you know that you got and essentially put the tag on that bull, it is almost like spike—some people, it's almost like spiking the football when you get a touchdown.
And I think even Jim talks about it, but I just sat back and I'm like, man, how cool is this?
And then the same token, Jim's like, hey man, if you ever down here and want to come to one of my comedy shows, for my wife and friend to go do that, or to see something I've never seen, or to go home and still tell my dad who's 71, you're not going to believe...
You know, what I saw in Austin.
You're not going to believe what happened in, you know, wherever.
But once you find common ground, and once you experienced it, like, experiencing nature for the first time for people that are in the city, It's so overwhelming for them.
It's so interesting to watch them just walk around the woods and just be confused and not knowing how to navigate, not knowing where they are, and being exhausted, not knowing how much energy it takes going up hills.
like you obviously think of Hoyt, you think of Realtree, you think of these different companies that are around the hunting culture but I remember one year I had a chance to work with Hormel Denny More Stew.
Hormel had Denny More Beef Stew.
And so they did the sweepstakes and it's like win a turkey hunt with Michael Waddell.
And so we did it and they run 30 second ads.
That was when you know everything was a bunch of 30 second ads and so the guy wins it, him and his son Well, they get there, and I realize they'd never hunted.
And it was my first time to experience guiding somebody that knew nothing.
I mean, I'd guided a lot of rookies, but I'm talking about when I say had no clue of nature.
And so I remember we're walking, and I realized that, okay, this would be fun for me because from the basics of everything, just the mountains, the streams to the tracks.
So we're walking along, and me and his son and him are talking, and I say, look here.
Cheetos, Chester the Cheetah, which I guess is from a true animal, a cheetah, but Chester Cheeto, he was...
Like, is there any of those tracks?
If you see one of those tracks, show me what a Chester Cheeto track looks like.
I'm like, you know, we don't have cheetahs, but there is no Chester the Cheeto.
But then it hit me, it's like he was talking about the movies.
Well, Bambi is so real to them.
The fox and the hound.
I mean, it's so real.
It's like, you know, somehow, you know, they think that you go to Antarctica or North Pole and these polar bears are sitting having a soda and high-fiving and talking about Christmas.
Obviously, you can go to the store, but out here, there's no fucking stores.
So out here, if you want to survive, if we lived here forever, this is the only environment you're ever going to be here until your heart stops beating.
I plan on it so hardcore that, like, when Netflix gave me a comedy special, I had to make sure that it was the beginning of August.
I was like, I need time to get ready.
Because, like, I have a whole training routine and a shooting routine, and, you know, I want to make sure I'm shooting 100 hours a day, seven days a week.
I want to make sure my...
Accuracy is fully dialed in.
I have 100% confidence.
My cardio is on point.
I got to be ready.
So I was like, it can't be any later than like August 5th.
I'm like, I need like four hard weeks.
I mean, I'm training for it all year round, but four hard weeks, almost like you're getting ready for a fight.
You know, people wonder, like, do you ever get tired of it?
You really don't.
I mean, I'm sure like you, you know, obviously say in the comedian world to kind of draw parallels, that opportunity to go out for 30 minutes or an hour to make someone laugh and they're digging on the stuff that you're performing.
There's got to be a natural high that comes with it.
So there becomes an addictive quality to it.
And it's not necessarily about the money.
It's just a certain situation that feels good.
So you wonder, like, when do I want to step down for this?
And it's kind of like, you know, Keith Richards playing a guitar.
Maybe never.
It's like this is part of it.
And I think hunting becomes like that.
And to the point with me, like the things I love, and I've been blessed that inevitably my financial opportunities have came from hunting.
Promoting hunting and working for different partners, as is Cam's, and many of us, Remy, Steve, a lot of us, but I'm still so addicted to the point to where my wife, she loves country music, my wife Christy, and so through people we meet, we've got invited to some really cool things, you know, from get-togethers to parties to situations, awards to ceremonies to different clubs, and so a lot of times we'll try to go, and it's actually a cool thing for me because, hey man, I met this person Would you like to do this or that?
And one thing in particular happened.
My wife loves country music, and there's a lot of those country music guys that I hunt with.
So I had gotten a text from a guy that was having some award ceremony around the country music.
I forget which one it was, but when they had it at the Dallas Stadium.
Anyway, I got invited.
He said, hey, if you want to come out, Waddell, look, man, we'd like to have you at the...
You know, man, we'll treat you like one of the singers, you know, and...
So immediately I said, oh dude, what's the dates?
And they said it's April.
I forget what it was.
Whatever it was, it hit right in turkey season.
Like right when I knew.
I hadn't even had anything planned.
This was time, but I knew, kind of like you know, September.
So I said, man, I'm sorry.
Thank you so much for the invite, but I'm not going to be able to make it.
Well...
My wife and I don't have a relationship where we go in through each other's phones and stuff like that.
But that particular...
My phone was sitting...
It was maybe a week later sitting there.
And that same gentleman had texted me on another matter.
And so he had just texted me.
I said, Christy, get my phone.
So she did.
And somehow she just happened to look at that text.
And all of a sudden I couldn't figure out.
She was just kind of giving me the cold shoulder.
Like the rest of the day I'm like...
What did I do?
And I couldn't figure out what I did, you know?
So finally, I was like, look, baby, you know, I figured out a lot of things about elk and turkey.
I ain't figured out a woman completely.
And so I know I done pissed you off some kind of way.
I don't know what I did, but, you know, help me understand.
She said, you know what?
I do have a bone to pick with you.
And I was like, oh, hey, well, let me have it.
You know, let me have it.
And I'm already thinking, I ain't did shit.
You know, I don't think.
She said, you know what?
I know you like to hunt turkeys.
I'm like, okay, alright.
And I'm like, yeah, I love to hunt turkeys.
She said, but you know what?
We could take one night and go to a really cool awards ceremony.
Maybe we could hang out with Blake and have a drink and just chill and relax.
And Luke was going to be...
And I was like, what are you talking about?
And then she said, well, I saw the text and we were invited to go to the awards.
And you quickly just said no, didn't even talk.
And I'm like...
And then I hit me like, what a selfish...
I don't know how many turkeys I've seen shot, or how many turkeys I've shot myself, but here it is, I'm 50 years old, and I'm saying no just like that, without hesitation.
Well, the reality of it is if you haven't experienced hunting, you don't understand why people are so drawn to it and why the experience is so much more powerful than anything else you have in life other than the birth of your children, you know, being in love.
There's a bunch of experiences that are wonderful in the regular modern civilized life.
But when you get that bug...
You get that bug?
You know, you get that bug?
When you hear the swat of that fucking arrow hitting the vitals, and you see the spot right in the golden triangle, you see the blood dripping down, and you see him stumbling forward, you're like, we got him.
We got them.
And every sense in your body is on 10. Your fucking goosebumps have goosebumps.
They've been ducking mountain lions for five, six years, and they know any little snap of a branch, any little, like, moving of a rock that sounds like it might have been a predator's paw.
You know, they think, oh, you hunters are going out there and, you know, getting these animals.
And, you know, obviously the hunters have such a responsibility and the balance of a lot of things.
You know, and Mother Nature is, first of all, very brutal.
And there's a lot to be learned through nature.
There's a lot of things we think we know, but then if you really dig deep and you're in the mountains, you realize, wait a minute, that was all human nature.
This is nature.
There's a difference.
So many examples that you can get into.
But at the end of the day, these deer also have coyotes.
Now they reintroduce wolves in some of these places.
And they have done studies that, in some cases, they feel like an adult male mountain lion can kill up to 100 mule deer.
One mountain lion.
So you're talking 80 to 100 animals that they kill.
So when you think about us, even if we're athletic...
Yeah, because they don't want the concept of game to be introduced, meaning hunted.
Their thought is they want to get it to the point where the predators and the prey balance each other out where there's no need for hunting.
And they would like to reintroduce wolves to help in that.
They do.
It's animal activists that have taken these positions that should be held by wildlife biologists who have an objective understanding of the populations and how to keep them healthy.
And the way they're doing it in California is you've got mountain lions everywhere.
In this one ranch that I hunt, they had a waterhole, they had a pond, and they had a trail cam.
They found 18 different cats that visited this trail cam.
I heard Rinella, because Rinella spends a lot of time in desolate places.
And I didn't specifically talk to Cam.
But kind of in perspective, I started working.
In the area of either guiding or working with an outfitter, working with companies that were doing shows for, at the time, TNN that turned into ESPN, now Outdoor Channel, now YouTube, so on and so forth.
Well, so as a young kid, you know, in rural Georgia, I finally had a chance to start going and seeing these places from Saskatchewan I got to go to Africa, all over Mexico, and now I'm hunting all across the western landscape, not just in Georgia hunting whitetails and turkeys and squirrels there.
I've only saw one mountain lion in the daylight.
One!
Now, I've spent tons.
I think Rinella said he saw six in his lifetime in the daylight.
So what you realize, if you see a mountain lion in the daylight, now I've seen a lot of mountain lions, but they all have been in a tree behind a dog or running behind a dog.
I'm talking about just you and I glassing, looking for meal deer and like, Joe, mountain lion.
One was in the Yukon, one was in Alaska, in the daylight.
I've heard them countless times.
You know, we've been camping in spike tents, and you hear the wolves.
I've heard them all across places where wolves exist, but you don't see them.
Another perspective is even coyotes.
I have 500, a little over 500 acres I live on in Georgia, and so I noticed that I was finding all kinds of fawns, and they did a bunch of studies from University of Georgia, Auburn University, talking about how many deer that coyotes eat, which you can't blame them.
Why would you not eat a fawn in the fawning time of year and feed your pups?
So I decided, actually, of all people who got me into trapping, it was Blake Shelton.
He was trapping in Oklahoma and loves it.
So I'm like, my God, if this country singer who hosted The Voice can trap, I've got to learn about this.
So I dug deep and 2019 and 20, man, I just dug in and just learned a lot more about trapping instead of putting out dirt hole traps or leg hole, dirt hole traps and different things.
And so I caught in 2021, I caught like 22 one year, 19 another year, just on 500 acres.
And if we go hunting tomorrow, now think about 20 dogs that are smaller than a German Shepherd, but a small, you know, Canine dog that lives on your property.
Some are passing through.
To think that in a four-week period, I could catch 22 coyotes.
That at times, you know, hunting a lot, I would see them time to time.
Along that also caught seven fox and two bobcats.
And I don't know how many coons and possums.
So for people to think that you see this all the time, you don't.
I live there.
And when I'm home, every day I'm up and I'm riding...
Checking food plots, putting in food plots.
I got bulldozers.
I got different things and tractors trying to make the wildlife habitat better to make sure I got better areas for my turkeys to brood, making sure I'm planting resources.
And I don't see these things.
And this is all I've ever done.
The people that live in Aspen are just out of L.A., you know, not trying to throw shade on them, but you don't know, man.
I don't know how to hit a half pipe like Tony Hawk either.
So I'm still learning.
And so for me to say that and to think that you can just spend nearly $4.8 million, $5 million to reintroduce wolves and think you're going to get tourists to come out there and look at them.
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These wolves, if they could talk, they're like, these people don't have a clue.
All these PETA members, they're all fine, long as it's your dog and your cat.
But all of a sudden, you let a herd of deer come in and eat their $40,000 worth of landscaping, and a mountain lion kill their pet, they're secretly calling me like, hey, bone collector?
I'm not going to lie, that's a little offensive, but...
Well, I think one of the beautiful things about social media for hunting and podcasts for hunting is that people have an opportunity to hear a completely different perspective about what it is that wasn't available before that.
I got into hunting because I started watching Spirit of the Wild.
I was, when Rinella had reached out and I had a chance to be on his podcast, you know, I I would say I'm a very secure person, but at the same time, I know I'm country.
I know I'm the, for lack of better words, the guy that...
I kill a lot of stuff.
There ain't no way to say it any better.
I could say harvest, pluck, take, but at the end of the day, I grew up where...
In Georgia, we could kill 10 deer legally a year.
So, mostly with a bow.
And then Alabama, the neighboring state, you know, you could kill a buck and a doe a day for a long time in Alabama.
And there was people that tried to do it.
It wasn't ever, did you get you a good one this year?
Like, yep, 47. Like, what?
That's a lot of food.
At first, when I first started meeting and hanging with Rinella, I thought, man, I hope he don't think I'm just this old redneck crazy dude.
And then once we've become friends, it gets back to the whole how everything is so much tighter that you realize and how we all have so much respect for each other in different lanes of bringing it.
And it's just like anything.
I mean, you've got different players on a team, all playing for the same team.
But they all have a different skill set.
And so we all grow up a little different.
And so again, I just assumed growing up in my small little area, just out of Manchester, Woodbury, Georgia, I really think the area I was from was called Booger Bottom, Georgia.
And I just thought, well, Booger Bottoms are everywhere.
Well, you find out there is a lot of different little names.
There are no lights there.
But I just really assumed everybody did.
And I was just completely devastated when I went to the city.
And, you know, and I'd tell somebody, like, man, you know, what do you do?
It's like, man, I work for a company.
We do hunting shows at T&N. You know, I'm so proud, thinking, man, I should be able to pass out a business card and meet a girl with this.
And the fact that you could go to full draw and just press a button to range and then say maybe the animal moves 15 yards to the left, you just press it again and you get a range and you have a perfect shot.
But some people think that that's cheating.
But it's just taking a step out.
Instead of picking your range finder off your bino pouch and checking it and then changing your site and then drawing back, with this you're doing it right from draw.
So from full draw you can just keep getting ranges.
And then you can also hit it once And then a second time, and you'll get pins.
I liked that a lot because, and I think I've heard you even mention this, what I love about archery is obviously you've got these windows.
Everything ain't just sitting out in the yard where you're shooting...
You're shooting through the woods, especially if you're out there elk hunting.
You've got these windows.
There was a site years ago that I remember, and it worked, in theory, great, but it wasn't like the Range or the Garmin, but they had these fiber optics that were glued to the middle of a...
Basically of a piece of glass that went into the site housing.
So you would buy this glass housing that, okay, if your bow was 280 feet per sack or 290 or 300, 320, and your pins were preset.
So you went in and got your top pin dialed in.
So then you had all these, but your site viewing was good.
The problem was when it rained or if it got dirty.
And what I did like about that is the fact that the reason I've always liked pins, multiple pins, is the fact that I could see my whole sight picture where my arrow is going from 20 all the way out to even if I'm shooting 80. In this case, most of my sights are set up from, say, 20 to 60 or 20 to 70. I try to put as many pins on my sight as I can.
A lot of people don't like it because they think it's cluttered, but once I've mentally got used to it, if I range a bull, say, 65, when I pull back, Without having doing any other calculations, I put my 60-yard pin on that bull.
It's in the clear, and then quickly, now it's like a memory of going back, and I quickly go back up to my 20-yard pin, and I'm looking all the way down through and estimating, is this arrow going to arc through?
But basically, from 20 all the way out to my desired, where I want to hit, I can see the arc of my arrow based on my pin set good.
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So you know if there's a gap in the trees, you're going to be able to get right in there.
I know if I'm at 60 holding dead on that clear spot, but I got a limb at 30 and my 30-yard pin's in the middle of it, I know, oh crap, I'm going to hit that.
So now I can just squat down.
So that's why I don't like as much single pin technology.
And then quickly, what I like about the pins, it's clutter, it's kind of old-fashioned, but I do like that a lot from that standpoint of trajectory of the ability to kind of kill or to take and fill a tag.
And Cam and I talked a lot about those things.
We talked a lot about the release.
I definitely like the, you know, I like the handheld from a, if I really want to try to haunt in and be a little more disciplined and kind of the feel it go, not feel it go off and shoot with completely surprise.
I like that, but I don't think that traditionally works as great for hunting because of the fact, I think you do have to know and to make that arrow go right now if you consistently have to Even in Texas.
I mean, we're shooting animals at, you know, 20 to 30 yards, those deer.
You know, people ask me all the time, do you ever get nervous or get buck fever?
Like, man, almost every time.
It's like, I think that's when, if some of that, yes, you get good at kind of...
Somewhat like stage fright, I saw a clip of Elvis Presley.
I thought this was so unique.
I saw a clip of Elvis Presley the other day on this YouTube clip, and he was completely in panic.
And this was like right in the prime of his career, and he was walking around, and it was a narrator saying, yes, Elvis notoriously would get just afraid every time he went on fray.
And then to control it, and then when you fit that arrow through that window, and then you can pick up the phone and call your family and say, baby doll, don't buy an old steak because I'm bringing it home.
It's, again, it's just an...
It's not like you want to disrespect the animal, but you just achieve something.
Being successful is that if you can get through that Nervousness and I think it helps you in everything you do in life I think anytime you do something really hard very difficult I think that ability to overcome that difficult scenario helps you with everything in life hundred percent and when it comes to archery to it You're on that ragged line to where in your subconscious you can go from, you can be the hero or you can be zero that quick.
And the only other person in history I've ever heard that, there was a guy named Kenny Bartram who was a motocross.
He was the first guy to ever do a backflip on a motorcycle, and he landed it.
And so he went hunting with us one time in Texas, and I said, Kenny, I mean, how much weed do you got to smoke to get on a bike and think you can do a flip for the first time?
He said, man, I just always thought I'd probably kill myself, but I'd try it.
I said, so you never thought you would land it?
He said, no.
Every time I try a trick, I think I'm about to wad it up.
I've often wondered, is there ever a comedian that walks out and is like, hey, I'm probably going to bomb, but I'm going to do the best I can, or I'm going to play this guitar the best I can.
As a matter of fact, if there's any negative thing, I think the hunting industry and even TV shows that we produce can put a negative vibe potentially on trying to kill these big trophy animals.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with it.
I mean, you're hunting Utah and the places we get a chance to hunt, absolutely.
You're looking for, in that case, a seven- to eight-year-old bull.
Right.
You know, sometimes they might score 320 to 370. At the end of the day, the trophy is for sure a mature animal.
But you also got to keep in perspective, especially if you grow up where I did, where literally there's, you know, 10 guys shared a 300-acre property that they just want to deer hunt.
And they're trying to get away.
Keep in mind, they're still managing a family.
They're still dealing with the economy.
They're still dealing with everyday strife of, man, how am I going to get off work, still get my kid to soccer practice or football practice, My wife is pissed off.
I hadn't even took her to Applebee's in the last three months, you know, and it's like I didn't take the kids to, you know, Disney World and the only family picture we got in front of the Shoney's big boy.
So, man, what am I going to do?
But in the back of my mind, it's like, I sure would like to get off.
Maybe Saturday I could spend a little time and go up to the hunt lease.
Hang out, maybe get a chance to shoot a deer.
They're not necessarily thinking, I got to kill a deer to put it in Pope and Young and Arboon and Crockett.
They're looking, it's more than just a hunt.
It is a getaway.
It's a, I call it, it's a cheapest, you know, antidepressant presence you can get on to where you can clear your mind, you can get away.
Hopefully you can turn your phone off, get up in a tree stand or a saddle, whatever it is, whether you're hunting public or private.
And we miss that in the hunting industry so many times.
And there's people that are literally busting their ass for their family.
It's not a sport to hunt, but it's therapeutic.
They grew up doing it to be able to sit around a fire with other men and women sometimes and get away sometimes.
To cleanse yourself of everything that's going on.
And unfortunately, I think that's what drives people sometimes crazy, even in the city.
Sometimes I walked around Austin today early, had me a nice breakfast, and I just walked around and ended up running to this children's network that was trying to raise money where you can kind of adopt a kid and give them so much a month.
So, man, I did.
Again, I talked to everybody.
I just said, hey, man, what y'all selling over here?
Like, oh, man, normally people don't come up and talk to us.
We have to sell them as a guy from Europe and And a sweet girl that was, you could tell, born and raised right around here.
Anyway, with that said, I ended up, you know, I said, man, I want to pledge some money every month.
So I picked me out a kid in Guatemala.
And so anyway, with that said, about that time, here comes a street person.
And he is cussing me and her.
And that fell out.
I mean, the most vile words you could, I mean, cussing like a sailor, as they would say metaphorically.
And I'm like, man, what's wrong with this guy?
So I said, y'all get this a lot, you know.
And it was just before, not far from when I come over here.
And the girl said, yeah, we do get that a lot.
And the guy with the British accent or the European accent said, you know, we get it quite a bit, you know.
He said, but I think there's a bad batch of something right now.
And I'm like, oh, really?
He said, you know, he said, man, people have been really mean lately.
They've been yelling and cussing and screaming at us.
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And well, by the time the guy comes back and he's like, you MFers, I know everything and everybody's retarded.
Yeah, and sometimes it's almost like, you know, I've never figured out completely a lady.
My wife, you know, sometimes it's always a game.
And I've learned that I don't know that I'll ever understand exactly what it is she wants, but I know she wants me to hear and pay attention.
And I think that's what...
Whether you're a hunter, whether you're from the city.
But overall, what I have found, whether you live in the city or the country, whether you get a chance to go to a rave or go to the mothership, which I hope to go by there or not, I just want to check out the joint, you know.
And so anyway, when it's all said and done, there's something about the peace and tranquility that you can refuel out in the woods, and it brings everything to a focal point.
Point, and you can be still and be quiet, and it brings everything back.
And so in reality, it's not about people going to think of you different if you shoot the biggest, highest scoring animal that you can put into the Bope& Young or the Boone& Crockett record books.
I think those of us, once we learn to respect each other and love each other's goals, that, yeah, if I know that your goal is to shoot, say, a 390 bull, That one day, you know, I'll get a call, and you're going to be hyperventilating, and you're like, I just did it.
Well, for people who don't understand why that's so interesting to us, it's because they're the most difficult ones to get, because they're the older, wiser ones.
And also, when you look at it from a conservation standpoint, those are the ones that you want to hunt because those are the ones who spread their genes and they're probably about to get taken out by nature anyway.
What dolphin females have to do is they have to breed with as many males as possible because when a female dolphin has babies, she has to take care of that baby for about six years.
So when the male dolphins recognize a female with babies and they don't know that female, those are not his babies, he'll kill those babies so that female dolphin will breed.
It's so cool, though, to see that and experience it.
And I think it's sad that most people don't know.
And there's a lot of very smart people that, in some cases, they think it might be a little beneath them to understand what maybe hunting is truly about, other than maybe what they see on a Walt Disney movie.
And I think that is definitely...
It kind of fueled me to be able to help educate and talk about those things.
And I know Ranella has done an amazing job of introducing that, too.
And there's a lot of great ambassadors that we've got right now doing that.
One of the coolest stories, actually, and only in America.
You don't hear this story in Turkmenistan.
I grew up, obviously, like I said, rural.
I loved to hunt and fish.
Very simple.
My dad was a contractor.
So I really thought that I wanted to maybe work with my dad or do what he did, hands-on labor.
I knew I didn't want to be in office.
Anyway...
I'll try to keep it short, but basically what I end up doing is just enthralled.
My mom passed away when I was young, 16, and so my dad and I become more like brothers.
And my dad, he had a ninth grade education, the hardest working man I've ever been around.
And so anyway, we loved hunting fish and it became therapeutic.
And so I got into Turkey Calling and had won some contests and met some of my Turkey Calling heroes, and that's where I met Bill Jordan and David Blanton.
And I started guiding when I was probably 19. And then one thing led to another.
I started working full-time there at Realtree.
As a guide, as a camera guy, they had that show on TNN, and so I was just literally camera jockeying it from skinning deer, guiding turkey hunters, and it was David Blanton who said, man, you know, there's a lot more you could do.
And so I kind of, by default, Joe, how I got lucky, too, was when I hooked up with those guys, David Blanton and Bill, I got to do some of the turkey calling tips because I had won some contests.
And so even back on TNN, I was this young kid, and they were like, hey, we need up.
We need a tip.
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You know, the TNN tip of the week, you know, brought to you by Fieldline Packs.
I'd went to heating and air school and got a degree and worked a year with Barringer's Heat and Cooling out of Zeblin, Georgia.
And I had me a truck, had my name on it, you know, Michael, you know, and had me my refrigeration tools and every Christmas my dad, oh boy, I got you another flaring kit.
I mean, just blue collar culture.
And all of a sudden, you know, I'm coming in telling the family like, hey, uh, I don't know if I'm going to keep doing the heat and air deal.
You know, like, what?
Like, you got a truck, son.
You got your own uniform.
You know, you got benefits.
I'm like, yeah, but there's this camouflage company wanting me to take Dale Earnhardt turkey hunting.
And my dad was the only one that got it.
Everybody else was like, it was an intervention.
Like, I'd go to Christmas and be like, hey, nephew, let me pull you aside.
Now, you know you can't make a living at this hunting and fishing thing, you know.
And I was just, you know, I got a chance to meet them.
But so many people I met and I couldn't believe it.
And one thing led to another.
And really what the biggest break I had was David Blanton, who was like a big brother.
I mean, like a like a father.
And he was just such a good guy, good Christian guy, good hunter.
Outdoor Channel was just coming on.
Outdoor Channel was really kind of coming on.
But at the time, you know, the kind of beat your chest kind of pride was the fact that you could be on ESPN and our TNN.
And then TNN had been through a situation where I think it was Viacom had some big merger that was part of the MTV thing.
And so they quickly, through their kind of culturally said, hey, we need to kind of do away with this hunting thing.
These guys are killing stuff.
And it become the Nashville, it was the Nashville Network, then it becomes the National Network, then it becomes Spike TV. And so everything moved over, all the...
The big Sunday night block move over to ESPN, but you couldn't show impact.
Well, about that time, they started the Outdoor Channel on cable TV. They were looking for distribution.
And so it was David Blanton.
He said, Michael, we need to come up with a cool hook and we need to create a show over on Outdoor Channel.
Getting back to meeting these people, and what I found that was fascinating, and it's just the same with these conversations you have, these people that you just look up to.
Yeah, you meet some people that are interesting and weird, but for the most part, you're like, wow, these guys are super cool, super talented.
And that's what I was finding when I would run into a country singer.
I remember Mark Chestnut sitting around and Drinking whiskey and him playing the guitar and singing Hank Williams Jr.'s song, running into Bo Cephas, running into, you know, to Leonard Skinner and all those guys.
I'm like, man, these guys are so down-to-earth and cool.
And I realized that there was more to this hunting than just this staunch, you know, here we go with the Encinitas Ranch.
Today, we're hunting the mesquite flats of Encino, you know.
With the coyotes abundant, there's a big buck around the corner.
The narrator.
Yeah, and it was just like...
At the time, it was classic.
It was so sanitized.
Everybody was starched.
You go to a hunting show, everybody had on khakis.
I mean, it's almost like it was a facade.
And I remember telling David Blanton, I said, I think what we're missing is the culture and the fun.
And everybody was very serious.
And you should be serious if you're going to go take a bow and arrow or rifle and take the life of a wild animal.
But the camp life was so amazing, and we'd have different personalities, different NFL athletes.
We would have comedians, people like Jeff Foxworthy.
And I was just so pleased that these people that I adored and was big fans of was people that you could sit around and have a glass of sweet tea or a cold beer and just laugh.
And they were as real, possibly more entertaining in person, kind of like your talk about Theo.
People ask, he's really funny.
Well, you should have...
Should have been with us at this UFC fight.
We couldn't even watch the fight.
The guy's cracking us up.
And so I told David, I said, I think most of these people, if we could do a show kind of documenting just the camp life and the reality of how much fun you have, I think we could sell that fun.
And so David said, do it.
He said, matter of fact, you host it.
I'm like, no, no, no, I'm not coming in here to pitch you for me to host a show.
Behind the scenes, I'll guide, I'll run camera, I'll help edit, produce.
He'd sent me to Maine to this International Film and Art School to learn how to edit on non-linear, the first Avid.
Now let's go back and build a pre-hunt, you know, and it'd be like Dale Earnhardt walking through the forest with his gargoyles on or however, and he's camouflaged like, yeah, we're going down here to a ridge flat, a lot of acorns up there.
Well, the deer has been dead a long time ago, obviously, by the time we shot that.
Right.
So he loved that, the instructor, because it gave us a chance to put the storyline.
And I thought, man, I'm going to be the hero.
You know, all these little girls up here in Maine, and I ain't never seen a lot of people with purple hair and stuff, and I could tell it was kind of that cool hippie trend, and it was artsy.
But in my mind, I'm like, I'm just having a good time.
And anyway, dude, immediately, Joe, it became a protest.
There was two or three people stood up in the class.
Like, we're not using this.
We cannot.
We will walk out.
These animals are getting dead.
If you can prove these animals...
We're not harmed.
And I'm like, no, they're all dead.
I mean, they're dead.
And finally, I had a little bit of a meltdown because that was one of the first times that it really hit me where I had a mass of people saying, you know, almost felt like the Antichrist because I'm the guy killing deer.
But even if you have to teach me out to class, I need to learn how to do this.
I'm a student, but I come up here.
My employer sent me up here.
I've got to learn how to do this.
So I came back pretty efficient as a nonlinear editor.
All of it didn't have any desire to know that that's what I wanted to do, but I was just wanting to, you know, sweep the warehouse.
You want me to edit?
You want me to take somebody hunting?
You need me to put up a fence?
Skin a buck?
You know, whatever.
And then when David gave me that opportunity to do Realtree Road Trips back in the day, it was in 2003 it aired.
We shot it in 2002. That's when everything for me, because it was all about personality, it was all about having fun, and that's kind of, we kind of come up with the tagline, this is a different kind of hunting show.
And even to this day, it's kind of still where we kind of settle in.
And it's like...
You know, honestly, I'm not really trying to out-hunt anybody, but we'll try to out-fund everybody.
And so if you come to camp, you know, and this is myself, big old T-bone, you know, he lost his leg, so he's not hunting with us as much.
He can't get around to cancer.
He lost his leg.
But Nick and I, I mean, we're going to have a good time.
And if you desire to get serious, which we do encourage, hey, it's time to buckle down.
There's a time for fun.
There's a time to hone it in.
But we just try our best to make it fun.
And I've learned that...
If you do that and you can make friends, that's the biggest form of the trophy you'll ever get.
Yes, that's a trophy, but the stories you got with sitting with Rinella and the people around the camp and that experience, you meet people from all over the country, in our case the world, and the next thing you know it's like even more special.
And so I know people, I say it a lot, I know people that's got some amazing trophy rooms.
But they're lonely, they dusty, and they really ain't made a lot of friends because they were so beating their chest to kill the next biggest thing that they forgot that the trophy is relationships and the adventure.
And yes, inevitably, this deer that's hanging on the wall that your family has enjoyed over a period of sometimes a year.
Sometimes it'll take you a year or two to eat elk, a full elk.
It's a lot of meat, but...
I don't know, man.
It's just an amazing journey.
I never felt like I was that talented, other than the fact I just had a lot of good work ethic my dad put in me, and I really had a passion for it.
And I didn't have really any weird opposition pulling me away from it.
It pulled me toward it.
But growing up so rural and blue-collar, I had to prove to my family that there was a livelihood here because they literally looked at it like...
It's a great point, because to this day, I'll go to, and aside, because I'm now, you know, I know you love classic cars, and I hear about the things you talk about, and obviously I'm a big fan of the podcast.
And so one thing that draws me in is the fact that culturally we're into the same things.
You know, Rubik's Cubes and 80s, and I always, my favorite car was a 70 Supersport, you know, Chevelle.
And even now when I meet people, that's the first thing they'll say after we hang out.
And I just had it up at Cactus Jack with Cameron.
I had two or three of the guys.
Like, hey, man.
And these are older guys.
Like, appreciate you, Waddell.
Man, you're just like I thought you'd be.
And it kind of takes me back.
It's not offensive, but I'm like...
What was I supposed to be?
And I guess I realize, and Cameron and I have talked a lot about that, about, like, it's odd that there is a thing that is fake, that people can't be transparent, that people can't just talk their feelings.
And everything we say don't mean our assessment is always correct, but at least it is something to be heard and told.
And then the more you talk, I think that's what reshaped the politics this year.
When you look at Trump coming on, J.D., Harris passed.
Well, it proves like, well, did you really have something to say?
And could it be valid?
And could you be real?
And everybody, I think, appreciates real, even if they don't like the person that they see necessarily as real.
And now everything's in question.
It's like, you know, it's like these rappers, are they really as tough as they say?
It's like, you know, I remember going to Utah and hunting, and I was like, hey man.
You know, this was before I ever knew I'd get a chance to meet you and talk with you.
And I said, how's Joe?
And then the first thing I asked Cameron, I was like, dude, he's unbelievable.
So you meet and you are that person.
And a question for you, I've often wondered, do you think that's starting to affect Hollywood a little bit to where now, if you look at the most successful people, it is the realest people.
You know, people might not even like, say, a Donald Trump, but people are gravitated because they think, hey, man, this is him.
I think the best thing for people in Hollywood that are entrenched in that world is to shut the fuck up.
Because as soon as they start talking, as soon as Robert De Niro starts talking, I'm like, Jesus, get that fucking microphone away from him so I can enjoy Taxi Driver.
And it's easier to expose stuff now because social media, I'm sure, like back in the day, I can only imagine the parties at Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard.
Some of these pictures on the wall in here, can you imagine some of the stuff?
There's this one very funny conversation where she's talking about meeting her in-laws for the first time, where her mother-in-law grabs her face, and it's really funny.
It's funny listening to her saying she's laughing hard, but a real laugh this time.
Well, it's like, well, I'm probably going to screw it up.
It's like, you know, and then CNN's going to be like, yeah, you're...
Rogan didn't even call her name right.
But at the end of the day, maybe now that she's out of that whole situation, because you see, and I think the world's changing, where record producers and stuff are controlling music, and if you're going to get on a radio station, everybody walks a tightrope.
You're working for this machine.
Hollywood, I'm sure, the same way.
You've got people that, I can't...
I remember Ted Nugent tells a story.
Was it Kurt Russell?
One of his best friends was Kurt Russell.
And Kurt likes to hunt.
And this was Ted just telling me in a hunting camp.
And I asked him, I said, man, how is Kurt?
I love his movies too.
I'm a big fan.
He said, dude, Kurt is amazing.
He said, but he had to...
To a degree, during that time frame, bow to that machine because he couldn't do these things.
So I think now it's like you don't know what's real because you don't know if they are trying to do this for a career or if they can be real.
And then at times, okay, I believe De Niro, in his case, is finally his true colors and finally like I'm enough to where I can be real.
But the real you do see in him, I'm like, go back to being fake.
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Just come back to me and think, I don't want to see this asshole you really are.
But I think real conversation, like celebrities were always people that were on a pedestal and you didn't think of them as real people.
You know, you never got to see John Wayne having long form conversations where he explains his position on this or that.
You just never saw any of that.
And I think more of that is being exposed now, and I think it's probably good for all of us to not have these ridiculous perceptions of these people and think of them as being larger-than-life characters.
The more conversations we have, the more conversations that we have access to, the more we get to see the patterns of how human beings think and behave, and the more we get to see what we like.
And generally, what we like is nice people being real.
The more you talk about somebody like Donald Trump, like him or love him, he has pretty much, as now, you know, the second time he's going to be president, he is accessible to the people in a weird way, meaning...
I had a chance to even meet Trump.
Talking about the hunting industry, he came to Las Vegas.
We used to have this thing called the Golden Moose Awards.
And I knew Donald Jr. He was a big hunter.
And anyway, the word got out that, hey, Trump, this is prior to the election, the 16th election.
He came to Las Vegas to say, hey, man, there's 13 to 15 million hunters out there.
I need to see where they see what the situation is here.
I think they're good people.
And I hear this from my sons, Eric and Donald.
So he comes there and I had a chance to meet him.
And same thing.
It was like, wow, this is before he's president.
He's still Donald Trump.
And I remember I didn't know much if I could, you know, in my mind.
Is this the guy I'm going to vote for?
He was still in the primaries.
But I remember the first thing he said to me, he said, his Donald Jr. introduced me to him, said, Dad, you know, this is Michael Waddell.
He works in the hunting industry, does hunting shows.
He said, man...
Immediately, so nice.
But I remember the words he said that I knew he wasn't a politician and was real.
He said, so you do a lot of hunting.
And I can't do the impression, but I said, yes, sir.
I love it.
That's all I love to do.
He said, I'm not good at it.
I don't have the patience.
My son, they're very efficient.
They're very efficient.
They're very good.
They hunt all around the world.
He said, but I got a question.
These wolves, what's the deal with the wolves?
They're killing a lot of shit.
And I said...
Mr. Trump, it really is a problem.
I got friends and ranchers out there, these wolves.
They reintroduced them.
They're spending millions of taxpayers' dollars out there.
And this is, in my mind, if I am playing this role of inferior or redneck or insecure, in my mind, I'm trying to talk humbly to kind of help him know what I know some friends out in Colorado have gone through.
Cattle to domestic problems to the elk population.
He said, well, it's simple.
If they're causing a problem, we need to do something about the wolves.
And I remember thinking, I'm voting for this dude.
I'm voting for this dude.
I don't care what he's talking about grabbing because I'd been to a few little nonprofit, you know, in Washington, D.C. with lobbyists and stuff where we're trying to get some money from a bill for the NWTF and Brood and Habitat or Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
And I found most of the politicians were decently fake.
And the whole time, again, I never dug into politics.
I'm like, I'm talking to a guy that once I do go back and Google, he come into office, he was making, you know, he's making as a senator, I don't know what, 50 to 100 grand a year.
I feel like there is a little bit of momentum that feels like there's a little bit of a cleansing process.
It's going to take a long time, I think, to get there, but I think everything that's happening now, it feels through opportunities and outlets like this that people can talk and people can understand what's real and fiction, or at least debate.
It seems like everything from, I don't know, the political world to just everything about the truth, about whether it's hunting and fishing, The truth about the cosmos, possibly some of the stuff about ancient civilization to people and people that love Jesus Christ.
You can really dig deep and you can have good conversations and it's not just dictated by a certain machine.
I love that.
That's pretty amazing that all of us can come together and have a conversation.
It feels like with this crew of people, with J.D. Vance and Elon Musk and RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy, I think there's a real chance that things can change, a real chance that we can expose some of the deep-seated corruption, some of the problems that we've had in this country and move us onto a better path.
No one really believed that she was going to be a great president, and they certainly didn't believe that Tim Walsh was going to be a great vice president.
That was crazy.
That was crazy that that guy was supposed to be one heartbeat away from the fucking president.
And then they also knew that there was so much corruption involved.
Everybody knew what they were doing with the Twitter files and all that other shit.
And I think that backfired on a little bit of the whole Harris thing when she said, no, everything's good.
And she's telling that to people who know exactly where the cheapest milk is.
And they were going to vote for her.
And they're like, no, it ain't.
I'm struggling out here.
You know, and then you're telling, you know, like, we're blessed to go to these hunting places, but they're not cheap places to hunt, to be able to technically trespass on these properties that are privately owned, and or if you were to go on a public elk hunt, you know, the private public.
Well, look, go get us a Urich.
If we did right now, me, you, and Cam, and Remy planned us a good DIY hunt.
Oh yeah, just in your bow and your arrows and your broadheads and your fucking rangefinder and your minos and your gear and your clothing and your boots.
Yeah.
The tires on your truck and gas and this and that and then tags and oh, it's not cheap.
Like I said, you could either buy you a small farm in Kentucky or just get you a new bow.
I mean, that's what it feels like these days, you know.
But I tell you, it's absolutely so amazing that we get a chance to even do it and even get back to hunting.
I tell people all the time, it's like, you know, I've always stood by the fact, I don't think, You're a badass that you hunt.
I think it's just badass that we can have that opportunity in America and that we can fall back on that.
And if times do get hard, there's a certain piece once you understand the craft of it, a little bit of that rule of living and knowing how to skin a deer, knowing the best parts.
And yes, you can eat it all.
You can eat organs.
You can eat real meat.
You can do all those things.
But at the end of the day, There's a certain piece as a man, especially, and I think overall, even though we're in a world to where, you know, we got these equality and women can do what men can do or supposedly, but at the end of the day, I've always looked at it that my job is to provide, you know, safety, some type of structure, food and care for my family and any man that's out there that knows nothing about nature.
That if these cities shut down, that would be a terrifying experience.
The Mercedes won't start.
The Wi-Fi don't come on.
You can't run down to Starbucks and all of a sudden you can't go to the market or call Uber Eats to deliver you sushi.
I told somebody a while back, I said, man, I'm going to tell you, when you become a hunter and you understand it and you become simple, all the financial situations you might gain, money's nice.
I agree that it don't necessarily bring you happiness.
It is great to be able to have the money to do those things we talked about, just eating.
Or maybe it is that 70 Chevelle that's like, I've always wanted it and you can buy it.
But at the end of the day, there's a peace comes to know that I could potentially lose it all, but if I got my wife and my kids and I got this bow and arrow, I might actually gain a little bit because now I got peace and tranquility.
I got a certain stillness that is more valuable than anything I could find at the rave or in the middle of the city.
And so I've often told people, even if you love the city life, which what people might not realize, I love the city life.
It's so fun to visit, but that's just it.
I want to visit.
I'm ready to get back out.
The thought of things I could do in Austin, there's a million things.
My mind's going wide open, like, man, I'd love to go to the comedy club.
Man, I heard the steakhouse was great.
They got this, they got that, and this place got the best martinis and this cigar bar.
But once I do all that, I'm ready to go back to the campfire, hear Whipple Wheels and Coyotes howling, like, you ain't gonna believe.
And I'm puffing on me a Fuente cigar, like, you ain't gonna believe this steakhouse that Joe told me about.
Well, I think, Michael, one of the things that people really enjoy about you and I've enjoyed talking to you is you have a genuine gratitude towards life.
You know, it's infectious.
It's real.
And I think appreciation for this beautiful, chaotic world that we live in is a virtuous thing.
They didn't want me to fight when I started fighting.
They're like, you're going to get hurt.
They didn't want me to do comedy because I was good at fighting.
Like, why don't you stick with that?
It was just, no matter what, there's always going to be people that doubt you, especially if you want to do something that's high risk, low probability of success.
You know, it made me dig deep because I think of that.
And the reason I ask you that is because that experience I had with my family, it was kind of mind-boggling because I thought they would see it as I did.
And I think there's a difference in perception or the way we perceive things and the true reality possibly because you've got to sometimes bring yourself out and look back in from their point of view.
And I learned it as I've become a parent because now I've got kids and they're wanting to do something.
I've got a boy, Mason.
He moved to Charleston, South Carolina.
And all of a sudden, I've become a grandmama.
In my mind, I've got...
Hey, when I get back, Christy, we're going to have some cornbread and collard greens and fried chicken.
I want to come back and tell you, because he listens to every episode.
My son McCoy, Meyer, all of them.
So in my mind, I got them pictured living in a little old house right there around the farm.
Well, he bumped some moves to Charleston, South Carolina.
I'm like, what are you doing?
Are you on crack?
You tell me.
What are you doing?
And it hit me.
It's like, man, I'm being my grandmama.
I'm being Uncle Tommy.
And the reason they was that way, same with your parents, people love us so much that they don't want us to fail.
And I think, inevitably, we can fail the people we love the most because we want to keep them safe.
I know it's a world where a woman can go out there and cut wood.
I want my damn wife cutting wood.
I'll cut the wood.
Let me get the calluses.
I don't want my wife going to the door.
You know, if a villain's at night, I'm not saying she couldn't shoot more better than me.
There's people that don't want someone to take a risk and succeed because they never took a risk and they don't want to confront themselves with that thought.
They don't want to be confronted with the reality of what they've done with their life.
Like, maybe they did have a dream.
Maybe they did want to be like Luke Bryan.
Maybe they did want to be on stage singing.
Maybe they did want to do something extraordinary and they never really took the chance.
So when they see you taking the chance, they want to fill you with doubt.
I see that and I feel that from time to time, but it makes you appreciate the people that encourage people.
It really does.
I've texted several people all the time, especially when I think about it, people along the way who said, Hey, buddy, let me pull you back.
Stay away from this stuff, but you're special in this.
You go do this and keep doing this.
Man, people don't realize what that means.
I think about that street person.
Literally, me in the right mood, especially with this young lady right there, I'd have wanted to hit him.
I don't know mixed martial arts, but I know a goddamn haymaker, and he didn't see it coming.
And, I mean, he was calling this girl all kind of names, and you MFers, and all it took was when he said, hey, bro, I'm on your side, and immediately he was just like, he just wanted to be heard, and maybe that's it.
And that's the one thing, I guess, the last thing I'd want to leave about the hunting community.
And I think you felt it just from people you've seen or maybe researched.
And like Cam had said, he said, man, you don't find a better student than Joe.
He said he knows more about broadheads than the companies themselves.
He researches this stuff.
He knows the geometry of bows and brace heights.
He's so dead deep.
He said he just he loves it.
And it made me feel so good to know that you're that deep into it.
And but when you start looking at so many of these things that's out there for us, what I find about the hunting community, it is a community of people that welcomes all.
And they want you to learn, and they're so appreciative that you might just take a look into this culture that sometimes can be criticized, that sometimes can be judged and think we're barbaric or we're hillbilly or uneducated or just ruthless.
And what you'll find is there is a part of that that with dipping into nature, mother nature, you have to kind of become an animal with that and be Like the bear, like the predator, you are a killer.
You have to come to full draw to feed your family.
But it's so welcoming, and I've never seen anybody alienized.
I've never seen anybody that I've thought that was a solid person within the industry and are just people around my house that wouldn't bring in, feed you, and say, come on, let me show you what this is about, boy or young lady.
And I'm proud of that, and I'm confident, and I know that there's nobody, even the people...
That might talk bad about them.
They're going to treat them good.
I remember one thing that was epic that happened, Joe, and it hit me pretty hard.
My daughter, Addie, had asked me, Dad, in a situation if we're at school and there's something bad happening, I was talking about some of the school shootings, and I saw we just had one.
I'm like, what should I do?
And I was like, was there any kind of mandate of what you should do?
And they said, well, they say do this, this, and this, hide under your desk, and sit there and wait, and they lock the doors.
I said, well, I'm about to go against protocol, Addie.
And I knew her school.
They had these outside doors that went out, and quickly, there in Harris County, Georgia, it goes off into the wilderness, you know.
Matter of fact, my farm is right across from the high school.
And I said, Addie, I'll tell you what I want you to do.
If something goes awry, I said, you know, you've hunted with me a lot and you understand, you know, how to hide and slip around and stuff like that.
I said, if something happens and you can see that exit door and you can get out and you can hit the woods, I want you to go right then.
Don't wait around.
I want you to go.
Figure out the situation.
Like if a bear's coming in the tent, you get out of the tent and get up the tree or whatever you got to do.
And I said, but here's what I want you to do.
I said, you go, and I ain't never told you to judge somebody because I don't believe in judging a book by the cover.
I don't.
I don't believe in that.
But I said, but in this case, in this adverse moment, you go out and you find a beat-up old Chevrolet truck.
It's got an NRA sticker on it.
Maybe a beat-up minivan with a mom riding around with some, you know, maybe it is that old 70 Chevelle, because that guy appreciates good cars.
And you jump out and you stop him.
It's going to be a complete stranger.
But I want you to pick out that person.
I said, you know, and find out.
And I said, if you find somebody with a four-wheel drive truck that you know probably resembles your granddaddy, or me, or Nick Munt and all these guys, you jump in there.
They're going to have a little snack.
They're definitely going to have a gun in there, and you tell them what happened, and they will protect you until they can find me.
And when I thought about that, I was dead serious, but then I thought, that goes beyond my daughter.
Anybody, it wouldn't matter if you was Muslim, Christian, or goth, or whatever, if you did that in the country, somebody's going to stop and say, hey man, what's going on?
They're going to quickly evaluate it.
And I'm not saying everybody won't.
I think most people has that opportunity.
But if you raise around that culture to where you're ready to help and you're ready to assist, love is so deep and the nature and the human nature is to protect and to make sure this person is doing good, even if they don't align.
And thought process.
And so I'm proud to come from that.
And that's probably my biggest joy, whether it's taking a Jim Brewer or a Theo, is when they see it, that's always, even if they don't get something, they're like, man, this was cool.
This was fun.
There's some good folks.
A little scared of y'all.
A little scared of y'all.
And Theo and all of them said, man, something happens.
I'm coming to your house, Waddell.
And Kayla Pressley was at this little funk.
She said, Waddell, my wife, his fiancee, I don't think he's married yet, he said, my wife said, hey, if something happens, we're going to Michael Waddell's house.