00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to the White Tail Woods, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon.
00:00:19
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on the show, I’m joined by Tony Peterson to discuss the science of doing hard things, what happens in our brains when we do that kind of stuff, and what the implications of all of this are for hunting and much more. All Right, welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light. This week on the show, I’m joined by my frequent collaborator, colleague and bully at Meat Eater. If we’re being honest, Tony Peterson, and today we are running down a little rabbit hole that Tony brought to me. He stumbled across some recent research that got him really intrigued about how relatively new science about how the brain works and how the brain changes when we do certain things, how all of that might impact our pursuits as hunters. More specifically, this is taking a look at some interesting parts of the brain that are triggered, that are worked. When we do hard things, when we do particularly hard things that we do not want to do, the brain changes. And when the brain changes, it leads to your ability to do certain things to change as well. And when you understand all that, you understand all these connections between the mental choices and the physical body and then how we live our lives. There’s a whole bunch of ripple effects from that that could impact our ability to deer hunt as best as we possibly can, to enjoy and be satisfied by deer hunting, or to tackle any kind of difficult challenge, whether that’s trying to kill a mature buck or kill a elk on public land, or do a backcountry fishing trip, or do a big hike or a big run or a backpacking trip, or whatever it is you want to do. There is this very interesting mental side of it that now we can connect to the physical part of our brain and think of it a little bit more like a muscle and how you can train a muscle. So Tony dove deep down this rabbit hole for an episode of Foundations, and he wanted to come on this show to riff on it a little bit more and to explore a whole bunch of implications of this. What does this mean for how we train? What does this mean about how we pursue deer hunting, the different challenges we tackle, how we set goals, how we teach our kids about hunting, how we find joy in hunting. All of that and much more is covered today. It’s in a unique episode. It’s a fun one with me and Tony just getting rift together on this and I hope.
00:02:52
Speaker 3: You enjoy it.
00:02:58
Speaker 2: All right, joining me now on the show for a little bit of an impromptu podcast. Here is my right hand man, mister Tony Peterson. Hi doing Bud.
00:03:07
Speaker 3: I’m doing so good, buddy. That couldn’t be better. Wow.
00:03:14
Speaker 2: I can only imagine what you must have just been doing before you start recording. That to be the case.
00:03:18
Speaker 3: I was actually, if people really want to know, I was talking to Randall about a project he wants me to put together with him, which would be how do I put this? Probably less serious than maybe some other projects we might work on, so.
00:03:39
Speaker 2: That sounds about right for Randall.
00:03:41
Speaker 3: It is never I always enjoy workshopping with Randall because you never know where it’s gonna go. It’s always fun. Man.
00:03:50
Speaker 2: One of the best things that Randal Ever brought into the world was this random social media video he put together for his own channel, I think, where he was at a base ball game and he’d smuggled in a zip block bag of chili to put on a hot dog, and so he’s sitting in the chair at this game and then he like squirts cold chili out of a ziplock bag all over the hot dog and it’s like all over the place, and he’s as happy as a clam. I just laughed so hard watching that.
00:04:18
Speaker 3: Randall is truly one of a kind. There’s only one Randall.
00:04:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a that’s the truth, and there may be only one of a kind of this kind of podcast here today, Tony two. Because I had plans for a show and then you’re like, hey, buddy, what about this completely other, off the wall thing that I’m kind of excited about right now. And I decide, like, screw it, let’s just see where this goes, Tony. Why do you have the brain on your brain right now?
00:04:51
Speaker 3: So I’ve been thinking about this really spurred this is so last weekend my daughters and I went and shed hunted this farm. I have permission hunt southeastern Minnesota I’ve talked about it a whole bunch. One of my buddies lives down there, and he said there’s been a pile of deer there and on the neighbor’s property. He’s like, you got to get the girls down and go run through there and shed hunt. And so we’ve had really really mild weather here right, Like we had some cold spells, we had some storms, but we’ve had you know, several weeks of like above you know, above average, very little snow up here where I live, very little snow over in Wisconsin where I hunt down there, no snow. So I’m like, this is going to be amazing, you know, like no snow. Shed hunting is great. Right, So they had a little storm go through the day before we went down there. My buddy said, you know, the fields are pretty wide open still, it shouldn’t be too bad. So I drove all the way down there with my daughters. It was cold. We walked out there and went into the spot where there’s a there’s a trout stream on this on part of this farm, and the deer, if you get a bad enough winter, they’ll they’ll kind of yard up there. Like on normal winters, you don’t see it, but there’s all deer that yard up there, and so it’s kind of where you start, right, like I find most of my antlers there and then we go do the other stuff. Anyway, we walked in the woods and there’s like three inches of fresh powder clinging to everything. So almost instantly I was like, we’re probably not going to find antlers, right, you just know, unless you get a big one times or whatever. Yeah, right, And so I told my daughters that, I said, listen, this is going to be a lot tougher than I thought. We had really high hopes, and we we ended up, you know, finding a ton of deer. Sign We had a we had a herd of deer run into us. That was unreal. I mean it was like forty to fifty deer for like ten minutes streaming through the woods around us. I saw five bucks still carrying, and so you know that’s another thing when that happens two hours into it and you’re like, well we saw five bucks and every one of them had his antlers anymore, right, and three of them were good, you know, good ones, you know. So whatever, So we had a really good time. We you know, hiked through the wood. It kind of became a winter scouting trip kind of talked through like when when I’m with them in those situations, I talk to like, why do you think this spot would be a good spot to hunt? You know, we kind of go through that shit, you know. Anyway, We’re driving home and my daughter was like, man, I just didn’t think it would be that difficult, And I was like, well, honey, most of what we do actually is like you kind of like they’ve they’ve been shown sort of a skewed view of it because I’m guiding them to deer, right, But most of us who went through the process without that just know. And if you you know, if you’re not sitting on a great property in a great place, you know what white tail hunting is like, it’s not easy. That’s why we have a job, right, That’s why we do what we do. And so I started thinking about it and it kind of led me down that path of when you when you finally kill a big one. You know, some people go out and get lucky at twelve years old and kill a booner or whatever, which is which which doesn’t really it’s not like germane to this, but it happens. But mostly people work their way up the process, right, if they don’t have a really good spot, they kill some does and little and move up to the two year olds and on up and whatever. But for a lot of people who are really hooked at it at like my age, your age, they had that moment where they finally killed a big one, you know, that one, thirty one, forty whatever, however it came to be, And it’s that moment where like before, you’re like, this is never going to happen, you know, like I’m never going to get this right, this is never going to happen, and then once it happens, your entire worldview changes. Yeah, And so I started like digging into that. I’m like, why why does that happen to us? And it turns out there’s actually a scientific explanation for a hell of a lot of what we do, and there’s a lot of data coming out of it. And it’s so I ended up doing this as research for a foundation script that’s going to drop second week of March. That’s that dives pretty deep into this. But there’s a thing in our brains called the anti anterior mid singulate cortex, which means nothing right, but it is a part of our brain, a region of our brain that is essentially responsible for willpower in a roundabout way, okay, And so if you start taking into that, what it does is if you do something difficult that you don’t want to do, and like that’s a key component of it. You have to not want to do this thing, there has to be some struggle, some discomfort with it. That part gets bigger. That part will actually grow in your brain, and you will be more likely to do more difficult stuff in the future. And you will still you will still kind of dread it, and you’ll still feel exhausted before you even do it, but you’re more likely to do that. And if that snowball rolls that way, it gets easier to do difficult things. If you don’t go through some struggle and you don’t experience discomfort and burn through it, that part of your brain, that anterior mid singular cortex gets smaller. And once I read that, I was like, this makes sense. Why when you look at somebody like that in Andy May, who I use as an example all the time you’ve spend time with Animeme, he’s I mean, he’s right at the top of the food chain for being one of the best hunters out there, no question. But also when you spend time with him, he’s really good at fishing, he’s in super good shape, he has he does these things that the average person doesn’t do, and you would think that. I think the view on that is that he’s just like genetically special or he was like he has something that just other people don’t. And what this data around this little region of our brain kind of suggests is, no, we’re all very capable of this. We are fighting against what our brain does evolutionary wise, which just tells us to conserve energy and not do failure, not engage in something that will probably result in failure. And so like the whole concept, I was like, man, this is just like so important to being a good hunter in a really weird way.
00:10:59
Speaker 2: Well, it almost sounds like this portion of the brain could be thought of similarly to a muscle. It’s like you, if you work that muscle, if you stress that muscle, it can grow and expand your capabilities. If you let that muscle lay dormant, if you do not stress and work with that muscle, it deteriorates and loses capability and function. So what you’re telling me is that this research shows that we can build a willpower and a determination muscle, or we can lose a willpower and determination muscle, and that can impact how we can handle and push through and succeed despite adversity. Is that what this is telling.
00:11:42
Speaker 3: Us one, that’s exactly what this is. And so as a an easy way to kind of frame this up, especially that will show you my age is if you talk about helicopter parenting right, like where you do everything for them for a child and sort of protect them from you know, going out and playing goalie and getting their asses kicked right or you name it, They’re not gonna learn how to get through adversity. And this is so this is like a I think inherently we understand this as people right, but we view this the wrong way. Like when I was when I was digging into this, I was like, man, we are looking at this like it’s literally an example of itself. So if you if you take this at surface value and you’re like, I’m gonna grow this part of my brain that I can barely pronounce and become the kind of person who can free solo l cap and do a whole bunch of shit, you won’t do it like you’ll be like, that’s that’s too much work. I’m not gonna do that, because you would look at this like a thing that’s just as hard as running that one hundred mile marathon or whatever. But this, like you said this, this, if you compare it to a muscle, right like, you don’t get jacked by doing three curls, right Like, You’re not gonna You’re not gonna have awesome biceps because you do three curls with a fifteen pound dumbell. That’s just not how it works. You have to do a lot of small movements.
00:13:00
Speaker 2: And so you’re kind of blowing my mind. Though right now my whole training programs don’t have to change.
00:13:04
Speaker 3: But anyways, I hate to break it to you, Marcus, but if you want to be jacked, you got to put in the work.
00:13:10
Speaker 2: Maybe that explains some things we don’t.
00:13:13
Speaker 3: But seriously, though we don’t. We frame this stuff up in a very human nature esque way, right like, because the social media thing is a good way to look at this, where everybody who gives us fitness advice is already jacked or in really great shape. The people who are telling you how to hunt or that you know that we looked up to or whatever. They already went through this, you know, And so it’s easy to be like, yeah, but you guys already have that, or like they already do that or whatever. But the reality is is there is a way to condition yourself to get better at doing difficult stuff. And what we do is we approach it wrong a lot of times. Right. This is why fad diets. This is why you know, somebody will come out and say you have to hunt this way, right, like I run cameras this way, or I hunt buck beds exclusively, or I do this and it’s silver bullet thing. Right, it’s a promise, right, but it’s not. It’s not how you get better like you have to. There’s there’s several steps to this, and I cover this in that Foundations episode, but the first one that really stuck with me was you have to stop negotiating with yourself. What do you mean? Man? So if you think about there’s there’s a phenomenon that happens with people when they go to the gym and they want to get on the treadmill and start working toward whatever. That is a five k, a ten k, a marathon just a twenty minutes at this speed. And so a lot of times, Okay, you go buy the workout clothes, you buy the pre workouts, your water bottle, you download your podcasts or you plan to you know, connect to the Bluetooth and watch your show, and you’ve set up You’ve set up this this thing that you have to do or you know you should do, and it’s predicated on a whole bunch of stuff that isn’t really you know, germane to the task. It can help you, right, like you know, listening to a podcast or whatever helps running or like for a lot of people it does, right, yeah, lifting weights and you listen to music, that kind of shit. But the more that you build into that where you can be like, oh, I don’t have this today, so I can’t do that right, Like for whatever reason the treadmills glitching out and you can’t connect to it. Well, now I can’t do my thing.
00:15:22
Speaker 2: I can’t do it.
00:15:23
Speaker 3: So we negotiate with ourselves. And on the white tail front, this is you know, this is something I talk about all the time where the primary method we’re fed by a lot of people is to stay out of the woods until the cameras show their daylighting. The weather’s going to be perfect, and then you go in and hunt, and so we look at that and go you have a let’s say it’s October tenth. You have a beautiful evening and you could hunt right, but your cameras have been dead, and you have three stands up and you’re like, well, there’s a west wind, so only two of those stands are even worthwhile and I haven’t got a picture of a good one in three weeks. You’re going to negotia right out of that instead of going, all right, well, these cameras have been dead, but what about this part of my farm? Or what about the water hole that I haven’t been into this year? Or I wonder if like instead of looking at it to solve that problem with a little step, right, Like if you go hunt that October tenth, you’re not changing your rout outlook probably right, you know, there’s kind of a reset moment. But it’s easy for us to negotiate or our way out of the work. Yeah, right, Or like think about it winter scouting wise, right, Like we’re talking about winter scouting like crazy. I’ve been going a lot lately. It is very easy for me to look at winter scouting and go that is so loosely tethered to my fall success that I don’t need to do this because I’m going to come back in August and I’m going to hang cameras and I’m going to hang stands. But every time I do it, I learn something, Like when I was with the girls last weekend, I found some stuff where I was like, I’ve hunted this farm since I was fifteen, and I’m going to set up here for the first time in my life. Life that kind of stuff. And so it’s we make these big we think that these changes are have to be these wholesale, big changes in our lives, and with deer hunting we do this all the time. But really it’s those small steps, but holding yourself accountable to them, and then you get that part of your brain going in the direction you want because you have to do things that you don’t want to do to get this to grow.
00:17:25
Speaker 2: What is the like, what does that? What does this look like in real life in deer hunting. You kind of lay out some examples there, but I’m curious because you know the research that you pointed to at the beginning. I saw a little bit of a YouTube clip talking about just for a little bit of context. And one of the key things mentioned in that, and you mentioned this as well, was that kind of the crux of this is that you do the hard thing despite not wanting to do it, right, Can you lay out a little bit more of an example of what that looks like when it comes to like, because I want to go hunting, so me choosing not to go hunting, I might ostensibly say, well, I want to go hunting on October tenth, but the conditions aren’t right and I’m trying to be smart, so I’m not going to do it. If I do it, well, then I’m kind of doing the thing I wanted to do. So does that count? Does that not count? What does that like? What does this look like? If you were spell the perfect example of how to work this muscle according to this research.
00:18:26
Speaker 3: So on that example, it’s a great example. Right, everybody wants to hunt. Everybody sitting here in March wants to go bow hunting more than they don’t. But when the fall comes and you can say it’s a better decision for me to not do this. What you’re saying, then, is the thing I care most about is killing that big buck, Like that’s why I’m there, right, But we have lots of ways to kill big Bucks. But if you go meet that challenge and go, you know what, I’m going to figure this out on October tenth. I’m going to go do this, that makes you a better deer hunter that as a person, And it’s not the thing about this is it’s not just making you a better deer hunter. Like when you look at what this part of your brain does and the willpower thing holding yourself accountable. If you picked up a guitar and it was really hard for you to learn how to play, but you stuck with it and you’re like, I’m going to just figure out how to play a freaking g chord seamlessly, right, That’s going to make that part of your brain grow, and that will help you become a better deer hunter because you’re more willing to face difficult things and get through the discomfort. That’s the whole point of this thing. We look at it so pursuit specific, because you know we’re talking about deer hunting, but it’s really life choices. Right. Like the example that I gave this in this podcast that I wrote was it always amazes me at meat Eater. I’ve worked in the outdoor space in some capacity since two thousand and three. Meat Eater is full of more people who have authored books. Like I can be sitting in a room meat Eater trivia or whatever, and I can look around. I can be like, that guy’s written books. She’s written a book. That guy’s written a book, like crazy high, Like they’re like the prevalence of that is way too high for a random sample, right, And then you can be like, well, not only that guy hasn’t written a book, but he’s run one hundred mile mountain marathon. That guy’s running half in the mountains. And you start going through this and it’s the same people doing stuff that most people think you can’t do. And so people look at that and they go, well, they’re special people, right, And I’m not discounting that there aren’t advantages and there’s there isn’t genetics at play here and all kinds of stuff, because of course there is. Like life, life is not fair, sure, right, just isn’t. But when you look at people, you know, the David Goggins and the Campaigns of the World or whatever, the Steve Vanella’s, they do a lot of difficult stuff and I can promise you that part of it is because they’ve just leaned into those uncomfortable, you know, struggles and gotten through them. And when you do that, like just like when you kill that first big buck, like when I killed my first big one, I was like, it felt like the world shifted for me. Yeah, like literally did it. And I have never not killed big bucks or had really good chances to kill big bucks since, and before that it felt literally impossible.
00:21:23
Speaker 2: Impossible.
00:21:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and so and that’s another way to look at that too. And I wrote about this is with with white tail hunting, we talk from a place where it’s like we’re pretty comfortable trophy hunting in a lot of ways, right, Like you’re you’re going to set standards that are that are pretty high because you know you’ll probably get there, or you know you probably have a good shot to hold out for whatever. That is a lot of the people who are listening to this, and a lot of people who are starting out that don’t go through that process of working up through the deer and killing some dumb ones first, killing the easy ones first. They don’t get there and they don’t learn that, and so you get to that negotiation stage where you’re like, not only did it not pay off before, I know it’s not going to pay off now. And it’s like, no, killing that two and a half year old when you’re three years into it is this thing that’s how you kill big ones five years down the road from now because you’re you’re just working through it. And it happens with running, it happens with everything, and it’s just fascinating to me because we’re so good at making excuses, you know, like for whatever, like health is like such a big one, but we are so good at talking ourselves out of not doing something and being like because I don’t have the genetics, I don’t have the metabolism or whatever. It’s like, no, man, We’re kind of all born with this thing in our brain that we can work on, but we have to consciously be uncomfortable, Like we literally have to force ourselves a struggle.
00:22:58
Speaker 2: It’s funny. I’ve kind of stumbled into this realization about my career and a friend of mine was wrestling with a career decision and I just kind of off the cuff shared this thing that I had kind of figured out in my own life but hadn’t necessarily like articulated it, and I think it applies to what we’re talking about here too. I’ve kind of figured out that whenever I’m presented with two choices for my direction in life or my career, usually whichever one makes me the most uncomfortable, which everyone scares me the most, that’s the choice I should take. That’s the path that I should pursue. And I’ve never really known why that’s been the case, but it’s worked out so far. I’ve done the scary thing, I’ve taken the big leap, I’ve done the uncomfortable, and it seems to be maybe it’s doing what you’re saying. Maybe this is in part that muscle growing because I’m taking on that next challenge or the skit, the thing that is higher risk but maybe higher reward, and that has seemed to guide me, and I wonder if the same is true on a smaller scale when it comes to our hunting lives or or whatever other pursuit we have in that you know, I don’t know. This is another one. I don’t know where I heard this, but I hammer it into my kids all time. One of the most important things you can do is learn to become comfortable being uncomfortable. Like that’s one of the key traits I’m always talking to the boys about, like we’re outside hiking or hunting or fishing or anything, like, guys is like if they start complaining if something’s not going right or if the weather’s not comfortable, Like, hey, guys, what’s happening right now? This is good? Like what do you mean this is good?
00:24:31
Speaker 3: This sucks?
00:24:31
Speaker 2: This isn’t We’re not catching any fish, or we’re cold or we’re tired, and like, no, right now, you are becoming, you are learning, You’re be getting better being comfortable, being uncomfortable, and that is like a superpower for the rest of your life. And and I think that I think that holds true for a lot of stuff, right.
00:24:48
Speaker 3: One hundred percent. I mean, if you if you went back in your life when you got out of college, you had a good job with a company that was on on the rise, right, yeah, and you ended up walking away and starting a hunting podcast. Pretty stupid, right, It’s it’s stupid in the way people look at I’m gonna run a marathon as stupid, like because to them, that’s the unsafe, scary choice. And so again I need I need to say this because I know that people are going to default to looking at this in a negative way. It doesn’t have it generally doesn’t have to be that big choice, that big choice you made. You might have made ten of them in your life that you didn’t recognize before that that led you to be comfortable enough with that you make that decision, and now you’re comfortable with a bunch more stuff. Right, Like you’re comfortable and it’s and it bleeds into life. And so when you see people who are like self starters, right who start a business or they go out on their own and they and they do something that sort of deviates from the path like when we were growing up, like you know, my dad, you like, you get a job at IBM and you work forty years and you get your pension or whatever, and like that’s the safe route. You don’t you don’t go try to be an outdoor writer. Like that’s stupid. When you when you make those decisions on a small scale, you you can go right back to really really little stuff and it’s going to keep that snowball going in the right way, or keep your momentum going in the other way where you’ll you’re shy away from that stuff, and so there’s there’s like a it’s so much easier to talk about this in the context of like exercise or diet or something, because it’s just sort of like a little bit easier to understand because not everybody wants to get better at deer hunting. Like a lot of people just want to kill big ones, and we kind of have the formula for that, and so like that’s that’s fine. But if you’re sitting there and you’re like, why am I not better at this? Like why don’t I have the kind of success I want, it’s probably because you’re partially not leaning into struggle in some ways, right, Like it’s just just think about it from the perspective of if if you have and I’ve done this to myself a million times, if you have a farm, you know, a lease permission based grandma owns it, whatever, where you can control the variables, where you can be like I put a stand here in the corner of the field because they always come through here. And I put a stand there back on the ridge because they run that, and I have a stand down at the bottom, and then you’re going to go out and hunt. But those stands are just not producing you can take the easy way and go sit those stands where you can go find those deer. And we know that the people who just get comfortable with that mobile set up, that mobile process are just generally going to do better everywhere with hunting and even out west when they go out west. And it’s like little things like that, just the same as you know, when the saddle movement came on super strong. It’s a little bit different now because it’s so it’s like ubiquitous across deer hunters, But when it first came out and you try them, that’s like an awkward thing, like it’s literally physically like discomfort there to some extent until you figure it out. And it’s also just a process where you’re like this, it feels like you’re failing because it’s uncomfortable, But you go hang it out of a saddle one time and you don’t You’re like, I don’t love this, and then you do it ten times, and then you go on a trip and then you’ve you’ve done it one hundred times in the last two seasons, and it’s just a thing you were very comfortable with that helps you be better at this thing you love, but you don’t see that.
00:28:23
Speaker 2: You know something that just kind of came to me, which I think is very interesting when you when you think about this the way you’re presenting it, when you look at this idea of the ability to do hard things, of the ability to struggle through adversity, the ability to achieve goals despite you know, seemingly insurmountable odds. I think that some people think that that is tied to a personality trait, like some people are that kind of person, some people are not that kind of person. And there’s some people just think like I’m just not that guy, Like I’m just not I’m I don’t do that. I play it safe. I have never been able to do that. I always fail or what it hasn’t gone my way, that’s just not for me. I think some people get into like that rut of thinking. And what this study shows. What this research shows is that this is actually available to anyone. Like anyone, every every one of us has this part of the brain that can be worked on, that can be grown. Every single one of us can become the kind of person who can who can beat insurmountable odds. Every single one of us has like the physical mental part of our brain that can actually be changed to become the kind of person who acts like David Goggins, you know, extreme example, but that’s available to every one of us. But I but I think that my intuition is that you tell me if this is right or wrong, because you’ve you’ve dove into this further than I have. But my guess is that if you try to do this, like if you jump right into the deep end, you are, like, there must be a risk to go going to like, uh, level ten right out the gate, right, Like I imagine it’s probably smarter start at level one and do that hard thing and be able to do that and then move up to two and like stack your way up. Are there any like specific examples in life that you can think of where I could start working my grit muscle in the brain again metaphorically to be able to become this kind of person. Like I want to become the kind of person that can do one hundred mile race. I want to become the kind of person who can handle all those all day sits and make the tough choices on my deer hunts and not quit when it gets tough. I want to be the kind of person who can do the ten day backcountry elk counting trip in the high Lpine that has always looked amazing. But man, that’s just over. It’s out of my pay grade. I want to be that guy. I’m assuming I can’t just snap my fingers and become it. What are some ways to start that process?
00:30:53
Speaker 3: In your view? It’s like everything, right, So if you want to if you want to lose weight, you’ve never been on a diet, never pay attention, and you drink three mountain dews a day. What’s the first start? Right? You don’t have to you don’t have to eat kale and bland boiled chicken every day, right, Like, you can start with that, and once you do that and get comfortable with it, that’s just like a little tiny baby step. So I actually wrote about you brought up all day sits. I wrote about that in that in that podcast where we talk about all day sits. Like, I actually really like all day sets. Now, there was a long time in my deer hunting career where I could not do one. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t get past it. I would talk myself out of it, you know, eleven o’clock hits. I’m like I’m finding a reason to leave. Now I’m finding a reason to stay. And so what I what I said in that is like I one of the things that has changed how I deer hunt is Okay, I figure out how to do the all day sets because I have a lot of faith in a rot spot. But then you go hunt somewhere in September and it’s going to get, you know, eighty five degrees in the day. But I’m on a trip in North Dakota, or I’m somewhere, I’m not home. I can’t go home and mold a lawn and take care of the garage or whatever. Then you’re like, well, what else are you going to do? And so I started bargaining with myself on those trips where I’d be like, you know, I really only think it’s going to be good till like nine in the morning, But I’m going to force myself to sit till ten or I probably don’t need to be there till three o’clock in the afternoon, but I’m going to go in at one thirty because i have nothing else to do. And when you do that thing that you don’t want to do, you know how it is like you go out there and eventually you get in there at one o’clock and at one fifteen a buck cruises through or a buck comes into water, and then you’re like, you get that reward for doing that thing that you didn’t want to do, and then you’re one step closer to an all days sit during the rut, and it’s a conditioning thing. So I kind of I guess another way to look at it would be like, you know, I love bird dogs, like I’m I have puppy fever bad right now, Like I want to get a new pup. I think I’m going to get one in the spring of twenty seven because I love training them. But people will ask me about it, and I’m like, I always just look at a dog now because I don’t want to fail in that, Like that’s so important to me to have a really good dog that I have to train that sucker for two years hard, Like you know, by hard I mean consistent, right, Like I can’t I can’t train an eight week old puppy really hard, but I can train them a little bit. But when you look at that, if on the outset, you’re like, man, two years, Like that’s a big commitment. But when you break it down into a daily commitment. When I have an eight week old puppy and I’m treat training it, I might do three minutes of training in an entire day to get it to learn how to sit and start to stay or start on recall or something. And it’s just like everything else, it’s not we look at it like we look at it in its entirety and it’s too much. You know, right, you want to write a book. You’re you’re in the middle of that process. What’s chapter one, what’s the what’s the outline? First, it’s like, okay, now I need to knock out chapter one. Okay, you did that, you do chapter two. Like I always tell people who are like, oh man, you know I can only run three miles, and like, well, if you can run three, you can run four. You just haven’t, you know, Like, it’s not like your body won’t do it, it’s your mind telling you to not do it. And so with deer hunting, I look at that stuff. There are a million different ways that we can get a little bit better. And I think, you know, I’ve been preaching about this a ton. People will talk about like you brought this up earlier, Like I don’t want to hunt on October tenth, because I’m not going to kill a big one, Like I don’t believe that at all. And it just like I don’t believe that hunting in the heat, hunting in the wind, hunting in the rain, whatever thing that keeps you out hunting in the mornings in the early season. I think every one of those things is solvable because I’ve been on enough trips where I had to try. And the problem with it is is we do this and you’re mostly going to fail, just like you would mostly fail if you try to take the safer out and didn’t go do those. But you get enough success and you work through it, so you don’t look at it like this is a thing talking me out of going. This is a thing convincing me how to figure it out. You know. It’s like everything, so much of the good stuff in life is like predicated on that long game consistency, and it’s hard. Well.
00:35:18
Speaker 2: I like the fact that there’s so much crossover effect here, you know, like if my favorite thing in life is deer hunting, what I think is pretty huge to consider with this is that there’s a ton of stuff that we can do in the rest of our lives outside of deer hunting, that given this explicitly will help us with our deer hunting, you know, experience and success. Like, when I consider this, I start thinking about this quote. I think it was from James Clear maybe he wrote that great book about habits Atomic habits. I’m pretty sure he said that you know every choice you make. You know, every time you’re faced with a choice, you are voting with your actions for the kind of person you want to be. So I frequently think about, like when when you know, whenever I happen to have like the actual awareness of what I’m doing, and I’ve got a choice ahead of me, I will think, like, what’s the kind of person I want to be, and what would they do in this moment? And the kind of person I would want to be would do x. So for example, a tiny thing. I talked about this with Michael Easter on a podcast a few weeks ago. He said that the stats are that two percent of people in America take the stairs. Whether there’s an elevator, escalator, or stairs available, only two percent of the American population will actually take the stairs. The rest will take the easy way. Ever since I started hearing that, I’ve started like, I always take the stairs. I’m like, I’m the kind of person that takes the stairs. That’s the kind of person I want to be. I’m going to do it, and I like doing it. And then when I’m doing I’m thinking to myself, you know what. That’s like the tiniest, most insignificant, silly thing, but it’s a vote for the kind of person I want to be. Same thing like the alarm clock goes off and most people want to hit snooze again, but you know what, I’m going to be the kind of person. I want to be, the kind of person that doesn’t hit snooze. I’m up right when I say I’m going to be. I foll through on my commitments. I’m going to be that kind of person. Tiny, small, silly, insignificant thing. But what you’re telling me is that that stuff squeezes that muscle a little bit, which leads to the next thing, which leads to the next thing, which leads to you saying, you know what, I want to be the kind I’ve never been the kind of person that could run a race. That sounds scary. I’m horrible at that. I can only run three miles. It’s very funny you mentioned this, Tony, because before I did my first half marathon, I had never run more than three miles. I remember the first time I went for a four mile race, I texted my buddy or four mile run. I’m like, guys, I’ve never ran four miles. I didn’t know it’s possible. So it’s weird that you said that. Maybe I told this to you because I’d never done it, didn’t know if it’s possible for my body. Sure enough, it was.
00:37:51
Speaker 3: I mean, that’s a people say that to me a lot. I hear that a lot, Like I talked to a lot of people at the gym, and I’m always like, all right, just envision a really slow, very hungry wolf is after you, and in four miles you have safety, right, so that whatever you’re you know, I don’t care hustle you are. Let’s say you do ten minute miles, right, that wolf does eleven minute miles, right. But you would make it to four. You just would. It’s not that your body won’t do it, it’s that your mind says you can. And so I know I know that, I know you do this a lot, and I think it’s a really important thing. And the research indicates that it is as well. Setting goals. You talk about this a lot. I think that I think I think saying that is like off putting to a lot of people, right, But it’s not the way I look at it. In deer hunting is the thing that we do is we go I want X buck, I want y buck, right, Like you know, I talk about this all the time. People are like, I’m going I want to go on my first l hunt because I want to shoot three hundred and fifty inch bowl And you’re like, that’s the wrong goal. It just is. And when we do it with deer hunting, it’s easy, right because the target buck thing the hit list buck thing, and we see people do this a lot, like that’s the buck I want to kill, or I only kill five and a half year olds. For most people, it would be better to set goals like I’m going to hunt ten days in September, ten days in October. I’m going to do three all days sits in a row in November, or I’m going to kill a deer from the ground.
00:39:34
Speaker 2: Yes, process, process focused goals, not outcome focus.
00:39:38
Speaker 3: Right, you have to write things that you don’t want to do, like let’s say you always get into the box blne That’s fine, right, But if you’re like I want to get better as a deer hunter, you could go into the season be like, I’m going to kill one deer from the ground, dough buck, whatever, take your pick, take your poison, whatever. That kind of thing is something where you’re like, it’s easier for you to go in that redneck because it’s comfortable, it’s awesome, you’re going to see deer, it’s it’s everything that a lot of people want on a deer hunting But it’s not going to make you. It’s not going to grow that muscle. Right. But if you’re like, I’m going to go do this thing that I don’t really want to do, it will help you out, Like it just will.
00:40:19
Speaker 2: So how do how do we balance this or how do we reckon with this idea that we’re talking about right here, which is the intuitive sense which is now confirmed with the research that by doing hard things that you don’t want to do, you can do more hard things in the future, you can have more success or push through challenges, et cetera, et cetera. Can like that’s this is the value of doing hard things and choosing that uncomfortable path. But on the flip side, something you and I have both talked about over the years has been also recognizing the need to still find joy and fun in hunting, and to not always be obsessed with that end outcome or pursuing success at the expense of everything else. How do we hold these two things in two parts of our brain at the same time.
00:41:12
Speaker 3: So I think a great way to frame it up is to look at that quote. It’s not the pursuit of happiness, it’s the happiness of pursuit. I like that. So we think that one hundred and fifty incher will make us happy, But it depends entirely on how you kill it. If you don’t do any real work for it. Yeah, it’s great, you can brag, you can send around the pictures, but it doesn’t mean the same thing to you as one that you worked really hard for. And I keep thinking about this. I mean this slapped me right up on right upside the head this year when I finally killed a good one in Wisconsin, and I was like, that’s my favorite deer I’ve killed in a long time. And I’ve killed bigger deer. I’ve killed deer on public in different ways. There’s been a lot of dead deer. I’ve done that, and it was because for eighteen years I kept going over there and getting my ass kicked and getting close and just not making it happen. And then it happened. And it’s like it’s hard to it’s hard to sell that, right, Like it’s hard. It’s hard for people to get behind the thing, Like I don’t really want to fail for eighteen years to feel good. But at we look at it and go, we’re I think we’re focusing on the wrong thing. And I’ve been bitching about this a lot with the trophy hunting thing is how you do it should be more important than what you kill, you know what I mean? And I think that that messaging is tough, right, It’s just tough because like our egos, we want we want the big deer. But I always look at this and go, I don’t people think that I like to run. I hate I hate it. I sit there, I run all the time, and I literally hate it every time before I go because I don’t want to do it. But I never ever ever regret doing it, just like getting up to hunt, like if you know Turkey season’s coming up, It’s a great example. If you get one of those seasons, it’s just a grind and those three thirty alarms, four o’clock alarms, you’re like, I don’t want to get up today. It’s going to be hot. The ticks are out right on down the line. You never regret being out there at sunrise. It’s worth it. You did something that you didn’t really want to do, even though if you ask me right now, and like, I’ll get up every every morning in Turkey season because I want to go so bad. It’s different when you actually get there, and so you have to just do it. Like you just have to find these things where you’re like, even though I don’t want to do that thing, I know it would be good for me because that is the thing that grows that muscle. That’s just it.
00:44:00
Speaker 2: Well, I think it’s also an interesting thing to think about. And I don’t know if this is like a cultural moment we’re in or if just every individual goes through this process themselves and I just happen to be in that moment and I’m noticing it in more people because of that. But I think a lot of folks seem to, you know, go through the typical trajectories where you want to you know, figure it out, then you want to shoot a bunch of stuff, and you want to shoot a big thing, then you want to shoot the biggest thing, and YadA, YadA, YadA, And so I do feel like there’s a lot of folks now that are starting to have the realization like the shine is coming off of the booner bucks a little bit, or like you got to kill a big one hundred and fifty in five year old that’s starting to not foreveryone. There’s lots of people that still love that. And don’t get me wrong, I love shooting a big buck too, but it’s not quite as alluring as it used to be for some people. I think some people are starting to see like, oh, there’s more to this than just that, and I think this is like a one or a great remind of an alternative solution. Like some people might say, oh, wow, I’m not getting as jacked up as I used to when I shoot a one fifty because I’ve now killed ten one fifties and yet still a lot of work and yeah, I still got to put a lot of time into my farm and I do all this stuff, but just not like what it used to be. It’s I wish, you know, someone said to me recently that they wish they could feel the way they feel the way they felt when they killed their first year again because I’ve never been that excited again. Or they wish they could feel that way when they killed their first big buck again, because that’s it’s not the same anymore, right. I think this is a reminder of a way to get that again, which is the big antlers sometimes can be replaced by the new hard, the new challenge. You could have a first time on the ground. You could have a first time with a traditional boat. You can have a first time without trial cameras. You could have a first time on public land. You could have a first time on a float trip in public land in a new state. Like, there’s all these different ways that you can do the new hard thing, which can make you feel like a child again and make you struggle again, but then have that same corresponding joy and excitement again having done the hard thing.
00:46:06
Speaker 3: Dude, when you when you said that, they said that, the first thing I thought was you’re just not looking for it, because and then and then in my head I thought, pick up a trad bow and just go try. Yeah, because when you step to the range with that recur for the first time and you stand there at twenty yards and you couldn’t pop a balloon out of seven qu quivers of arrows, like all of sudden things change. And when you’re in that tree stand and you have a bow that’s sixty inches tip to tip and you can’t shoot behind your tree now and he walks behind you, everything’s different. Like you’ve you’ve put yourself in a totally different world. I would say that the reason that people say that and believe that, like I wish I could feel that again, is because we we let our egos have a say and we default to what we know will work. Yeah, right, like we just we have a hard time getting out of our own way that way, but that you know, it’s hard. This concept is a little bit hard with deer hunting because of stuff like that, Like we know a way that works to kill them, and it’s not necessarily leaning into struggle, right, but to enjoy it is different. So if you want to kill a big one, there there are ways to do it where there isn’t a lot of struggle. After a while, you get things established and you get the farm set up and whatever, like you’re not you’re kind of it’s kind of like on auto, right, like you just treading wattle bit right. You just know if you go sit on the food button, you leave it alone until November first, think good things are going to happen, But the process there is gone, so the result changes, you know, it’s the same thing. Like I promise you this. We’re going to see all kinds of studies out of this ozembic GLP one craze where people can take a shot or get an injection and lose weight. That’s great, right, Like that’s healthier. It seems to be healthier than staying heavy. Right, But you know there’s the mental component of achieving that isn’t there. So that person hasn’t changed their mind. They’ve just changed their body and they and they might you know, I mean they might get skinny and love how it feels, and and that might change how they view things. They might be more likely to exercise whatever. Like I’m not saying that, but that purely alone. Like if you could take a pill and kill them a one hundred and seventy inch er every year, you’d sell a shitload of those pills, and a lot of people wouldn’t be very happy because that’s not what this is, Like, that’s that’s not why we’re there. Like we talk a big game about loving to hunt and loving the process and loving the animals, and then we reduce it to this one thing like how can we make it as easy as possible to kill as big of a deer as possible? Yep? And you literally can go out and just challenge yourself to to to have a harder process to get somewhere with it.
00:48:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you’re I think you’re one percent right. And I think that when we take the easy route, or when we kind of tread water into the easy route or stumble into that rut, the outcome, even though it’s the outcome we thought we wanted, it ends up being hollow. And then you’re left with this like sense of holl in this and you’re like, Wow, why do I do this? I don’t know, It’s just the thing I do. And it’s okay, I guess I like it. But I think a lot of folks I’ve definitely felt at times where you’re like, I don’t know, there was there used to be more of this and this this shows again, it’s it’s an intuitive thing. Like we’ve talked about this in the past, but it’s interesting that there’s actually like a physical component to it now. But I’m curious about this, Tony. What does this imply for how you parent your kids and introduce them to hunting and teach them about this stuff and other things, Because again, this is back to like the joy versus struggle and what I talked about earlier, Like, I’m constantly preaching to my kids about becoming comfortable being uncomfortable, and I look at hunting as one of the best places to do that and to learn that. But at the same time, I also want them to experience the joy. I also want them to like not hate it, and not to look at hunting or the outdoors as this place of constant struggle and misery. So I personally have fought this battle in turn, Like every time I take them out, I’m always wrestling with like, hey, you got to tough it out, just deal with this thing and do it versus the Okay, let’s not make them hate this. You what’s your sense about like how this how this functions in an eight year old or a ten year old.
00:50:31
Speaker 3: I mean, obviously you gotta you have to be a little careful with it, right. But the fundamental concept of this is if I force my ten year olds to get up and go turkey hunting, they never want to get up, you know what I mean. Like I have two fourteen year olds. They don’t want to wake up and do this, but you you get them to go do that thing they don’t want to do, and then the turkeys are goblin and the deer come in and whatever, and it’s like, Okay, this is like a mini example of that with the with that balance between you know, challenge and kind of guaranteed success, like what I did with my daughters. They had it really easy when they were eight, right, Like they just did like I set up everything and I didn’t I didn’t know about this what we’re talking about. But again it’s like sort of intuitive, and so eventually they’re gonna do an all days sit with me. Eventually they’re going to get out of the pop up blind and have to camel up and think about their movements and try to kill them. So when we talk about like goals in the process of this stuff. Two years ago I told my daughters, I was like, we you guys, are gonna hunt without blinds this year for the first time. We’re just gonna go out and try it. We get busted whatever, however that breaks. And both of my daughters killed deer when we built natural blinds in spots that we kind of walked in and you know, like I knew they were gonna be deer probably coming in there, Like I knew they were good spots. But it’s like not just marching them to a blind I put up right, Like I talked about this on I think it was Meat Eater Radio Live or something, But I feel like when they have a buy in, it’s just better. And so you start out and you try to make it easy because you have to, right, but it doesn’t take very long. And you see this with kids, and I think parenting wise, I’m I think setting an example that you’ll do hard stuff, like you’ll do the things that most people won’t. Like. You brought this up way earlier about you know, people are like they’re just not going to do a lot of this stuff, and in my head it kind of triggered like there’s sort of a social contagion component to this, right, Like if you hang around people who do hard stuff, you’re just more inclined to do it. Like I’m buddies with Jas Bouserman and Tim Kent, who’ve both been on this podcast, and they both are long distance trail runners. I knew them long before the meat eater days. And I remember, you know, when I started running, Jace was training for a hundred miler and I’m struggling, like struggling to get a five k and He’s like, yeah, twenty four mile training run or whatever. Just like being around somebody who’s doing something hard is so good for you. Just like if you’re around people who don’t ever do anything hard and don’t ever like try, you know, do anything with any discomfort or struggle, you’re gonna go the other way with it, you know. And so I think I think there’s like a lot going on there in our lives that we can sort of steer the deership or the hunting ship that is not it doesn’t it’s not even connected to it at all, which is sort of the whole point of this.
00:53:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, on the kid front. One other thing I thought, and this maybe applies beyond just the kid front, But as I’m thinking about that application, I would think that there’s a difference in how this would work for someone if they were forced to do the hard thing versus if they made that decision themselves. Right, So, if I’m out there with my eight years old and it starts raining and it’s cold, and we still have an hour of daylight or something like that left, if I were to just say, hey, Everett, we’re hunting in the rain in the cold, just because it’ll be good for it. It’s what we’re gonna do. We gotta do it, and that probably toughens them up to some degree, but maybe not as much as if somehow we got to the point where he made that decision for himself. And how you get to that point probably is a process. Obviously, probably a big part of it is modeling, like being the example like you described. That’s probably a big part of it. Is if you can model this for your kids for a certain amount of time and explain why you’re doing this stuff. I guess I guess that’s what I’ve been trying to do, like explain to the kids, like, hey, the reason we’re doing this, the reason I’m out here right now because it’s good to be uncomfortable, and now you know, it’s funny. I’ve had my young my oldest son like start parroting this stuff back to me. I can’t remember what it was, but something over Christmas break we’re doing something might have been, and we went up to Picture Rocks. It’s like a national lake shore up in northern Michigan, and it was like zero and we were snowshoeing to go see these ice formations and stuff. And I remember saying something like, Ah, this is kind of crazy, isn’t it, guys? And then Effett goes, well, yeah, Dad, but we’re the Kenyans. We’re comfortable being uncomfortable. He said that. I’m like, hell yeah. Like it was one of those moments where it finally you see, like, oh they are listening. So I wonder if, like the Superpower hack, when it comes to trying to instill us in a kid, is not to force them to do this all the time, but to model it, to explain why we are doing it in our lives, and hopefully put them in a position and encourage them to get to the point where they themselves say okay, yeah, you know what, No, I’m not going to go in early today dad, because this is you know, we can do this, this is why we do this, just like your kids are willing to step out of the blind and try the ground blind, do the harder thing because they’ve seen you do that and they’ve heard about how that benefits you, and they’re willing to try that next hard thing. I gotta believe that that is really what you want to see, but takes.
00:56:04
Speaker 3: A while to get to. Yeah, I mean it’s a process, but yeah, you’re setting that example, right, And I think about like, you don’t You’re right, you don’t really want to force your kids to do it. I mean if there were situations where I was like, we have eight gobblers roosted one hundred yards away, like there are situations around to be like you’re getting your ass up like we’re just gonna do this, sure, but also you know, you always try to frame it up and be like you know, like yeah, it’s gonna be tough, right, but it’s the deer gonna come in like or whatever. Like you can just lie to them like you don’t know, but they’ll call you out on it afterwards, like I thought they would. You know, they’re not going to regret going. You go eat a bunch of candy and whatever, and you see some squirrels or but it’s also if you allow them to opt out, which is okay, right, Like I’ll never forget my one daughter when she killed her first buck. She was nine and I had a whole bunch of bucks on camera, little guy coming into this spot, and her sister was up to bat. We made a drive over to Wisconsin after school on a Friday and we got to the cabin and she was like, Dad, I’m just tired. I don’t want to go, Like I don’t want to go, and I’m like, listen, honey, if you don’t go, your sister’s going to and she’s going to shoot a buck. And she’s like she really wrestled with it. She didn’t go. We went out and her sister shot a buck like five minutes into it. I wasn’t even set up, like I was getting my camera gear set up, and she goes, dah, there’s a buck. And I thought she was messing with me. Looked up, here’s a four key in there. She laced him. We were back to the cabin before it was even close to dark. And those kind of things like they leave a mark too. It’s a different thing than this what we’re talking about, but it just think about it like when you’ve got that you know, cell camera in front of that stand and it’s October twenty seventh and you’re like, oh, I should get up and go, but it’s going to be even better in three days. And then you don’t go, and that dude walked your hitlister. You go, Okay, I should have just done that thing that I didn’t want to do. Like there is that part of it too, but the kid thing’s tough. Man, Like, I really think this is gonna be a weird way to put this. I think that setting an example of doing what most people won’t do. Positive stuff. I’m not talking about like shooting Heroin into your eyeballs or whatever, but like, yeah, positive stuff is so important. They see that. Like when I was growing up, my dad is just like notoriously has a bad attitude. He just does. And it’s like it’s so easy for me to default to that. But like he would look at a hunting or fishing situation and always sort of like focus on what the negative outcome was probably going to be, you know what I mean, And like a lot of people do that, and I internalized that. I saw that for a long time. Man, I looked at it like I will never be good at this stuff. I will never figure this out. And it’s just like it’s just not for me. But you keep going, and I see how damaging that is, you know what I mean? Like, you see how damaging that is. And when we talk about success deer hunting, and everybody wants that decoy or they want that strategy, or they want whatever, most of what our audience needs to hear and understand is you have to do something that the other people won’t. You know, like this is like a core tenet of being successful on pressure ground. Is like if you are willing to do things other people won’t do, then you win. Like you will, you will have more opportunities, you will be moving in a direction. It’s just it. And that follows you everywhere in the outdoors, like that follows you fishing, that follows you in pheasant hunting when you go out west for the first time. If you’re the kind of person who will go in the conditions other people won’t, you’re just better off. You’re going to be better at it. And so I think that setting that example, you know, for your kids and just doing it for yourself is like hugely important, Like it is the key to killing deer on public.
00:59:56
Speaker 2: Land and honestly probably anywhere.
01:00:01
Speaker 3: I mean, it’s right, I mean it’s better. It’s always better than not doing Yeah, but it’s the difference maker is real when you’re competing against When you’re competing against the deer, it’s different. But when you’re competing against the people for the deer, or for the pheasants or for the oak, the person who does something the other people won’t is the person who kills. It’s the Andy May success, right, it’s the Eddie Claypool success where I don’t care if it’s antelope, I don’t care, if it’s high country meal deer, I don’t care if it’s Illinois white tails. They’re just so much more likely to succeed. And then you look at them outside of hunting, and they’re still doing things that most people won’t do, and it’s it’s just so important.
01:00:43
Speaker 2: Well, that’s the cool thing is that all of what you just described is great. But then you can also tell your wife or your spouse or your boss that, hey, this also translates to the rest of my life. So give me that vacation time, because this is going to make me a better husband, wife, employee father, whatever it is. Right, That’s that’s the argument I think we can make now, right, Tony.
01:01:05
Speaker 3: I think that we’re right there, buddy, All right, well, excuse me.
01:01:10
Speaker 2: I appreciate you bringing this idea of the table. It’s one that resonates. Remind us, give us a give us a reminder. Where are the Foundation’s podcasts? How often do they come out? What are some other things you’ve been talking about? Because folks should definitely go listen to this episode that you do a deeper dive. But what else should they be looking for?
01:01:31
Speaker 3: Well on this feed right here every Tuesday. I’ve really you know, when we this is I think it’s been almost five years now. That’s when we when we were just first kind of kicking around the idea working together, and you came to me with this opportunity and we came up with foundations. I was like two years and I’m out, we got to do something different. But what I’ve realized is I was looking at it from the perspective of tactics and techniques and gear and not looking at what actually makes us good hunters. Like all of that stuff is complimentary, right like you if you have that DSD THO you’re gonna kill more deer somehow if you figure out how to use it, you just will. But having the mindset to be better at difficult stuff like that’s just there’s like a lane that people aren’t talking about. You kind of touch on it with deer hunting. But it’s like the more as I get older and I look at where you like, where we kill deer and the kind of hunts we have and how this works out and the scouting and everything, it’s like, man, it all kind of points in the same direction, and it’s this stuff and I just think it’s so fascinating compared to just talking about how awesome rubs are, you know, which are great, But this is like universal, right, somebody in Georgia can listen to this or understand this concept and get better. But I might not ever, you know, talk about scrape hunting in a way that resonates with him.
01:02:57
Speaker 2: You know, give me two other episodesdes of Foundations that you can think of right now that you’re particularly excited about or proud of that you would say, hey, if you if you haven’t been listening to Foundations in a while, here’s two more. You gotta check out. What are those two recommendations.
01:03:12
Speaker 3: So I just dropped a couple on et scouting and winter scouting, and I’m trying to I’ve been I’ve been winter scouting a lot, and to me, e scouting and winter scouting are sort of the same thing, right Like if I you know, last weekend, I was on a farm that I know really well. So I’m not pulling up on X to look at that the same way I was a couple of weeks ago when I went out to western Minnesota, some land I’ve never set foot on, and had dropped a bunch of pins and I just wanted to walk public and hunt some rabbits and just see if I could find a place to maybe kill a deer at some point. Going through that stuff is what feeds those podcasts, and so it’s not it’s I’m trying not to do like, oh, well, you find this type of uh you know, the top of lines or whatever. You’re like, it gets tight here and so there’s going to be a pinch point there. Like that stuff’s great. People are covering that like crazy, you know, like we know how to find a water hole on on X, But I’m talking about like putting it into use and then like ground truthing what you’re finding. But because that it flows both ways, right, we think like you’re gonna pull up on X and be like, I’m gonna drop a pin here, and I’m gonna walk in there and the rubs are gonna be there and I hunt there. But a lot of times you drop that pin, you walk in there and you’re like, well, there’s a ladder stand there, and there’s a stand there, and you’re like it doesn’t matter, that doesn’t matter now. But you walk through that cattail slew and you end up in the next little wood lot and you’re like, here it is. And that’s what I’m trying to get, is like we kind of sell a lot of answers to this stuff, but really the accountability is on the individual to go out and put this into practice in their world. And so I’ve been talking about that a lot lately, and I’m gonna write one here coming up pretty soon. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but I ran into a little spot on this farm that we I was with the girl last weekend and there’s a place we call the betting area. It’s just this ridge top. You know, there’s always dear beded and there’s very advantageous for west winds. Just typical whatever stuff, right. But there’s a little spot that I’ve never really set up on, and I actually was looking at it on on X just because I was bored, and I was like, man, the way that that hillside feeds down in that little spot, Like I’ve been through there a million times, but I’ve never It’s just one of those walkthrough locations on your farm. And I told the girls, I was like, we’re going to go shd hunt that ridge because bucks bet on it a lot. And then we’re going to just check out this little spot. And I’m like, I bet there’s going to be a bunch of rubs pointing down toward the field where they just take this this subtle kind of ridge down. And we walked in there and the first rub we found was like, you know, a three hander, right, Like you can’t even get your hands around it. And I keep thinking about this stuff and going what we think we know about our farm and what deer do is like eight percent of what’s actually going on out there just the same, right, And I think about if you keep engaging with that idea and going to learn something you don’t know like you think you know, but you actually don’t. You find all kinds of stuff and you don’t just default to what you expect to work. And that’s that’s winter scouting, man. Like I I’ve said this a million times and I know you know this. I feel like it’s so much more valuable to me than almost anything else I do for deer. But I have to remind myself and I have to force myself to keep going because of that, just the seasonal timing and how disconnected it feels in the moment from when you’re actually hunting. But it’s so important.
01:06:48
Speaker 2: Gotta sometimes do the hard thing even when you don’t want to do it right right. And on that note, Tony, I will I’ll thank you for taking the time to do this and bringing a good idea at the table and just more kind of zooming out. Thanks for doing foundations, like for all these years of that work. I don’t think people realize how much work it is to write that. It’s not like you’re just riffing off the top of your head. You’re deeply thinking about something, writing up a really good essay essentially, and then you know, sharing that with the world. That is intensive. That is time intensive, so thank you for doing that and thanks.
01:07:26
Speaker 3: Thanks to chet Yeah buddy, thanks for having me, and with.
01:07:31
Speaker 2: That we will wrap things up for today’s show. Thank you for joining us. I appreciate you being a part of this community. Until next time, stay wired to Hunt.
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