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, we are kicking off a new series in which we are exploring the habits, mindsets, methods and routines of the best deer hunters in the world. And to kick things off, we've got John Eberhart. All right, welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light and their Camel for Conservation Initiative. And I'm back. I don't know what kind of crazy things Tony said that I was up to over the last few weeks while he was manning the ship, but none of it was true. I have been out west. He probably said I was doing a little fishing, and that's true, doing a little camping, that's all true, but also chomping at the bit to get back into some white tail things. Got some good bucks showing up on camera already. I'm excited to talk about those things. But today the main story, the big picture here is that we're kicking off a new series, and this is a series that I'm excited about because it is different. It's different than what we've done in the past. It's different than I think, you know, pretty much what anybody else is trying to do with their podcast, because I'm not asking our guests over this next month really about, you know, their hunting tactics. I'm not looking to understand their perspectives on patterning deer or deer behavior, or understanding dear habitat or different spots to set up your tree stands, or how to shoot your bone, none of that stuff. What I'm interested in is is one or two levels deeper than that. What I want to achieve with this series is to get a look under the trunk, behind the curtains, behind the scenes, inside the minds of the best of the best deer hunters. How do they think about deer hunting problems and struggles and challenges. How do they make their decisions? What are the routines and the habits and the little things and their mindsets that lead to their success? Like these are the building blocks of success. That's what I'm trying to get at here. So I put together a series of twenty questions that I think will help us get a glimpse of that behind the scenes machinations in these guys' minds. These are questions, like I mentioned, we're going to try to help understand how they set their goals, how they define success, how they think about failure, how they get better at things, who they look up to, who they observe and see as successful, and what do they find success to look like in those people. All of these things I think will help us have a better underlying understanding of what the tools of what the mental models necessary are necessary to have success as a deer hunter. So this is different, different level of thinking, different several layers beneath the surface that I think will give us all a better idea of how we can become better deer hunters ourselves. And my first guest, the guest to kick this series off this week is John Eberhart. If you've listened this podcast, you likely know him. He's the author of many books. He is a long standing outdoor writer and one of the most successful DIY white tail ball hunters in the country. He comes from Michigan. I've learned a lot from him personally. I know many of you have too, and so he was the guy who I thought would be a great person to kick this whole thing off. And what you're going to see is that this series of twenty questions will be the same series of twenty questions I ask to every single one of the guests we have in the upcoming week. So we're going to get to hear all of these different, very very good deer hunters answer the very same questions, and we'll see what's you know, what they have in common. We'll see how they approach these things differently. And I think it's going to be very insightful and interesting to be able to compare and contrast all these different folks who all have tremendous success but maybe approach it in different ways. Or maybe what we're going to find is that while their tactics are different, maybe their mindsets and their habits and routines and philosophies, maybe those are more consistent than we realize. It's going to be interesting to find out. I'm very excited about it. And we're going to kick off the conversation with John here very quickly, but real fast. We want to give you a heads up on something that is going to be coming up in a matter of days if you're listening to this in early July. Next week, we have a new educational white tail video series launching that Tony Peterson and I are hosting called Whitetail Edu. And these are a series of kind of foundational, relatively beginner whitetail how to pieces. This is the kind of thing that if you've been hunting a long time, these will be good refreshers. If you are relatively new, or if you have a new friend or a new family member, someone who's getting into this stuff but hasn't been doing it for twenty five years, these will be great videos to send to them to help level them up. Because what we found is that there's a lot of people who listen to this podcast and we end up speaking over them. We end up talking about details, little nuanced things that they just don't quite understand yet, and then they miss out on a lot of the really good stuff we cover here in the podcast. What we want to do is establish a resource that will get you fully up to speed on the very most important core foundational elements of deer hunting, things like understanding where, why, and when deer feed, what they feed on how to determine that things like really diving deep into understanding tracks, not just the surface level, but what can you read into those tracks and how can that apply to future deer hunting efforts. Same thing with scrapes and rubs and understanding maps and how deer use habitat all, that kind of stuff. We're going to try to establish a really good baseline for all of those topics for folks. So the place that you can go to see these videos when they come out is a new channel for met Eator. It's called meat Eater Clips. That's what you need to do right now is hit pause on this podcast, go to YouTube and search for meat Eater Clips that clips, subscribe to that channel. Then when the new videos drop, you will be the first to know it and you'll see them right there. You can give them a watch or pass them along to your friends who are still getting into this and still learning whatever it is. We'd love it if you check them out, share them around. Hopefully this can help a lot of folks and better build people to be able to listen to these in depth, know more advanced conversations and get the absolute most out of it. So again, that's white Tail. First one comes out, I believe July tenth, and then it should be I think every week from there on for a while. And again that's on the Meat Eater Clips channel. So that is my one heads up for the day. Without further ado, let's kick off the mindsets of the Whitetail Masters series today with John Eberhart. All right here with me on the line again is mister John Eberhart. Welcome back to the show. 00:07:30 Speaker 3: John. Thank you, Mark. I appreciate you offering this gig before me so that it was great to do a podcast with you. You always ask me questions that usually other people don't ask, which is nice. 00:07:43 Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I do try, and I think we're going to do that again today. But you brought up something just before we started recording which is really interesting, which was I've made you a guinea pig several times now, I guess because when I started the what would You Do? Series, and that was like four years ago, you were the first one for that, and I had forgotten that you were first, and now I'm making you go first on this too. So the pressures on though, because it went so well with the What would You Do? Series that We've continued it for years, so now John, we need we need to make that happen again with this one. But you know, the guy was telling you before we started. What I'm hoping to get at with this series and with our chat here today John, is to kind of, you know, get a look underneath the hood. It's like popping the hood on a muscle car and seeing what's going on behind the scenes, the habits, the routines, the mindset, the philosophy, those kinds of things like what's going on in here as you were out there deer hunting making decisions or preparing in the off season. So we're probably not going to talk about, you know, what's better a rubb or a scrape or a how big of a track you're looking for? Not that kind of stuff. It's it's going to be a different kind of angle we're going to take today exactly. So, So, John, I guess the first thing I want to look at with you is a simple thing. How do you define deer hunting success? 00:09:11 Speaker 3: Well, that would totally depend on how many years experience you have, what type of property you're hunting, and what your goals are. You know, there's guys that hunt public land that are just out there to enjoy nature and maybe kill a door or subordinate buck for the freezer, and that may be success to them personally for me for success, I my goal for success is to kill mature bucks in pressured areas. I don't look up to anybody like TV guys. I shouldn't say any most TV guys I do not look up to as as serious deer hunters because they're hunting in ultra managed properties almost as do like settings, fantasy land stuff, and it doesn't take much skill set to do that. So so to me killing three and a half year old in older bucks in heavily pressured areas against tons of competition, and probably at least half of my competition on the public lands and free permission properties that I'm hunting, which is exclusively all I hunt, you know, at least half of the people are targeting just deer, So that's a different type of pressure. Anytime you're hunting ultra managed property where nobody's shooting at anything until it's four and a half years old, you know, you can have several hunters on the property, but that's not hunting pressure, because you know, once the deer hits to kill kill engagement criteria. You know, they move a lot during daylight hours, they move out into short crowd fields. They'll walk into your little shell corn in the weeds in front of your twenty feet in front of your box blind that sticks out like a sore thumb, and you shoot them. So you know, to me, that's that's not deer hunting, or at least that's not a skilled deer hunter. So a mock. Personally, on my end, it's being able to hunt against heavy competition and target three and a half year old and older bucks because in a lot of areas I hunt four and a half year old bucks just do not exist. 00:11:12 Speaker 2: Yeah, So on the flip side, then how would you define deer hunting failure? 00:11:23 Speaker 3: A failure to me would be a buck comes in and I have an opportunity, but I think I'm going to get a closer shot, so I don't take the first good opportunity, and then I don't get the opportunity I think I'm going to get because something else happened. Maybe he's with the hot dough and she turns and leaves, or maybe he comes in and then all of a sudden he turns ninety degrees and goes a different direction where he did offer me a shot and I passed on a thirty yard shot because I think I'm going to get a fifteen yard shot and I didn't take it. That'd be about the only time I look at failure because being in the woods. To me, being in nature, there can't be failure in deer hunting. You know, I've went three years in a row in Michigan without seeing a buck that I would shoot, or without having a buck on camera that I would personally shoot. Do I consider those three seasons it's failures? Absolutely not. I was out there, I had the best bucks in the area walk by me that I did not shoot. So how can you look at that as failure? You can. You can only fail when you don't when you don't take advantage of something that's there, or you don't get the opportunity. It's something that you know is there. You don't get that opportunity, then you may have failed in you know, your location or your seasonal timing, your daily timing not being there it's the right time of season or right time of day you did your sequence is wrong. Maybe used a tactic it didn't work, but Overall, I really never look at deer hunting as a failure. I just enjoy being out there in nature. Got I'm seventy three years old, and I just have a passion for it. So unless I unless I do what I said early as far as missing an opportunity because I passed on what I know, I could have taken the thirty yard shime and killed it waiting for a fifteen yards hid and then I don't end up getting that shot. And that's happened to me several times. And those are things I've never ever gotten. 00:13:33 Speaker 2: This happened to So then maybe maybe this leads maybe that'll be the answer to this next question. But I'm curious if you think back, if you look back on past either failures or just mistakes, can you think of any particular failure or mistake that sets you up for later hunting success, like a favorite failure that changed something for you, that taught you a lesson or changed how you proach things. Can you can you think of a specific example like that that you could describe absolutely. 00:14:04 Speaker 3: Nineteen seventy five, it was late October pre run, I think it was October thirtieth, and I was hunting in a draw. This is in Michigan. I was hunting in a draw. There was there was cutover saplings up a little hill to the west, and there was also cutover saplings to the east. And I'm in a little kind of a lane of weeds between these two cutovers, and there's I'm in a white oak kind of where it dumps out into into some open timber. And I had a big bug, biggest buck at the time that I ever had an opportunity to shoot. And he came down to thirty five yards. He came down that little draw in weeds, and he stopped. And it was a bluebird afternoon, sunny, sunny, sunny afternoon, and I'd had twelve other doze and ponds, and one other subordinate buck go by me within twelve yards and feet actually on acorns under my tree, and then moved on. And so he was coming through the same route, so he was on their trail. And at thirty five yards he stopped and he gave me a broadside shot. And at the time I shot leagues a lot back then, and at thirty five yards, I have the thirty thirty five yards ten and I could have shot that deer with no problem stand a dead broadside, and I thought, well, you know he's on he's following all these deer where they went into the timber. So I just well, I'm gonna wait till he comes within twelve yards fifteen yards, And all of a sudden, he just took off and ran up the side of the hill to the west. And when he started running up the hill, in the saplings, you know, these saplings were probably tempoly tall, there was a dough and I had not seen that dough. But when he started running up that hill, I saw that doe spook from him, and so you know, obviously in the evenings the thermal drafts from the hills are going down, so he winded her and took off after her, and I didn't get an opportunity. I never saw that buck again, and that probably is why I mentioned what I said, what I think is a failure that's happened to me two times. But I've never ever forgotten that. And as you well know, you you remember your mistakes far more than you remember your success. 00:16:28 Speaker 2: They sting, They sting so much more. Yes, And I've even thought, like the the low that I feel when I've really messed something up is much lower from baseline than the high I feel when I do succeed. And so by that I mean like if I were to hit and wounded deer and not find it, that is way more significant of like an impact on me than if I smoke a deer and find it thirty minutes later, you know. So that leads me though, to a follow up to your question. It seems like the takeaway the lesson from that experience was, as you described it in a minute ago, take advantage of that first opportunity because they can be fleeting, which is. 00:17:18 Speaker 3: Very true during any semblance to the rug bases. Yeah, when anything happened. 00:17:23 Speaker 2: But have you ever had the opposite happen where you wished that you had waited to let a situation play out because you did take the first opportunity and maybe rushed it or it didn't end up being optimal, and then that led to, you know, something bad happening, and then you thought, oh, geez, if I had just been more patient, he would have came into twenty five or twenty Has that ever happened to. 00:17:53 Speaker 3: I've made miss I've made mistakes where I remember I had a bought ap and this was in Kansas. I had about one hundred and eighty inch buck and some really tall was actually this help. You know out in Kansas should get a lot of hot growing wild and it was in really tall hemp, and he was coming right towards me, and there was a dough in front of him that I did not see because the hemp was so tall. All I could see from him was his head and his rack sticking up above them. And he was following her, so she was obviously on her own way that was going to come right by me as well. So I was watching him, and I was moving around in my saddle to get a shot opportunity when he came, because I knew exactly what route they were on. He was on, and when I made that move, the dough, the doe had already stopped. She was standing there. I didn't see her, and she picked me. When I made a move. He wasn't looking, he was looking at the dough. She spooked and he went with me. I don't know if that answered your question, but. 00:19:06 Speaker 2: Certainly a scenario we don't want to have happened. 00:19:09 Speaker 3: Yeah, and another another time, Yeah, that was that would have been the second biggest buck I've ever shot at the other eight hundred and eighty andj right killed. And another time in Michigan, this was probably my worst my worst case scenario ever. Nineteen ninety seven, late October pre run. I was hunting a pinch point between two betting areas and I was hunting for a specific buck. I knew he was there, and he was probably of one fifty ish, which is monster for Michigan. And at about that straight up noon, here he's coming out of one betting area. You know, he was gonna sent check for those in one others betting area and take the pinch point of security cover to the next bedding area. And he came through ten yards again. It was straight up twelve o'clock and when it was on all day said probably twelve yards, I mean a perfect it was a chip shot. He was on my wall mentally, this year is dead. He threw my bow dead broadside twelve yards. Man stopped him. I shot right over his back. I didn't think there was any way in God's green earth I could miss a bear. And that's probably the last year I can ever remember physically totally missing. And that that gave me thought that don't ever take shots for granted, you know, don't just draw back, and because he's so close, it's like shooting in an elf, you know, you just you pull your pin down. And as soon as my pin got some someone so in the Bibles, you know, I just let it go. And I must have jerked a little and shot over his back. I just didn't take my time and follow through with my form. 00:21:02 Speaker 2: Easy to do in those moments, that's for sure. Okay, So I want to I want to step away from you for a quick second and ask you to think of a different whitetail hunter that you know, who you do look up to, someone you think is truly elite. Can you think of someone you think is a truly really really excellent deer hunter and describe to me what it is that makes him or her so successful? So who would that person be, if you're willing, if you want to share the name, or if not, describe to me what makes this person so special, what's their their secret sauce, what's behind the curtain for them? 00:21:46 Speaker 3: Yeah, there's only been one hunter I've ever looked up to, one bow hunter. That's Miles Keller. I mean, he's past his crime now. I don't even know if he's still bond. But Miles Keller was killing big bucks back in the eighties and early nineties before all this TV junk, in my opinion, and he wasn't a writer, but he got interviewed. There was quite a few articles where they interviewed Miles Keller. He was extremely detail oriented, which I think I am as well. He was very detail oriented. He targeted specific bucks, you know, and he had a cool job. He drove around in the countryside. I can't remember what his job was, but he got to see deer, and back in the eighties it was a lot easier to get hunting permission. So when he would see a monster buck, he would go and if he could get hunting permission, he would target that deer. And typically that deer was in he was in trouble when Miles Keller targeted him, because he had a pretty high success rate. And Miles Keller always, you know, he used to wear shower caps over his hair because he knew, you know, a high percentage of his order. This is before sunt lot was coming out of his hair follicles, so he shaved clean and he put a shower head band over his head so he wouldn't have as much older he Even though I'm not a believer in the sprays you know, the sodium bite carbonate and water sprays. I think they have very minimal effect. But he used that. He used anything that he thought would give him an edge, and he was just an extremely successful hunter on regular properties. Okay, So I guess Miles Keller would be the only only person I've ever looked. I've hunted with a lot of high profile ball hunters. I've never been impressed by. 00:23:38 Speaker 2: Him, so to say that, no, that's okay. So with Miles you mentioned a few things there, but is there is there any one thing that stood out from what you read about him, or observed with him, or learned about him that you think was was really his key to that success. 00:23:57 Speaker 3: Yes, he knew not to win shrewed into a deer's area anymore than needed to be. So he hunted very smart. He keyed on rut FaZe hunts. He knew that's when they were more vulnerable. As far as moving during daylight hours, he knew the seasonal and daily timing of locations. He knew he was hunting in a food location like in a white oak or a lost apple tree or whatever the nut tree may be chestnuts. He knew it was an evening location because so he wouldn't spook here with his you know, feeding there with a morning entry. So he put a lot of things in place that really if you read any of the media time no media people were talking about that he had knowledge of deer behavior beyond the normal ball hunter. And you know, I feel like I try to follow in that stuff, you know, seasonal timing, daily timing. Is this a morning location, is this an evening location? Is this a mid day location? You know, like that those pinch points between the two betting areas, that's a mid day location, both to two big bucks. I've had opportunities at there. We're in the middle of the day, so you know, knowing seasonal and daily timing, and you know what locations are for what time of season. You know, Miles knew that, and I used to read his interviews. I don't read much media and I rarely watch TV, so yeah, those were those were the things that really stood out with Miles over anybody else. 00:25:35 Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it's funny you mentioned that because, like you said, you followed in those footsteps, right, and then, as I've told you in the past. You know, your book Precision Bow Hunting was really like the awakening for me to that those timing issues with with timing of day, timing of season, and shifting everything because of that, which made a huge, huge difference in my hunting life, which which is a perfect segue to the next thing. 00:26:01 Speaker 4: I'm curious about. 00:26:13 Speaker 2: What single, if there was a single change or choice that you've made over the course of your deer hunting journey that has made the most meaningful impact for you, taking you from an average deer hunter or a good deer hunter to a great wall I think what you just described maybe was one of the biggest shifts for me once I realized that I needed to really look at the season not as just like, oh, this is three months of deer hunting season, but this is a one week window, and this is a seven day window, and this is a two week window, and this kind of thing will only work for this time of year. These specific locations are only right for this time of year. I didn't grasp that until I was twenty twenty one when I read your book, so that would probably be my answer to this question. But what for you, what change or what choice did you make that took you from here to here. 00:27:06 Speaker 3: I've had three choices in my deer hunting career that have made of boom boom boom. First one was postseason scouting. Post season scouting was never written about. I didn't know anything about it, never heard anybody ever mentioned postseason scouting. When I started doing it in the mid seventies, you know, I was I was just doing pre season scouting and location preparation like every other gowner. That's all it was ever talked about in the media pre season. So you know, one season, I was like, I filled my tags early and I'm like, you know what, I'm going to go out here in December. You know, gun season's over and there wasn't any snow on the ground, and I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna scout early. And when I started doing that, I was looking at the property because in Michigan and in the heavily pressured areas that I hunt, everything revolves around security cover. And when you go out there and you preseason and scout, everything looks like it's got adequate security cover per deer to move through because everything's got folageiants. Everything looks dense, so it gives you a false sense of what security cover is once the foliage is down during the rut phases, and that's when bucks start being vulnerable, moving more during daylight, you know, in pursuit of dose. So during postseason scouting, I can still see all the scrapes. I can tell the fresh licking branches because you can see the white of the meat of the tree. The runways are still there from the rut phases, very visible. You can totally go in and rape bedding areas as far as scouting them without concern busting deer either, because they're going to be back in there. You know, when you're scouting, you know whether it be January, February, March, you know, even even into April before greenup. You can just molest everything, prep your locations, do all your scouting, mark your public land locations on ONYX, and you know, have all that stuff set where you don't really have to do anything during pre season, so you're not making any intrusions and changing any visuals by making shooting lanes or or entry and exit routes. You're not leaving any human odor. You know, you don't have to worry about sick control when you're scouting in postseason, and nobody ever talked about that. So that was the first thing that was a huge, huge That's big. Second thing was in nineteen eighty one when I bought my first saddle. I bought a treestling cost thirty nine dollars ninety five cents so and I'm still hunting from that same exact treesling. I've modified it a lot, but it's the same one I've used since nineteen eighty one. That made a huge uptick in my kills as well, because it gave me more tree options. It gave me three hundred and sixty degrees shooting mobility around the tree. I didn't have to worry about leaving stands on public land because the saddle is always with me. You know, there's just a gazillion advantage of the saddle over at tree stand once you get used to it. Third thing was was as big as postseason scouting because the saddle made a difference, but it wasn't a major game change, but it made a difference in the locations that I could hunt and take advantage of the three sixty and not worry about that. The third thing was hands down cent lock when I bought my first cell a suit in nineteen ninety six. It took me almost a year to learn how to because sell lock very does a very poor job at conveying how to properly care for store and use their clothing. You know, they make nice clothing. It's not overly expensive, but they do a very poor job, in my opinion, of conveying how to properly use it in conjunction with other sent free things like your backpack or washing your aids on your sticks, or whatever the case may be. So to give you an example, what a difference that made from nineteen sixty five when I started bow hunting until through nineteen ninety six, Because in nineteen ninety six when I bought that suit, I really didn't have a grasp on how to properly care for it, and what did you in conjunction with You know, I took my backpack out in the tree with me, which I got into every day with my bare hands. So it was a huge human CENTERI So it didn't matter how well I took care of my body, I still got the backpack here to scoop from. So in nineteen ninety seven, from nineteen sixty five, through nineteen ninety six, which is a I think thirty two seasons. I took ten record book bucks in those how many years? Thirty two seasons, I took ten record book blucks. From nineteen ninety seven through twenty twenty three, I've taken forty five record book blucks. It's different, so the stats are pretty much there. I went from yeah, ten and thirty two seasons to twenty or forty five bucks in twenty seven seasons. 00:31:49 Speaker 2: And hopefully you were learning some things along that line along that period too. 00:31:53 Speaker 3: But I was obviously when I started in the sixties, I was pretty novice and green because I have family members that hunted. But by the mid seventies, I was killing pretty much the best bucks in the area. I was pretty decent in the mid seventies. 00:32:10 Speaker 2: Okay, that's very insightful, and I love hearing about these Yeah, yeah, it really is. And it's interesting to hear about these major inflection points you had, you know, decades ago, seventies, eighties, nineties. I'm curious about changes that might have happened recently. Can you think of anything in the last five years, so from from sixty eight years old to seventy three years old. Can you think of any new belief, behavior, habit, something like that that you've picked up in the last five years that has significantly improved your hunting or hunting enjoyment. Is there anything that stands out absolutely? 00:32:56 Speaker 3: As you well know in an avid hunter yourself, you know you key on in Michigan, you key on the first three or four days if you're in a heavily pressure if you're on public land, free permission properties, more than likely any mature bucks that you want to killer or nocturnam before season opens because the other hunters on the property did things wrong during preseason so they but still you key on those first five days of season. You always got special five days, and then you got the lull. You've got that October lull when handy mature buck you want to kill is typically going to be vetted all day or they're going to move into their betting area before daylight. They may move a little in their betting area during the day, but they're in heavy security cover. So you've got that lull period and then you get into pre run and that's when you start spending most of your time on stand again. So during that lull, i wasn't hunting much. And one thing I have learned over the last four years is I'm hunting a lot during the lull now, but i'm hunting, I'm sparring, I'm doing spiring sequence. It's a long standing or six four of the last bucks I've shot six book bucks in the last three seasons, four in Michigan, two in Kansas, and full of the four bucks I shot in Michigan in the last three years that made book. Three of them I rattled out of either standing corn or in a betting area during the lull because when you do sparring, not rattling sequences, not aggressive rattling sequences, because during the law bucks are still they're sparring for pecking order. They're just you know, you may see a ten point sparring with a four point. Okay, you never see them fight for breeding right now, but they're sparring for pecking order in the four areas and so doing spiring sequences. Bucks tend to bed a majority of the mature bucks bed in the standing corn because it's for the most premium security cover. You can have nobody walks in the cornfield and then you can eat in it, so you got dose betting in it, you can feed in it, and it's the most superre your betting area you can have. And most people are afraid of corn. Well, I can't hunt this. You know this is going to suck until the corn gets harvested. Well take advantage of it because you can hunt the edge of the corn. You can spire bucks out of the corn, and you're not molesting your rot face hunting locations so that you're going to hunt in the timber once the corn has been harvested, so you're not ruining anything in the timber or betting areas outside of the corn, you know for pre rud hunting once the corn is down, but you can still rattle or spar bucks out of the standing corn or in betting areas. So to give you the betting area scenario, two years ago, I was scouting some public land and there was in the postseason and there was a betting area at one of them that I it was a decent betting area, but I had better betting areas to hunt in my rotation. But it was a good betting area, So I said, what the hell, you know, as is the lull, I'm not going to hunt this betting area during the rut phases on this piece of public land. So I'm going to go in there on a morning hunt, get in my tree two hours for daylight, for the bucks transition into the betting area, and if there is a big mature book, if there is a decent mature buck in that betting area, you know, about seven forty five, I'm going to do a rattle of sparring sequence and see if I can bring in because once they're in their betting areas, they're much more apt to respond to something. And it's a social thing, you know, it's it's also sparring as a social activity. It's not a battle. And at seven forty five I did a sparing sequence and I did another one five minutes later at seven fifty and the buck came in and I shot, so two of them. I rattled the bucks out of standing corn and the other one I sparred in in a betting area interior of the betting area of a betting area. Was not planning out on injuring the rough. So I've learned three of the four bucks I've shot in the last three years in Michigan to make book. We're during the law and that's a time I try to avoid. 00:37:00 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a big change. So when you're doing when you're doing this edge of standing corn during the rut or sorry, during the lull, with this idea of hey, I'll probably do a little bit of sparring when you're choosing a location like that. One thing I would be thinking about if I'm specifically targeting the corn is where I think my mature buck might be betted. Corn can oftentimes look like a blank sheet of paper, like it could be hard to find a specific concentration zone as compared to when you're looking at a forest and you can see, oh, there's this one area that's you know, very very thick, or a different habitat topic. I know there's probably something better there. But when you go about trying to choose how you want to sit alongside of a cornfield where there's not as much diversity, how do you choose your hunt location for that type of hunt? 00:37:49 Speaker 3: Excellent question. I'm not glad you asked what you want to do because deer, especially mature bucks, they're always going to gravitate to security cover. So when you walk the perimeter or the standing corn, typically you've already scouted the property during postseason and you know now you know it's in standing corn, so you know what the perimeter or the cornfield is. What you want to do is you want to go to the standing corn wherever it butts up to other security cover. You follow what I'm saying, because I'm mature bucks much more likely to come out of a out of a standing cornfield if he's going from security cover or the corn to security cover of the location off corn. So a lot of times when I'm scouting postseason scouting and I'm walking the edge of a perimeter of a crop field. You know you can even do this on public There's a lot of public land butts up the private corn. Okay, so you can walk the edge. And if you see, let's say a scrape area during postseason on the edge of a standing or on the edge of a crop field and it obviously the cropfield wasn't last year, Odds are is going to be corn this year? Well, if that scrape area has any semblance of security cover around it, that's going to be the number one spot I'm going to want to be because odds are that's that scrape area because dos and bucks are going to be traveling in and out of the standing corn, that scrape area will probably be active again, you know, when it's in standing corn. So if there's any tree there, that's going to be the number one spot I would key on. But if there were no scrape areas around the standing corn, I would key on wherever the best security cover is that butts up to the standing corn to make him feel more comfortable committing to come out of the corn. Otherwise, if you're just rattling along standing corn and let's say it butts up to a weed field or a wide open area, odds are he's not going to commit to coming physically coming out of the corn. He'll probably still come in, but he'll probably stop, you know, five to ten fifteen rows from the edge, and if he gets close enough to the edge and he can't see a visual, he's not going to commit to come out and give you a shot. Now, if it's on property you have permission to hunt. You can actually make like a B a B lane in the standing corn, maybe twenty five yards out, make of four three or four foot wide B lane. That way, if you see a buck coming through the corn, if the rollers are running parallel, to the edge. You could maybe see a buck coming through the first one and shoot him when he goes through the second b Yeah, get ready for it. But man, two years ago, I raddled sixteen bucks out of standing corn by the fifteenth October. 00:40:41 Speaker 2: Yea in Michigan, in Michigan, between the. 00:40:46 Speaker 3: First and and I didn't even start doing it until the fifth of October. So in a ten day period, I rattled in sixteen bucks. Now only one of them was a shooter. The others were all subordinate, but I shot him. 00:40:56 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a heck of a number right there. 00:41:00 Speaker 3: Last year I only rapped six Last year, I spared in six the year before that sixteenth. So the changes from here to year depending on where the deer are in the corner. 00:41:07 Speaker 2: All Right, you're pulling me onto a tangent here, But I ask a couple more tangents or a couple more follow ups on this. With your sparring, your lull sparring sequences, how many times would you do that in a sit? Is that like a once a sit sparring thing you'll do? And I have an assumption of what a what a sparring sequence might sound like, But I'm curious I guess I want to know for sure. Can you just describe how long would this sparring sequence be. I'm assuming it's very subtle tickling and stuff like that, but please some details on the sparring sequence and how often you would do that and when in a sit would you do that? Okay? 00:41:45 Speaker 3: Typically, so it's worked best on morning ons because in the morning it's dead quiet. Typically, so when you do a soft sparring sequence, a deer that's out in the corn two hundred yards can hear it. Okay, So that in the morning, because it's so dead quiet, they can hear your noise. It's a lot farther, so asparing sequence is going to be. And I use a rattle bag. I do not use antlers. I've been using the same night nail rattle bag for over thirty years. I've had to replace the fabric, but the sticks are still the same. 00:42:18 Speaker 2: Bag. 00:42:18 Speaker 3: I'll separate the sticks in the bag and then I'll make just one quick little clang, you know, jire the sticks together, and then I just gently roll them together for maybe ten seconds, eight to ten seconds, and then I'll stop, and then maybe ten seconds later I'll do that again. I won't make the initial flash, but I'll just roll the sticks together and you know, make like two bucks are pushing on each other and meshing their horns. It's nothing like what you hear on TV in the rattle sequence. There's nothing aggressive about this. But you do that about you do a spar, you do quiet, You do a spar, you do quiet, you do spa, you do a quiet. It may take a minute to do a full sequence, and then I'll do them five minutes apart. So on a morning hunt, i'll do it between seven forty five, depends on where I'm at first. If I'm on the edge of a standing corn, I'll probably do it about seven point thirty. If i'd me in a physical betting area, like I was on that public land betting area, I'll do it about seven forty five because I know the bucks are still going to be up and moving around, and they're in a betting area. They don't have any issues coming back and forth by you. I'll do it five minutes apart and then I'm done. So whether it be morning or evening, I only do two sequences. In evening, I'm going to do them about forty five minutes before dark. The first one and then another one five minutes later. I always do them in succession, and I always do the first sequence lighter than the second sequence because the first sequence, let's say there's a buck betted fifty yards from you. If you make the first sequence, it's too loud, he may not commit. Because spiring sequences are very quiet, low key. You've heard them before, I'm sure. So you want to do the first one a little bit lower key, to a little bit lower volume to possibly bring something in that's close, and then the second one you want to raise the volume a little bit to possibly catch the attention of something farther out in the field. And it's kind of interesting because when you do a sequence for a minute, you know where you're doing probably three or four physical sparing sequences. The rattling noises bucks have like an internal GPS. 00:44:34 Speaker 2: They know exactly crazy. 00:44:36 Speaker 3: I rattled in an ELK on my my second elkhon on federal land in Colorado out of saddle. I was off in the tree. I rattled in a five by five that I shot with my night white tail rattleman. Yeah, yeah, that was that was That's pretty much I'll made me do that. But I just what the hell, you know too, and I just did. I did an aggressive sequence to call that alka. Yeah, I think I was the first guy probably ever to shoot an elk out of the saddle and definitely the first guy to rattle in and elk with a white tail rattle. 00:45:12 Speaker 5: Yeah, that's a heck of a story. 00:45:27 Speaker 2: Interesting, interesting stuff. So let's uh, let's let's shift a little bit to habits. I'm curious about a couple of things when it comes to your habits. Is there any unusual habit that other people find absurd when they hear about you doing this, but that you strongly believe helps you as a hunter. So a habit that other folks think is nuts that you stand by because it truly does help you. 00:45:53 Speaker 3: Yes, well, Selloc's probably my number one habit because I get a lot of mocking on social media because people have no concept what they're talking about when they talk about side control. The know nothing about activated carbon. But as far as what you're talking about morning on morning hunts, I'm always in my tree an hour and a half before daylight, and most people think that's crazy. And it's kind of interesting because ninety five percent of the time you get in your tree an hour and a half four daylight. It's not going to make any damn difference. But the five percent of the time, you know, the one out of twenty times a buck goes into a betting area forty five minutes or half an hour before daylight and then you make your entry. You know, twenty minutes before daylight, you're not gonna get a shot at that deor you're not even going to know you spooked him when you walk into that bedding area during the rough. So being on stand early is a habit that a lot of people. Man, you're getting a treat that early. Yeah, And it's it's something I've just been used to and I've I've always done it since the mid seventies. And probably what got me to do that was again in the mid seventies seventies seven. I remember I was going in and I was hunting where there was a cedar swamp and then there was a small ridge up up to an oak flat white oak, white and red oak both And this is in Michigan. Obviously I didn't hun out of stay killed in ninety seven, but I went I was going in on a morning hunt and I was going in about a half hour before daylight, and I'm walking I'm gonna I'm gonna hunt one another trees along the edge of the cedar swamp, catching deer coming out of the oak ridge down into the cedars the bed for the day. And as I'm walking down the edge of these cedars, I spooked the deer. And when I got up to where the deer spooked, I mean, the tarsloder was just the stench was strong, and I know, you know exactly what I'm going to do. There was a buck bedded here, and I really didn't think a lot about it, but I walked by it and I got in my tree and all I'm thinking, blah blah. So the next time I went in there, three days later, I didn't shoot anything. That day, I spoke the same deer in the same exact spot at the same exact time with my half hour before daylight entry. And then it clicked, he is staged there, and he probably came in there, betted there an hour before daylight to intercept all the dough activity coming off the soak ridge. So that's when I started getting in my trees an hour and a half before daylight. And I've had a lot of guys email me that read my books that read that, and they said, boy, what a difference that made to them. The guys that shot bucks that were moving, they basically transitioned into the bedding area or to the edge of a bedding area where they were physically at but then they felt comfortable. The bucks felt comfortable. They were either going to stage there for those coming through, or they started feeding on acorns under the tree, and then they stayed there and fed because they're next to or within security cover. They felt comfortable and they could hear anything coming, any danger, and they kept feeding until you know, five or ten minutes after daylight, and then they shot up. Yep, And if they would have went in with a half hour before daylight entry, they would have spooked him in never mom. 00:49:16 Speaker 2: It mm hmm. Yeah. That's another eber heart ism that I picked up that's helped me a lot too. 00:49:24 Speaker 3: Well. And it's kind of it's kind of sad because so many times you do it and it doesn't pay you any dividends. But the time it. 00:49:31 Speaker 2: Does, Hey, but you get a really nice tree set on that. If nothing else, which I do enjoy. 00:49:39 Speaker 3: I always go to sleep for an hour. 00:49:41 Speaker 2: Before Okay, so this your answer to this next question might be the same as what we just is what you just described, but just in case it's not. So, what you just told me was your most unusual habit that's important but people think is absurd. More simply, what would you say is your most important habit of anything related to deer hunting or maybe even life that maybe in some way does trans translate to hunting. What's your single most important habit? 00:50:13 Speaker 3: Uh, never be a fit upfraid of failure. So if you don't try things out and fail, you're never going to learn and progress and go forward. But my habit, say that question one more time about my most important habit? 00:50:29 Speaker 2: So what would you what would you point a finger at as your most important habit that thing that you always do, this thing that's part of your life, either every single day of your life or just during hunting season. So regardless of what people think, whether they think it's smart or stupid, just what's that number one habit that you think translates for you knowing? 00:50:52 Speaker 3: I don't know if it's a habit that knowing the daily and seasonal timing for every hunting locations became a habit once that's a learned process. And once you've learned the seasonal and daily timing of every location you have prop because I have this year, I've got fift over fifty trees strapped right now for ball, probably only a dozen of them, but I've got that many right but knowing the daily and seasonal timing of when to hunt them and how to hunt them. And I don't know if you call it a habit. 00:51:30 Speaker 2: You've made a habit of preparing in that way in which you know and have all that set. So that's a fair thing to describe, I'd say, yeah, flip side of that, then what is the mistake that you keep making? There must be something. There must be some mistake that you know, I got to get better at this or I continue to struggle with this and that continues to be a hump that you are still working on getting over. Is there anything you can put a finger at as well? 00:52:03 Speaker 3: Is that for? You don't know if it's terms of a mistake. But the home bo I'm having right now is shooting. I mean I can still I'm down to a forty pound bow, which you know, getting old sucks. It's just part of life. And I literally cannot draw a forty five pound bow anymore because my shoulders are so bad. So it's not a mistake. But I'm struggling because I definitely never want to go to a cross bow unless I absolutely have to. In most states now you can't unt with a bowl under forty pounds, so I'm right on that edge. I mean, I've I've killed every deer i've shota with a forty pound bow and had a clean pass through because I'm shooting lighter arrows and fixed blade small cut fixed blade heads. I wouldn't consider that a mistake though. That's just part of life. Sure, mistake or mistake do I consistently make I have a harder time getting up out of bed to hunt hunt in the mornings. I mean, as you get older, you just I just I still have the passion and the desire. But sometimes when the alarm clock goes off now and it never would have happened ten years ago, I turned the alarm clock off and go back to sleep. And but I think a lot of that is attributed to motion cameras as well, because I've got motion cameras now, because they're all sell cameras and I have them. You know some at my locations that are fourteen feet off the ground so the deer can't see them, and I put them in August, so I'm not you know, having to intrude into the spot to check an SD card. So I guess that would that would probably when there's nothing on camera, it's hard to get motivated on a morning hunt. Sure, and I've shot, you know, I've several three times I've shot bucks that were book bucks that I never had on camera. So just because you don't have one on camera, the meaning couldn't come through the area, just not going in front of the camera. 00:54:04 Speaker 2: That is the risk of those cameras that they can provide a false sense of what's out there, and then you, uh, I've become too dependent on them and then had that exact same thought you just described. We're like, ah, there's nothing moving, and then I do go out there once and then I see two great bucks, but they're sixty seventy yards away, and they could have been in the area the whole time and I never would have known it. 00:54:25 Speaker 3: Yep, yep, h Yeah, I've shot I've shot good real one hundred and fifty some inch bucks that I never had on camera. They avoided the camera that when they would come in to check the scrape area, they would do it down wind. They never came into the scrape. Yeah, not even in night. That's what surprised me. I never even had ninetime pictures all the work than the scrapes. But when they'd come when when they came through, which was the only time I saw them, they came to the down wind side of the scrapes, twenty yards and sun checking. 00:54:53 Speaker 2: Mm hmm. 00:54:54 Speaker 3: That was their demise. Yeah, but I did not know they were there. 00:54:59 Speaker 2: Yeah, sometimes you's got to be out there. 00:55:02 Speaker 3: Yep. 00:55:04 Speaker 2: So whether I guess, quite simply, I'll just ask, what is your process for getting better at something? Whether it be the things you just described that you've struggled with what you know, shooting right now, or or just getting better and always getting up and getting out there in the woods, or if it's something totally different, how does John Eberhart get better? 00:55:31 Speaker 3: I just I'd work harder. I find myself not being able to work. Like location preparation. You know, scouting is no big deal because you're walking. That's not a big deal. Whether you're wearing waiters or using a canoe or whatever. That's no big deal. Location preparation is something that I can't do as fast as I used to. I usually prep everything myself, So I'm getting I'm getting better over the last ten years, i'd say, and being a little more detail and oriented when I'm prepping locations, because, as you well know, scouting and proper location preparation is ninety percent of the game. You know, the kill is just the byproduct of all your other hard work. So I tend to as I'm getting older, I'm forcing myself to work harder because I have to put more hours into my work and location preparation because I can't do it as well and as fast as I used to. So I'm having to work harder if you get the same amount of work done. 00:56:40 Speaker 2: Makes sense? 00:56:41 Speaker 3: Makes sense? 00:56:42 Speaker 2: Yeah, it does. And it's a perfect segue to another question in the list, which is you mentioned working harder, and that's something that probably any successful deer hunter will say, is you have to work harder, right, But what does that actually mean? Can you define what hard work means for you? 00:57:03 Speaker 3: Yeah, hard work would be well, location preparation, it's it's labor, you know, we're talking labor prepping a tree, you know, whether you're using spikes or you know, having to go up the tree with sticks and clear out the area in the tree, clearing entry and exit routes because a lot of times your entry route is different than your exit route depending on you know, the location. Hunting, clearing, shooting lanes. You know, that's all. That's all work. I I never view scouting the physical scouting has worked because when I'm scouting, I'm just on foot. I don't take my location preparation here. When I'm scouting, I will totally go in and scouting area and you know, waypoint, mark what air, what trees I may want to hunt, or locations, and then I'll come back with my location preparation gear to prepare them. If they're on private or you know, I'll clean them up a little bit. If they're on public. You know, I'll cheat and cut some stuff on public, you know, during postseason, so that it's out of the way. And I'm not making a pre season entry to change any to change anything and cut anything, so I'm leaving any order. Sure, So work is just it's just the physical labor I'm doing out in the woods. Is what I would be buying is work, And I can't stand it when I'm like with my kids, like Joe, my son who owns saddle Under Nation the Facebook page. I shouldn't say this, but it's true. I can't watch other people prep stuff because I'm so fussy on how I want to do it. If I'm preparing a tree, even if you know, like Joe picked up twelve acres and we were prepped four locations on it, you know, I prepped all the trees even though they're for him, because he likes the way I prep them, because all the stuffs and everything are perfectly placed where you can move around the free and one point doesn't go lower than the other. So I do all the prop while he may be doing lane you know, shooting, lane clearing, or whatever the case may be do. So that's what I consider working labor. 00:59:15 Speaker 2: How many days in the off season do you think you're out there doing something like that? 00:59:21 Speaker 3: January? It depends on when once the snow melts. I never I never scout until the snow melts because any sign in the snow is totally misleading because deer will change where they bed during season when they start getting snow on the ground and hunting season's over. And they're not being molested. You know, they'll move down into lower ground where they're more protected from the cold winds and where they're closer to a preferred heating or in a lot of times they'll migrate, you know, like in the up up to fifteen miles with cedar swamp. So so sign you see in the snow is totally misrepresentation of what those deer are doing in the fall. So what was the question? You don't you forget the question? 01:00:04 Speaker 2: How many days do you spend in the off season doing that kind of thing? 01:00:09 Speaker 3: Okay, once the snow has gone. In the last few years, you know, the snow has been gone pretty early, so usually by this year, I think in February I was scouting and days this year I would say twenty scouting new properties, going on, checking out new public lands. You know, we did that twelve acres, which took two days. And that's the cool thing about postseason. You can rape and pillage and yeah, you can spook every year in the county. It doesn't matter all that. Yeah, so I at least twenty days. 01:00:46 Speaker 2: So twenty days of scouting. Does that include. 01:00:49 Speaker 3: Scouting and location or if it's on public cleaning out whatever I can and get away with yep. 01:00:57 Speaker 2: Okay, So I want to take a deep breath here. 01:01:00 Speaker 3: Just during postseason. That doesn't like I do some pre season speed tours as well, ye, which that's days also okay. 01:01:09 Speaker 2: So I want to take a second and step away from this process oriented approach and just briefly talk gear to give us a mental moment, and then I'm going to throw you right back into the fire. But tell me this, what purchase of one hundred dollars or less has most positively impacted your hunting success or enjoyment? So what's something you bought for a hundred bucks or less that has made the most positive impact on your hunting. 01:01:44 Speaker 3: Satell I bought in nineteen eighty one for thirty nine ninety tis by far, there's nothing remotely. 01:01:50 Speaker 2: Close under a great point prices. 01:01:53 Speaker 3: Right, Well, let's back up a bit, because they're not thirty nine to ninety five anymore anymore. You're talking about something currently that would be under one hundred dollars price point if I, if I didn't have a rattle bag, and I and I, you know, having having something to make sparing sequences, I already have it, but that if I didn't, that would be something that I would highly recommend and invest in, and then learning how to properly use it and when to use it and what type of locations do you use at. I think I think sparring is something that ninety percent hunters are afraid to do because they've done rattling and it's spook beer and that they don't understand. Sparring works anywhere if you're in the right types of security cover, you know where a buck can has to come through the security cover to commit get buck close enough to commit to seeing what made the noise. Obviously, you don't want to spar if you're in an area where a buck can see eighty yards to the base of your tree, because if he comes out, you rattle him out of something, and then now he's got to go eighty yards across open and vulnerable area to get to where the noises were made. He's not going to do that in the daylight. So if he can't see a visual, he's not going to commit to it. So it's got to be security cover butting up close to within your shooting branch. 01:03:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's a very key point there to keep in mind. For them. Kind of the inverse of that question. If you had to give up all of your fancy, high quality hunting gear that you've accumulated over the years, You've got to give up your your great camo, your great bow, your great boots, your great optics, your fancy cell cameras, all that stuff, and it had to be replaced with entry level products. So all of your hunting gear was going to be replaced with like the bare bones, entry level Walmart version of all your hunting gear except for one thing. You can keep one category of top tier, high end stuff, So you could keep your high end bow, or your high end camera, or your high whatever. What would be that one category that you would want to keep the high end. So another way to look at this is, if you had to only choose one category to spend extra money on, what would that be? 01:04:21 Speaker 3: Lock? Hands it down? Okay, not not even a contest. Unt Lock is the biggest game changer there is. And if you do, once you learn. 01:04:30 Speaker 2: How to properly use it, Okay, that's easy. That was super simple, very easy, And you are consistent. John, You've been talking about this for the for years and years and years, so no one can say that you are chasing anything other than what you consistently believe in on that front, which I respect. 01:04:49 Speaker 3: Yeah, I still struggle comprehending outcome. Warhunters don't use activated carbon. It's not cell Lock. You know, I'm not the cell Lock name is irrelevant. Sure somebody else made activated carbon line clothing. It would you know if I would be on board with them as well. So it's the activated carbon. It's not the brand. It's not like they just haven't known the patent. I'm using activating carbons, so nobody else can use it. So everybody else says it doesn't work, and everybody else is followers like Lemmings jumping off the cliff with somebody that says it doesn't work. 01:05:23 Speaker 2: Fair enough. 01:05:25 Speaker 6: Yeah, okay, off of gear. 01:05:38 Speaker 2: That was our gear. That was our gear detour. Now I want to get back to the hunt, and I would love to understand what your decision making process looks like before heading out for a hunt. So you know, for me, you know, the night before a morning hunt, I'm laying in bed thinking through a thousand things, trying to side you know, this variable, this variable, this variable, and then probably in the morning again I'm checking stuff and double checking my thought process all that. What does that look like for you? 01:06:10 Speaker 3: Okay, first, I want to say, as far as First Light's concerned, I'm a big First Light fan as well. Is the farst based garments, thank you, because Marino wool is hands down the best base garment you can buy. Period. End of discussion. So the question was. 01:06:28 Speaker 2: What decision making process before hunt? 01:06:30 Speaker 3: Decision making process before I hunt? I actually my closest spot to Hunts thirty five minutes from my house, so I may have something in mind when I leave my house, but I'm thinking all the time i'm driving to where I'm going because I don't have any locations, whether it be public or private that I don't have multiple, multiple locations preps. So I'm always thinking. Even though I've already thought I made my mind up, I'm still thinking and I may change my mind before I get there. Yeah, so I'm not paying attention to wind direction. Wind direction never enters my thought process. I shouldn't say never, because a lot of times when I'm sometimes when i'm setting up a primary scrape area location, you know, I'll set up a tree if it's on the south side or southeast side of the of the actual scrape area. I'll set it up knowing that big bucks mature bucks sent check scrape areas from downwind, So I'll set it up where I got a twenty five yard shot to the actual scrapes, and then I'll have a shooting line twenty five yards down wind to me. So if a butt checks at any place from twenty five yards for up to fifty yards down wind to the scrapes, I will get that shot. So as far as driving going to my which location what drives my thought process? Okay? Or the acorns still on the ground, if they've been scarfed up, apples still on the ground, if it's you know, if it's a destination mood location, the time of season obviously, if it's if it's pre rut, which is in my opinion, the best ten days of the season. If it's during pre rut, you know, which of my locations offers the best funnel or the best opportunity for a buck moving during daylight hours, because all signed in the world is meaningless if it's not made during the daylight so, you know, and it's not revisited during daytime, so just rain. You know, if it's if it's a nice drizzle of rain or if it's a bluebird day. You know, if it's if it's windy or it's raining, I may go into a bedding area for an evening hunt, Whereas if it was dry and sunny, I wouldn't because I'd be making too much noise. But if it were windy or rainy, I'd have the wind the rain to mask my noise. Because I love hunting interiors of betting areas. That's my number one go to spot after early season, you know, when everything's betting defeating, so the time of the season, the weather, not the wind, but the weather, and obviously what I have on my cameras. You know, if I get if I'm getting some consistent moving you know, like every third day, I'm getting a buck every third or fourth day, I'm getting a buck coming by a specific location. That would definitely play into Okay, I need to go with that spot. Yeah, kind of a vague answer, but that's all I got. 01:09:27 Speaker 2: That's fine. I'm curious then if there is any kind of deer hunting related decision that you struggle to make. So is there any decision throughout a deer hunt or throughout the hunting season that you somewhat frequently struggle with and if so, how do you overcome that struggle. 01:09:54 Speaker 3: I don't really struggle with that. I make my decision and I stick with it. You know, There's many times I'll get in a tree and I'm thinking to myself, Man, I should be over there. Everybody does. 01:10:06 Speaker 2: That's what I'm thinking about, is when I asked this questions that kind of thing. 01:10:10 Speaker 3: Yeah, but once once I commit to a location, I commit to a location. I I on a few All Days sets, I've physically been in a location and seen morning activity maybe two hundred yards away, you know, during the rough phases. When I do All day sets, usually the foliage is down, so I got a big visual because the foliage is down, and if I see movements farther away, I'll pull my sticks and stuff and move for the you know, mid the rest of the midday in the evening. But other than that, typically, if I, if I'm committed to a location, even if I think I should be in this one, I'm going to stay where I'm at. Once you commit to something, you should stick with it because I think when you get down and move, you're just possibly altering your activity. Because I mean been in the tree a while. Obviously the deer could be starting to move, and you may alter dear activity because human human activity affects deer movements more than any other factor period human activity. So I don't want to molest anything by moving once I'm committed to a spot. 01:11:24 Speaker 2: It's risky. That's for sure. That that very thing bit me in the butt last year, So I. 01:11:30 Speaker 3: Uh, you gotta tell me how that happened. 01:11:33 Speaker 2: I yeah, I moved in a spot and I was hunting a location tight to a betting area that I knew the buck I was after spent a lot of time in and the wind shifted on me. And I do still obsess over the wind myself personally, and so when the wind shifted to blowing into that betting area, I sat there and say, oh gosh, this isn't good. And I was worrying, like part of me is saying, you don't want to move because you know you're gonna spook deer and he might be coming, and you know, when you're climbing down from the tree, he might show up and you can blow it all up vice versa. He might be going into that bedding area any moment now, and get a big whiff of me, and then my hunt's done too, and there could be twenty other deer that would want to use that betting are and you're going to blow out twenty deer or ten deer or whatever it is. And so I went back and forth, back and forth on that, and then I finally decided, you know what, I got to get out of here, like it's it was blowing the worst possible place. And I take my son control really serious. But I know that I'm not. I'm not I'm personally not able to make it one hundred percent. So I knew that, you know, stuff would win me. So I pulled. I started pulling down my set, and as I'm about to about to climb out of my platform, I hear snap. I turn over my shoulder, and it had been a windy, rainy day and the one buck I was after was twenty five yards away walking right through my tree through my shooting lane. 01:12:55 Speaker 7: Oh no, yeah, last season, yeah, last season. 01:13:01 Speaker 2: And and it gets worse john, because so I was devastated. So he walked through my lane. My bow had already been like lowered down on the rope, so I was able to pull back up without him seeing that, but he got into my wind and got just kind of wiggy and and eventually gets kind of like slowly trotted off before I was able to get a shot. 01:13:21 Speaker 3: Do you think had you not moved down the tree part way and had to get back up, that he still would have winded you? 01:13:27 Speaker 2: Or if I had, if I had still had my bow up there, if I was like, if I'd just been hunting, I would have I would have noticed him before he got to my wind, and I would have had a wonderful shot. 01:13:38 Speaker 3: Got so much. 01:13:43 Speaker 2: Yeah, it cost me that opportunity. So he runs off to that betting air. I pulled on my set and I decide, Okay, I blew this sucker up. I'm going to go and move to the other side of the property, to the far opposite side of this betting area now and hope that maybe I can catch him working this side of it in the evening. And he did it, and I got a shot at him in that that that evening and hit him in the shoulder and didn't kill him. 01:14:13 Speaker 3: Yeah, I had had you not moved, he wouldn't have come out in that other spoty, But it came out where you had. 01:14:18 Speaker 2: Been quite possibly, yes, yes, quite possibly. So I got effectively had a shot opportunity in the morning, and then my pivot gave me a shot opportunity in the evening and I blew both of them. So that was that was a what what what I would look back on as my worst day in my dear hunting life. Probably Now I did end up killing him in uh end of November, so I caught back up to him a month later. But uh, but that's a that's a story for a different days November. That was that was with a gun. At that point, he was wounded. I could tell he was infected and it was a bad deal and I needed to do whatever I could to u. 01:15:00 Speaker 3: Dangering. 01:15:00 Speaker 2: He had like all sorts of pusts and stuff in there. It was it wasn't good. So I was able to uh to wrap that one up and end it as ethically as I possibly could. 01:15:10 Speaker 3: I will I will say this, the biggest buck I ever shot, which was one hundred and eighty enter, was one that I got down and moved on an all basis. I got down and moved at ten o'clock and I ended up shooting it. 01:15:20 Speaker 2: Like yeah, sometimes it pans out. Yeah, So along these lines. I think, you know, dealing with tough decisions or dealing with mistakes like what I just described. 01:15:32 Speaker 3: I think it doesn't make your honey man, if you never made a mistake, it would be boring. 01:15:37 Speaker 2: It's very true, very true. So so that's a perfect leading to this, which is, how would you define mental toughness in the context of deer hunting and how does that factor into your deer hunting success if at all? 01:15:55 Speaker 3: Big ten, I think mental toughness I have a complete chapter on mental toughness in my new book. Mental toughness is not worrying about conditions, weather conditions in clement weather, thirty mile an hour, thirty five mile an hour winds, you know, rain, as long as it's not up driving pouring rain and going hunting regardless. There are so many hunters that as soon as there's any type of fall weather they give up their hunt. Oh they're not going to move tonight, blah blah blah. And I have killed deer in weather conditions that were you would never think a deer would move in and typical dose and stuff don't use you know, they like blueber day. But when you're hunting in severe in clement weather. You know, mature bocks during the rough phases, they want to breathe and they're going to move, they can't go inside. So I think mental conditioning, where you don't let anything affect what you're going to do concerning hunting plays a big, big part in success because when you're hunting pressure areas, opportunities are so few, and the more you're out there, I'm not saying you have to still hunt smart, but the more you're out there at the right times of season and the right times of day, no matter the weather conditions you're you're going to have higher percentage of getting opportunities. I think that has a lot to do with mental toughness. Getting up in the mornings is mental toughness. Getting up, you know, three hours before daylight to go hunting and be in your three an hour and a half or daylight every day, even though you know one out of twenty hunts is the only time it's going to work for you on average. That's mental toughness. Staying in your tree. If you're at you know you're in a betting area. If you're in an all day sit in a betting area, you got to be in tree an hour and a half before daylight settled in, and you don't want to leave the betting area until at least a half an hour after dark. Even though you can't shoot, you want to make sure if there was a mature buck in there, he's gotten up and moved out of the betting area, so that you're not spooking him with your climbing down the tree and your exit out of the betting area. You know, right at dark, you know when he probably hasn't exited the betting area yet. You know those are all or you know, if you're on public land and you know and it gets heavily pressured public land. Mental toughness is knowing that if you find a bunch of sign Let's say you find this awesome location and it's got some seonone's of security cover, and there's three active scrapes here, and there's rubs on all the perimeter brush around the scrape area. But yet it's an easy to access location for anybody from the parking area or wherever the public land parking is on, and is you know, mental toughness is knowing that if there's a mature buck using that scrape area, it's probably at night you know, all the sign in the world is worthless if it's not made or visited during daylight hours. So knowing there's three other guys bee hunting this section of public land, you know, not every day, but on and off the and of course of the season, that's just ball hunters. You know, they're going to find that and they're going to ruin it. They're going to ruin that location for daytime hunting. So, you know, mental toughness is knowing that when you're hunting public land in a heavily pressured area, you've got to go places other people aren't willing to go. You've got to don waiters or hit boots, or use a canoe or a bolt across the lake or whatever the case may be, because that's where the buck. Mature bucks are pushed by all the other hunters because they're typically too lazy and they're not willing to do the work to get back to those places. So the mental toughness is knowing you have to do that if you want to have any semblance of being consistently successful in a pressured area. Yeah, and and most of the time you do these things and it doesn't you don't make it kill, But you have to do them all, and you have to do them consistently for the few opportunities you're going to get in a heavily pressured area your body. 01:20:17 Speaker 2: Yeah, when you're feeling exhausted and frustrated or stumped or pissed off at how the hunt's going, or anything like that, when that's happening season could be either or could be any Could it be any one of those things. When you're feeling that, how do you activate mental toughness? Like how in that situation? How do you turn it on? Or what do you do when you're feeling exhausted, frustrated, stumped, struggling? How do you respond? 01:20:51 Speaker 3: I usually don't think about that because it's it's in planet, It's ingrained in my DNA. Now, as far as the way I hunt, I don't allow myself during a physical hunt to get mentally disabled where man, this isn't going to work, or I'm hunting in the wrong spot, or I didn't do enough work here. Once you're committed to what you're doing, you just do it. I don't know if that's a good answer for that. 01:21:25 Speaker 2: No, I actually think that's I think that's insightful. 01:21:32 Speaker 3: Yeah, because I never think negative things when I'm deer hunting. You know, I may I may sit there and say, God, I wish i'd have been over there for this. This may suck because this or that, but I still commit to it. So I don't let it mentally drain me. I just commit to it and I say, well, I'll do that on another day. 01:21:52 Speaker 2: No, maybe thirty years ago, though forty years ago might have been a different story. Would you say that you are where you are now because of the experience of going through this and pushing through those roadblocks. Oh yeah, that's why you're there. 01:22:05 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely years ago in the seventies and eighties, Oh, I would get very tense and pissed off, and you know, being at a location and I didn't think it was going to work out. But once I commit, now I just I just hunted because anything's possible. I mean, I wouldn't have a location there if I didn't. I wouldn't have prepped that location if I didn't think it was going to be worth hunting. Now, back in the old days, I would, you know, in the late seventies and eighties, when I was postseason scouting, i'd prep locations at let's say an oak tree or at a lost apple tree in September, and then I wouldn't I wouldn't do a speed tour because doing a speed tour back then, because I wasn't using sut lock, it was an intrusion into that spot prior to season. So I wouldn't do a speed tour to see if the oak had acorns, or the apple tree we're dropping apples, or what's see into what's seeing what kind of buck sign is around those trees just prior to season. So I wouldn't take those pre season speed tours. And then I'd go in and hunt, but go into a hunt, maybe a white oak tree, and I get to the tree for an evening hunt and it's doesn't have any acorns that year, so it's totally worthless. So I've just blown a complete hunt. So but nowadays, because I mentally prepare for all that, I do my pre season speed tours in total clad in selt lock where I'm not leaving any odor, and I'm checking to see all my early season locations and which olks have acorns, which ones don't, you know, and I whatever locations are not producing mass or fruit they're discarded for that year, you know, and those they're still good locations, but they'll be for another year. So you know, back in those days, I go in and be frustrated because now I'm totally wasted in evening hunt because I'm hunting in a with no egghorns and there's no sign here. 01:24:02 Speaker 2: If that makes sense, it does, and that is frustrating. 01:24:06 Speaker 3: That very fest that doesn't happen anymore. That never happens nowadays because I'm mentally prepared with my speed tours on what does not have food. 01:24:16 Speaker 2: The lessons learned over many years of trying this stuff and learning right, Yes, all right, John, If we had one of your best hunting buddies, or your son Joe, or anyone who knows you well, who is hunted with you and has spent time behind the scenes seeing how you actually do what you do. If one of these people was on the line with us today and I asked them to point a finger at your single greatest strength as a deer hunter, do you think they would yours? So if if your best hunting buddy was asked, what's John Eberheart's greatest strength as a deer hunter, what do you think they would say work. 01:24:57 Speaker 3: Ethic and mental toughness. It'd be too it'd be too cold work ethic. I've scouted locations and prep locations for other hunters that are pretty high profile guys in Michigan, and they were blown away at how hard I work in prep locations. They because they said, I can't do that. I just don't have the I just can't do what you do in trees and and they don't have the mental toughness. I'm sure it would be my mental toughness and my work ethic, which I think you'd get that same answer from almost any really successful ball Yeah. 01:25:35 Speaker 2: What would they say if I were to ask them, is your greatest area of weakness or your greatest area with room to improve as a deer hunter? 01:25:45 Speaker 3: They would say I'm a Nazi because my kids call me that I'm a deer hunting Nazi because when they hunt with me, because we don't hunt together in Michigan. We all want our own spots in Michigan. But when we go out of state hunting, and they they don't like me when I'm out of state because everything is to the minute. You know, we're leaving here five minutes to five and if you're not ready, I'm leaving without you, you know. So they call me the deer hunting Nash, So I guess my discipline would be what they would say. 01:26:24 Speaker 2: But it also might be a big part of your strength too, right, it probably is. 01:26:28 Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and now they're like that. That's what they used to say several years ago. And now I'll put my son John, not Joe. But I'd put my son John up against an hunter in the country, and Chris I would have in his day as well. Joe Joe not definitely, not Joe, but John definitely. 01:26:47 Speaker 2: Would we better make sure Joe doesn't hear this one John, I think. 01:26:51 Speaker 3: He would agree with me. I think he would agree with me. 01:26:56 Speaker 7: All right, self awareness, that's good, all. 01:27:08 Speaker 2: Right, So maybe you might have just answered my next question here. But what is the most common trait or mindset or habit that you see in all the best deer hunters? You know? So, if you had to point to that one most common trait that all the best deer hunters have, is it one of those things you just described or is it something different, I'd say work ethic, Yeah. 01:27:31 Speaker 3: The amount of work you only get out of hunting what you put into it. And if you want to hunt at a serious level and you're hunting heavily pressured property against a lot of competition, it requires a lot of work because you have to do things different than everybody else. You have to be more more assertive, you have to do things other hunters are just not willing to do so, and that saw it comes down to work efforts. 01:27:54 Speaker 2: What is a commonly held piece of hunting dogma or something that most folks believe about hunting or that a lot of people do as hunters that is actually false or that you think is false. So kind of the flip side of what I just asked you. So, if that's the thing that everyone who's really good always does, what's something that a lot of people do that you think is actually a mistake or a false. 01:28:20 Speaker 3: Belief they do well, A lot of hunters don't pay attention to control. But that's that's another topic. Ah. Buck betting areas. I think buck betting areas is a big misconception for the most part. You know, there's so many people that talk about, well, buck's only betting, you know, only bucks betting, betting betting areas, buck betting areas, and you know, if you have a small betting area, let's say it's cup lakers, you know, and there's a dominant or sure buck betting in it during the rush phases, obviously those don't want to be in there with their fonts because they're going to get blested and bugged all the time. But I'll hunted in hundreds of betting areas over my career, and I have seen those come in in the mornings and bed and they have bucks come in and bed, you know, fifty yards from them. And in the evenings, I've had bucks get up and move and then does get up and move in the same betting areas going buy me. So you know people that say only bucks betting bed and betting areas and those don't that is totally totally yes, I've got hundreds of I would maybe not hundreds, but fifty to one hundred occasions where I've hunted in betting areas and seeing those in bucks in the same betting areas betting down, not bucks in there pursuing and you know, searching for those, but actually betting down. And obviously the bigger the betting area, the more you know, it's just like a cornfield's a betting area, and good grief, I've seen multiple bucks and betting in cornfields and dose in cornfields on many, many occasions. 01:29:59 Speaker 2: Yeah, in just you. 01:30:00 Speaker 3: Know, just marsh grass, swamps and stuff like that. Yeah, if betting area is a decent size, there's going to be bucks and those betting in it. And I'm not a big person that believes in hunting specific buck peds because when you're hunting in a heavily pressured area like Michigan is public land, free permission properties, there's probably on average, i would say one three and a half year old or older buck to every forty other deer. I'd say that's the ratio on as to doze fauns and the sport that bucks. You know, one in two year old sport bucks. So when you're hunting a specific buck bed, first off, how are you going to find a specific but bed? Okay? And but if you did, let's say that you did find a specific buckbed and I have found them before, but there it's not something I would key on on a regular basis looking for buck peds. If you typically during season a mature buck, they're pressured, they're going to move deeper into the interior, of the betting area to bed they want to get deeper in. Typically your dose fonds more than the bucks they're going to be betting more out on the peripheral edges because they're not pressured the same, their security precautions are not quite the same as a mature buck that probably has been shot at or wounded. So when you are hunting, let's say you were hunting a specific buckbed, Obviously, when you went in to hunt that buckbed, you know you're hunting it where you're going to be upwind of that buckbed. But when you're entering into that betting area to get near that buckbed, because there's forty to one other deer, you're highly more than likely to spook peripheral, doze bedded or subordinate bucks before you get close enough to that buck sixty to one hundred yards from that buckbed. And when you spook these other peripheral deer, they're going to run in the direction you're coming in from, So they're going to run towards the supposed buck that's betted there. So obviously, if that buck here's deer running past him, if he stays betted and he does get up to move before dark, he's not going to move in the direction you're spooped from. 01:32:21 Speaker 2: Yeah, right. 01:32:23 Speaker 3: And then second scenario would be, let's say you did go in and set up and you were fifty to one hundred yards from a buck's bed, it's your buck's bed. A buck is typically the last buck in the evening to get up and move, So you're going to have all these other forty ratio forty to one ratio deer in that's betting area get up and move in the direction that you're expecting that buck to move when he gets up to move to move. So if all these other deer are moving in the same direction that that buck is, that means they're going to be moving by you. And if you don't have a control regiment that works, once they're on the down wind side, they're going to blow or spook, and obviously then that buck's not going to get up later and move in that same direction either. So that whole buck betting thing, it sounds cool and it gets a lot of it gets a lot of press, but you've got to be hunting in some semblance of a managed area where you've got quite a few mature bucks in it for that to even remotely work in a pressured area where you've got, you know, such a high ratio of other deer to the few mature bucks that exist. The odds of hunting a buck betting area successfully, a buck bed successfully is very very low, extremely well. And everything I do is based on percentages. What are my best percentage ods? And that's right at the bottom of the percentage jobs. 01:33:48 Speaker 2: Yeah, much, Yes, it does. And it's not an easy thing to pull off, that's for sure, and much easier said than done. Okay, last question, John, You've made it through, uh, through this series of questions. Yeah, last question for this one. 01:34:05 Speaker 3: Okay. 01:34:06 Speaker 2: If you were forced to distill your approach to deer hunting success into one single idea, or if you had one message that you wanted to leave the deer hunting public with, and you had to put that single idea on a billboard on the side of the highway that every deer hunter would see as they drive to work in the morning. What would that one message be, that one phrase, one liner, one idea that you would put on that billboard that everyone could see. 01:34:38 Speaker 3: What would you choose the one term? 01:34:41 Speaker 2: It could be a term, a phrase, a sentence of you know something that either would be like your most important advice or that important reminder, or the distillation of of what you do, or if you had to leave folks with one parting. 01:34:55 Speaker 3: Thought, well, I could be you know, un art would be the first the first two words I could think of, because a lot of people hunt a lot, but they don't hunt smart. You know, when you learn how to hunt smart, you typically start hunting less. But the times you do hunt, you're hunting smart and you're capitalizing. You're you've got a higher percentage rate of success because you are hunting smart and you're not ruining your locations before they're ready. You know, every location to me has a ready time, you know, like mass trees, fruit trees, you know their early season time. Rock based locations, they're a rock based time. You don't go anywhere near them until that time of season because you're molesting. You're altering the dough activity at them, and all bucket activity during the ruck phases revolves around door activity. So if you're altering door activity to a rough phase location prior to the rut, obviously, if those dose quit coming in there during day light hours, the buck when you start pursuing does he ain't gonna come in there in the daylight either, So hunting smart would be the simplest two words. But I mean just saying hunting smart, there's a lot of different directions you could take those two words. I mean, what does that mean. 01:36:18 Speaker 2: It's a good thing to keep in mind. 01:36:20 Speaker 3: This is a whole lot of area. 01:36:22 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a good billboard. I'll take that reminder every day. John, You've got an exciting new project coming out into the world here pretty soon before we wrap this up, can you can you fill us in on what we can expect here in the coming months? ISHU. 01:36:40 Speaker 3: Yes, I'm hoping in August. Launch on August. Ready, I wrote a book in conjunction with Greg Godfrey, and I wrote the majority of it, and it was so long. I've been working on this since January of twenty twenty three, so I've got probably three to four thousand hours in it. And it's a book. It's a new book. And when I send it to the book designer, he laughed and he said, John, if I put this on a six by nine book, which is what your other three books are all six by nine, And if I put it in an eleven fonts, which is kind of a small font He said. It's going to take nine hundred. 01:37:20 Speaker 4: Pages, so. 01:37:24 Speaker 2: That is amazing. 01:37:25 Speaker 3: Yeah, So it's broken down into three volumes. So the name of the book is going to be Ultimate Guide to DIY Bucks, which DIY means do it Yourself. It's gonna have twenty seven chapters. It's gonna have. It's gonna cover travel, hunting, health and conditioning, pre rud, peak rud, post rud, late season, early season, staging areas, chapter on hunting standing corn, the reality is of hunting pressure. It's going to cover train features. You know, he'll country, egg slash, rural swamp areas, hunting in pine plantations down south because Greg Wi Greg's from Georgia, Florida and Georgia. It's gonna cover pretty much every aspect, thermals, how to hunt, swirling winds, thermals in the evenings going down, thermals in the mornings going up. It's going to cover side control in detail like nobody's ever seen it before. It's gonna talk about, you know, ticks and mosquitoes. Activated carbon actually absorbs all your you know, lactic acid odor and your ammonia odor. You dispel and your carbon dioxide so you don't have issues with ticks and mosquitos. It's gonna cover everything there is to do with bull hunting. It's gonna have a chapter on saddle hunting and everything you need to know about saddle hunting. But it's not a book for just saddle hunters, you know. It's gonna be for any anybody that hunts white tails in America. And it's going to be three volumes, and I'm going to actually do an audio, so it's going to be in paper, it's going to be in an ebook, and it's also going to be an audio. The audiobook will come out later. I expect the ebook in the paper books to be available sometime in August. That's our plan. And Tethered is going to be the fulfillment center, so all orders will end up going through them. And for your subscribers, Mark, they might be happy to know you have participated in this book. 01:39:34 Speaker 2: Sure. 01:39:35 Speaker 3: Mark has I think two short kill stories. There's seventy four kill stories in this book. They're all three to five paragraphs along, so they're very abbreviated, and all the kill stories fit in whatever chapter that they can lend credibility to that chapter which you just read, So there will be photos of the bucks as well as a three to five paragraph story. Andy May has several kill stories. Garrett Praul from DIY, Sportsman, Greg Godfrey and Ernie Power, the two owners of Feathered, also have kill stories. And I have about fifty five kill stories in it, I think. So it's going to have a lot of photos or they are going to have a lot of photos. We're probably going to be in the twenty seven to thirty dollars price range per volume. And and I'm really excited about it because I think this is going to be a basically this is going to cover everything there's about. 01:40:36 Speaker 2: Going So how how does how does this differ from the previous books you've written on this topic? So if I, like me, I own all of your books, I've read all of your books multiple times in what what should I expect this different or above and beyond from those previous editions. 01:40:54 Speaker 3: It's going to have more detail to give you an idea all of those other three books I've wrote, we're in the two hundred from twenty to two hundred and fifty page are you Each one of these volumes is going to be over three it's going to be three hundred fifty page. Yeah, so you're going to have basically one thousand pages versus any of those other books which were two hundred twenty to two hundred and fifty, much more detail. It's going to cover more ground, it's going to cover more different types of train features. It's going to have more information than the other ones had. They're definitely different than the other ones, far far more detail oriented. 01:41:31 Speaker 2: And what has been about ten years since your last book? So, so ten years of evolution for you as one hundred. 01:41:37 Speaker 3: Two brok fourteen years, fourteen. 01:41:39 Speaker 2: Years okay, yeah, so lots of lots of new things there, I'm sure too. 01:41:44 Speaker 3: I'm very very excited about it me too. I've worked on this for so many months. I didn't even put my boat. I live on a lake and I didn't even put my boats in the water because I didn't want them distracting me from writing. That's and I love. 01:42:01 Speaker 2: The fish, so dedication. 01:42:05 Speaker 3: Then it's I'll be glad when this is done and it's put to bed, and it's you just order it and it's done. 01:42:11 Speaker 2: So well, keep us, keep us posted. I'll be very excited when it comes out in August, We'll definitely tell everyone. I'm wired to hunt all about it. Anything else you want folks to know about anywhere that folks, I guess remind us of where people can go to connect with you, to see your content, to buy previous books. What's the best place to do that online? 01:42:35 Speaker 3: Well, my website. You can buy my books on my website. But I'll be honest with you that there's no reason to buy any of my previous books if you're going to buy this one. I mean, I think you'd be unless you wanted something for this year. If these aren't available in August and you wanted some for this year, you may want to. You know, I think eber Art Outdoors, not eber Art Outdoors, but Booning White Tails of Eberway would be the most current and updated book that's available at the moment. But you're not going to need that if you end up getting these other three. The downside is these other three books, you know, you have to kind of have all books. They have it all fit together. I did not want to do three volumes. It just happened that they were going to be too long to put into a single book. 01:43:20 Speaker 2: And can you imagine getting a book like six inches tall, though. 01:43:25 Speaker 3: I wouldn't want it because they wouldn't want to read it. Kind of cool. On the on the spine of the three books, I'm going to have a really cool photo where when three books are stacked next to each other on the shelf, it will form a photo of big a big book. But if you just had one or two, you're missing something very cool. It doesn't form the actual picture picture. 01:43:50 Speaker 2: Well, I'll be impatiently awaiting the uh this this three volume set. Congratulations on getting that done. That is no small achievement. I'm sure that was a tremendous amount of work. So so thank you for dedicating yourself to that. I know there's gonna be a lot of us that will benefit from it. And I've said it every time we've talked, but I'll just say it again. Thank you for the impact you made on me. John uh Oh, you welcome. I don't I don't know if i'd be here today if it weren't for those books I've read of yours and subsequent lessons I've learned from you. So so thank you for that. Thank you for your time today. 01:44:25 Speaker 3: More importantly, Mark, thank you, and may you know you may thank me for this as well, but we'd both like to educate hunters. You know. To me, I love educating hunters to make them better hunters put so much time and effort into hunting and spending so much money on it. And to me getting a kill story from somebody emailing me a kill story, it's so gratifying. Well, I did this and it worked, you know. Yeah, I just think it's awesome. Man. You you're doing the same thing. You're trying to educate hunters to be better, and what's your successful ball honor? Because you put so much time into it, it just gives your self gratification. I mean, it's just awesome. So thank you as well for your format. 01:45:12 Speaker 2: Well, it's been a lot of fun. This has been a lot of fun. I'm excited to see the rest of this series and hear the rest of folks. And as you did last time, you kicked it off really really well. John, So thank you, thank. 01:45:24 Speaker 3: You very much. Those were definitely unique questions. Thank you, Thank you for the opportunity. 01:45:30 Speaker 2: All right, and that is a wrap. Thank you for joining us. Hope you enjoyed that one as much as I did. We've got some great guests coming up. I will tease a couple here. Some of our future episodes in the Mindsets of white Tail Masters series will include episodes with Ben Rising, Andre Toquisto, I think we've got Dan Enfhalt coming up, and a number of others. I think you guys are really gonna enjoy these can't wait to share with you. One last reminder, go subscribe to the Meat Eater Clips YouTube channel so you can check out our new white Tail Edu video series. And with that, I'm gonna let you go. I appreciate you, hope you're having an awesome summer, and until next time, stay Wired to Hunt.