00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Podcast, your guide to the White Tail Woods, presented by First Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. 00:00:19 Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on the show, I am joined by big game hunter, outdoor adventure and filmmaker Donnie Vincent to discuss his personal journey to embrace an old school approach to hunting and what the rest of us might be able to learn and enjoy by embracing something similar. All right, welcome back to the Wired to Hunt Podcast, brought to you by First Light and their Camo for Conservation Initiative. Today we are going old school, and we're doing that in a couple different ways. And one I've got a guest today who I haven't had in the show in a number of years. Big mistake on my part. But back in I don't know, probably like twenty fifteen, sixteen seventeen, somewhere in that window which feels kind of like yesterday, but it's actually ten years ago now. Donnie was on the show in the past talking about some of his previous work, stuff like his films like The Rivers Divide, I think another one called Who We Are. He's been a tremendous filmmaker in the hunting and outdoor world. He has a wildlife biology background. He has traveled the world, been to some of the wildest places, has done some of the most wild, fantastic things you could ever imagine as a hunter an outdoor person. But he's also a terrific storyteller and I think a representative of our hunting community. And he's someone who's taking kind of a unique approach to doing this. While many folks, myself included at times, have leaned into all the time technology, all of the tools, all the latest greatest trends within the hunting world, Donnie's gone the other way. He has leaned away from that, and he's gone more and more quote unquote old school with his approach to hunting and his equipment and his his mindset and the trips he goes on. And all this came to mind to me and I was reminded of all this with the latest film he released. This film on the Donny Vincent YouTube channel is all about kind of an old school deer hunt and deer camp in Illinois that he did hunting from the ground without a blind camping out in a TP you know, a hot tent, hunting with a muzzleloader, not having a bunch of trail camp pictures of the bucks he's after, but just getting out there and seeing what's there, and that was. 00:02:44 Speaker 3: Refreshing and kind of inspiring. 00:02:47 Speaker 2: And many of you folks might have you know, heard my episodes we did earlier this year exploring ways to bring adventure back into our hunting seasons. I think that today's conversation is going to echo some of that and kind of harken back to some of these themes ways to get back to what hunting is really all about. I've felt the need personally to re explore some of these things for myself, and I have to believe that I'm not the only one who's feeling that a little bit of our modern hunting culture and technology and obsession over certain things and the social media effication of everything, it's changing the hunting experience in a way that I personally am not fully comfortable with. And I'm still working out what that means for how I hunt and how I do these things and how I talk about these things. I'm still personally figuring it out for myself, but I feel like Donnie's perspective and thoughts on this could be helpful to me as I try to sorrow that out, and I think for many of you maybe as well. So this conversation I thoroughly enjoyed it. Donnie has some opinions and perspectives on you know, the way to do things or the equipment. To you is that, of course, might be different than many other folks out there, and that's okay. We can all approach this in different ways. Some of us might want to go more old school, some of us new school. Some of us want to use certain technologies and tools, others maybe not to each their own right. But I think hearing Donnie's ideas on this front, if for no other reason, is going to be good food for thought. It's going to be something for all of us to chew on. Regardless of what decision or what way we decide to go about these things. I think thinking long and hard about how we do what we do is an important exercise. 00:04:31 Speaker 3: So that is the plan. 00:04:32 Speaker 2: Today We're going to old school talking about how to embrace this old school approach to deer hunting and bring a new mindset to our year as a hunter. And I think you'll I think you'll be inspired and refreshed by this. 00:04:45 Speaker 3: That said, very. 00:04:47 Speaker 2: Quickly, want to give you an update if you are listening to this when this comes out, which. 00:04:52 Speaker 3: Will be June. Oh jeez, bear with me here. 00:04:56 Speaker 2: June nineteenth, twenty twenty five is when this podcast will first to be airing. As of today, when I'm recording this, which is June twelfth, twenty twenty five, there is a really significant update that impacts wildlife and wild places and our public lands in particular, that I would be remiss if I didn't bring up here today for. 00:05:15 Speaker 3: All of you. This is really important. 00:05:17 Speaker 2: The budget bill that we discussed two weeks ago with myself and Tony. 00:05:23 Speaker 3: Hopefully you heard that episode. 00:05:24 Speaker 2: I brought the fact there's this whole budget reconciliation process going on, which is basically a fancy word for the House of Representatives and the Senate are. 00:05:33 Speaker 3: Debating a big, beautiful bill, as I. 00:05:34 Speaker 2: Call it, and it's got a whole lot of stuff in there that's not related to hunting and fishing, But what is are a bunch of things related to public lands that they're throwing in. And just yesterday, so June eleventh, the Senate version of the bill, the Energy and Natural Resources side, came out and in that is some pretty crazy stuff. We're in a big fuss a couple months ago about the fact that the House of Representatives included public land sales of more than five hundred thousand acres, and they were doing this in a way that went around the usual process for carefully disposing of maybe a few public land acres and making sure those funds go back to future public lands. That was a big problem. It was dangerous precedent. But hunters and anglers and outdoors people raise a huge fuss and we got it taken out of the bill. Well, now the Senate gets their take and they just released their language and it's much worse. The Senate version of this bill is now calling for the mandated sale of somewhere between two and three million acres of public lands. They're also calling for mandated drilling on the coastal plan of the Arctic National Wildliffe Refuge, which we talked about last time. They're also talking about bringing back this crazy proposed road called the Ambler Road that would push a two hundred mile industrial corridor through the wild wild landscape of the Southern Brooks Range in Alaska. 00:06:59 Speaker 3: A lot of stuff in there. 00:07:00 Speaker 2: There's just almost too much to even bring up right now, which is a damn shame that so much is being lost in the noise. But really, this two to three million acres of public lands being sold through this process without public comment and without us being able to really influence it is really dangerous. It's the most dangerous threat I have seen to public lands, probably since I've started paying attention to this stuff in the last fifteen years. They have the votes, they have the support, they have the pathway to making this happen unless there is an undeniable. 00:07:35 Speaker 3: Upwelling of outrage about this. 00:07:37 Speaker 2: So if you hunt or fish, or camp or climb or backpack or do anything on public lands across the nation, whether you live on the East coast or the West or in between, this is serious. 00:07:47 Speaker 3: This is the red alert. This is the Code red moment. This is it. 00:07:53 Speaker 2: This is the big one. This is something we really need to take seriously. So it's in the Senate right now. We need to all our senators. We need to give them a shout. We need to let them know that we aren't going to stand for our public lands being sold off for quick money grab. It's as simple as that. I'm going to give you a phone number right now, and I'm going to ask you, practically beg you to pick up your phones and give these folks a call, because our voices do still matter. We still can make a difference. If you call the capital switchboard and just let them know, hey, I'm looking for the senator for Michigan or the senators for Rhode Island or Montana or whatever, they will forward you to that office. 00:08:34 Speaker 3: The number is. 00:08:34 Speaker 2: This two O two two two four three one two one. I'll read that to you again in a second. But you just call that number. You tell them what state you live in. They will forward you to those offices and then you're gonna get a voicemail, or you're gonna get an intern or someone, and you just leave your message. It's very easy. Nobody will argue with you. There's nothing to be intimidated by. But let them know, Hey, I'm a hunter or I'm an angler, I live in this state. I care about these places, and we are not going to support the sale of millions of acres of our public lands. 00:09:07 Speaker 3: So please ask. 00:09:08 Speaker 2: Your senators to oppose the sale of these public lands, to pose the degradation of our wildlife and wild places that are so uniquely special to us who here in America and to those of us who hunt and fish and explore these places. 00:09:23 Speaker 3: This one is a doozy, and I hate to have to preach like this. 00:09:27 Speaker 2: I wish I could just talk about deer hunting, having fun, chasing big bucks, catching fish, enjoying ourselves out there. 00:09:33 Speaker 3: I hate that we have to talk about politics. 00:09:35 Speaker 2: But if we want to keep these opportunities in these places and these critters around, we have to engage. And this is one of those absolute most important moments in my lifetime ever to engage on this kind of stuff. And if you care about these things too, that's the case as well. So please give this number a call right now, pause this podcast. If you can make this phone call, it'll take two minutes. It's really easy. Call two zero two two two four three one two one. That's two o two two two four three to. 00:10:11 Speaker 3: One two one. 00:10:14 Speaker 2: If you're listening to this in the future and this is going on, hopefully we won this fight. Hopefully we still have our public land acres. Hopefully you can forgive me for taking a few minutes out of this podcast to talk about these things. 00:10:27 Speaker 3: But I care a whole hell of a lot about our wildlife and wild places. 00:10:30 Speaker 2: I know that many of you do two, so we got to stand up for them. So with that out of the way, thank you, and here's my conversation with Donnie Vincent. 00:10:45 Speaker 3: All right. 00:10:46 Speaker 2: Joining me now is the one and only Donnie Vincent. 00:10:50 Speaker 3: Welcome back, Donnie. 00:10:51 Speaker 4: How's it going. 00:10:52 Speaker 3: It's good, It's really good. 00:10:54 Speaker 2: I'm glad that we can be sitting here chatting again as we're just talking before recording. It's been a while, so so thanks for making this happen. 00:11:03 Speaker 4: Yeah, I appreciate the invitation. It's uh. I figured we jump on another one of these things sooner rather than later. But yeah, I appreciate the invite and look forward to it. 00:11:12 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's uh. 00:11:15 Speaker 2: I've always appreciated your hunting and outdoor philosophy. I think might be how I would summarize it. And we're in a moment right now and it's not particularly unique, I guess to right now, it just seems maybe amplified right now in which it feels like our hunting culture is is changing, and that might be for a lot of reasons, but but something feels different. And I saw a recent piece of content from you that seemed to echo a different way of going about things, which which caught my eye, which reminded me, hey, I gotta get downy back on here. I want to talk to him about this kind of stuff because I've been thinking about all this a lot and so and so where I want to start it is with a phrase, a little bit of something that you wrote about yourself a while back. I want to read it to you, and then I would love for you to kind of explain or expand on this and help us understand what you mean by it. All right, Okay, So the other day I read you described yourself as such. You said, I'm just a man who's obsessed with wild places and the way the old boys used to do it. So what do you mean by that? 00:12:26 Speaker 3: What do you mean? Why are you obsessed with how the old boys used to do it? What do you mean by that? And what's all that means for how you live your life? 00:12:34 Speaker 4: Well, the first part saying I'm obsessed with wild places is one of the things, one of the elements that I think there's a disconnect today is I truly do love going to the wilderness. I don't want to go to the wilderness and be there just long enough to shoot a boone Crockett caribou, or to shoot a boone and Crockett elk and to get my picture back so I can share it with people who back me, to fans, to other hunter's friends, family, I truly want to spend as much time as possible in the wilderness. I'm completely enveloped by the weather, by songbirds, by reptiles, by the game I'm hunting. It doesn't matter. I'm completely immerged when I'm out there. And so that's the first part of that. That's really what I meant is I love being out there. And the second part of it is I think there's not only a charm. You know, a lot of times I think we look at old photos and we get nostalgic, and it's very easy to get nostalgic and look at things and remember stories that you had with your dad or your buddies, and that emotion, that family emotion or friend's emotion starts to kind of take over the essence of the photo or the essence of the moment. But I think there's a certain charm with how hunters originally did it, actually chasing their food, actually chasings and skulls for a slightly different purpose of you know, still having them as ornaments and cabins and things like that, but that being a portion of the hunt, the photographs being a portion of the hunt. But how they used to kind of enter into these wild places without every technological advantage at their fingertips. They went into places that they didn't know what was on the other side of the mountain. They had maps, of course, and a lot of these places. They looked at where the stream beds were, where major river bottoms were, mountain tops and plateaus and things like that, where there's forested regions and grass regions. They looked at major demographics of ecologies and different habitats, but they didn't know what was out there. And I think that is incredibly charming. I think that is to actually go and look around and to have that in your mind of I actually have to go and scalt this place out. I actually have to go, and where is the best place for me to set up my tent? Are there trout in that stream that I can catch and have for dinner. Occasionally, Am I close to the elk? Are? They? Are? They miles away? And just I think that having that unknown and having that lack of technological advancement brings you so much closer to the hunt and so much closer to your quarry. Because back then, Mark, if you wanted to kill an elk or a caribou or a moose, you had to have an understanding, whether that came from people that had hunted one hundred years before you through wisdom or saying, hey, my dad always said, and I love these things. You know, like you hear different things about you know, the turkeys are gobbling, when the lilacs bloom. You hear all these different timing things that old timers tell you to kind of give you hints like hey, morell mushrooms are growing, when oak leaves are the size of squirrel ears. You know, you hear little things like this. And so unless you had some someone mentoring you, like you had to be as much of an expert as possible on these animals to go out and find them in experience and hunt them. And that's basically what I mean. 00:16:13 Speaker 3: Why is that? 00:16:15 Speaker 2: Why is that still important today? Why does that still hold an appeal today? Because some folks might hear all that and say, well, that sounds charming as you put it, but maybe not terribly effective. Given the fact that we've got this app and this tool and this other technology. Why is that still relevant now in your mind? 00:16:36 Speaker 4: For me, it's the closeness as I learn more about the area that I'm going to hunt, learn more about the animal that I'm going to hunt, and all the other elements that in body, at the weather weapons that I'm using, things like that gear, the I'm going to be bringing. It brings me closer to the experience. It envelopes me more into that predator and prey relationship. And it's just the experience that I value, the intrinsic value the experience that I value so much more. I'm not saying that using a certain app. I've used some of these things, and actually I used an app and in hunting the deer of the piece of the footage that we just released, the film that we just released, and I looked at kind of the lay of the land and how I had seen this buck before, I'd been in this river bottom before, and and I was just learning. I walked and looked at everything, looked at all the sign, looked at how the animals were moving around. But I also want to see kind of the lay of the land from bird's eye view, and so I didn't have a paper map of the area, so I used I used an app to do so, and so it you know, there's still some elements of it. But just the more you can immerse yourself for me, the more intrinsic, the more valuable the hunt is to me, and the more unknowns that exist, more rewarding they are as they present themselves, kind of like fishing a lake that's never been fished before. 00:18:05 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, What were the early inspirations for you? Like, you've described some things there that I'm curious where or how this kind of infiltrated your life in your subconscious I'm hearing echoes of the past and what you're describing, and I'm curious what those things were, whether it was stories or books or films, who or what kind of inserted this parasite into your system that's grown and grown. 00:18:33 Speaker 4: It was books, man, I mean it's it's been a few different things, but it was books. It's I talk about it. We have a new film series that we're coming out with. We'ren't a unique position at our company, Sigmanta, So we've been filming professionally since twenty eleven, and we've produced five films since twenty eleven, but we have filmed like twenty films since twenty eleven. So we are not launching a film series entitled Fantastic Places that are going to launch the other fifteen films that we never launched, from the very first one that is going to probably come out probably two to three weeks, we're going to launch that. It's an archery doll sheep hunt to all the other places that we have traveled. But in that kind of essence of laying out that new film series, I talk about my dad had this bookcase when I was little, and he had two things that really spoke to me. He had a walnut bookcase and he had a walnut gun case. And my dad's walnut gun case had those two sheets of glass where you know, I had that weird round and horizontal lock in the middle of my dad unlock. The lock would slide together and he could slide the glass either way and he would My dad hunted very rarely, and almost always when he did, it was for squirrels. Or he'd go out with a buddy of his and they'd go help a farmer with woodchucks or whatever it is. Because I grew up on the East Coast. But my dad's gun case and I'd look at the I'd look at the wood on the guns. I'd see how he would oil the guns. And when he'd open up the bottom drawer, it had his nineteen eleven service pistol for money he was in the navy, had his hunting knives, all these cool things that he had collected. And then my grandparents got him a book subscription to Outdoor Life, and so he had all these Outdoor Life books, not magazines, but books, and man I pored over those things, and I read how those guys would describe traveling. You know, they would take steam train to you know, they would take a ship and then a steam train, and then they would take horses and then they would or the horse would drop them off. They'd and they talked about the horses having flour in their boxes, penn air boxes, and they had flour and sugar and like they're making biscuits. And they would talk about, you know, the color of the doll sheep's horns, and it was just they were going into uncharted territory, and they're going for a big adventure, going for thirty forty five days. And it's just how they wrote about the animals, you know, they would describe everything from the sheep that they were hunting to the wolverine that they ran into along the way. And then he would, like Jack O'Connor, would very eloquently pen about the personality of a wolverine and what this particular wolverine looked like that he ran into, what his attitude was, where he was going, what he thought he was up to, and you do it so in such a such a beautiful fashion that it just was very inspiring. And the clothing they wore, how they described it just was, you know. And they were headhunters, like these guys were trophy hunters, like they ate the animals they killed. They talked often about the very fine meat, but they almost always described the very fine heads that they were after forty inch sheep, there after seventy inch bull moose, and it was all wrapped into one for them. It was the entire experience, the meat and the and the trophy. 00:22:01 Speaker 2: When you when you think back on those stories or even when you're talking about them right now, about how it used to be, does that create a sense of sadness in you now when you recognize the difference of them to today Or is it or is it inspiring when you hear about how it used to be and how that might inspire what you do today. Which of those possible emotional responses do you have when you look back and think about that. 00:22:31 Speaker 4: Both it's both. I'm terribly inspired by what happened back in the day, and you know, it inspires me to look at the areas that I'm going. Like years ago in two thousand and nine, I hunted. I was archery hunting stone sheep in British Columbia, and I was hunting with a native guide and he and I were talking about Jack O'Connor and his grandfather, I believe had one of his cousins or one of his grandfather's cousins had guided Jack O'Connor, and he was pointing to one of the mountains, like I'm sitting on the top of the mount with my bow. I just airwed a big pitch black. And Jack would always talk about these really dark rams. I just airwed this pitch black, really handsome stone sheep. And here I am sitting there and he's telling me about his grandfather guiding Jack O'Connor, and he's pointing to the mountain. He's like, not that peak, but the peak behind it, and I said, yeah, I see it. He's like Jack would hunt that mountain often, and I'm just like wow, you know, it's just incredible and not obviously things have change, but when you go to the North Country. It's one of the reasons people ask me all the time, like why don't you hunt elkmore? Why do you go hunt caribou and moosen? Because when I get above the Arctic Circle, or when I get near as far out as I can get in Alaska, it's like taking a step back in time. I'm flying in in a super cub that was built in the nineteen sixties or seventies. I'm you know, I'm rolling out a down sleeping bag that, while it is brand new, looks identical to the downsleeping bags that were made in fifty years ago, essentially, like they haven't changed all that much. And you know, my tent is a little bit more modern and Obviously my weapon is a lot more modern, but still it's very similar. So when I head to the North Country, that's what really kind of embodies me, and what distracts me or concerns me, is that the you know, either the social media aspect of it, or just how some younger people or I don't even want to put an age to it, but some you know, like you see some of the waterfall of pictures of guys saying piles for smiles, you know, and they're like, there's no one even describes their hunt anymore. Mark, they don't even tell you what the morning was like, the don't tell you. I recently saw a somebody sent me a post and it was about this person killed I don't know, it's a certain number of turkeys this year. And they said, I drove this far, flew this far. I hunt hunted Kansas for one hour, killed the bird, hunted South Dakota for one hour, killed the bird. And they had killed like, you know, ten turkeys in two weeks and two Grand slams, and like there wasn't one element about the adventure, not one element. It was literally a grocery list of you might as well have been looking at football stats of how many interceptions you threw, how many touchdowns you through and and it was it was, it was, it was. It was boasting. There wasn't anything about to do on the grass. And I'm listen, I met with a company yesterday and it was a very positive meeting, and the meeting went great, and it wasn't about it was on the A lot of people don't know. I have two branches of my business. One is a commercial side and then the other is is kind of our documentaries and storytelling. And this company was talking to me about the commercial side. We're going to be filming some work for them, but they, you know, to my face, they're like, we're we're not really interested in your in your long form storytelling, old school type hunt. We want to go to this new breath of fresh air, this fast paced movement, this kind of exciting hunting is cool. It's it's it's trendy, it's fashionable. Like that's the direction that they wanted to go and and and that's you know, that's their prerogative. But I just see these things and I just am concerned about the same wisdoms that I was telling you about a moment ago where somebody says, hey, the moose move into this valley about the time of the first snow. You know, you hear things like this. I'm just concerned that we're going to lose that type of wisdom, We're going to lose that type of woodsmanship. William Altman is our director of fatal at Sigmantha. He lives in Maine. He's a he's a bigfoot essentially, like the kid is in the woods twenty four hours a day, texting me deer tracks and texting me map images of like look at this swamp, look at this crossing, Like we text back and forth NonStop about look at this rub that I found. Look at this grouse on his drumming lot. I mean it is total immersion. And then and then to even move over to Cody dia Cuisto from Lone Wolf Gear, Like the guy owns a trail camera company. I use more of Cody's trail cameras than Cody does, and he owns the company. He doesn't hunt with a blind, he barely hunts with a tree stand, and when he does so, it's ten feet off the ground. He doesn't stop a deer, he doesn't use a peep site. Now he's using a recurve, but he'll go out. He'll text me in the morning, Mark and he's like, hey, what are you think of this track? He has no idea what this deer looks like. He goes, what do you think of this track? Am I wasting my time? Or is this a good one? I'm like, Cody, I think that's a good one. And then four o'clock in the afternoon, he'll text me a picture of his bloody arrow and I'll go what is he? And he goes, I don't know yet. I just saw a huge body, white til walking by. I came to full draw and I shot him. And then an hour after that he'll text me this picture of this seven and a half year old you know whatever. And he did it all off of nosing around and looking at tracks. I'll guarantee you Cody's experience is tenfold. The guy that got a cell cam picture, grab his bow that he can shoot ninety yards with ran and got in his box blind and then when that deer walked out at ninety yards, he made a good shot. But like I'll guarantee you, Cody is is h His experience is ten times with that gentleman, and he'll remember his experience and that deer a lot lifetime, whereas I fear that other one might just be a number and a dry a trip to the tax durmy shop. 00:29:07 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I don't. 00:29:11 Speaker 2: I've wrestled with all this myself in my own personal trajectory, you know, as I grew up hunting since I was three, so I've been doing my whole life. But in my you know, after I graduated college and I kind of had control of my own future, is when I really really doubled down on the white tail thing and really wanted to figure it out. And at that time, it was it all seems so so incredibly challenging and daunting that every little piece of technology that I could use, or every tool that might be available, is like, oh, I need to take advantage of every opportunity I have because this seems so damn hard. Sure I'll try this thing that eliminates my sense. Sure I'll try this camera that's going to help me see. I'm sure I will try this you know site that's going to help me see you know, get my pin on him. A little bit later in the evening. 00:29:56 Speaker 3: Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 00:29:58 Speaker 2: Yeah, But gradually, over time there's been this kind of crossing trajectory where I've seen my skill set grow and then at the same time see my need for those tools decline because of the compensation I have created within myself, within my own capabilities. 00:30:17 Speaker 3: And so I've found now that my innate. 00:30:25 Speaker 2: Tools that I bring to the table are just as effective maybe as the technology that you used to supplement me or be a crutch. 00:30:35 Speaker 3: And I'm realizing that you are. 00:30:36 Speaker 2: Losing, as you've said, you lose a little bit of the experience with every additional layer of technology put in between you and the animal. And so while I've used all these things, I've done all these things, every year, I'm finding myself wanting to simplify more and more and more, a little bit by little bit. And I can see where it's headed, Like I know where I'm headed, I can feel it. 00:30:56 Speaker 3: And I just don't know. 00:30:58 Speaker 2: I don't know how to make sense of this from like a community perspective, When you think about the entirety of our cutting community, I understand everyone's in a different place, right, We're all at a different point on that personal journey. We all have a different background and experience with hunting. For some people, their tradition is is sitting in a box line with Grandpa and watching the food plot. For some people it was you know, track and deer in the snow in northern Maine. And I understand everyone has that unique connection and it's valuable in its own way. But at the same time, I can't help but feel exactly as you are, and that we are losing something when we when we immerse ourselves so much in our phones or in the gizmo and gadget, and lose sight of what originally brought us here. When you look at this is a long winded way of getting to how you feel when you look at where we are as a community, when you look at all of this technology and all of this modern culture around hunting. Now, what specifically is most alarming? Is it how we're talking about things on social media? Is it the fact that you know, sometimes people are hunting and the ways you describe they've got the you know, the instant photo on their camera. They sneak out there with a high powered rifle and a night vision scope. Now and they can have an app that dials in their scope for them. They don't even even know how to handle windage they've got, you know, I mean every possible thing that the military has almost now it seems like we're using to try to kill a deer. What of all of this stands out to you is like top of the pile concerning that that maybe is a community we need to start thinking about, because there's a lot of examples we could dive into. 00:32:47 Speaker 3: What are those most glaring to you? 00:32:51 Speaker 4: I think, I mean, one of the things that one of the elements that I dislike the most is sell camps, right that if you're if we're like picking up product, That's one of the things that I dislike the most. I I I even I have a large lease that I hunt on with some dear friends of mine in Illinois, and I've been there for years and we have like I don't know, sixty cell cams on the place, and and not once ever and it drives my least partner's nuts. Not once ever have I logged in. You know, we have a log in and we all get to see all the photos. I've not once. I have no idea how to log in. I've not once logged in. And and occasionally I'll ask one of my least partners, like, hey, did you see have you seen that giant eight? Is he have he? Has he been coming walking down that stream? Have you seen him from Afar or whatever? And it'd be like He'll just like go into the app and you can look, yeah, look, look look yeah, like and I'm not going to And so my biggest concern is and I think like this goes towards every aspect of life, from learning how to drive a car, to hunting to painting to it doesn't matter two dentistry. Like I feel like the technology is is really pushing past the human element and in the hunting sense. The thing that I don't really care for is a lot of the young guys, a lot. I'm not not all, Like I've met some really young guys that really have a fever for they want to get out in the woods and explore. They want to be woodsman. They want to know how to build a shelter, how to build a fire, how to survive, and then how to add hunting to the element, fishing to the element, things like that. But it's it's what worries me is the community as a whole, how they talk the you know, every state making crossbows legal for archery season absolutely hate that drives the deer populations down, particularly you you add the crossbow to the cell camera, to either baits or foot plots, and then a box blind. I mean, you have zero disadvantages. You can shoot however far across bow can shoot. And you know, I moved from My dad used to be a rifle hunter and he did so very very sparingly, and he was not a good hunter too. I told my dad, I said, hey, can I get you to shoot a bow? And he said, ah, Man, I don't know, and I said can, I said, I want to show you what I see in September because when we go out on deer opener, as charming as that is, and you're from Michigan, right, Mark, Yeah, see that stuff? To me and I'm going to be a hypocrite here, it's charming as hell, like you sitting in a box blne a box line that looks like a fish house with your grandpa. Charming as hell. That fits for me sitting in the latest scent roof silent window five thousand dollars that that's where it goes like this to me and so like I live in Wisconsin right now, if I drive around during deer season, you should see some of the blinds and stuff that we see out at. Like there're guys like lazy boys, like yeah, Green Bay Packer painted stands. It's crazy anyway. But with my dad, I said, can I can I teach you how to shoot a ball? And he's like, I guess. So I got on a bow and he could shoot only forty pounds and he had to come to full draw and shoot like he couldn't hold it. He had to come to full draw, get the target. Shoot. He showed like fifteen eighteen yards. So anyway, I I borrowed a haybail blind when the original haybale blinds from double ble Archery, I borrowed one from a friend. I went put it out in the woods and I took my dad and I was sitting with him and we were over this. It was over like a little but not a food plot, but there was a clearing that would grow just regular like Kentucky bluegrass. But the deer would always feed on it. They'd come out of this swamp ticket they'd feed on and then they go out to a beanfield and I'll try to make this story really quick. But I was sitting with my dad and al asudden I saw antler tips coming through the woods and I said, hey, Dad, a buck is coming. It's like okay. And this buck came out and he was like one hundred and thirty five inches eight pointer, which is the biggest buck my dad has ever seen in his life. At this point he comes out, he's looking at me like his The deer is already at twenty yards right of this area of grasses, twenty yards away, and the buck comes out mark and he starts making us scrape. And I know you've seen this. I know most archers have. But he is hitting the ground so hard with this hoof, so dirt is flying like twenty feet and he's doing it with his left hoof, and then his licking branch is such that he has to stand on his hind feet and stick his nose way up there. He's like whatever, six feet seven feet off the ground and he's rubbing it. He drops down, he goes back to and I was washing the deer, but I'm watching my dad and his and the deer come starts walking right at us, and then at five yards he turns broadside my dad comes to full draw, but the deer doesn't stop walking. He just walked away. My dad lets down, which is totally cool. And I he just looked at me and he goes, how often do you see that? And I said, almost every day, man, when I'm bow hunting, I see that almost every day. And he was just flabbergasted. And and those experiences like that type of experiences. And then when I moved from that, when my dad finally couldn't draw his bonymore and I said, hey, okay, I'm going to get you a crossbow. He was sixty four years old or whatever. I got him a crossboard sixty two years old. That's what the crossbow is for to me, Like, that's what that is for, and like uh, and so just all the technological advancements like we obviously. I remember back in nineteen eighty six, I was in northern Maine with a buddy of mine's family. They were bear hunting, and we went up there just to ride Honda etc. Three wheelers in the woods wall My buddy's dad and his buddy bear hunted, and I remember that old psc or old bear compounds. They had the latest compounds on the market. They were so cool, like tree bark, and I remember they were so amped up because they had three brass pins and they had just added a light to those pins because they couldn't see the sides of the bears at night. They couldn't see their pins on the side of the bears. And you know, that's this kind of stuff that starts right that's where all this kind of But yeah, I just concerned that with a lot of the young people that hunting to them is inches of antler. It's a crossbow, it's a bait pile, it's a food plot, and it's dare I say this if you took a group of guys to five guys, you and your buddies, and you say, we're going to go on a hunt in Illinois, boot plots, box blinds, giant box everything like that. You guys are gonna hunt for a week. You're gonna go do that, and then we are going to go to a giant area of state land or a giant private property in wherever. In New York. We're gonna go to ten thousand acres in New York and you guys were gonna go and everyone's gonna have a tree stand on their back. Everyone's gonna have a different section of the property. In the morning, we're all gonna hands in the middle. Ready break, and we're all gonna go our separate directions. And then I'm gonna force you guys, you have to come home at night to a cabin and the five you have to sit down and tell me about your day. I bet if we did that, the New York one would be way better than the Illinois hunt, way better because you'd be exploring. You'd find crick crossings that you didn't even know existed. You'd set up your tree stand. Ol Suden, here comes a buck, You're like, holy man like, or here comes a little buck, and then Ol Suden, here comes a bigger buck, and like, I'm gonna shoot this dough. It's just it's just so much more rewarding. It's no different than like when I I'm moose hunting in Alaska this year, I have no idea what's where I'm I don't even know where I'm going yet, I don't know what I'm gonna see. I might see a seventy five inch bolt loose, I might not even see a moose. Like it's all adventure to me. But that's my biggest concern is cutting the corners, making the crossbows available to everyone, making sell cameras to everyone's just looking at their phones. Like, and I know you've experienced this, Like you go into hunting camps. Now we used to all sit around and tell stories of the hunts that we had done. Now we all sit on our phone. So like, I'll sit in a hunting camp. I looked around. There's ten guys in camp. Everyone is on their phone. They're not even talking. That's what's that's that's what's going away. 00:41:48 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been feeling all this myself. And and I did series on the podcast earlier this year exploring the idea of how to bring adventure back in to our hunts, because I think, especially in the white tail world, it's become so there's become this this formulaic approach that's become very popular. That's kind of everything we've been describing, right, It's like, all right, get your food plot, get your box blind, get your cell cam. 00:42:15 Speaker 3: Uh. And again I say all this as someone who has done all of this, so I've lived this. 00:42:20 Speaker 4: I have as well. 00:42:21 Speaker 2: Yeah, but but that you know, for all the reasons we've discussed that can grow stale, that can stagnate, that can you can lose something there, right, And and so I've I've been exploring personally, how do you, how do you how do I still be a deer hunter? How do I still be a white tail fanatic? But do it in unique different kinds of ways that that stoke a fire in me in a different kind of way. So I've talked to people about doing float trips for white tails. I've talked to people about doing backpacking trips for white tails. 00:42:52 Speaker 3: I've talked to people about. 00:42:53 Speaker 2: You know, doing canoe trips on big lake systems for white tails, different stuff like that. I'd love to hear what it's looked like for you, and I would love to hear about the Illinois example. But also if there's any other examples you have of ways that you have brought back adventure or this old school connection to our hunting past back into your white tail life, because I think there aren't a lot example of there are not many examples today of how that's done. Most of the examples for what deer hunting looks today is the antithesis of this. So could you paint me a picture of that or give me some examples of ways that you've done this. 00:43:32 Speaker 4: So the last couple of years, for instance, when I hunt in Illinois, Wisconsin, wherever it is that I'm hunting, I've been hunting with a longbow or a recurve, either one of those, mostly a longbow the last couple of years. But and for instance, I'll tell you kind of my system in Illinois is is it's we have one big farm and we have like five or six little farms, and so we almost always have some very large bucks on the place. And so last year we got hit with EHD pretty bad, so most of our bucks perished, but there's there was still some really nice deer left over. But I wait to see where these really really big deer are going to be living, and then I stay away from there because that's where everybody goes. That's where all my partners go and hunt, because they all want the two hundred inch deer, they want the one eighty one And I never shoot those deer because I don't I don't hunt those deer really, And so how I've done it for myself is I went back to scouting by being in the woods, by taking a look around, by walking down crick bottoms and being like, Okay, here is a crossing. Why are they crossing here? How are they using this? Where are scrapes in the woods, not just on the edges of food plots, but where are the scrapes in the woods that really no one else knows about? And how can I get to them by a canoe? We have a river system that runs for our whole property, so I've been looking at hunting by the boat or waiting across the river. I've been doing a lot of that stuff where I go in the morning, hence the video that we just published. I way across the river there to get in the back door on that book and using traditional archery equipment, which takes a lot of practice and a lot of understudy. With my dear friend Joel Turner from sean IQ, I shoot underneath him quite a bit. I learned from Tom clumb Out in Colorado kind of the mechanics for shooting the bow. And but that's an element. And then I I use trail cameras mark And what I do is I set trail cameras up in particular locations of where I really want to see kind of movements, how animals are running, but I set them up, and I generally set them up at the end of August, and that I won't check them like I haven't checked them this year yet. I in fact, I've been too busy. I need to go down to Illinois and pull all my cameras. I'll look at all the videos and then i'll use that information this year. I'll look at like, okay, bucks are actually crossing, because if I find a really cool crossing, I'll put a camera up there. And then I'll want to understand our mature deer using this or is this just a dough and fawn like highway and so, and then I'll generally separate myself from the gentleman that I hunt with. I'll separate myself and I'll go over to one of our smaller farms that they really see not a lot of value in the deer that are living there. But I'll find a six seven eight year old, you know, one hundred and forty in eight pointer and that looks like a side of beef walking through the woods, and I will love to hunt that deer. And so I'll do different things like that. But it's just like what you're saying going in with a stand on your back. And I've been doing a couple of things. I've been doing a fair bit of gilly suit hunting from the ground, ye going in and just like and sometimes I get just destroyed, right Like I'll find this little area where the deer are feeding on a locust tree, and I'll find this little spot that I'm gonna set up, and I set up and lo and behold, because I don't know this yet, Mark, Like all the does are coming out behind me, you know, and I have my wind blowing a certain direction, but all the dose are coming out behind me. That I get just blown out that night, and it makes me kind of laugh, like I didn't realize they were coming out right there or whatever. But I'll be doing stuff like that, or going in and hanging and hunting. And I always thought saddles. I always thought saddles were the dumbest thing in the world because of who was using them, like the people like, you know, kind of like it was very popular. And then I met some of the guys from Tethered and they said, let us send you one, and I said no, and they said let us send you one. I said, okay, let's set a watch. 00:47:50 Speaker 3: Out for those guys. They're very convincing. 00:47:52 Speaker 4: Yeah, very convincing. And then I used it, like I can't film with it. It doesn't work for our style of filming. But when I go out by myself without a camera, it's it was incredibly rewarding. The hell of a tool, hell of a tool, and like sneaking up into this little tree and sitting there, it just was so rewarding. Like if I were if I weren't filming, I would either hunt like Cody dia Cuisto. Because it's also very difficult for us to film, uh, with a with a secondary photographer. It's very difficult for us to film like ten feet off the ground. It's just very very difficult. Yeah, So like we generally have to be higher up or further back or whatever it is. Like we are very particular about where we pick our spots. You know, picking a big silver maple that has a lot of branches and you know we'll set up there. We can't just sneak in and set up you know, on a telephone poultry, it just doesn't work. But anyway, but adding elements like that, doing some some saddle hunting, doing some low low tree stand hunting, doing some and then finding these internal internal woods food plots, like finding the locust trees that they're feeding on, finding where the real good concentrations of acorns are, where these little oak flats are, just reading the sign, going in and and looking for mature, mature box and mature dose. That in the deer hunting element, that's what's really inspired me. And I've even thought about lately, both for ducks and deer. I'm going to the boundary waters and paddling in and like going on some of these islands. And then I there's a place I don't want to say where it is. There's a place in Minnesota that I've been wanting to hunt again. I don't want to say where it is, but I know very few people hunt this place. And it is freaking massive, and it's it's public land, and it's very difficult to get to, and it's very far away, and and but I know some gentlemen that have been around this area and they're like, man, there's very few deer there, but like we have seen some box there that are like will melt your freaking mind. And then so things like that, Just doing things like that, and I've recently been reading about finding lakes that have wild rice on them in the boundary water, so I can go up and duck hunt in the fall out of a canoe, which I think would be really sick. But that's what I'm doing. I'm and it doesn't take It's a mindset like you and I, because I think you would enjoy this. Like we could go set up a camp in Illinois, grab twenty two rifles and go out hunt fox squirrels and come back, skin them up quarterum, get them in the frying pan, and you'd have the time of year. It's no different than hunting moose in Alaska. It's the same thing if you have the same mindset. 00:50:58 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:50:58 Speaker 4: And the more difficult you make things, the more you pay attention, the more interesting they are. And I've said this many times on podcasts, but I took a photography class in college, and my very rarely when somebody says something to you that's all or nothing, is it true? Almost always when somebody says the one hundred percent or zero percent, all the time you can say no. But my professor said to me one time, the closer you get to something, the more interesting it becomes. And I thought, is that true? I start thinking about like a tree, Like you see a maple tree from far away, it's beautiful. But if you really start getting close to looking at all the bark and look at the venation and the leaves and look at how it grows, and you really understand the biology of sugar maple like acer sacaram Why is it acer? What does that mean? Why is it sacarum? Is that Latin for sugar? Like? Okay, so when is the sap running? When do people collect sup? And you become an expert on sugar maples. The next time you see a sugar mate, well you're gonna be like, I really appreciate that tree. And if you do the same thing with the white tail deer, when are they breeding? And why? Like I hear so much information out there that's wrong, like what are they doing? What? And even like I listened to your I don't listen to hunting podcasts until the fall. That's when I'll start when I'm road tripping and stuff. And I listened to your I loved your series. I wish you did more of it. Actually it's like seven days, oh, one week in November. One week in November. Yea, I love that stuff because I like chronological journal hunting. I don't care that you shot a one eighty could care less, don't care if it was on sugar beets, brassicas from this company or that company, don't care. But if you're like I went, you know, like this one time, you're like, I snuck into this spot. I thought it was a good spot. I heard of two bucks fighting, and then you realized it was the neighbor rattling his face off. Made me laugh. I was like, because that's a story that you didn't kill a deer there, but it's a story. And then and then you lament it on the one hundred and fifty inch buck that you missed and all this stuff, and like that you didn't you didn't kill a deer there, But it was better than a story than if you did, because you actually told the story. And I think about those things and that's what's interesting to me. And I hear this stuff also, Mark, I laugh about this all the time. Come November, all these podcasts are talking about the grind. How do you stay in a tree stand? What little tips and tricks? What snacks a you're gonna break? I sit? I like to hunt dark to dark. I like to get to a tree stand about an hour before shooting light, and I'll stay there until the gate is good if it's if it's right at the end of shooting light and nobody's around, I'll slip down and I'll get out. And I take great care in how I approach my tree stands. Very very often I'm going through a crick bottom or something along those natures to get into a tree stand. But I'll sit about twenty five days thirty days every year, dark to dark. And it's not a grind to me at all, from the from the moment I get to the tree stand to that when the sun goes down, it goes by in a flash. To me. My alarm goes off every day in November, my alarm goes off at three am. That's when I get up. I get up at three every single day. It's the same time. I don't want to rush in the morning. I get up, I eat breakfast, I drink a cup of coffee, I get my gear together and I head to the woods. I do the same thing every day. And when I sit there, when I'm not coming out, I'm not going in. Sometimes i'll come out if the wind's gonna be wrong and I'll go to another farm. Or sometimes I have a plan of like I'm gonna hunt this buck in the morning, and I'm gonna slip over and hunt this buck in the afternoon, things like that. But I'll literally just get down, go over and get back up, or get down and go whatever I'm doing. It's just it's just so rewarding to see the birds and to watch the geese fly over. And you know, I see the songbirds change throughout the fall as they're going through their migrations, and the deer change. And I know you appreciate some of this, but yeah, I just want to get as close as I possibly can to the natural world. And the older I get, the more I hunt, the more I realize I wanted to keep taking little mini steps back from from what is popular right now and what is technology right now. 00:55:16 Speaker 2: Yeah, speaking of those all day sits, I do a lot of that myself. And what I speaking of all these different little crutches or ways that you know, the outside world infiltrates your hunting experience. 00:55:31 Speaker 3: It's so easy today to be out. 00:55:33 Speaker 2: There and every time your quote unquote bored or things aren't happening. You reach for your phone, right, It's so easy to reach for that phone out of just instinct, and then before you know it, you're looking at some smut on your social media feed or whatever it is, and losing sight of everything around you. And what I've tried to do more often, I don't do this enough, but I want to continue to do more of this is you go out there and not bring the phone or bury the phone in the bottom of your backpack as just for emergencies, and otherwise, force yourself to immerse in the natural world around you. Force yourself to truly open your eyes in the ears and notice all the little things going on. And the times I have done that are the absolute best hunts. The most rejuvenating, refreshing, surprising hunts are when you embrace the stillness, embrace the lack of action, embrace the embrace what you might originally call boredom, but if you kind of wallow on it enough, it ends up being fascinating. Like you talked about, when you go deep into something, you realize there's so much more there, There's so much more intricacy. 00:56:48 Speaker 3: You know, this is a total tangent. But another way I do. 00:56:52 Speaker 2: This is you know, you talked about really focusing in on something specific like a maple tree, And I think that by understanding the context of a place or a species, you see it more closely too, and so not you know, for example, I'm going to and I think you've been here before. I'm going to the Arctic National Wilife Refuge in three days, and I'm just reading. I'm very excited. 00:57:22 Speaker 3: I've just been reading every little bit. 00:57:24 Speaker 2: Of history and natural history and everything about this place because I know that when I go there, I know it would be. 00:57:32 Speaker 3: Incredible either way. 00:57:33 Speaker 2: But if I were to go there with this context and with this history and with this understanding, I think it will be as I've experienced other places, and that it feels like I go from looking at the world through a fuzzy pair of sunglasses to instead putting on a picture perfectly clear, terrific prescription set of eyeglasses, and all of a sudden, the world is bright and clear and you can see and recognize, in a appreciate so much more around you. And I think you can do that in one way being developed that context, learn, learn, learn, And then the other is to simply open our eyes and not be distracted by the junk in our pocket or whatever it might be. 00:58:12 Speaker 4: Absolutely, when I was younger, I attempted to bring a book to the tree stand, and two things were glaringly obvious to me. One, I can't believe how loud it is to turn a page when you're paying it to out was just like holy cow. And Two, I just kept reading the same sentence over and over again because I read the sentence and then I lift my head up and look around, and so to your point, like when you know, like I go to Alaska, right, I get asked a lot, why don't you elk hunt? Well, I love elk they are and I've camped in places where elk live and I've listened to them bugle all night long, and it is as I mean, I remember the first time I saw a box canyon. And I walked up into this mountain valley in Nevada, and I'd heard the term box canyon before, but I walked up in there and I heard these bolt bugling, and I was like, oh, this is a box canyon. It's a canyon. It's literally in the shape of a box, like and I remember that popping in my head, like, oh, this is really cool, and it looked like I took a step back time because I hiked so far into hunting's elf. But that's why I go to Alaska. That's literally when I hunt Elk, I see people, I see side by sides. I see ten guys standing around with ten spotting scopes on tripods. I see all the hunting gear that I don't want to see. I see all the outfits that I don't want to see. I see it looks like they fell out of a catalog, each guy. And when I go to Alaska, the pilot that drops me off doesn't give two rats ass about the hunting industry. He doesn't care who's popular and who's not, who has this many likes in this many followers. He doesn't care who was on Joe Rogan could care or less. He is a pilot in a very dangerous place, and he lives there because he's a man that has enveloped himself, surrounds himself with adventure. And he's going to drop me off from the wildest freaking place he can think of, where he may have saw moose last year, or he may not have ever seen a moose, but he thinks it's a good place to land his airplane. And I'm the type of guy to take a look around, and I love that. And when we like, we can't use our phones up there right, the phones, there's there's nothing to them. And we have our in reaches, which will occasionally use for safety or even just to communicate at home. But when you can be up there, and I've sat there on the hillside before, Mark, I hunted moose in Alaska three years ago. It hunted. I think it ended up being the wettest year and recorded history in Alaska. It rained. I was there for seventeen days. It rained dark to dark for all seventeen days, probably about five hours it didn't rain. Other than that it was downpouring, honest, because there was a typhoon that was coming in. It was extreme. What we saw. One legal bull moose. I definitely could have killed it, but I passed it because I thought it was probably about a sixty inch bull. But it looked youngish to me, so I was like, I'm not going to shoot it. But to your point, that boredom, that leaving your phone tucked away, we ended up laying there, sitting there whatever. And he talked like, you know, I'd sit there. If you were there with me, I'd be like, you know, tell me, tell me about the best hunt you've ever had with your dad, or tell me. And I would literally start asking you questions that I may have already known, Like I might say, if we're sitting there, I might say, like, Mark, tell me why did you start wired to hunt? Like what what were you trying to do? And then like what was your first hunting memory. We'd start getting to know each other for the renversations, and then we'd have like, you know, you've met William Altman, right, yeah, So William would lay there and be like I tell this to people and they just laugh. But hit later there and be like, Okay, no bullshit, don't come up with some fake answer. How many donuts could you eat right now? Don't give me some stupid one hundred donuts? Like how many donuts could you eat right now? And I'd be and I'd sit there and be like, I think I could eat eleven donuts. He'd be like, oh shit, you cannot eat eleven, you know, like, and people wonder and like he really likes goat cheese, so he started talking about goat cheese and like, oh, we just but you start having these conversations. Right, We've sat there and we've been trapped in a tent for five days, where we started reading all the packages and finding typos and the ingredients and all this different stuff. Like people think that you're lost, but I think that we're actually discovering. And do you remember when Suckerberg started talking about the metaverse. Yeah, and you were going to start having You're going to meet be able to move to a house in the metaverse and go shopping in the metaverse, and meet a girl in the metaverse and have relations in the metaverse. I actually got really excited about that because I was hoping, and I'm sure it maybe will trend that direction, but I was hoping about sixty or seventy percent of the world's population was going to move into the metaverse and just stay in their houses, stay on their computers, become fat slobs, and just degrade into what it is to be a giant blob of cells that lives in their computer screen, and that they were going to leave the woods to me. And I still kind of have that hope for humanity, believe it or not, Like I hope that a certain subset of people go and pour their noses into their phones and into their computers so that I have a little bit more room to rome outside. 01:03:55 Speaker 3: Certainly seems like it's happening for a lot. 01:03:58 Speaker 4: It does. Yeah, yeah, but it's it's yeah. It's just that everyone has their own way of doing things and I don't. And I mean this, I don't want to denounce anybody else's way of doing things. But there is a right, and there is a wrong, and there is a way of being present. And my only criticism is if I could show you a slower, more in depth way and you have a better time in doing it, doesn't that maybe lend itself to being a better way of doing it. 01:04:33 Speaker 3: It's hard to argue. 01:04:36 Speaker 2: One element of this that I've noticed you lean into even on your white tail hunts, would be what happens after the hunt I've seen like in your recent Illinois film, Pretty sure you were doing this in the River's Divide, but like camping out, like I have a hot tent, and even though you're in Illinois a stent, you couldn't be too far from a road there, you're still camping out on a tent, having it as wild of an experience as you can have in a place like that, can you can you just tell me a little bit more about why that's been important for you, how you've gone about that, what's the setup you'd like to use, Because I think a lot of people look at this and think, well, Okay, if I'm in Alaska or Montana, sure I'll do some big wild camp out. But I'm in Michigan, or I'm in Illinois, or I'm in Mississippi, you can't do that. 01:05:25 Speaker 3: But that's not true, is it. 01:05:27 Speaker 4: No, that's not true. And originally we started doing it because it filmed better, right we we and we weren't going out to look, this wasn't fashion. We weren't going out to film Batman here. We weren't. We didn't have a set. But we just thought, we will be more present, we will be better on camera. We will be dirtier, more beat up, more aware if we're if we're camping, if we're immersed in the you know. And several years ago, I drew I drew a tag in Iowa and it just so happened during the rock that year that it was like ten degrees and William and I were camping in Iowa. You know, Ben Harshein yep. So we were camping on Ben let us use his lease well from drawing my tagging. So we were camping on Ben Harshein's lease. And I was texting Mark Durry and I was sending him pictures of my downsleep bag was frozen in the morning, like covered in frost. Mike were in a we're in a seek outside tepee an hate man TP with a woodstove and the TP and Marcus texting me back. He's like, man, I have a house that's not too far from there. Just go stay in that house. And then he's like, you know, he's trying to find me places to stay with buddies his or or whatever. And I was like, no, it's not it's not the point in Illinois, and and and then one of the times we did this, and you'll see this coming out. You and I have spoken about the River's divide in the past. You've watched the rivers divide. Well, there's a River's divide two coming out, like almost the exact same story. Cool, that's gonna come out. But this deer I arrowed him. It was like thirty twenty five or thirty below zero. I arrowed this deer, he's six and a half years old, and I hit him low in the brisket and it's really funny. William Altman and I were sitting up in the tree standing. We're like, you know, Williams like, did you heart punch him? I was like, I don't know. I felt It's like a thirty five yard show. I'm like he felt really good. We're talking and then all of a sudden he comes running by with blood dripping out of him, dogging adult. We're like, nope, did not heart punch him. He is doing just fine, and if we watched him anyway, But I ended up hunting that deer for three years and killing that deer. If you recall the River's divide where Steve was standing when I killed him, this deer by the time I killed him would be nose and nose with Steve if you superimposed the two videos, which was funny because this deer lived like three miles from Steve and was rarely down by where Anyway. I tell you this because William and I camped that whole time, and there's a house that's available to us right there at the property, pot showers and everything. But we camp for like seventeen days in like negative thirty degrees, and you know, camping in that temperature is hard, like everything's frozen. You have to get up in the morning it's thirty blowszero in your tepee before you get a fire going. But it is so much more rewarding to come home, paying your bow up, take your backpack off. You know, your your senter go, you're breaking kindling, you're getting it in the We had this little titanium stove. You're getting in the stove, lighting it and you hear the aluminum or the titanium on the stove where we use this stove from a company called winter Well, they're really good. It just starts heating up and popping and then you know, like the stove pike gets red hot, the box gets red hot, and we're just you know. The beautiful thing about that is when we're in north to go to hunting, there there's a lot of firewood, and places that we've been in Alaska moose hunting, there's a lot of firewood. You will come to understand comfort as a as a realm of the work that you have to do to get it. And so like when you camp in a place where it is very difficult to get clean drinking water. You have to go very, very far. The next time you camp in an area where there's a crystal clear stream five yards from your tent, you will embody that so much more. When you camp in a place where you have to walk far and wide to get any sort of firewood if you're going to have a fire, the next time you camp in an area where there's copious firewood, you will feel that that reward. You will feel that, like man alive. We have so much firewood. And several years ago, we were camping in Alaska and there's we were camping on this spruce flat and all the spruce trees, like their bottom ten branches were all dead because they're all grown together. So the trees are doing beautifully, but the bottoms were and we could just go over there with a little saw and knock it off and have like blazing fires. And it was an endless amount of fire works. Like I'll never forget that, you know. I ran out of water one time, Me and the whole crew ran out of water one time chasing this mountain caribou in the Northwest Territories, and we're so dry, like you couldn't even lick your lips because your tongue would stick to it like you could peel your tongue off. One of the guys that was working for me, Chris Kirkby, is a brilliant man. He's such a wonderful guy. He doesn't work for us anymore. He's such an awesome dude. He peed in his water bottle because he thought he was gonna have to drink his own pea later on that day, and he became so dehydrated that he couldn't walk. He kept he basically fell down the mountain. For us to get down, I carried his backpack, so I double backpacks on. William carried all of his camera gear and he just kind of like figures his way down. But when we got to the bottom of the hill, we were going through the forest and mark we came upout this little It was a spring coming up out of the ground. It was only about two or three inches deep as crystal clear, ice cold. The bottom was muddy, so we to be very careful. We sat, we saw this thing, and the three of us sat there and we'd fill up a bottle a little bit, and we let Chris drink it down and then it was, to this day, probably the most rewarding thing I've ever drank or eaten in my entire life. And so when we're camping, when we have moments like that, if I come over to your house tonight and your wife makes homemade pizza and you and I sit and have homemade pizza, like that's not lost on me. Man. Like I've been hungry, really hungry, and I've served long, far and wide for drinking water and for firewood and for animals, and I've walked into all my toenails have fallen off, and I've I've been so cold and so beaten. I've been so cold before that, I was certain that I wasn't going to live this night. And I sat down and talked to my good friend Frank Harris. I was like, hey, man, I think we're gonna lose our lives tonight. I just want to tell you like I love you, like I don't regret a thing that we've done today. Like we're very far from our tent. It's raining, it's hailing. We're in the Chucatch Mountains of Alaska. I couldn't feel my legs anymore. He couldn't feel his legs. The only thing that I could feel, and I'm not trying to be gross here, I could feel water dripping off of my testicles. That's the only thing that I could feel was when water would run down my back, I could feel it dripping off my testicles. And like we were going to lose our lives that night. And we made a grave mistake, a terrible mistake of we hiked a very very long way from camp without rein gear and we got caught in a blizzard slash rain. And then Frank said to me like, hey, you see that. He was a super tough, macho guy. And he's like, you see that rock up there And I said yeah, and he's like, I bet you can't walk to that rock. And we did that for about eleven miles until we got to our tent and we actually made it that night. So these experiences that I've had, I've been in the Bearing Sea, where I thought during the Winds of Adac, the film that we did for Benelling Colin, like William Oltman, myself another gentleman, and then the two captains on the boat, I I felt you it was about fifty to fifty that we are all going to lose our lives that night in a storm. And so I hate to say it like this, but that's why I camp. Because when you camp, when you listen to you know, in that piece that we filmed, the coyotes were howling all around us that night, Like you can't experience that in a house, Like that's not gonna work. And then hanging the deer in that in that big silver maple and having a fire at night cooking the deer like that is just cool. It's just the right way. Yeah. 01:14:43 Speaker 2: Yeah, So you've mentioned a handful of different ways that we could try to go about things in a different way. We've talked about camping out. We've talked about, you know, using more primitive weapon. We've talked about maybe stepping away from from our cameras to some degree, at least changing a little bit there. We've talked about, you know, maybe setting aside our phone limiting distractions. Are there any other really transformative ways that you're putting this into action in your own life with your hunts? Are there any other parts of this that other folks could consider, Like, I gotta believe this is going to be resonating to a lot of folks. These types of conversations keep popping up, but people always like, well, how what, what was it? 01:15:32 Speaker 3: What does it take? 01:15:33 Speaker 2: What are there any other things that you would, you know, want someone to take away from this conversation in ways that they can reconnect with with the way the old boys did it a little bit more. 01:15:43 Speaker 4: I'll say two things. One thing, I want to take a little dive back into gear because this was something that occurred to me last year. I didn't realize it until I did it, But so I met some engineers from a company called Q It's a rifle company out in New Hampshire. I don't know if you saw the photos from my caribou hunt last year Mark in Alaska, but I'd killed my caribou with this very technological looking rifle. Had a silencer. I'd never shot a rifle of silence around it before, had a rail like you would see on a military gun, ar platform, foldable stock. Not anything I would ever shoot, like the opposite of what I enjoy shooting. But I met these engineers at Q and they invited me out to come out to New Hampshire where their companies and build to a gun build. I was like, oh yeah, okay, I'll do that. It's kind of cool. So I went out there and built this gun. I tell you all this because I ended up taking that gun to Alaska, and for no other reason than they kind of dared me too, because I sat in their offices and talked to their engineers and met their owner and met their CEO and the presidents, and and I was like, this is this gun isn't for me, this is this is not the type weapon for me. I ended up taking this technologically advanced gun and on this hunt, and I started to realize all these little intrinsic pieces, like how the gun carried when I was in really serious bear country, how I was able to go through the alders with this AR platform. It was apparent to me because I've never served in the military, Its apparent to me now why our soldiers shoot an AR platform, both for the grip, safety, all this stuff. When I shot my caribou, I took the longest shot I've ever taken on my life at an animals three hundred and forty yards, and I stuffed the magazine while into my backpack, and it was way more solid than just resting my rifle on the backpack. These are little things that really spoke to me. But in doing this, I kept looking at this rifle and thinking, this isn't me at all, but I very much enjoyed hunting with this rifle, and in that this is silly to even admit this, but in that I realized, it's not what you're hunting necessarily, it's how you're hunting. And so if you you know, we all choose different weapons, Like I shot that deer with the muzzloorder. There are a lot of very fancy muzzlelolders out there right now that company Woodman Arms or Woodman Arms out of I think they're out of New Hampshire. To me, they build the most incredible muzzle around the market, this little petite thing that's for carrying and for shooting. They shoot beautifully, they're super accurate, they look like they're built in nineteen seventy five, and they're just absolutely stunning. And to me, when I'm holding that gun, it's really charming and really rewarding and looks the part. But then I also ran into that when I was holding this queue when I was in Alaska, and I realized, like, this is a really cool platform hunt with as well for different reasons, and so I think people don't put enough stock in their mindset. Much like I used to say, to experience fantastic things, you had to go to fantastic places. Well, there's people out there that are like, I can't go to the Arctic Circle, and they're wrong. They can, but they're like, I can't go to the Artic Circle. It's expensive and it's not actually as expensive as they think, but like it's scary, and it is scary. The weather will kill you, the bears will kill you, the airplane crashes will kill you. But you know, they can go do these adventures. And so one of the things that I realized is you don't have to go to the Arctic Circle to hunt. Like you're in the Arctic Circle. You and I, through mindset and through adventure, could go camping in Illinois and go or Iowa or Wisconsin and go on a squirrel hunt. We could go on an October squirrel hunt and still appreciate the leaves, changing still appreciate seeing a big, plump, heavy hooked buck slipping through the trees while we're squirrel hunting and shooting some squirrels and you know, and picking some berries and going back to the camp and having a fantastic dinner and having a very rewarding adventure hunt kind of a big adventure hunt in somebody's proverbial backyard. So I think mindset is something that's very, very important. But beyond that, I just think that if people go to go do things that they've never done before. Go go on a go on a wilderness hunt for elk or moose or caribou, or go on a wilderness white til deer hunt, or get out, go to someplace that is just a little bit further out, go camping, don't don't put much stock in the size of the antlers, or you know, go on a doll hunt, even even get together with your bodies and go dough hunting and remove the remove the stress of the antlers, and say, hey, we're gonna go onto this. We're gonna go on the state land. We're each gonna we're gonna draw an area out of the hat, and whatever you deal with you have to deal with. If you drew the area where there's a bunch of duck hunters, you have to deal with the duck hunters, or you have to canoe it or whatever and just get back to either hunting by yourself or hunting with your body's hunting with your family and kind of like taking a step back man and looking at you know. We talked about the gear, We talked about the the end result, like the size of the animals, but really like, uh, what about the story? What happened? Like what what what went down? And like I shot this caribou last year. It's probably the biggest cariboo I've ever shot in my life. And I've probably shot I don't know, eight to ten cariboo. It's probably the biggest caribou body I've ever shot my life. The bowl was very, very old, just basically had hockey sticks or antlers, but he had really big cool fronts. But like when I got back into Camp Main camp, like a couple of the guys had shot like Boone and Crockett bulls, and like when I brought my bull on, they were kind of like whoa, Like you shot that, and like you know, but you know you didn't want to hold out for a big Well, first of all, I shot I shot this ball on the last day. I hiked my face off looking for I'm mature bull that had a really big, handsome rack and was heavy, hooked with lots of good meat. I've got four pounds of hamburger thowing right now on the counter from him, and which is fantastic. Yeah, it's really good. But that is like that bull was running an entire harem of cows. He had pushed them to the top. He was in cheap country. He pushed him to the tippity top of his mount We hiked up there and I killed him, and it was just so amazing. And I lost my dad last year. I lost my dad in March last year. And so I was sitting at this bull. I appreciate that, but I'll sit at this bowl like like I just started, like, you know, tearing up, and I was thinking about my dad, and it was just like, yeah, it wasn't the biggest antler bowl in the world. It probably was the biggest bodied bull I ever shot. But I left there like unbelievably fulfilled and unbelievably happy. And even if I didn't kill that bull, I would have left there with a heart. That was because I took my little one person hill aberg tents camped at a mountain pass. I was camped right next to this these legacy grizzly bear brown bear tracks where they step into the same footprint. 01:23:15 Speaker 2: I saw those last year on Admiralty Islands, a very different place, but yes, I've seen it. 01:23:19 Speaker 4: Does that not freak you out? 01:23:21 Speaker 3: Amazing? 01:23:22 Speaker 4: Like they're right right next to my tent and it was cool. It's like, right next to my tent, there's a caribou one that they've been walking in for a million years, and here's the brown bear one. Like I can literally see front pad, backpad, front pad, backpad, and I can even see like I could go up to these rock outcroppings where the snow cross over and I know they dend there, and I'll go up there and look and like there's like I can literally see somebody dens there every year and I can see their footprints. They've been doing it for ten thousand years. Man, And like, yeah, whether I killed the bowl or not, I'm looking at all this stuff. I'm washing the weather, I'm watching my buddy come in and land is supercouver where he probably shouldn't be landing a super cop picking me up and dropping off the end of them mout like it was just that's why I hunt man, that that I want to share it with you. That's My biggest bane mark is I want to share with you. I want to share it with the guy down the street. I like, if I was a billionaire, I would do exactly what I'm doing for work right now. It's just that I would take people with me. 01:24:22 Speaker 3: Yeah. 01:24:23 Speaker 4: Yeah, I share it because that, I think is one of the next levels. It's mentoring somebody. Like I didn't kill a turkey this year. I just brought kids turkey hunting, and uh man, that was awesome, so awesome. 01:24:37 Speaker 3: That's so cool. 01:24:39 Speaker 2: I think like this is a perfect place to kind of tie a bow on things. And I love this kind of There's there's a number of different ways of doing this, but everything drills down to reconnecting more closely with the place, with the people, with the animal, with the experience. And you can do that vie removing all these different barriers, whether that be technology, whether that be where you stay, whether that be mindset. But there's you know this, this is this is an opportunity available to anyone, whether you can travel to a fantastic place or not, whether you have a lot of money or not. I think that's a really important thing to remember. 01:25:18 Speaker 4: That's right. 01:25:19 Speaker 2: Yeah, I've got I've got just a couple of really quick questions for you. 01:25:23 Speaker 3: Uh. 01:25:24 Speaker 2: Number one, you talked early on in the very beginning about some of these books that inspired you. Do you remember the name of any of these books or a book that would be one you'd recommend us seek out and try to find for some of this kind of wilderness old school inspiration to any standout still in your memory? 01:25:45 Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I have. That's really funny. The most inspiring book I have is literally right behind me, and I've kept it all these years. It's called The Big Game Animals of North America by Jack O'Connor, and it just was in each chapter as a painting. So it opens up with a particular animal, then as a painting of the animal, and then he goes on to tell you the story of hunting the animals, and then after the hunt he describes the natural history. And so I don't even know if that's why I became a biologist. I don't even know if that's why the biology of the animal is so important to me. But that's how that book is laid out, and I absolutely love it. Most of Jack O'Connor's books, Sheep and Sheep, Hunting, Desert Sheep, Animals of the Desert. All those books are very inspiring to me. And you and I have talked about this before. I think before any hunter passes their hunter safety they should have to read Elder Leopold San County Almanac, Like that should be a prerequisite. I just had a friend read it, a young man, he's probably twenty five, twenty eight. He lives in South Dakota. He's a rancher in South Dakota. He read it and he's like, I'm totally changing how I set up my properties. He's going away from food plots and going to not going away from food plots. He's setting up more natural food areas. He's setting up he's doing more grasses, he's doing more edge habitat, he's doing things for wildlife, Yes, more things for wildlife. And so Elder Leopold books, Jack O'Connor's books, I think that stuff is And then you know, even the old school. Have you seen the new field and streams that are coming out? Yeah, they're great, Yeah, really well at don and so like anytime you can jump on those old pens and have an understanding of how those guys saw wild places, I think is very popular. 01:27:35 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more with you on that stuff. Okay, finally, can you give us the scoop on on what's to come with your films and your content? Where can people see what you have out there already? How can they connect with you and make sure they can see what's coming. 01:27:53 Speaker 4: So search for Donnie Vincent on YouTube, subscribe and follow us there. That's where new work is going to be coming out. We have two film series that we're launching. Three film series. Actually, one is Unfiltered, which you just saw on an episode of the on the Illinois Buzzlutterbuck. The next one is Fantastic Places, basically fifteen to eighteen films that we have done that we have filmed over the last fourteen years. They're already filmed, they're already in the can. We're editing and editing them now. The first episode, which is an archery dollshy Punt, is coming out probably in two weeks. It's probably thirty five minutes long something like that, which is really fun. I sit down in this cabin and I kind of tell the story. If you've ever seen like True Detective with Matthew McConaughey, I sit down and kind of retell the story in a chair, and then we caught the old footage that was shot back then and then old interviews back then. That's fantastic places. And then we have basically what is going to be our new film series, which is just things that are currently happening and so we're putting together. If you've watched our film The Other Side, which was a film about multi will bear hunts, uh, this is going to kind of be like the Other Side part too, but it's going to be all about Cariboo and different character hunts and the backbone of it. It's going to be my latest my last two caribou hunts in Alaska that I've done in the Alaska Peninsula, but it's going to be Embody Mount Cariboo, Woodland Cariboo, Caribou in the Arctic Circle and all the different places that I've that I've wanted character. So wow, Yeah, there's gonna be a lot of work coming out, and yeah, there's there's going to be quite a we we've taken quite a hiatus from putting films together because our commercial business gets quite busy. But somehow we're finding by managing our time a little bit more efficiently. We're finding time to do both. 01:29:41 Speaker 2: That's great, That's that's exciting. I can't wait to see all that. I I appreciate you, know everything you've done over the years down and you've been saying. A phenomenal storyteller and and inspiration. 01:29:53 Speaker 4: And and and a role model. 01:29:56 Speaker 2: I think of sort for folks as as a way of doing this a little bit differently than maybe what we'll see everywhere else. So thank you, thank you for that, and thanks for this conversation. 01:30:06 Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks Mark, I appreciate it. And hopefully you don't wait so long to do the next one. 01:30:11 Speaker 3: I don't plan on it right on. 01:30:13 Speaker 4: Thanks man, all right, and that's going to. 01:30:18 Speaker 3: Wrap it up for us today. Thank you for joining me. 01:30:21 Speaker 2: I appreciate you being here for this conversation. And until next time, stay wired to hunt.