Ep. 636: Foundations - What You Won't Learn From Hunting Content

why that matters. We are right here in the middle of the worst month of the year, at least in my opinion. You might want to debate me on that, but honestly, that would be embarrassing for you, because March is obviously the suckiest, stupidest month there is to be a white tail hunter in a lot of places. That probably holds true even if you are a white tail hunter. But if you aren't, you're in the wrong neighborhood with

this podcast. Anyway. This is the month when seasonal depression really opens up some dark doors between the old ears and can cause us to try to live vicariously through hunting content, to feel that old spark of real hunting. It's a poor substitute, I know, but it's worth a try. It's also worth understanding that all of the things you're missing if you do spend some time reading articles or watching YouTube videos and yes, even listening to hunting podcasts.

My wife is always trying to get me to work more jobs. It's annoying, especially considering I already have a full time job. Chowie's tells me to find something fun and maybe pick up some evening shifts or something, which feels a lot like she's trying to get rid of me. And one job that she encourages me to pick up is as a personal trainer at the gym. Now, I

know what you're thinking. That makes total sense. You think, well, Tony is insanely fit, he has muscles for days, he can outrun a cheetah even if he pulls a hammy, and he's one of the most helpful guys in the hunting industry. And I get it, and I do appreciate all those compliments I just made up about myself. The truth is, I wouldn't hate doing it. I love seeing people who decide they want to own their future by

starting to exercise. It's honestly one of my favorite things about going and working out, besides the far more selfish reason that it helps keep the old demons locked up in the basement when it has been winner for four months and the deer season is still half a year away. But the truth is, I happen to know quite a few of the personal trainers at my gym, mostly because they are the people I see nearly every day. They are all fit as you can imagine, and they handle

people really well. They are brought into someone's life when that person is at a vulnerable point. But that makes it a little bit of a tricky situation though. So when someone says I need to get my ass moving for whatever reason, that's kind of like admitting they haven't taken care of themselves, usually for years. It's not really something to be proud of, but taking some initiative over it is. So these personal trainers, they work like this.

People set up a free consultation, usually for like an hour, and the goal is to decide if signing up for more sessions and really committing to something is in the cards. And one of the trainers who I lived with occasionally told me this year that in January he had twenty four of these consultations. I asked him how many of them turned into repeat clients and he said, none, zero, not even one. Now, he's a really nice guy who knows his stuff, so I doubt he scared them all off.

I asked him what the deal was, and he said, it's just like that a lot of the times. And then he said, and I quote, it really burns me out because he cares if people get healthy. He hears the stories of work injuries and depression and all kinds of issues that can lead to people not taking care of themselves. And he knows that while getting into shape isn't a total magic bullet, it's usually a really solid start if you want to feel better mentally and of

course physically. He ended our little chat by saying he just keeps smiling and meeting with people, and a few of them end up hiring him long term. Some even end up as Jim regulars after he's done with them, and knows, he said, make him real happy. The thing about this is that, even without my wife pushing me to get certified and be a personal trainer, I always look at those folks like they have a pretty sweet gig. They get a free gym membership, they get to help

people out. What I saw and what I think I knew about their job was about three percent of what it actually is. Though. Now, I bet you could take about any profession out there and make the same claim and be right. You can do the same thing with hunting content. And that's what the show is about. Now.

I know I've talked about this topic in the past, but I want to share some of my personal experience about it to frame this whole thing up and tie into this stupid, dumbass month of March when you might be sitting on your couch in the evening watching an edited version of someone else's hunt. The first time I ever filmed was a turkey hunt when I was fifteen.

My buddy Jared. He didn't draw a tag, but I did, so he offered to use my parents video camera to document the whole thing, and we figured it would probably be a pretty epic turkey hunt. I'd already killed one tom the year before, so it was pretty much a lock. I figured well. Jared and I set up in the dark in the corner of a cut cornfield, and not long after we cozied up to a couple of oak trees,

a tom gobbled in the dark. Several did. Actually, I can't remember for sure, but I think I was using one of those springloaded pushbutton calls that a not very smart monkey could probably operate. This was a long time ago, and the birds weren't nearly as pressured then as they are now. This became evident when out of the woodline a monster Tommy emerged in half strut. He saw my home. Jake pushed into the dirt over a foam hen and said,

not on my watch, Junior. Unbeknownst to me, during the whole encounter, which was maybe thirty seconds, Jared was whispering shoot him, shoot him, shoot him, shoot him. I don't think he knew he was saying it, kind of like a duck dog that can't help it whine a little when the sky's lighten up and the birds start circling. Anyway, I dumped that time when he got to my decoys, and Jared nearly dropped the camera wall, shouting, holy shit,

we got him. Apparently he didn't know that being a videographer usually means you're not also the real time narrator. That was all for fun, of course, and It wasn't until I got the job of equipment editor at bow Hunter that I actually filmed my first industry hunt, my first professional hunt. I guess this was a South Dakota hunt where you hide behind horses and sneak into a prong horns guard and shoot him. Now you know my stance on trophy hunting western game, but if not, I'll

explain it. I don't trophy hunt out West. I'm an equal opportunity hunter when it comes to elk, mule, deer, and antelope. But back then, if you were on TV, you didn't shoot little stuff, so I knew i'd have to hold off. Still, it didn't take us very long before we had closed the distance on a pretty good buck that was chasing dose around and running off some youngsters. When we got to sixty yards on that buck, which was as far as I wanted to shoot, the guide

turned the horses sideways and told me to draw. I did as I told, and there sixty yards away was the antelope walking. I held my pin and waited for him to stop, but the guide started whispering in my ear. You have to shoot him, now, you have to shoot him. Now, he's going to get away. In my head, I was like, yeah, I don't take walking shots at sixty yards ever. But you know what I did. I shot because I wanted

the whole thing over with. I was aiming in front of that antelope by a hair and I missed him by about a foot in the other end. It was not pretty and it was not something I was proud of. Now. After that speed goat ran off, I knew I was going to look like a total d bag on the show, and I sure did. I also had a conversation with the guide off camera about how I'll choose my own

shot opportunities from there on out. Later that day, we walked right through a herd of beedded antelope while leaning into the sides of the horses, and a little buck, you know, not twenty yards away never even got up, never ran away. I told the guide I wanted to shoot that goat because I was pretty sure i'd hit him in the lungs, and the guide made it clear that while it was my call, it kind of wasn't,

so we kept going. Eventually we found a good enough loaner feeding in the pasture to let me get to fifty one yards and I actually hit him right in the heart, which I cannot stress enough was extremely relieving after my poor showing earlier. After that was all the post shot footage, and of course the butchering and all the other things you do when you kill an animal. But when I saw the show, I realized something. Well, I did look like a total dbate when I took

that shot, probably a few other times. But the reality was most of that hunt didn't make it. Given that my entire hunt was a half of a one show. It was reduced to less than eleven minutes of actual hunting for a four day hunt with multiple stocks and all that stuff that happens after you shoot one. I filmed quite a few shows for them, and it filmed quite a few for other companies. Every one of them has always left me thinking that we never really have

the chance to show a real hunt. We show highlights which are up to an editor, we might not even know. And that's kind of that. It's weird, and it's not limited to video. Back before a big old internet asteroid hit Earth and caused most print titles to go the way of the dinosaur, we used to get to write hunting features. These were two thousand, maybe three thousand or thirty five hundred word articles that told the story of

a hunt or a particular animal. They were my favorite thing to write, and still would be if I could find someone to publish them and pay me for the time. It's not going to happen anyway. The biggest challenge was always what do you not tell? What parts of the story were necessary to the whole arc all along, and what could be left out because it didn't go you know, well enough along with the narrative to warrant inclusion. As you can imagine, a lot of those stories just get

left out. There's a lot of stuff that you're just not going to see your read or hear about. And this is a side note here, but I've also noticed that the random hunters who tell me they're hunting stories at deer classics and weddings and bar mitzvahs and recently a memorial service, they don't have the editing gene. They give the long version ahis and it's usually a lead up to a longer version. I'm kind of joking there, but mostly not. The truth with content is, most of

the time most of the stuff is just left out. Now, this isn't necessarily a nefarious move. It's just the nature of attention spans and the reality of competing for eyeballs and ear bawls. Even though it's largely benign and honestly mostly dictated by the audience, it's also worth understanding what isn't there. There's a false promise with hunting content. Scratch that. There's actually two false promises. The first is that most

of it will make you a better hunter somehow. Maybe it does in small ways, but I think a lot of it is pure entertainment and that's it, and that's okay. Entertainment is good. We need it, and there's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with watching another two hundred in buck die in a food plot after getting shot by some country singer who probably couldn't kill a button buck on public land if he gave him the whole season and let him hunt at night with a high

powered rifle talped with a thermoscope. I know that was a cheap shot, and I'm not proud of it. The other false promise is that what you see or read or hear about is what happened. It's not. It's a super abbreviated version with the best medium in my opinion, being podcasts, it's a hell of a lot easier to tell a whole story or as much of a story as possible, when you have unlimited time and you're just

having a conversation. It's much harder to tell the whole story of a hunt when you have forty or fifty hours of footage during which about ninety percent of it nothing really interesting happened, except stuff does happen. The hours spent in stand watching squirrels that might get turned into a few seconds of footage in the actual episode. That stuff matters. If there are days like that, the host will probably mention it several times, but you won't really

get the full picture went on. It's just too hard. When you watch a sizzle reel, you might see a hunter shoot a great buck, maybe even on public land, and never be told or shown that there were four other good hunters glassing and scouting for that shooter, or in a lot of it shows, there might be someone managing dear just for a specific personality to come in and shoot it, and of course, you know, writing a pretty big check and promising lots of thrilling social media

content around it. The thing is hunting content can be great entertainment, and it can be highly educational. It can be a lot of things, but it will never be a full picture. It'll be a slice of something, and it's up to you to recognize that in your personal hunting life. If you're wondering why you don't see big bucks on public land, and a total stud like myself always seems to it's because I'm not telling you how

often I blank. I'm not putting up Instagram posts on the days when I can't get the old engine turned over and I just can't find a deer to save my life. When you watch me on something like one week in November, you see at most four or five minutes of my entire day, a day that starts way before first light and usually ends with a mind grinding session on where to hunt the following day, well after the sun is set in the nocturnal bucks have started chasing.

The thing about that is you might see four minutes of some rando like me explaining my daily hunting situation, mixed with those shots of squirrels and maybe a few deer and not much else, and not really think a whole lot about it. But what's happening there is an all day sit where very little happened, which is a real common Then you know, randomly, on day seven, a clueless eight pointer runs in, stops in some brush with one shooting window, and suddenly my week, which didn't mean

anything to the viewers, looks pretty sweet. So you say, damn man, I'm going to do some all day sits this year. But you're all day sits don't seem like mine. Yet they are. You have the hours and hours of no movement and all the second guessing that comes with it. You scroll social media and you see grip and grin after gripp and grin, and the whole thing kind of sucks. But you don't see what one into those grip and grins. You don't see the money spent, the time invested, the

skill that a lot of those folks have. And I don't know. You see Andy may post another picture of a monster he killed on public land somewhere. You don't see his struggle years or the year long scouting obsession he has, you know, the one that leads him to have seasons that almost no one on earth could match once, let alone him multiple years. The truth of it all is out. They're in the woods, my friends, it's waiting for you, and it's not as fun as it looks

in the hunting content. It's not as easy as it looks or as enjoyable. Generally, it's kind of a bitch, honestly, but it's also worth it, and it gets to be a hell of a lot more fun when you realize that you have your own white tailed journey to take, and it's not about a product or the right lighting

of for your trophy photos. It's about doing what makes you happy out there and recognizing that the best anyone like me or Andy May or Mark or anyone can do for you is offer up a few suggestions, maybe some encouragement. Then you're on your own. But that's the way it's supposed to be. You can't learn to really hunt by just listening to someone talk about it any more than you could learn any other skill by just listening or observing. Now it doesn't hurt, of course, but

it's like two percent of what you need. That's better than nothing. But it's your scouting sessions and your trail camera work, your understanding of your equipment, and your time on stand that kills your ear. You know, your big bucks or your little bucks or doze or whatever you're willing to shoot. It's on you, which is why this whole thing is so frustrating yet so rewarding at the same time. It's up to you to go beyond that consultation, to book those sessions and start picking up some weights

and pounding away in the treadmill. It's up to you to change for the better. Remember that this month, when you're begging for your brain to release just a little dopemine and for the sun to come out for a few days, remember it when you think it's not worth it in this stupid month, to go out and look for a few antlers, or maybe walk the cattail slow before the ice gets too rotten, scout around a little bit.

Remember that it's on you to figure out something to do to get better, even if that's just standing in the slushy snow to fling a few arrows now instead of waiting until the summer to start shooting. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which has brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening, and if you just need some more whitetail content to

entertain you or hell, educate you. Head on over to our YouTube channel you can see a whole bunch of how to videos that Mark and I have produced. Or you can head over to the dumbyater dot com slash wired and read all kinds of articles on hunting strategies and tips and scouting and all that good stuff.