Ep. 680: Foundations - Hindsight Bias and its Relationship to Hunting

I'm sure there are worse ways to shed your mortal coil than getting pulled under by a giant dinosaur lizard that we should have gone extinct like fifty million years ago, but that's way on the top of my list. Anyway, Life doesn't actually always suck, and that's a good thing. The one way that life does suck for all of us at different points is that we all have regrets. We have all experienced things if we wish we would have done, but we didn't, and those things haunt us.

That's what this podcast is all about. Although it'll be more cheerful than I'm leading on, trust me. Is there a sweeter feeling than making a prediction about something and then that something actually happens. No, well, unless your prediction is that I don't know, all of our over the counter elk hunting opportunities are going to go away, and from here on how the chance to chase bugles in the mountains is going to be greatly diminished for the

average hunter. That's one you actually don't want to be right about. Or I guess if you follow the stock market and there's a company you're interested in that you think could go on to make tons of money, and you think, I need to buy some shares in that company.

I know it's going to explode, but you don't. Then guess what happens That company invents a new widget, or they announce a partnership with Apple or something, and then boom, your little four dollars a share stock suddenly jumps to forty dollars a share and you realize that you could have had your dream beach house and maybe put your kids through a sweet college, but instead you're just some poor loser who knew, just absolutely knew that buying into

that company was the right call. This is called hindsight bias, and it's ripe in the world of finances. It's mostly a psychological issue that is also known as creeping determinism or knew it all along phenomenon. That's not actually a joke,

my friends. It's called that. It's a weird thing that we all do where once an event happens, we think we predicted it, and that makes us feel two things, overconfident in our abilities to see the future, and sad that we didn't act on those predictions, at least when those predictions are actionable, like during the dead years of Microsoft's rain under Steve Balmer, where the stock traded sideways before finally finding its legs and shooting up to the

moon while making lots of people who stuck around insanely wealthy. This is happening in the stock market right now. Do at least partially to the artificial intelligence feeding frenzy out there. Every earnings report where companies can talk about their artificial intelligence ambitions is an attempt to be a part of the it crow to attach themselves to this what some might call a little bit of a bubble. They want to be a part of this AI movement. They want

to capitalize on it. So do the average people who want to buy into stocks. The thing is, even if your gut said you should have bought Pallunteer Technologies or Google or whatever, if you didn't at whatever time, you probably weren't that convinced. After the fact, of course, you know that you were right, but during the moment you didn't believe it, at least so much that you dumped a bunch of your money into those tickers and cross your fingers. This isn't limited to the Wall Street bets

crowd over there on Reddit either. Hindsight by us is rampant in our lives, and it mostly sucks. But it's also a reminder that you don't have to suffer regret unnecessarily all of the time. You can take control of your life and you're hunting future at least to some extent. Look at it this way. You want to own land, right, of course you do, we all do. But land is expensive, and it's always expensive, and interest rates suck right now and there will be a better time for you to

pull a trigger. Right, No, there probably won't. Land is going to stay expensive. It's going to get more expensive, and interest rates might come down or they might go up. But the truth is it's not likely to get any easier for you or I to buy something unless a rich uncle we have gets eaten by a crocodile and we suddenly find ourselves the benefactor of this diligent saving and is untimely chomping to death. I have experienced this

on the land front recently. A lot back in twenty fifteen, I bought thirty acres in north central Wisconsin that was priced like a couple from Chicago owned it and they didn't ever want to use it, and we're sick of paying the property taxes on it. So I got it at a good price, but it didn't seem like crazy cheap then, and it was still a lot of money for me at the time. When I paid that property off, another parcel one hundred yards down the road came up

for sale. It was a little bigger, had some egg on it, which is like an animal gold mine in that region, and was generally priced pretty well for the time. I looked at it a lot. I thought about it a lot, but I decided I wasn't interested in immediately putting myself into more debt right after cling my way out of my last land debt. And you know what happened right That property sold, and since I'm right next to it often I get to see the deer that

use it. This year in July, I drove by that property on my way to work on my ground and there was a very nice velvet buck, nice eight pointer standing in their field, just taunting me. I should have figured out a way to buy it, because I regret it now and I knew, and I mean I just knew it was going to be a good deer property. It's also probably worth double what it was just seven years ago, maybe more. This happens on a smaller scale

with hunting, too. It's not all about real estate. Most years, Minnesota and Wisconsin opened their bowseason on the same Saturday in mid September. This forces me to make a choice on which state I'm gonna hunt, But every so often Wisconsin has an opener that is a week earlier than Minnesota. The last time this happened, I was stoked. I knew I was going to hunt both states on back to

back weekends and not miss out on anything. And since Wisconsin was up first, I hung some stands, I scouted my happy ass off, and I had a pretty solid plan for opening weekend. What I wasn't super confident in was a morning stand that I had that was in a staging area off of some destination food. I knew I could probably get there undetected, but there was a

chance i'd blow the whole spot up. I also knew from in person scouting and trail cameras that there were some bucks using the trail right by the stand, and that one of them was still in velvet. I don't know why this is, but it's just cool arrowing a velvet buck, and it's really really cool to do it in a state where it's very rare to even see one during bo season. Anyway, that opening morning alarm went off, and I sat in bed and I talked myself out

of going. I had a really good evening planned and so I skipped the morning, but I didn't feel good about it, and I really didn't feel good about it. When I went in there later that day and I checked my camera by that stand, that velvet eight pointer went right on through late in the morning. Now, if I had been there, you know, he might have winded me, he might have saw me, he might have heard me going, and he might not have gone through. I'll never know.

What I do know is that I think about that decision and that buck a lot more than I should. I just knew I should have gone, and I didn't, or at least that's kind of how I think about it now. The truth is, I made a call and it turned out to be a bad one. But I did kill a buck that evening, which is kind of crazy. But he wasn't that velvet eight, and I don't know why, but it still stings. Hunting is like that. But mostly we don't know who came through when we weren't there.

That's probably a good thing, otherwise we'd be all press even more than we already are. Hindsight bias happens in other ways too. I'm experiencing some serious and I do mean serious fomo right now. I'm not going elk hunting this fall, and in fact, I'm not going west at all this whole season, at least unless something changes, which I don't think is gonna happen. And I know I only have so many elk hunting opportunities left, and I could probably swing in an early season hunt this year

if I wanted to. But my September is going to be busy and the girls and I have some bear tags and some other plans, and I'm trying to ignore the fact that I know, I just absolutely know that my elk hunting partner is going to go have an amazing time in the mountains and he'll probably kill a bull right where I was gonna hunt. That's enough bitching about that on my part, because you know what, that's life. Complaining about not going on another l hunt because you

get to bear hunt with your daughters is dumb. Complaining that you didn't buy Google back when the Internet looked like it was created by kindergarteners is dumb. Losing sleep over one hundred and ten inch buck that walk by your stand when you were snoozing away, it's dumb. But all of those things are lessons. To experience regret now is to understand how to possibly avoid regret later. How's that for a philosophical quote You definitely never get from

that guy, Mark Kenyan. The truth is you're going to face many, many choices in your hunting life, and throughout this hunting season, as we gear up to get going, ask yourself what you can do. What situations in your life are right for regret if you don't take care of them, if you don't do them, are you talking yourself out of an opportunity because it'll be easier to just not go. Will it save a fight at home? What's the motivation for your decisions? Or let's look at

this another way. What's a hard decision you could make this year that will most likely cause you to not regret it. I'll start. It's not going out hunting. I want to selfishly for all the obvious reasons. But I know if I stay home and I can bait bears more and set up for the early deer season better, and I can spend some time fishing with my girls when the trout will be hungry and this mom mouth will be schooling up, I'm not going to regret it now.

Is that stuff as cool as arrowing another bull in the high country? I don't know. Maybe maybe not. But the right decision is sometimes shrouded in mystery when you make it. What's going on in your life where you could make a better hunting decision now, one that will wipe away some potential regret and give you the feeling that you'd have now if you looked into your brokerage account and saw a cost basis for your apple shares that is in the single digits. Let's look at an

easy one here. How much are you shooting your bow? If the answer is not much, okay, But what's something you'd likely regret for the rest of your life. How about missing a buck that you could easily have hit well or worse? How about hitting one poorly when you have a perfect shot lined up in front of you. Maybe there's nothing you could really do about a whiff or a bad hit, but oftentimes there is. Maybe it's a matter of taking fifteen minutes today and tomorrow and

the next day to shoot your boat. Because if you sit in that stand or saddle and that buck of your dreams walks into twenty three yards and you shoot over his back or under his belly, because you're straight up shook. As the kids would probably say, you know what, You'll get to experience hindsight bias in real time, because you'll not only think about how you knew you should have executed better during the shot, But how you could have shot more all summer long and you didn't. You

just knew you should, but you didn't. Let's take that example and go a step further. This summer has been hot, so stupid bit hot in fact, that it's kind of crazy in a lot of places, going out to work on stands and the scout deer on many of the days we've had this summer just straight up nightmare fuel and mostly a non starter for a lot of folks. But what if you could have and if you had, you would have trimmed your stand sites up nicely so you could shoot the most likely spots for a buck

to be, but you didn't. And now it's mid September. There he is mowing away on the beans while you couldn't get an arrow through there to save your life, which ironically saves his life. What will you regret if you don't do it? What's something you could do now to alleviate that sinking feeling of suddenly knowing you should have done something, something that you knew you should do

and you didn't. Maybe it's as simple as you've been seeing some bucks in a certain corner of a field and you know you should get a blind in there or a stand, even though you have a setup already in place that's just down the woodline another one hundred and fifty yards. Guess what's going to happen on opening weekend if you don't set up right where you know you should. Or how about this, I recently got permission

to hunt twenty five acres by my house. Now that might not sound like much, but where I live it is. It's a huge wind for me and the girls. The downside was the guy who gave me a permission has been kind of flaky, or I thought he was anyway. The first few times I tried to get him to commit to taking a quick walk back there on his land to see the property lines and just what his ground has to offer, he either didn't respond or always

had some excuse. I could just feel that permission slipping away and was hit with the old familiar feeling of being excited about something only to really be disappointed. Soon after, I told myself it was a lost cause and I almost gave up. But looking at the bulldozers and the mc mansions popping up on that only spot within two hours of my house that I have permission prompted me

to give it one more go. I hate bothering people and have grown to really really hate talking to strangers, so it was easy for me to adopt the mindset of the whole thing being another lesson learned. But I texted the guy anyway and just said that my schedule was opened for a quick walk if he was available. I left it at that, and he responded with a time to come over and said get on over here,

And he couldn't have been nicer. And I couldn't quite believe it when I was standing over a secluded pond in the middle of his property looking at a stupid good spot to set up a blind. And then I couldn't quite believe it when I saw some long beards feeding away and he told me I could turkey hunt anytime I wanted to. There, we jumped a few deer, found some absolute deer highways. I left the day in a way where I would only describe our relationship as

being super best friends. Now, this guy's a very casual bowhunter who was about to learn a lot about bow hunting, and I'm a very serious bow hunter who is very happy to have some ground to hunt where the dough tags are unlimited, and the drive to get there is like eight minutes. If I hadn't texted him, i'd have regretted it forever. But you know what, I figured it was going to be a no, and so my hindsight

bias was actually wrong, dead wrong. The lesson there is this, my friends, despite us believing from time to time that we can actually predict the future, we can't. The best minds on Wall Street can't definitively say what company is going to have the next trillion dollar market cap any more than the average person can accurately predict the share price of any given publicly traded company at any point. The best minds in the hunting space don't know what

the landscape looks like in ten or fifteen years. That's just the truth. Hell, they don't know what it looks like next year. We have to work with what we know and what we believe to be coming down the old pike which is short for turnpike. And I only know this because I had to look it up and make sure that it wasn't actually supposed to be coming down the pipe, which makes more sense for modern humans

and super Mario Brothers enthusiast alike. The future is a mystery, but you can take a look at your life thus far and tally up some of your bigger regrets. Use that list to help you make better decisions from here on out. This, at least in the realm of hunting, will get you into more beautiful places. It'll help you

fill more tags, It'll help you fill the freezer. It'll help you fill up that intangible part of yourself that just needs to spend some time in the woods to shake off the ick that comes from work in life and then not so fun stuff we fill our days with. So think about that and think about coming back next week because I'm going to talk about elk hunting, or more specifically, how to get out on your first elk hunt before it's too late. That's it for this week,

my friends. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. If you're out there sweating and you want to get some deer work done, you should at least check out our trace lineup from first Light. Super cool. It's built from fabric that really allows like a ton of breatheability and It's kind of become my go to for a lot of my early season and my summertime stuff.

You should also check out the Origin pant, which is like this weird pajama type pant but works really well for early season hunting. And as always, I want to thank you for listening and for your support for myself and Mark and everybody at Mediator here. We really appreciate you guys coming and giving us the support that you have. If you want to check out some more hunting content,

head on over to the mediater dot com. You'll see tons of articles, video series, how to stuff, you name it, it's all there, go check it out.