Ep. 709: Foundations - Gambling Versus Investing In The Deer Woods

starting to hear people say they saw bucks chasing. You know, at least if you live in the North Country, the promise is real and this year it's the year for you. But what if it's not, Or what if you go out and it's supposed to be awesome and it sucks. What if the bucks don't come running when you're blowing on your Phelps grunt call or you're doing your best buck fight impression with their rattle bag, Well you might be what I'd affectually refer to as a deer hunting

gambler when really you should be an investor. Allow me to explain myself as a sober dude who would rather not set fire to his money. I can't think of a worse place to be than a casino. It's not my jam. And even though I kind of actually like playing blackjack and poker, I'm not very good at either one of them. You have to be able to think about numbers beyond the level of a toddler to be any good at cards, and I can't, so I'm not.

Casinos are a big case study in human psychology. People go in with the promise that they might win big, and almost always they don't. In fact, the truth is that every casino game is designed to give the house better odds than the player, every single game. Now, blackjack players have pretty good odds, well compared to other games. You know, the odds of winning blackjack are slightly less

than a coin flip. The folks sitting down thinking they are due for a face card and an ace are mostly destined to lose via a war of attrition against the house. Craps has nearly the same odds, maybe slightly better, but again not good enough to get your mortgage paid on a consistent basis. Roulette offers roughly the same deal. The odds is sitting down at a slot machine and winning. They're far worse, although it depends a little bit on the game. You don't really have to even go to

a casino to gamble. You can bet on sports these days. You can eat gas station sushi and then go powerlift at the gym an hour later. You can buy a puppy and not tell your significant other. Or you can listen to the financial media and buy a bunch of stock and some company that is bound to be the next Google or Apple. This one might be the worst because that doesn't really feel like a gamble after all.

How could a company that makes cutting edge artificial intelligence that is going to change our lives for the better ever really go down in value? Or I don't know, how could a company that is three D printing rockets to send a space to bring down the cost of delivering satellites into orbit and not succeed. Well, a lot of companies are working on AI and there will only be a few really big winners, And I don't know, rockets explode on the launch pad all the time. High

level employees em bezel money or do worse things. Pandemics happen, Disruptive technologies you won't see coming show up on the scene, and quite often our own impatience and ignorance gets us to buy in after the hype train has already gone through, and then sell as soon as the euphoria fades and reality sets in. Buying individual equities also known as stock and publicly traded companies is amble. It can make you rich,

probably won't. Buying ETF some mutual funds that hold the entire domestic market or the entire international market, or an equal way to every company in the s and P Five hundred is a different story, provided your timeline is sufficiently long and you're patient enough. It's also boring, But if you want to get rich kids, or at least be wealthy enough to potentially retire early, this is the way. It's not fun, it's not quick, but it is the

best way to do it. Start early, invest more than you think you can, and let the power of time and compounding do its thing for you. Check back in oh, I don't know, thirty years and feel free to send me a healthy tip, you know, because I'm the guy who convinced you to be responsible with your money. There are other ways to do it. You know. You can invest in real estate. That's a big one right now. But that's something that sounds easy and can come with

a whole bunch of risks and other headaches. Essentially, if it's popular and sexy and sounds exciting, probably a bad route. Stick to boring and time tested when it comes to your money. Now, I know you won't fully listen to me, so let me give you one example of how I have come to be so wise. When I first started investing, I was super duper clueless. I also found myself in a conversation with a buddy of mine who does marketing

work for a whole bunch of outdoor companies. At the time, which was probably about fifteen years ago, those companies were all in on magnets, on packs and clothes and biny harnesses and such. He and I were talking about this, and he mentioned that he was investing heavily into rare earth mineral companies, you know, the miners and the processors. His spiel was impressive. After all, rare earth minerals have to be rare, and they are used in all kinds

of things like hunting, backpacks and smartphones. So I did something really dumb. I went out and found a company that was all about this rare earth mineral life and better yet, their stock was like thirty cents of share cheap, right, So I dumped a grand into it, and then started learning that rare earth minerals aren't that rare, and nearly

the entire market is controlled by China. I also learned that the company I had staked my future on didn't have much of a future, and when they went belly up, I got an expensive education. We are hard wired to gamble because we love surprising rewards. This makes us susceptible to our own psychology, and that's bad news and so many different things in life. One of those things is you freaking guessed it windsurfing just kidding. Well, I don't know, Maybe that does seem like kind of a gamble, but

obviously here I'm talking about deer hunting. As I mentioned in the intro, you're probably as optimistic now as you'll be all season. The best couple of weeks of the season are upon us, and there's nothing standing between you and a giant dead buck. But you know, a little time in the saddle are a blind. Now, that might be true, but it's probably not. It's far more likely, because the odds don't really lie, that you'll be one of the eighty percent issh or so of bow hunters

who don't kill a deer this year. Factor in mature bucks, and it's far more likely that that number is probably closer to ninety seven or ninety eight percent of people don't kill one, maybe even a little higher. You know, I'm not a math guy. I remember that. But here's the thing, though. You can gamble on deer hunting, or you can invest in your success. You can do a little both, actually, or a little one and a lot of the other. But I don't want to go there yet.

I want to explain this concept first. Investing in your success involves a lot of things. It involves scouting. You know. Of course, if you don't scout enough, you're not going to be very good at deer hunting without having you know the keys to an amazing spot. I keep saying this and people keep asking me what the secret is to being more successful. It's scouting, you know, as if I'm keeping something secret to myself here. Believe me, I'm not.

It's not complicated. Scouting is like setting that automatic withdrawal from your paycheck every pay period. At first you go with ten percent because that's a nice round number and allows you to take advantage of your employer match. Then you get a five percent raise, so you bump up your contributions by two or three percent. It's boring, not fun at all, but it is a great way to stave off lifestyle creep wile also investing in your future.

Scouting is that move, It's that strategy. The time spent walking the winter woods in March, that's an investment. Your summer glassing sessions, the mid morning sneaky session you make into a spot right now this week, just to see what it looks like. That's responsibly investing in your deer hunting future, maybe the immediate future, or maybe three seasons

down the road. And it goes beyond that. Every shot you take at the range, every arrow you index to a specific broadhead, every time you pack your gear specific way so you don't forget any thing. Every time you sneak in to check a camera and pay close attention to making as little disturbance as possible. All of this stuff is mostly mundane but highly necessary. Think of the boring stuff you do or should do, and look at that. Look at each thing like it's a little investment in

your future. This is because it's true, and this does a couple things for you. It makes you a better hunter because you're getting the work done. That's a simple one. But it also conditions you to do the work and to be mindful of the details, to be disciplined. It puts you in the mindset of someone who takes care of business. And that's not nothing. My friends. There are patterns to our behavior in ways we can either encourage the right ones or lean into the negative ones. Get

into the right ones. Condition yourself to be the kind of hunter who takes care of this stuff all year long, because when it's the last week of October, your chances of success will be so much higher than folks who don't do this. Just like the person who puts away fifteen percent of their gross pay for three decades or somewhere around there is going to be so happy to retire, while the person who buys lottery tickets each week and doesn't save is going to have an ugly moment of

reckoning at some point. The other thing this does for you is keeps you from gambling irresponsibly. And what do I mean when I'm talking about this with deer hunting? Well, it's something I've mentioned a lot, but let's make this personal. Do you own any deer calls? How many bottles of dope have you bought for this season? When you go out hunting? Do you always put out a cent wi with some dope on it? Are you always trying to add something extra to your sits to increase your odds?

Let me ask you, why is it? Because you believe that this stuff is mostly harmless? So why not? Well? Is it mostly harmless? If you go out and put a cent wick up or three of them, you probably have to walk where you intend to shoot a buck. Is that risk free? I'd say it's not. You're inviting a deer to go right where you just were, if you planned to rattle or grant you or both in blind calling sequences? Is that risk free? There's movement associated

with it, but that can be mitigated. There's also the reality that when bucks come to a call, they often swing down wind. It's not risk free. There's another truth here too, and it's that dose don't like hearing calling a whole lot, and some bucks are real spooky about it. How about running cameras this time of year, there's some major risks there. The obvious is not hunting because bucks

aren't showing up on your camera. There's no greater risk to your hunting success than gambling that the bucks aren't moving because there is one tiny glimpse of the woods that is somewhat unreliable tells you the deer aren't there doing their thing. Now, I'm not saying to not do these things. Blind calling sessions are fun, trail cameras are fun. This stuff can be useful. A lot of this extra

stuff is just enjoyable. But I want you to ask yourself when you head out hunting in the next week, why you think you need any of those things, and what is the risk of doing any of that stuff on any given hunt. Are you talking yourself into trying to make something happen because you have very little faith in your setup, or are you convinced that the conditions are right to rattle Because there's a huge difference between the two. The investing part of white Tail hunting does

this for you. It gives you faith in your setups and you're hunting plans. It's reassuring because you know that the rubs were thick on a ridgetop after last season, and you know that you haven't been in there yet this season, and the odds are real good that a buck is going to be doing now what a buck was doing last year in there. Or maybe you found a huge community scrape last spring in a travel hub

and haven't been in there yet this season. But you go in with the idea that the wind is right and the scrape is there, the exact tree you'll hunt is prepped and ready to go. This is a far cry from going into one of your old stands that you've been sitting since the opener and deciding the pre rud is going to revive the spot, especially if the neighborhood bucks hear some grunning or antler smashing together, or maybe they just need to get a whiff of dopey

that is supposed to be fresh. But it also only cost six dollars for a bottle, and there were hundreds of bottles in the store you just went to, and there must be thousands and thousands of them in other stores, so how could they really be fresh do and estrascent. Here's how you know whether you've invested in your success or not. When you get set up, do you have

confidence to not do anything extra? I mean, do you believe that without any get rich quick stuff full faith that the deer will go through, including the type of deer you probably want to shoot. If so, you've invested. Well, if not, you probably haven't. This is where it gets weird for me and maybe you. People often look to me to give them the answer for right now, the short term green light on some strategy or style or

decoy usage or whatever. Instead, I want you to think long term and use the next couple of weeks to catalog how you feel about the work you've put in and what you would maybe do differently in the future. I do this a lot, and honestly, it sucks, but it also puts me in a headspace to make better decisions. Let me give you a quick example from my season so far. I killed a solid ten pointer on the fourth day of the Minnesota season. Since I knew I was going to hunt early season bucks and I needed

morning and evening sits for a variety of wins. I couldn't just phone it in. With the help of a good buddy, we tackle the process, scouting and hanging stands and running cameras and developing a good plan to kill just such a buck. In the first four days of the season, when the wind didn't cooperate and other hunters came into some of my spots and one housecat hosed up a good opportunity, I didn't really panic. I didn't run to my bag of tricks. I just kept hunting

good spots based on the conditions. The buck I killed was simply a result of investing into that hunt so that I wouldn't be tempted to gamble. Of course, it doesn't always work that way. Oftentimes it doesn't. Those rascally deer are tough, and fates are fickle for all of us. But you can head your bet on a bright future by taking note of what you're not doing that you should, and then instead of forgetting about it, by about January actually doing that stuff. So I'll wrap it up this way.

Just pay attention to yourself for the next couple of weeks. When you rattle, ask yourself, why is it because you're bored? Is it because you don't have faith that anything is going to come by? Is it because you've sat the same blind for four days and you know the whole area is probably burned, but there is a shot that

something will come running in any way. Or are you sitting over a sweet pinch point near a gnarly bedding area and it's first light and it's cold and you know there have been some big cruisers in your area because there's a world of difference there which treats the get rich quick stuff as complimentary to a well planned and well executed hunt, not as the savior for poor planning or low confidence sits because you don't have anything better going on. Be honest with yourself as we slide

into the rut. Take note of how you feel during your sits. What's your confidence level? Like? Are you stoked to wake up and get into a specific stand because you believe it's going to be full of action or are you kind of dreading walking out for another sit where you need to cross your fingers and toes and just hope and pray something will come by. How often

do you have one experience or the other? How much fun are you having going out to sit that might be the true litmus to us because anticipation and the expectation that you'll see something, they're the true heroes of deer hunting. They make everything better and when either wanes or disappears completely, it's a powerful motivator to start gambling on a good outcome, and we know how that works

out unfortunately. So do this come back next week because I'm going to talk about midday hunting and why it's both overrated and underrated at the same time. That's it for this week, folks. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast. I honestly, truly cannot tell you how much I appreciate your support. So many of you guys and gals out there have been awesome to us. You know, you're buying some first light stuff,

you're watching our videos, you're listening to our podcast. It really makes this all feel pretty amazing, So thank you for that. If you need more whitetail hunting content, if you want to, check out Clay's podcast. If you want to you know, check out some mediat or trivial whatever, go to the medieater dot com and you will find everything, podcast, video, series, articles, you name it. You can get your fix over and over and over and over again over at the medeater dot com.