Donnie Vincent: Hunting, Hard Things, and the Mindset That Gets You Through Storms

In this episode of Two Percent, Michael sits down with backcountry bow hunter and filmmaker Donnie Vincent to unpack what months in remote wilderness teach you about stress, calm, and competence. Donnie was featured heavily in Michael’s bestselling book, The Comfort Crisis, and now he joins Michael for the first time on mic since the book’s release.

They talk about the ethics and emotional reality of hunting, why sourcing your own food changes your relationship with life, and how modern convenience hijacks the ancient “search” that once made humans thrive. Donnie shares stories from Alaska—about storms, solitude, and the kind of discomfort that forces growth.

The two discuss the importance of building resilience when nothing's certain, staying present in wild places, and how you can get the same benefits of a hunt without ever picking up a bow – all it takes is choosing experiences that are hard and honest.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
In order to weather storms, not only in the Arctic,
but in life, you have to put yourself in the storm.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
I literally hike two miles to come arrow this.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Doctor, and it's the best meal you've ever had in
your life. I am freezing cold the entire time. I
hiked more than I'd ever hiked in my life, and
I was like, that was awesome.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Through your curiosities and our engagements and your questions, it
just was going to allow me to dive deeper into
the things that I pulled most.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
Dear to my heart, Welcome to two percent. I'm your host,
Michael Easter. I am really thrilled about this podcast. We
are now on episode two. We're off and rolling today.
We have an amazing episode. But before we get in,
if you are unfamiliar with me, you might have seen

(00:56):
me on The Joe Rogan Experience, or the Hubanman Lab
podcast or various TV shows. My background, I'm a health
and adventure journalist. I've been doing this for twenty years.
I started at Men's Health. I was a professor for
seven years, and then I ended up writing the books
The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain, which became best sellers,
and The Thrust of my work is it improving your life.

(01:18):
It often takes doing hard things. So this is what
this podcast is about. Now. Our name comes from a
study that found that two percent of people take the
stairs when there's also an escalator available, only two percent.
I would argue one hundred percent of people knew that
taking the stairs would be better for their long term
health and well being, Yet ninety eight percent of people

(01:41):
choose to do the easier, more effortless things. So what
we're trying to do is we're trying to build a
tribe of two percenters that are willing to take on
challenges big and small in their life to improve in
the long run. Today we're talking to Donnie Vincent. Donnie
is a backcountry bow hunter and filmmaker who travels into
the world's most remote extreme areas for months at a time,

(02:02):
and he makes these movies and I like to describe
them as being a lot like the Planet Earth series,
except they happen to have hunting. And he's really changing
the face of hunting and how it is perceived. He's
thinking about ethics, he's thinking about the life cycle and
where our food comes from. He's thinking about conservation, he's
thinking about what extended time in wild places doing hard

(02:25):
things does for the human body, mind, and spirit. Now.
I first met Donnie when I was an editor at
Men's Health magazine. I ended up profiling him for the magazine.
We become very fast friends, and then he ends up
calling me like months later. He goes, Michael, I'm going

(02:46):
up to the Arctic on an extreme and dangerous hunt
for more than a month. Do you want to come along.
We're going to see grizzly bears and climb ancient mountains,
and it is going to be the most epic adventure
a human being has ever go on. So I said yes,
and then I find myself up in the Arctic. We
have this amazing, incredible adventure that tested me in every

(03:07):
single way. But I will tell you this, I came
out the other side a better person, and Donnie was
a key guide in getting me to realize the value
of challenge. During that stint up in the Arctic, we
had all these moments up there, like when a storm
would roll in. We had this one time we were
camped on a hillside and this crazy windstorm rolls in

(03:28):
and it almost totally destroys our camp. And I was
freaking out because if you lose your tent in the Arctic,
you are screwed, Like you are absolutely screwed. But Donnie
just went into like, yeah, solve the problem mode. He
was calm, he got everything fixed. It was just like
watching him made me realize, Oh, in order to weather storms,
not only in the Arctic, but in life, you have

(03:50):
to put yourself in the storm because that is where
you figure out how to live, how to improve, and
how to be a better person. So that's what we're
going to talk to Donnie about. So with that all said,
let's welcome Donnie, Donna Vincent. Welcome to two percent.

Speaker 3 (04:04):
Dude, this is I mean, I'm beyond honored to sit
down and talk with you. Obviously we're friends, but this
is different different.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
What was your reaction to getting an email from an
editor at Men's Health.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
Yeah, somebody just asked me this the other day that
had just read The Comfort Crisis and they asked how
you found me, and I said, I actually don't know
if you were asking around and my name popped up.
But first of all, I get asked almost daily by
someone if they can join me on a hunt, whether
that be you know, a military guy, a kid, a parent, whatever,

(04:43):
But yeah, I don't know, just the professionalism in which
you went about it, and even in your email, there
was an instant seriousness to it that you were your
curiosity was real.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
You weren't trying to get a free hunt out of it.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
Not that not that anyone else is either, but your
you're curious was real. It was honest.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Yeah, and that was in Nevada. That would have been
what twenty nineteen, that was in El Kunt.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
Yeah, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, something like that.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yeah, So for this men's hell story, we go hunting
in Nevada. And I will say this, I was coming
from Las Vegas and it was hot as hell in
Vegas and we get up to about eleven thousand feet.
I am freezing cold the entire time. I was hungry
the entire time. I hiked more than I'd ever hiked
in my wife, and it was absolutely rough. But I
came home and I was like, that was awesome, And

(05:33):
it gave me the seed of an idea of asking, well,
why was that such a valuable experience, which eventually led
me to pitching The Comfort Crisis to a publisher. They
said yes, But then I had to make the big
ask of asking you, hey, man, can I go on
one of these crazy month long hunts you go on?
So I asked you and you said yes. Why did

(05:55):
you say yes?

Speaker 3 (05:56):
But honestly, Michael, the questions you were asking me in
nova that I struggle to answer because I remember specifically
one morning we were sitting up and it was kind
of chilly out and you're asking me. I've told this
story before, but you're like, hey, are you cold? And
I said, yeah, I'm cold, and you said, well, you
don't look cold. And you said that you were cold,
but you said that you yourself were cold and you look

(06:19):
like you were cold. I was also cold, and you said,
but how come you don't look cold? And I was just, well,
it's just I'm I know, you know, the sun's coming up,
We're gonna warm up.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
I have extra clothes, whatever it is.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
But then you started asking me questions about hunting and
things that I thought were going to be a slam
dunk to answer, you know, like why do you hunt?
And why do you think we hunt? And these were
questions that I really struggled to answer with you, and
you know, and I could anecdotally hit elements of it
that I enjoyed watching the sun come up, or you know,
listening to animals or watching animals. I could strike on

(06:50):
these little points but really not dive into the seriousness
and what it means. And then when we parted ways
and you brought the project of the humpt Crisis to me,
I just took it as this is this is a
project that is going to this It's going to allow
me to learn more about myself and more about being
a hunter, and more through through your curiosities and our

(07:13):
engagements and your questions and things that you find uncomfortable
and comfortable. And it just was going to allow me
to dive deeper into the things that I hold most
dear to my heart.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
What do you remember most from our hunts in Alaska?

Speaker 3 (07:28):
I mean, I remember a lot of things, but I
remember I mean, honestly, probably the thing that is more
most striking to me was how uncomfortable you were to
take your first animal, which meant the world to me
because it's really uncomfortable for me to take an animal,
and rarely do I see that in another And I'm

(07:52):
not saying that other guys don't feel that. I think
they do. I think a lot of us bury it,
hide it, you know, whether it be on camera to
our buddies or whatever. But you didn't have the position
or the wherewithal to bury it or hide it. You
just fricking it was out. And I appreciated it very much.
The uncomfortability that you went through, and also the uncertainty.

(08:14):
I remember the tarmac with the airplanes. I remember you
realizing that I wasn't joking. We are flying out in little,
tiny airplanes with pilots that are very skilled, but holding
no control over the weather or what is going to happen.
And so those are those are very defining moments for me.

(08:34):
When you took your animal and then the flight out.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Yeah, totally. I mean I remember so much of that
trip and think about it all the time. But to
your point about taking an animal, let me just say,
if you're listening and you have any qualms with hunting,
we're going to get into Donnie's worldview about hunting, which
I think is really nuanced and important. But I'll say this,
after I took that animal, I definitely went through I

(08:57):
was totally sad. I was angry at you guys for
a minute. I was. I mean, it was just all
these emotional swings. But eventually, after going through that, I
think I started to understand, Oh, this is why Donnie
does what he does. And had you not because I
remember your position on that was you don't have to hunt.

(09:19):
I'm not going to make you hunt. At the same time,
I think you would understand this greater topic that you're
writing about if you were to hunt, And so for me,
I trusted you on that, and immediately after I go,
why did I trust this son of a bitch, Like,
I think, this is the worst thing I've ever done
in my life. I'm never coming back from this. But
then afterwards I got it, and that just totally changed

(09:41):
me in a lot of ways.

Speaker 3 (09:42):
Yeah, you could live. You could have calm just like
you did in the vat.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
You could have.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
Calme and written the story and written the book about
the things that we were doing from the outside of
the fire, if you will. But if you wanted to
truly dive into an experience and have those emotions well up,
you you were going to have to take an animal's life.
And I specifically remember your sadness, I specifically remember your anger.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
I also remember.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
When we were caribou their faces even when they're alive,
when they were close to you, when you see their
eyes and their big, huge bulbous nostrils, they are a
very sweet looking animal there. People always like to use
this word. It has no position in wilderness and wildlife,

(10:33):
but people like to say they're in it.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
They have an innocence about them.

Speaker 3 (10:36):
They look like a creature that could do no harm.
They look like a curious animal. They almost have eyes.
They have looks like your dog might look at you.
But I remember when you took that animal's life, and
you took a fine bowl, an old bowl. That's what
we do, that's how we try and do it. We
try to remove animals from the herd that are gonna
have very little impact on the herd. And I remember

(10:59):
when you took that bowl. The quietness that the Arctic brings,
other than a little bit of wind is it's very,
very haunting you. There's nothing as far as you can
see other than pure wilderness, some mountains, some trees, rivers,
but there's nothing as far as you can see. There's
a true aloneness that you feel there other than the

(11:21):
people that you share that time with. And then your
bowl was laying there, you know, there's a melancholy piece
to this. And then I remember when we started skinning
your bowl and you started to see, you know, dare
I say, meat products that you also have seen in
the grocery store.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
I remember you were like.

Speaker 3 (11:42):
Oh, now that the skin's off, Now that we're breaking
the animal down, it's starting to look like steaks. And
then I saw you kind of go oh. And I
still to this day if I kill a moose or
a black bear and you walk up on it, there's
a sadness to it. And you start breaking the animal down,
you start doing the work. You start earning these calories

(12:04):
that you're going to have this winter or over the
summer or whatever it is. You start getting the blood
on your hands and feeling the weight in your backpack,
and it starts to transition into a workload that is,
you know, quite an investment and a respect that you
have for wild places.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
Yeah. I think that's a good segue and to talk
about kind of your overall worldview on hunting, because hunting
is obviously controversial among a lot of people. Yeah, so
how do you think about that and how do you
have conversations with people who may be anti hunting. Maybe
vegetarian or vegan. What do those look like? And how
do you sort of shape that.

Speaker 3 (12:43):
It's in a manner of what you carry yourself in.
It isn't smoking mirrors that there isn't this position of
you have to dance around the subject matter or come
up with clever sentences or clever statements to sell what
you're doing. It is who we were as a people,
and ecosystems do very very well to be hunted.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
Most do anyway.

Speaker 3 (13:07):
And obviously human beings have encroached into a lot of
wild areas and we've pressured a lot of game in
different areas where some animals are going extinct, and then
some other animals that do very well in near human beings,
like the white tailed deer are exploding and neither numbers
taken down by hunters or else. There's just an immense

(13:28):
amount of car collisions and things like that. If you
want to carry yourself in a manner that is going
to engage good conversation with non hunters or anti hunters,
or vegetarians, vegans, whatever it is. People love when things
are black and white, but nothing actually is black and white.
We live in the gray position, and so we better
carry ourselves and be open for thoughtful questions around saying

(13:50):
because you might get asked the question Michael that actually
changes your thought process and might actually make you think
about a process that you're doing that you may maybe
shouldn't be.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
When I think.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
Hunting right now, particularly everything on social media is grandiose.
People that call themselves hunters right now, and some of
the things that they do are very difficult to justify
and very difficult to kind of contemplate because it isn't
man versus beast, it isn't man versus wild. This is
an immersion of who we are. And there's a big

(14:23):
difference between conquering a land and shooting a limit, and
then there is kind of becoming one with predator and
prey and really enveloping yourself in the natural world.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
Yeah, and you've made the point. You know, if a
person eats me, typically the buy in is to go
to the grocery store and buy me that's you know,
prepackaged looks all nice, but they don't really know where
it came from, what the animal live like, all these

(14:55):
other important things. Don't really have a selection over that.
And you've pointed out, well, I actually know those things
you know, I know how old this animal was. I
know was it close to the end of its life?
Where did it come from? How did it live? And
so you said that we're kind of inserting yourself, and
you're able to insert yourself and kind of I think
make decisions that fundamentally change. How do you think about

(15:20):
where your food come from? Comes from? In a world
where most people, including myself, most things I hate, I
have no idea. M M.

Speaker 3 (15:28):
Yeah. I think we as a people, and I mean
myself is included. Like if I need something today, if
I need to, if I'm might have broccoli for dinner,
and you know I don't have a garden going right now.
If I need broccoli for dinner, I'm going to go
buy that broccoli. And I'm going to go to the
grocer store and I'm going to try to get the
best quality items that I can. But the reality is,

(15:51):
you know, we don't live a lifestyle. Some people do
that are truly off grade, But we don't live a
lifestyle that lends itself to getting everything in this manner.
But I think it's much more who you are as
a person, how you live your life. And I think
the more we hunt, the more we gather, the more
we grow, the more we envelope ourselves in wild places

(16:14):
and are getting outside and experiencing the wild world. And
some of the things that you discovered in the comfort
crisis when you went back, when you took some of
our experiences to different researchers, and they and they backed
up the things that I guess I was talking about
and that you were experiencing as well, with how that
affects our psyche and our happiness and our feeling fulfilled

(16:37):
that you know, I just think it's where we live best.
But man the infrastructure right now, Like you go to
New York City, right, you live in downtown New York City.
I don't even to me, that seems like a hell
hole for me to live in Manhattan would be a prison.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
I don't think you would do well there. I really
don't think. What do you beyond because we've been focusing
on kind of food and meat, What do you think
hunting gives people, well, particularly you, beyond just the meat?

Speaker 3 (17:11):
Yeah, I mean, it's it's time outside, right, it's sunrises,
it's sunsets, it's the physicality. Much to like the technical
book that you have just come up with now, about
rocking or walking with weight like that is there's a
euphoria that comes with going into the wilderness, whether it

(17:33):
be hunting, fishing, you're looking for mushrooms, whatever it is.
There's a euphoria that comes from peacefully and quietly moving
about a space and becoming an observer.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
You're a frontline observer.

Speaker 3 (17:45):
You are picking apart everything from the birds, the fall
of the fish, the weather, and just that feeling as
a human being that quiet is.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
It's unreal.

Speaker 1 (17:58):
Yeah, and I think that the one of the important
things that happens because you brought up hunting foraging. It's
a search, right, and so humans evolved as hunters and gatherers.
Every single day we knew we needed food to survive.
We had no idea where it was going to be,

(18:18):
so we had to insert ourselves in nature. And granted
we lived in nature one hundred percent of the time,
now we spend ninety three percent of our time indoors.
We had to go out and search, and that search
had to be inherently rewarding for human beings, or else
we wouldn't have continued to do it day in and
day out. So I still and I think one of
the issues that we face today. Is that the same

(18:40):
mechanics of the search for food, for hunting and gathering,
they've been put in casino gambling slot machines. It's same
way social media works all these different things, and that
captures our attention the same way that those outdoor searches do,
but in a way that doesn't give us all these
important things like sunshine, like movement, like exposures of nature,

(19:02):
like physical trials, like having to overcome things, and so
that's been it's almost a hijacking of this ancient system,
and it doesn't always help us.

Speaker 3 (19:11):
I totally agree and even at things that we're doing right.
I have friends that, for instance, if I'm going to
go fishing, I might get a small boat and paddle
down the Mississippi River and cast my lures to you know,
current seams and cast behind logs and behind rocks, and
cast to places that I know or small mouth bass

(19:34):
or walleyes or muskies where they're hiding for them to
attack their prey. I might go about fishing that way.
And then I have other friends that have a boat
absolutely encapsulated electronics with transducers facing out from every app
and it paints them a beautiful picture of this boulder,
this tree, there's actually a fish laying right behind the

(19:54):
second branch. It doesn't necessarily make them easier to catch,
although you see zact where it is. But I'll guarantee
you that experience is diminished. Everything in our lives is
brought up as a shortcut, like you said.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
And I mean, imagine, I've done this before.

Speaker 3 (20:11):
I've been I've been so insanely dehydrated in the mountains
because I've run out of water and I'm in an
area where there aren't any streams and I'm not going
to have any water until I dropped five thousand feet
and then I have to find water. And I've went
through that search and then found cold water, and to

(20:32):
this day it was one of the most euphoric experiences
of my life.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
And I've done the same thing now.

Speaker 3 (20:37):
I've never truly been starving, but I've went three or
four days without food until a pilot came and picked
me up. Or I went three or four days without
food until I arrow it a dock and then was
able to eat a doc or something like that, And
that is I mean, it's difficult for me to convey
the excitement that you get like holding a dead green

(20:59):
wing teal snowing outside. I just I literally hiked two
miles to come arrow this dock because I could see
it on a pond two miles away, and I dropped
on here to arrow this duck because I'm I'm gonna
you know, I had to arrow this dock. Then I
just stripped onto my underwear. So last week of September,
I just swim out into a pond that's nearly frozen,

(21:20):
grab this dead doc, swim back, dry off as much
as I could, get dressed, hike back up, pluck the doc.
Cook it. But I mean, there's no greater experience.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
And it's the best meal you've ever had in your life.

Speaker 3 (21:33):
Yeah, yeah, it's unreal. It's and I wish we all
still live that way. I really do like and I
have no bane against farmers. But when agriculture started, we
started having more babies, we started staying in one place.
We started you know, our excrement was now in one place.

(21:53):
And that was that.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
That started a ball rolling that we'll never be able
to recover from.

Speaker 3 (21:59):
The Earth will reco from it, because you know, we'll
go through some sort of you know event here that
will probably greatly diminish, if not wipe human beings out.
You know, whether that be in our lifetime or fifty lifetimes,
who knows.

Speaker 1 (22:12):
So one thing is that you know when you when
you tell stories about your hunts, it sounds so far
away for the average person. And I remember when I
first kind of became interested in hunting, and it was
probably from you and your work. Before I sent that
email to ask you if I could join you on
that hunt in Nevada, I remember looking at how do

(22:33):
I start? And it became I was like, oh my god,
there are so many things you have to do to
get started. It's not like basketball, where if I go,
you know, I want to play basketball, So I go
to Walmart, I buy a ball, and then I just
go to the court and I start throwing it at
the rim. What I think is interesting, though, is most
of my friends from high school that hunted, they grew

(22:55):
up in hunting families, and so I think people would think, oh,
you must have come from this long line of hunt
but you didn't. So how did you even get drawn
into hunting and start to live this way?

Speaker 3 (23:05):
And that's a really good question, and it's one that
I can't entirely answer, because when I was little, it
was all I thought about. And I don't know if
that came from my DNA or if that came from
my dad's book collection, because my dad loved wildlife and
he had all these different wildlife books. And I lost
my dad this a little over a year ago, and

(23:30):
there were questions. I have so many questions for my
dad now that he's gone. But at his funeral, I
was talking to one of his very best friends and
he was talking about this adventurous life that I live,
and he said, boy, are you your father's son? And
I didn't get a chance that day, but I really

(23:51):
wanted to ask him because I didn't see my dad
as an adventurous man at all, and so I want
to ask him. Obviously, he's referencing something in my dad's youth,
and so I don't know what it is that you know,
this gentleman was speaking of. But my dad had a
really cool collection of old books, old hunting books and
books on military tactics and wilderness survival and fishing and

(24:16):
all these different how to books and had he had
small game books, books that taught you how to hunt squirrels, rabbits,
and crows back then to you know, books on hunting,
grizzly bears and moose, and I just dove into all
these things. And I can sit here and say I
then wanted to be a hunter or a big game
hunter or whatever. But really what I wanted, Michael, I

(24:36):
think more than anything is that I wanted to live
a rural life. I wanted to live in a cabin.
I wanted to have to kill a moose for my
winter meat. And it's I haven't gotten all the way there,
but that is what I wanted. That is that those
are that's the life that I wanted to live. That's

(24:56):
those are the things that I find most charming, splitting
wood and having heat your house with firewood, and going
out and fishing and going out hunting, because there's there
is this euphoria of doing it on your own and
supplying for yourself.

Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah. So how did you start? Because I know in
college you researched wildlife biology, that's what you studied, right,
and then you ended up doing some research on tigers
in Southeast Asia, right.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
Yeah, the in Nepaul and Bangladesh.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
What'd you learn from that?

Speaker 3 (25:28):
Those are scary places? That is one thing that I learned.
I remember just going to the airport, and you've experienced
some of this stuff yourself now, but going through machine
gun checkpoints and going through checkpoints where everyone's pointing a
gun at you and they think your passport is fake.
And when I was younger, I thought they really thought

(25:48):
my passport was fake. And now as I've gotten older,
I realized they just want to bribe so they can
get through to the next machine gun checkpoint where he's
also going to tell you your passport is fake. And
then you know, being those being in that research and
kind of understanding and seeing like, for one, where when
I was in Bangladesh, there's no hunting allowed in that country,

(26:08):
But the gentleman that I was working for, he said, hey,
careful kind of what you talk about when we're working
with the other biologists, he said, you know, because he
knew I did a lot of hunting, or that I
loved hunting, lived hunt, I guess. But he also said,
you're probably gonna get a lot of respect from the
biologists here because even though they don't hunt in the

(26:29):
country any longer. The ancestors that were the pillars of
their communities, the leaders that were of their tribes were
the better hunters in their tribes, So the hunters would
go to the top of the community and probably because
they could provide the most and kind of make decisions
on where people need to go for hunting and gathering.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
And so he's like, you're probably gonna get a lot
of respect from them.

Speaker 3 (26:49):
But just be you know, roll into it slowly because
more so in a lot of those countries are dealing
with so much poaching that they're you know, it's not
that they're anti hunting, they're anti poaching, which is course.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
Was a very different thing.

Speaker 3 (27:01):
And I wanted to study wildlife biology because I wanted
to be in wild systems and I wanted to contribute
and help wildlife. And as weird it is for some
of your viewers or listeners that don't understand hunting, that's
also one of the biggest reasons why it hunts, because
I want to be a frontline observer. I want to understand, Hey,

(27:21):
how come there's a bunch less ducks, and why are
we losing so much habitat and you know, all these
different elements that are really really important because as we
lose our soils, Like people might think I'm concerned about
the white tailed deer or the black bear or something.
But really what's concerning is our soils and our waters, insects,
our grasses, things like that, because if we had those,

(27:42):
if we still had you know, ten million buffalo on
the planes, like, we would be so far better off
than what we have right now. I'm having endless row
crops of corn and soybeans.

Speaker 1 (27:52):
Yeah, I think that's I understand why we have all
these things. It's about efficiency. It's the fact that people
could start to have a lot of children and then
you go, well, a lot of these people are starving.
What if we use some science to give people more
food and keep them from starving, and then that propagates.
But I do think you're right that we lose something

(28:14):
in that process. It's like everything, right, It's like progress
has trade offs, and sometimes those trade offs are good
and sometimes they're bad. Yeah, And then so then you
end up doing research. Was it on the Tulisach River?
Is that right?

Speaker 3 (28:26):
Yes? In Alaska?

Speaker 1 (28:27):
And that was doing and that was doing Samon counts.
So you get I loved this story. You get sent
out for how long were out there? Like five months?
And there was a bunch of you that started, and
I think you were the last person standing. So tell
us about that experience and what did you learn from
all that time alone outside.

Speaker 3 (28:46):
Yeah, when I interviewed with my boss, it is really
funny because I was nervous. I know, these jobs have
a lot of competition to get and so I really
wanted to be in the wilderness for the summer, you know,
spring summer, early to fall in and so I started.
I was studying up on all my biology because I
was like, what is he going to ask me in
the interview?

Speaker 2 (29:06):
How is this going to go?

Speaker 3 (29:08):
And I better have my you know, my ducktn room
And he said, basically, my interview was we're going to
drop you off from the wilderness. What's the what's the
chance that I'm going to have to come and pick
you up? And I said zero? And he said are
you sure? And I said, yeah, I'm not coming out
like you're not. I'm not going to get homesick. You're

(29:29):
not going to have to come get me. He's like, well,
that's that was the biggest thing that they were looking for.
And to your point, because a lot of the people
that go and do this work, they end up a
week in two weeks in, three weeks in, they're they're
they're out, like they want to get picked up, they
want to go home, they want to drink a beer
with their buddies, and they want to get back to
that kind of that infrastructure, that kind of noise that
we feel very comfortable with. But I thrived in this,

(29:53):
you know position like this is. You know, they provided
me with a tent and a sleeping bag. We had food,
We had a research tent like I had even though
to the average person, I was roughing it. To me,
I had everything that anyone could ever want, and I
loved it. I love being around the wildlife. I love
the quiet. There were times, you know, there's about four weeks,

(30:18):
six eight weeks where the bugs are you know, biblical like,
they will wipe you out.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
Like it's probably early June to early August.

Speaker 3 (30:30):
It's significant, and so you just have to get your
mind right. You're gonna have clouds of mosquitos, You're going
to have you know, there's going to be you know,
things that you're gonna have to face throughout your day.
But seeing you know, I remember, like day three that
I was there, I was talking to this up a
kid and I was like, hey, man, I have to

(30:51):
go take a nap because we'd been working twenty four
hours a day for a couple of days. It's like,
I got to go lay down. He's like, okay. His
name's Peter Gregory. He's an awesome, awesome kid. And I said,
but if you've seen anything cool, come wake me up.
And he's like okay. And so I went laid down
and he came over to the tent. I was laying
down for maybe thirty minutes, and he's like, eh, darnie,

(31:12):
there's a big bear.

Speaker 2 (31:15):
Was like, Peter, don't mess with me.

Speaker 3 (31:16):
Man, Like we're just starting out working together, Like, tell
him be honest. He's like, I'm serious, biggish bear I've
ever seen in my life. So I was here and
so I got out and the bugs weren't out yet.
I remember I unzipped my tent and I stood out
there with Peter, and I could see this huge tundra flat,
which you know what that looks like now, I felt
like I could see twenty miles and I could see

(31:38):
the Killbuck Mountains, which Purple Mountain majesty like literally looks
absolutely perfect. And then here's this bohemoth one thousand pound
plus brown bear just walking right past my tent, his
furs really long from over the winter, and it's blowing
in the wind, and he just walked as peacefully by it.

(32:03):
It looked like every oil painting I've ever seen that
has stopped me in my tracks. And that's just being
there and doing that stuff, and seeing the fish and
holding the salmon and understanding the ecosystem and watching that
river system. We'd get there early enough, there'd be no
fish in the river besides residence species Dolly Bardon, grayling,

(32:24):
northern pike. But then all of a sudden, one day
you could hear the fish in the river. The river
would go, it'd be very few egos, very few gulls.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
Very few wolves, and grizzly bears very few.

Speaker 3 (32:37):
And then one day the fish would show up and
the whole ecosystem would come to life with all the
animals that I just listed. And I mean to see
that and experience that, and to know that that happens
every year in the wilderness, whether we're there or not,
I mean, that is that's everything to me.

Speaker 1 (32:53):
I feel like that's this greater metaphor for a lot
of ways that we improve and that is to say,
you can't quit until the magic happens. And it's like,
I'm sure with the people who tapped out, because if
I remember right, something like ninety percent of people don't
finish the full five months.

Speaker 3 (33:10):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
And I think anytime you're doing something that has challenges,
you hit this point where you just go, I've had enough.
I got to get the hell out of here. Like
you just start to freak out. But if you can
just kind of wait it out and just wait and see,
then you kind of get this second moment where that
sort of phase and you go, oh, this is why
I'm here. Yeah, But if you don't go through that
doubt and the struggle, you're never going to get that

(33:33):
big important realization.

Speaker 3 (33:36):
I think that's really well said, and I think we
experienced that a lot in life and even the things
that I mean even exercise, right, Like, you get to
a point with exercise and you're like, this absolutely sucks.
But then you get over this hump where it's almost
like that ball or wheels starts rolling down the other
side of the hill and you're like, holy cow, I
made it. And now embracing this suck is that much

(34:00):
easier and now you have this perspective that you didn't
have on the on the front side.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
I think that's yeah, I think that's very well said.

Speaker 1 (34:07):
So you starts as a hunter, you do this work
in Alaska, and then at a certain point you start
filming your hunts. And the way that I described your
hunts in the in your films in the Comfort Crisis
is I like to say, there are a lot like
Planet Earth, except they have hunting in them in the
sense that I think if people are aware of any

(34:28):
hunting films or documentary they've seen on the Outdoor Channel,
they're not good. It's just some people who are kind
of we need to get the buck with the biggest
antlers and grip and grins, and yours are very thoughtful
and very much embedded in nature, and nature becomes kind
of the key character in this. So how did you
even start doing the documentaries and what made you want

(34:53):
to do something different? What was it about that that
you're like, I want it, this is how I'm going
to do it.

Speaker 3 (34:58):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (34:59):
So, so it's a long story that I'll give you
the cliff notes.

Speaker 3 (35:03):
And so I was working as a biologist and I
was also going on hunts because it was just all
I ever wanted to do. And when I was on
these hunts, I started bringing a handicam and a camera
because I wanted to come home and talk to my
mom and dad and say like, look at this grizzly
that walked to my camp, and look at this caribou
that I saw, and look at the northern lights, and

(35:23):
here are the things. It's kind of like bringing my
adventures home, tell family and friends. And then through hunting,
I would bump into people in airports, I would bump
into people in hunting camps or maybe a lodge, and
they know, we'd just start talking and say what do
you doing?

Speaker 2 (35:39):
I'm a biologist And then I'd say what do you do?

Speaker 3 (35:42):
And they'd say, Oh, I have a TV show on
the Outdoor Channel, or you know, I'm editor of this
hunting magazine or whatever it is, and variably, and so
I started to meet people, and then people started taking
interest in the hunts that I was doing and started
asking me like, Hey, would you write a magazine article perhaps,
or could we photograph you for.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
A magazine article?

Speaker 3 (36:01):
And and then can you show me some of this
footage that you have because I would love to use
it for my TV show, and I would just give
him my footage and and so one thing kind of
led to another, and I did a project with a photographer.
I did a sheep hunt in in the Yukon in
this Peterson's Hunting magazine, I believe it was wanted to

(36:25):
shoot photos, wanted to do a photo essay of this
particular hunt. So the photographer contacted me and he's like, hey,
I met him through some other work and he said,
I would love to tag along with you on this hunt.
I'll pay my own way, take all your photos, and
then you know, you'll have access to all the photos,
and and and then I'll he'll have his project. We

(36:47):
went and did that, and then that opened a lot
of eyes in the industry.

Speaker 2 (36:51):
People wanted.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
You know, I started popping up on covers of magazines
and in magazine ads. That actually became a problem because
I started walking through department stores and I'd see my
face on like men's underwear, and you know, I didn't
I didn't understand that there was a market here that
was going on. I didn't realize the commercialization of this.
And so long story short, I started working with a

(37:16):
particular company and I said.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
I approached them and I said, hey, I.

Speaker 3 (37:21):
Would like to maybe get into more professional filming and
do some more storytelling.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
And they said okay.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
They said, well, we have another guy that also wants
is kind of hitting us up for some dollars to
do this project over here. Perhaps we can introduce you too,
and we can double our dollars down in one place,
and you guys can work together and work on a
very similar project. Sound like you guys want to work similarly,
And so I went. I went and started doing that project.
And that gentleman had he had some a photographer that

(37:53):
worked for him, and then the editor that worked for him.
And I met these guys and they're wildly talented and
we started working on this project together. Well, that guy
that I got linked up with was not a not
a good man. He wasn't good to just not a
good man. He wasn't He didn't do things legally, he
didn't treat his employees.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
Well.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
He's very talented with a with a still camera, which
is why he had gotten as far as he had gotten.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
But and so I just decided, this.

Speaker 3 (38:19):
Is really cool filming wildlife in this manner and kind
of going down this storytelling road with a bit more
of a professional eye. And I thought maybe we could
do this on our own. And so I approached the
two guys that worked for him and I said, hey,
I'm going to start my own company. And within I
mean a sentence, they said, you know, hey, we want

(38:41):
to leave and go with you and start this company.
And that in the one guy's name is Kyle Nikolaite,
he was, he's not my business partner. He is not
a man that gives compliments. He does not have the
ability to pay someone a compliment. He only is a
truth sayer, that's it. And so, like we were riding

(39:01):
a truck one day and he said, you're a really
good storyteller. You have a very honest approach to your storytelling,
and you have a heartfelt sorrow or position that you hold.
You're very very thoughtful in your design and architecture of
how you tell a story. And he said, if you're

(39:23):
willing to do that on camera, I think people would
respond to it in a very positive way, and I
think you could make films that people would watch.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
And so he is a very gifted editor. And then
William Altman, as you.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
Know Sawyer's Little Man, William's in the Comfort Crisis for
those of you who have read the book.

Speaker 3 (39:43):
Yes, and so he is an extraordinarily different human being.
And I have another sort of William Altman named Forrest
Row Now that works for us, and he is very
similar to William. He's twenty two years old or twenty
three now. But all he wants to do is all

(40:04):
he wants to do is be outside, and all he
wants to do is be outside in the right manner, if.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
That makes sense, you know, William.

Speaker 3 (40:11):
And so we started a company and we started making films,
and then that led to us telling stories for other companies,
and we started doing commercial work. And we said no
to commercial work for years and years because we didn't
want to really necessarily commercialize who we were. And then
in true sense of kind of what you just referred to,
we started telling stories for other companies and it started

(40:33):
to be terribly rewarding to take our talent set to
get to know someone like you. Let's say you wanted
to film a piece around the Comfort Crisis, and to
tell your story through what it is that we do.
And we really started to grow as a company and
doing commercial work and then also our documentaries.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
Yeah, and you guys just released this new documentary, The
Way Back. This is a great one because I really
feel like it hatchers who you are and it tells
the story of this caribou hunt you did, but with
this sort of thread of how you done that same
hunt with your father who you mentioned passed away. How

(41:14):
did that all come together? Did you go into that
knowing that was what the story was, or did that
arise organically or how did it all happen.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
That popped up organically and in the true essence of
the word. And so I started hunting as things kind
of line up in my life. I started hunting with
this particular pilot out of Port Olsworth, Alaska, and I
started moose hunting with him and caribou hunting with him.
And he's a very difficult place to hunt caribou. And

(41:44):
he's like, I think you would really like this place
where we hunt caribou. He's like, there's very few animals there.
It's a huge area. You're not going to see very
many animals at all. But there are some very old
and large bulls there that need to be taken because
as the population basically doesn't have as the biologist put it,
they didn't want to care, but to start eating themselves,

(42:05):
not a house and home. And so this is down
in the Alaska Peninsula. It's a lot of weather, very
dangerous hunt and very difficult. So he's like, I think
you'd love it. So I started doing that and I
did the first year and it was awesome. You kind
of see a reflection of that in the in the hunt,
and it was such a cool place to be. And

(42:26):
we had really nice weather that year, which was remarkable,
and we found some really handsome old bowls, and we
worked really hard to get to be successful, and so
it was awesome. And I remember I was texting my
dad because my mom my mom had had a stroke,
and so I was text with my dad and I
was like, Hey, how's everything going at home? And it's

(42:47):
like good, and he's kind of telling me the ups
and down and I was getting ready to fly home.
This is kind of fun. But I was getting ready
to fly home, and I probably had like four or
five days left. And then I was sitting down and
an interview and I felt the ground shake beneath me,
and I was like, oh, that was a pretty big earthquake.
And I've been an earthquakes before, but I was like

(43:07):
that one, like really like.

Speaker 2 (43:10):
Really move the earth.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
And so I contacted one of the pilots, being my
in reach, and I was like, man, did you guys
feel that earthquake at camp? And he's like, wasn't an earthquake?
A volcano erupted. He's like, so you felt the volcano
erupt And I was like, oh, that's cool, and he's
like it is cool. He's like, but no airplanes are
going to be able to fly now for like ten
days because volcanic ash destroys airplane engines and so you

(43:35):
know you're gonna have to sit tight and you know
whatever else, and which was I thought was cool. So
I was texting my dad about all that stuff, and
he loved My dad always thought like he'd always asked
me like, hey, man, where are you going? What are
you up to? Or if I text him, he'd be
like where where are you because he wouldn't even really
know where I was. And then and then he always
you know, wanted me to get home safe, and he's like,

(43:56):
you know, you can't keep doing this work and not
come up short, you know, And so we always talk
about I know that, and so fast forward, and I
ended up suddenly losing my dad and my mom within
ten weeks. And so then my life just continues like
all of ours do. And you know, you obviously exist

(44:18):
with great sorrow. And I didn't always have a great
relationship with my dad, and he was very much like
some of your humble beginnings in the comfort crisis. My dad,
I knew my dad with I had a relationship with alcohol.
That's what I knew when I was growing up was
my dad and beer, and and he was a you know,

(44:39):
he was a great drunk, if you will, Like he
just drank and you know, there wasn't fighting or anything,
and he just that was his thing.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
But he didn't have a lot of time for me.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
And I grew up in a household with a brother
and sister that were you know, they they weren't, they
were troubled, and so my parents were very very focused
on my brother and sisters. So anyway, so when my
dad and my mom passed, it affected me much more
than I thought it would, because I instantly thought of

(45:14):
a million questions that I wanted to ask my dad,
things that I couldn't conjure up when he was alive, Right,
I'd take him deer hunting and we'd sit in the
truck and we talk about the weather or if the
crops were out, and it would always make me kind
of giggle. He'd always tap his fingers on the windowsill
of my truck and he'd be like, oh, a lot
of corn is still standing, you know.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
And you know, we talk about the weather. And my
dad had an interesting life. He was in the navy.

Speaker 3 (45:39):
And now I'm curious when his friend said, oh, you
are your father's son, Now I'm really curious about like,
was he fishing a lot more than he ever told
me about? Was he My dad wasn't a talker, so
he didn't tell stories. And so fast forward, my life continues,
and we're going in on this project on the Peninsula
again because I wanted to another I wanted to get

(46:01):
out there and see more of that country. And Yeah,
there was just a complexity in my emotions and the
things that I was doing that I didn't anticipate from that.
And so yeah, and I wanted to put a film
together and kind of talk about some of that stuff,
because I mean, it's as raw and as you know, revealing,

(46:23):
as vulnerable as I guess as a person can be.

Speaker 1 (46:27):
Yeah, well, I thought it was just I thought it
was excellent. And I thought also that it really highlighted
how you stand out in the hunting world in a
way that you'll talk about those things. I think you're
a lot more I would say intellectual hunter. I would
even say spiritual hunter. I would be interested in two things.

(46:49):
How have those views evolved? Have you always had them?
Have they changed over time? And then also how have
you been received in the quote unquote traditional hunting world.

Speaker 3 (46:59):
When I was young, I thought I had to behave
a certain way that I was kind of seeing on
TV or I was seeing like with Buddies of Mind,
where like if we kill the deer, you know, we
would hoot and holler and I would be excited. You know,
if I if I shot a buck and I was
hooting and hollering, it wasn't fake if I was really excited.
And like Bodies of Mind, when we first started hunting,

(47:21):
you know, we would come up empty handed ninety nine
percent of the time. So when we finally got a deer,
like we'd hug and you know, like holy cown, even
though we just lived it. We'd tell each other the
story again and like he came down this ridge, and
you know, we'd do all this stuff, but once you
were over that emotional dump, you know, you'd look at

(47:41):
this animal and I would, and you see the blood
coming out of his wounds, and you'd understand that, oh,
my arrow passed through his heart or my bullet passed
through his lungs and he ran, and I would see.
I'd put myself in this perspective of I'd watch and
tip over, and I knew that he's losing his life

(48:04):
right now, and so I would think about that, and
what if that was me? What if I was the
one that had been shot. I'm over there trying to
take my next breath, but my lungs are filling and
and and I would just have this connection of understanding,
or at least I would think about, you know, what

(48:25):
did this deer go through? And now that he's laying there,
and I'm going to start skinning him, you know, I'm
looking at his eyes and his nose, and you know,
and right away, I you know, i'd start cleaning the
blood up, and I start brushing the dirt off his
face and putting his tongue back in his mouth. And
his tongue had fallen out and things that I felt

(48:46):
were appropriate.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
And so I've just always had this.

Speaker 3 (48:51):
Ultimate respect of don't take the animal's life until you're
entirely ready, or this is the animal, or this is
the moment, this is what you're going to do. And
then once you do that, there's this there's a proper
steps that you need to take to utilize this animal
into you know, to be kind of in this wild system.
And so while I've always felt that great connection, it

(49:15):
took me a while to understand and to be honest
with you, you were also a big piece of my
growth because talking to you about this stuff for the
Men's Health magazine it was something that I'd never done before.
And in talking and teaching it to you, or in
talking about it openly with you, I found areas of
my brain and things that I talked about, you know,

(49:36):
kind of where you you'd asked me a question, I'd
say sentence, and I go, yeah, yeah, that's how I feel.
But I haven't had to conjure that sentence up to
anyone else because nobody else had asked me that question.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
And so then I started to understand.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
And then once I read the Comfort Crisis, and I
started to see all these metrics that you went put
to the things that I was experiencing, and then all
so even actually with the scarcity brain and kind of
seeing like I kind of giggled when I read the
scarcity Brain, because it's very easy to look at somebody
and be like, dude, you're getting hoodwinked with a slot machine.

(50:14):
But then I also looked at it as my own life,
and I was like, man, I'm getting hoodwinked with a
white tail deer because every November, every November, it's all
I can think about, and every springtime I wanted, you know,
I want to go on and tap trees right now
for maple syrup, and I have firewood to cut, and
then I'm gonna have fish that I'm gonna go chase.
And so it's kind of the same thing a little bit.

(50:35):
I mean, there's no bells and whistles, but I get
maple syrup comes out of the tree once I boil
it down. It's kind of the same thing you get in.
And so I didn't always have this soulful, heartful connection
to where I can articulate it, but I always took
that time, even around my buddies, I didn't talk to
them about it. But I always took that time to

(50:57):
put myself in the deer's shoes, if you will, or
to put myself in the dut shoes, and to do
these things. And I'd killed a couple of animals when
I was younger, like I shot a blue jay once,
I shot a black caped CHICKENI once these are non
game species that I just cause and effect. I had
a gun. I was a little kid or a younger kid.
I saw a bird and I shot it fell and

(51:20):
those were immediate for me, immediate no nos and sorrows.
And I remember I shot the chickadee and instantly I
was like, oh my, I just took a sanda's life
for absolutely no reason. And then I kind of let
someone talk me into shooting the blue jay. And then
I learned then that I was like, doesn't matter what

(51:41):
anyone else wants, it matters what I want. And then
even when we first started, you know, working with you,
and then when we wrote our first film in twenty twelve,
I wrote this voice over for the film and I
handed it to Kyle nick Lay and he read it
and he's like, this is terrible. He's like, you have
to rewrite all of this. He's like, I've never ever
heard you talk like this, but I wrote it in

(52:01):
a manner that I thought we were going to entertain people.
And he he educated me much like you did in
some essence where he's like, you have to make these
films as though no one's going to watch them.

Speaker 2 (52:14):
You have to make these films so they are so
true to who you are that.

Speaker 3 (52:19):
It doesn't matter if anyone else watches it, because if
you make it for you then and you're being completely honest,
then you'll never have to chase any sort of fashion
or or you know, a different type of decision or or.

Speaker 2 (52:35):
Or you know, inspirations or whatever.

Speaker 1 (52:38):
Dude, you were always Isn't that such a good metaphor
for art and how to live? Yes, it's like, why
copy everyone else?

Speaker 2 (52:48):
Just do your own for you.

Speaker 1 (52:50):
If people like it, great, If they don't, you still
you still got something internally rewarding from it.

Speaker 3 (52:57):
Yeah, and if you chased the things people liked, which
change all the time, you're always going to be one
percent behind or ten percent behind where the people are going.
You're always it's and you're not doing anything that's true
to yourself. So it's literally you're it's an empty bucket.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
Well, then you have to become your your copying what
has become the trend? Whereas I would argue with your case,
you have started a trend of hunting documentaries that are
different than what was before, Like you're kind of the pioneer.
You're seeing a lot more documentaries that are shot like

(53:35):
Planet Earth if you will, that are asking big questions.
What when you first released your first documentaries, what was
the reaction in the hunting community.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
I thought we were going to get murdered, if I'm
being honest.

Speaker 1 (53:47):
I thought the guys interested to have guns yep.

Speaker 3 (53:49):
And I thought the guys are gonna there that it's
going to be horrible, And it wasn't. People came out
of the woodwork and said, I've thought about for years.
I've never articulated to my buddies. I've had these same sorrows.
I've had the same seriousness. Other guys came, I mean,
I'll be honest with you. A couple of guys came
to me and said, this is, you know, ridiculous. It's

(54:12):
just hunting. It's just a deer, you know. But very
very little of that, Michael much more was people then
wanted me, wanted their kids to watch our stuff. And
then you know hunting instructors wanted their pupils to watch
our stuff, and you know guys that were going to
get their hunter safety cards. And it was a lot

(54:34):
of stuff like that. I met a young lady last
week at a convention. I met her dad and she
started a company called Cookies for Conservation and so where
she started baking cookies in their kitchen, she would go
out and selling. This was something that she wanted to do.
She was thirteen or fourteen and she started selling all
these cookies. She gives one hundred percent of the proceeds.
I'm sure she buys cookie dough and stuff with her,

(54:56):
but she gives on a hundred percent of her proceeds
to wildlife habitat and generating wildlife habitat. And he's like
that you are the one that inspired her to do
this stuff. So yeah, and I got I got another guy.
He's like, hey, can I take a picture with you.
He's like, my kids are gonna flip out. He's like
you are and this is so weird. But he's like,
your our kids reward for if like they crush their

(55:20):
metrics during the week of school and sports or whatever.
They get to watch Donnie Vincent films on the weekend,
and it's just like, yeah, so it's.

Speaker 2 (55:27):
Stuff like that that, and I've.

Speaker 3 (55:30):
Received very little negative, you know, feedback some of it.
You know, some guys don't want to listen to the
long drawn out answers or writing or kind of the
reflective nature of it.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
They don't want to do that.

Speaker 3 (55:43):
And then of course, you know, some people are just
you know, they're just against what what I'm doing all together.
But it's very few, very few.

Speaker 1 (55:53):
What's interesting is I think that even vegans see some
value and what you're doing. Oh like, you're not getting
all these letters from vegans that are negative, many are positive.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
Many many are positive. And then they are curious.

Speaker 3 (56:10):
They'll say, Okay, for instance, I'll tell you one I
did this shoot years ago. We did this shoot with
a company called zeal Optics. They make sunglasses and snow
goggles and stuff. And they invited they invited us out
to this big photo shoot and where they're doing a

(56:31):
new catalog and I was one of their athletes. And
so it was me and all these red Bull dudes
and girls, all these super talented people. And so the
first night we all got in this house and everyone's
in the Red Bull gear and I'm just sitting there
like I've seen you in a magazine. I've seen you
in a magazine. I'm you know, I'm sitting there and
the guy's like, okay, first thing first, we're going to
go around a room. Say your name, you're disciplined what

(56:54):
you do, and you know while you're here. And so
all these people are going around like I'm a professional snowboarder,
I'm a professionel down hill, mountain bike or all this stuff.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
And there's a guy named Mike Dowdy.

Speaker 3 (57:03):
He's i think the best wakeboarder in the world out
of Florida. Been a Red Bull guy forever. And he's
laying on the couch and he has his Red Bull
baseball cap over his eyes, which, if anyone knows anything.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
About Red Bull, you can't even buy a Red Bull
baseball cap. So if you see somebody with a.

Speaker 3 (57:18):
Red Bull baseball cap, like, they're probably have gods of talent.
So anyway, he's laying there with his baseball cap on
his eyes, and it's going all the way around and
it comes to me and I'm like, my name's Donny Vincent.
I'm an adventure bowl hunter and they're all kind of
looking at me, and he lifts his cap up and
he looks over and he says, what did you just say?
And I said, my name's Donny Been someone adventure bow

(57:40):
hunter filmmaker. And he just sat there and he's like,
coolst fricking thing I've ever heard in my life.

Speaker 2 (57:46):
And he put his hat back over his face. And
so all of those people, most of.

Speaker 3 (57:53):
Those people, a lot of those people were, you know,
against hunting or had questions about hunting, or were vegans
or vegetarians or whatever. And the next morning I was
up early getting a cup of coffee and one of
the dudes was a professional surfer and he's like, man,
I've never eaten meat in my entire life. He goes,
both my parents eat meat because I've never eaten meat

(58:14):
in my entire life. But he said I and he
kind of looked around. He's like, but I've always wanted
to be a bow hunter. And he's like, what is
that all about? And I goes from our ancestry, man,
I said, you you know, and he's like, I feel
this connection in the waves he talked about feeling the
energy of the earth and the waves, and he's talking

(58:34):
about seeing fish and all this stuff, and I was
just like, that's He's like, where's that coming from? And
I said, that's from us being hunters and gathers. Your
ancestors hunted and gathered and would skin buffalo and eat
meat and would forage. And I said that was a
very successful way for us to live and a very

(58:55):
rewarding way for us to grow muscle in our minds
and to learn our thumb and great fire. And so
I said, that's probably where it comes from.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
And I've had other vegans and vegetarians.

Speaker 3 (59:07):
In fact, I probably received more positivity from that community
of people than I have from hunters, if you will.
And they have questions and then they want to say
They'll say, I don't want to be a hunter, but
my wife and I would like to start shooting rabbits
that we have on our land and eating rabbits. And
I say, okay, So I kind of give them. They
I'd say, okay, do you want to do it with

(59:28):
a bowl or with a gun? We want to do
with a gun. At first, I'm not skilled with the ball. Okay,
buy this gun, and we talked about it, and then they
send me pictures of like him and his wife in
the kitchen, skinned out rabbits, carrots, cut off, all this stuff.
And then they'd send me and it's funny because they
would say to me, I don't want to be a hunter,
but this is what I want to do. And then
you know, obviously I'm sitting there on the backside going

(59:49):
they'll look now, but you're a hunter. Doesn't mean you
have to go out and try to shoot the biggest
deer on the land, or go out and shoot a
giant caribou that you're going to mount and hang on
the wall, or you know some of the things that
we do around our films or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
And and like with you, I remember.

Speaker 3 (01:00:05):
When I mailed you and your beautiful wife a box
of elk meat from the elk that I killed in Nevada.
I remember right away you mentioned me back and you're like,
I think this is the finest mean I've ever eaten.
I think that's what You're awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:00:18):
And even she liked it, and she's not a big
meat eater. She was worried at first, and she was,
this is actually great.

Speaker 3 (01:00:25):
It's awesome. And then you going and getting your caribou
and having your caribou meat and your caribou hide, and
you know, and and uh, yes, it's been a it's
been a lot of inquisitive people. And I get a
lot of people that write me that will say, hey,
I totally disagree with you killing this mountain lion, but

(01:00:45):
can you walk me through the how you did it
and and why you did it? And I walk them
through it, and they'll say, you know, Okay, I didn't
like it, but I totally appreciate your explanation and the
why you did it and how you did it and
all these different things. And I like those conversations. I

(01:01:05):
think it's really important. Like I said, we live in
that gray area.

Speaker 1 (01:01:09):
So a lot of people who are listening to this
right now, they may not want to hunt, they may
have no interest, But how can they take some of
the lessons from your hunts and find ways to apply
them to get a lot of the same benefits. And
I'm going to give you an example here. So after
our hunt, I started spending a lot more time in
the wilderness, and I just did this forty five day

(01:01:30):
backcountry hike across southern Utah I wasn't hunting. I was
walking every day. But I will say I experienced a
lot of the same benefits that I did when I
was reporting the comfort crisis with you up in Alaska
for more than a month. How do you think that
if people don't want to hunt, how do you think
they get some of the benefits you do? And to
sort of set this off, I'm going to read you

(01:01:51):
a quote of yours. To experience fantastic things, you have
to put yourself in fantastic places. What can that tell us?

Speaker 3 (01:02:00):
Yeah, I think it's funny. I said that. I said
that sentence when we're on the top of a mountain
in the Arctic Circle. We're in the Mackenzie Mountains of
the Northwest Territories. And when I said that to one
of my crew and I was like, you want to
experience fantastic things, you have to put yourself in fantastic places.

(01:02:21):
But really, I've come to realize that that fantastic place
that you have to be in is in your mind,
because the reality is you and I could go out
in my I'm in a log cabin on ten acres
of woods here in Wisconsin, and you and I could
go out and set a tent right now on my
ten acres and get a couple of bows out, or

(01:02:44):
a couple of twenty twos out. We could go and
hunt my population of gray squirrels that I have here
amongst all my oak and maple trees and kill three
or four or five gray squirrels, skin them out, bring
them back to our tent, start a fire and cook
them in a frying pan over our wood stove and
the TP, and sit down and have this podcast. Dare
I say this, You're in Las Vegas right now, right Mike,

(01:03:08):
when I'm in Wisconsin. We're doing this over our computers.
If you said, hey, I want to experience something while
we do this, and I said, okay, well fly out here.
We'll hike around my ten acres, we'll kill a couple
of squirrels, we'll sit down on the TP, we'll start
a fire, and we'll cook the squirrels over the fire,
and we'll have this conversation the TP. Our experience would
be tenfold what it is over a couple of computers.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
And so I realized you don't have.

Speaker 3 (01:03:32):
To go to the Arctic Circle on hunt carryboar adulship
or gris le bears You can do this in your
own backyard.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
You can do this in a state forest. You can
do this.

Speaker 3 (01:03:41):
It's a presence and a mindfulness that is the fantastic
place for you to be in. And even if you
don't want to hunt, you know you can become a fisherman.
If you don't want to fish, then you can just
explore and the walk about that you just did the
forty five day walk about. Go and do that. Watch
the sun come up, watch the sun go down, Understand

(01:04:02):
when the rain is coming, when the wind is coming.
Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out
on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.
It's without a doubt you can't. You can't come out
the other side if you live in your essence of
what's the first rule of a masogi, don't die right.

Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
Make it really hard. The second rule is don't die.

Speaker 3 (01:04:24):
Second rule, don't die. Beyond that, you will come out
a better person. Yeah, that's that's for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:04:31):
I'll say. For me, the time in the wilderness has
always been my greatest teacher because it strips away control
and I feel like modern life, a lot of the
technology we have is to put us in control of
every variable. We've got calendar scheduling everything out, we've got
technology that can deliver food, we've got xys. Everything is

(01:04:52):
predictable and in control, and when you get outside that
all gets stripped away. You might get lost. You can't
predict what the terrain is going to be like, you
can't predict what the weather is going to be like,
shit is going to go totally off the rails. But
you got to figure it out. And it's in that
process of having certainty and control stripped away where you
have to figure it out, that people begin to realize

(01:05:15):
something that I think we've lost, and that's that you
can just figure things out and do things and become competent.
And then for me, that tracks back into everyday life
where I get an email I don't want to deal with.
I go, you know, you just survived a lightning storm
mount in the desert. I think you can be okay,

(01:05:35):
go into this meeting you don't want to go to.
And that just changed that fundamentally changes your relationship to
your everyday life.

Speaker 3 (01:05:41):
For me at least, I totally agree. And I think
like when you were with us in the Arctic, I
could see it on your face.

Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
You were bored. There's portions of.

Speaker 1 (01:05:51):
That time where you're like, so damn bored.

Speaker 2 (01:05:54):
Now what do we do? You know?

Speaker 3 (01:05:56):
Because when you're out there, are there animals or aren't animals?
It's our animals. How do we get into position to
look at them better? How do we get into position
to maybe take one and take it back to camp?

Speaker 2 (01:06:07):
Is it raining? Do you have to put your rain
gear on? Or is it not raining?

Speaker 3 (01:06:11):
Are you cold? Do you have to put your down on?
Or are you cold and it's rain you need to
put your down And you start going through these things like, oh, hey,
we need it's we have no idea what day it is,
but we know we need water, and we know we're
running low on food, and we know we are probably
going to have to hike to the next drainage because
the caribou don't seem to be coming through here any longer.

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):
But those purities for me.

Speaker 3 (01:06:35):
Having a tent, having to maybe have a wood fire
and carry all your supplies in the backpack and have
to deal with, you know, one hundred mile an hour
wind or an eighty mile an hour wind, or being
bluff charged by grizzly bear and having a grizzly that
is now starting to harass your camp because he realizes, like,

(01:06:55):
if I harass these guys enough, I'm gonna be able
to steal all their food and maybe even you know,
like kill one of them or whatever. And you know,
you start to like break all these things down. But
there's an essence, the simpleness of it that is such
a pure way of living life. And but when you
come from the rat race, like if I took somebody,
and I've loved to do this sometime, but if you
took somebody that had to totally like take a guy

(01:07:19):
that goes clubbing every night or something like that in
New York City and just take him out there and
then just be like, yeah, this is, first of all,
we're going to hike ten miles today, and you are
going to hate yourself. There's gonna be blisters all over
your legs and your thighs are gonna chafe, and you're
however strong you think you are in the gym, and
this is going to wear you out.

Speaker 1 (01:07:38):
It's not gonna work, Yep, not gonna work.

Speaker 3 (01:07:40):
And then you're gonna sit there and have to reflect.
And I just think that stuff is I often think
what if we didn't What if things just continued in
the hunter and gather society? You know, who would we
be as a people? What would the world look like?

Speaker 1 (01:07:56):
Very interesting final pal questions. What's your most important pieces
of gear?

Speaker 2 (01:08:08):
I mean, the reality is it's your mindset.

Speaker 1 (01:08:15):
And that comes through getting out there. And I feel
like that's an equation of time and not quitting. Like
we talked about in the beginning, you need to go
out prepared enough. You need to know that there's going
to be a lot of hurdles, but you just got
to take them one at a time, and in the
process of hurdling, you get better at hurdling.

Speaker 3 (01:08:35):
Yeah, because I've even seen people do you know, like
we might have gear in the essence of, you know,
really nice rain gear so we can go further in
the rain.

Speaker 2 (01:08:47):
We might have really.

Speaker 3 (01:08:48):
Nice down gears, we can exist further into the cold.
But if you look at the guys that were one
hundred years ago and they were dealing with animal skins
and wolves, and even look at some of the Eskimos
now and some the tribes that are way up on
the ice cap and stuff, like, they do amazing things
with just seal skins and polar bear skins and things

(01:09:09):
like that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:09):
And really the gear.

Speaker 3 (01:09:12):
Is it's a hack if you will, and you even
look at the stuff that we use. Another company made it.
So it's this shortcut that we're complaining about. It's the
same shortcut because if I had to go out and
get a seal to make my mucklucks or get a
seal to then make my part cut. Now we're talking
like that's you know, that is a very real essence.

(01:09:33):
But everything in life comes with it's kind of give
and take. But I would say your mindset and positivity.
I think people greatly underestimate our lack of time on
the face of the earth. I think people greatly underestimate
a positive attitude. And I think people greatly underestimate how
interesting you are to the rest of us. If you

(01:09:56):
were just going to be yourself, no matter what that is,
I people, we will find you. You be you, and
we will find you terribly interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:10:07):
That feels like a hell of a note to end
on DONI my man, this was awesome. I really appreciate
you coming.

Speaker 2 (01:10:13):
On same same anytime.

Speaker 1 (01:10:16):
Final question, what's our what's our next adventure? I feel
like we're due for one.

Speaker 3 (01:10:21):
Yeah, we're due for one. We need to figure we
you and I need to talk. I'd love to go
on a walk about with you where we're actually hunting
or doing something along those lines, or even maybe a
sort of Canadian canoe trip where we canoe up into
a wilderness and have to pordage and paddle and shovel
water for a bunch of days and go catch some
fish and and I think there'd be a lot of

(01:10:43):
fun to just go and kind of sit back again
reflect And I'd like to hear I've read all of
your books, but i'd like to hear about them again
from your mouth and and hear your ideas and the
things that you're experiencing and and i'd really enjoy that.

Speaker 1 (01:10:57):
I'd love that. Man, let's plan on it. Thanks for
coming on, man, Thank you, Thank you for having me.

Speaker 3 (01:11:01):
Michael, there you have it.

Speaker 1 (01:11:04):
Thanks so much to Donny Vincent for coming out of
the wilderness for more than an hour to have an
awesome conversation with us, and thank you for tuning in.
As always, we're going to be in your feed twice
a week, so please keep an eye out for more,
and if you have any questions, please drop them in
the comments or send us an email. Even better, if
you want to send us a voice memo or a

(01:11:25):
video of yourself asking the question. We would absolutely love
that and we will try to answer as many as
we can. Don't forget to hit subscribe, and as always,
have fun, don't die