Jake Bush and I sat down for one of those conversations that started in one place and ended up somewhere I didn't expect. We caught up on life first, the season, family, trying to find some balance between chasing deer and not losing your mind or your marriage in the process. If you've hunted hard for more than a decade, you know that tension. It's real, and it's worth talking about honestly instead of pretending it doesn't exist.

But the meat of this one is mindset, and how much of what happens in the stand actually gets decided before you ever climb up into it.

Jake and I got into a shift a lot of us go through eventually, moving away from chasing inches and toward chasing the story. That doesn't mean you stop wanting a good buck. It means you start valuing the process that got you there as much as the animal itself. We talked about what changes when you make that shift, and honestly, hunting gets a lot better.

We spent a good chunk of time on failure, because that's where the real lessons live. Not every failure is the same. Some come from bad information, some come from ego, some come from just not being honest with yourself about what the sign is telling you. We broke down how to actually build a process for learning from a blown hunt instead of chalking it up to bad luck and moving on.

That led us into scouting, staying methodical, staying present, and catching yourself when ego starts making decisions instead of your eyes and your gut. Patience keeps coming up in these conversations for a reason. It's the one thing you can't fake, and the one thing that separates guys who consistently kill mature deer from guys who get lucky once.

We closed it out on deer behavior and core areas heading into this season, and what to do if you're feeling stuck or frustrated right now. If you're the kind of hunter who wants to actually get better every year instead of just showing up, this one's for you.

Give it a listen and let us know what part hit home.

SHOW NOTES AND LINKS:

—Truth From The Stand Merch

—Check out Tactacam Reveal cell cameras

— Save 15% on Hawke Optics code TFTS15 

—Save 20% on ASIO GEAR code TRUTH20

—Check out Spartan Forge to map your hunt 

—Save on Lathrop And Sons non-typical insoles code TRUTH10

—Check out Faceoff E-Bikes

—Waypoint TV

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I've been staring at trail camera photos for longer than I care to admit. Thousands of them. Maybe tens of thousands. And for a long time, I thought that was the job — collect enough pictures, find enough patterns, and the deer would basically tell me where to stand.

They didn't.

What I've learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, is that there's a canyon-wide difference between information and understanding. You can have a card full of pictures and still have no idea what's actually happening in that timber. The data doesn't think for you. It doesn't filter. It just sits there, and if you're not careful, it buries you.

We're living in the golden age of trail camera technology. Cellular cameras, high-res video, time-stamps down to the second — it's all incredible, and I mean that. But I've watched guys drown in it. They've got spreadsheets, they've got apps, they've got more buck sightings than they know what to do with. And come November, they're still sitting on the wrong ridge, second-guessing every move.

Information without interpretation is just noise.

That's what this episode is really about. The gap between knowing something and understanding it. Because those aren't the same thing, and the hunters who figure that out — the ones who can sit with uncertainty, resist the urge to over-analyze, and actually read what the woods are telling them — those are the hunters who make good decisions when it counts.

Patience is part of it. So is humility. You have to be willing to say, "I don't know what this buck is doing yet," and mean it. Not as an excuse to do nothing, but as an honest starting point. The hunters who've been at this for thirty years aren't necessarily smarter than you. They've just been wrong enough times to stop trusting data at face value.

Deer don't live in spreadsheets. They live in the timber, in the wind, in the terrain features you walked past without thinking twice. Your cameras can point you in a direction, but you still have to think your way to the stand.

This episode is for every hunter who's ever felt more confused after pulling cards than before. You're not doing it wrong. You're just missing the step between data and decision.

That step is understanding. And it changes everything.

SHOW NOTES AND LINKS:

—Truth From The Stand Merch

—Check out Tactacam Reveal cell cameras

— Save 15% on Hawke Optics code TFTS15 

—Save 20% on ASIO GEAR code TRUTH20

—Check out Spartan Forge to map your hunt 

—Save on Lathrop And Sons non-typical insoles code TRUTH10

—Check out Faceoff E-Bikes

—Waypoint TV

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I've said it before, but every season I get a little more convinced that the best hunters aren't the ones with the fanciest gear closet — they're the ones who actually understand what they're chasing. That's the thread running through this whole conversation with Cody, and it went a lot deeper than I expected going in.

We start with journaling, which sounds like a soft topic for a hunting podcast until you realize Cody uses the exact same habit for jiu-jitsu that he does for whitetails. Write down what happened, write down what you got wrong, come back to it later. Failure isn't the opposite of getting better — it's the raw material. That mindset carries through everything else we talk about, and honestly, it's the part of this episode I keep thinking about.

From there we get into deer scent — and how much of what hunters think they know about it is built on assumption instead of observation. Every deer has a different threshold for what spooks it and what it just shrugs off, and understanding that spectrum changes how you think about wind, entry routes, and how much risk you're actually taking every time you climb into a stand.

That naturally rolls into a conversation I've wanted to have for a while: the difference between gear that actually makes you a better, more efficient hunter and gear that's just marketed like it does. We name names, we draw the line, and we talk about why simplifying your kit usually beats stacking it with gadgets. Boots come up here too — because apparently neither of us has found the perfect pair yet, and if you have, we want to hear about it.

We also get into the Ranger stand setup, quartering shots with a bow and the technique adjustments that actually help, why leaving your phone in the truck changes the entire texture of a sit, and how we both manage nagging injuries and stay in shape when we're living out of a duffel bag half the season.

This one's got a little bit of everything — mindset, mechanics, gear philosophy, and the stuff that actually keeps you hunting hard into November. Give it a listen.

SHOW NOTES AND LINKS:

—Truth From The Stand Merch

—Check out Tactacam Reveal cell cameras

— Save 15% on Hawke Optics code TFTS15 

—Save 20% on ASIO GEAR code TRUTH20

—Check out Spartan Forge to map your hunt 

—Save on Lathrop And Sons non-typical insoles code TRUTH10

—Check out Faceoff E-Bikes

—Waypoint TV

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I sat down with DJ Riley for this one, and it turned into one of those conversations that started in one place and ended up somewhere I didn't expect — which, if you've been listening long enough, you know is usually when the good stuff happens.

We kicked things off talking about summer. Not the fun part. The part where you're scouting in ninety-degree heat, dragging cameras through timber that feels more like a sauna, and trying to convince yourself that recovery matters as much as effort. It does. I've learned that the hard way more than once — pushing too hard in July and paying for it come November.

From there we got into something I think about every single season: the clean slate. Every year I try to walk into the woods like I don't know anything. Not because I don't — but because the deer I'm hunting this year aren't the same deer, and the pressure map isn't the same map. Holding onto last year's plan too tightly is how you miss what's actually happening in front of you.

That led us into deer behavior — specifically curiosity. DJ and I talked at length about how a buck's curiosity is one of the most useful and most underrated tools in your kit. It's why the bump and dump works when you do it right. You're not trying to avoid every interaction with a deer. You're trying to control how that interaction ends, so the information you leave behind works for you instead of against you. Trail cameras play into this too — not just as a way to inventory deer, but as a way to read how curious, cautious, or comfortable a specific deer is being on a specific piece of ground.

We closed the conversation on something less about tactics and more about who we are as hunters. Every mistake I've made in the woods has taught me something, but only if I actually slowed down enough to notice it. DJ said something that stuck with me — that the moments right before a shot, the ones where everything speeds up, are exactly when you need to slow down the most. That's not just a hunting lesson. That's a life lesson wearing camo.

If you've ever wondered why the same techniques don't work the same way twice, or why some hunters seem to "read" deer better than others, this episode is for you.

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I'll pick this up right where I left off in episode four. I told you to sit down and run four honest questions on your worst hunt of last season. No sugarcoating, no "I need to be more patient." Find the actual decision that broke things. If you did the homework, you've got something with edges now, a real turning point you can point to.

So now what? It's July. There's nothing to hunt. You've got a diagnosis and no patient to test it on.

This is where I borrowed an idea straight from jiu jitsu, a sport I've spent a fair amount of time getting choked out in over the last few years. There's a difference between rolling and drilling. Rolling is live sparring, full resistance, real stakes. Drilling is the boring part. The same move, fifty times, nobody fighting back, until your body just does it without asking your brain for permission.

Hunters only roll. We show up in October with nothing behind us except the last October. No off-season reps. Just waiting around and hoping we remember how to be good at this.

I got into Angela Duckworth's research on this for the episode. She splits practice into naive (logging hours, shooting shots you can already make) and deliberate (finding the exact thing you're bad at and grinding on it while it's uncomfortable). Most of us practice naive. We scout the ground we already know. We shoot the yardage we're already good at. Then October shows up and the same gap is sitting there waiting.

I break down three ways to actually drill in the off-season. Running high pressure scenarios in your head until the right call has a groove worn into it. Physical reps on your shot sequence, including the part where I talk myself through mine out loud like a crazy person, and it works. And catching the pattern that keeps costing you, then building the habit that interrupts it before it happens again.

Right now, we're in the building phase. August and September, you tighten up. Once the season opens, the drilling's done. You're just trusting the work.

Duckworth has a line I can't shake. One season of learning is a paragraph. Ten seasons of deliberate work is a book. Most of us are out here collecting paragraphs and wondering why we never get anywhere.

Hunt like you train.

SHOW NOTES AND LINKS:

—Truth From The Stand Merch

—Check out Tactacam Reveal cell cameras

— Save 15% on Hawke Optics code TFTS15 

—Save 20% on ASIO GEAR code TRUTH20

—Check out Spartan Forge to map your hunt 

—Save on Lathrop And Sons non-typical insoles code TRUTH10

—Check out Faceoff E-Bikes

—Waypoint TV

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I hadn't sat down with Josh in a while. Not because we fell out or drifted on purpose, just life did what life does. Kids, seasons, work, all of it stacking up until you look up and realize it's been way too long. So when we finally got together to record this one, it felt like picking up a conversation we'd never really finished.

A lot of this episode is about parenting through the years nobody prepares you for. Josh and I are both staring down empty nesting, watching kids pull away into their own lives, and figuring out what that means for how we spend our time now, hunting or otherwise. There's grief in that transition, but there's also freedom, and we don't pretend it's simple.

From there we got into hunting, which for us has never really been separate from parenting anyway. We talked about what success actually means once you've been doing this long enough. Filling a tag used to feel like the whole point. It isn't anymore. What matters now is who you're with, what you're teaching your kids, and whether you're building memories that outlast you.

We got honest about the risks of hunting alone. Not in a preachy way, just real talk about what you lose when there's nobody there to help you make a decision or get you out of a bad spot. Companionship on the hunt isn't just nice to have. It's part of what makes this whole thing worth doing.

We also talked about the fear that comes with getting older. Losing hunting partners, losing time, losing the version of this sport you grew up loving as the landscape shifts around you. That's a heavy subject, but we didn't want to dance around it.

By the end we landed on gratitude. For the friendships, for the stories our kids will tell someday about us, for the fact that we still get to do this at all. The hunt was never really the point. This one is about why we keep coming back to the woods anyway.

If you've got a hunting partner you haven't talked to in a while, this episode might be the nudge to call them.

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There are seasons in life that don't care about your hunting plans. They hit hard, rearrange your priorities, and force you to figure out what you're actually doing out there and why. That's what this conversation with Justin was really about.

Justin lost his nephew before the season started. I'm not going to gloss over that. It shaped everything about how he approached the woods this year, and honestly, it made for one of the more real conversations we've had on this show. Grief has a way of stripping away the noise. You stop worrying about inches and start thinking about what the time actually means.

We got into a lot on this one. Fitness, aging, managing injuries that aren't going away as fast as they used to. If you've been hunting for more than a decade, you know exactly what we're talking about. The body starts sending signals you can't ignore, and the question becomes whether you adapt or make excuses.

One of the things Justin kept coming back to was trusting his instincts. Not the overcomplicated, over-researched, app-dependent version of hunting that we've all been seduced into at some point, but the raw gut feeling you develop after years of watching deer move. That instinct doesn't show up on a map layer. You earn it.

We also spent a good chunk of time on ground hunting, and that's where things got fun. Close encounters from the ground are a different category of experience. The margin for error disappears. You feel the hunt instead of observing it. Justin had some stories from this season that reminded me why I fell in love with this in the first place.

But here's the thread that tied all of it together: time. When you're balancing a family, a job, real life, every sit matters more. That pressure can work for you if you let it. We talked about hunting aggressively when you only have one or two windows in a week, about not burning a stand waiting for perfect conditions that might never come, and about letting experience teach you faster than any piece of technology can.

The role of tech came up too, and not in a flattering light. We've all leaned on it as a crutch. Sometimes the best thing you can do is put the phone down, trust what you know, and go.

This one hit different for me. I hope it does for you too.

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

SHOW NOTES AND LINKS:

—Truth From The Stand Merch

—Check out Tactacam Reveal cell cameras

— Save 15% on Hawke Optics code TFTS15 

—Save 20% on ASIO GEAR code TRUTH20

—Check out Spartan Forge to map your hunt 

—Save on Lathrop And Sons non-typical insoles code TRUTH10

—Check out Faceoff E-Bikes

—Waypoint TV

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's a version of hunting where everything goes according to plan. The rig starts, the weather cooperates, your deer or elk are exactly where you left them. That version of hunting isn't what Blake Ledger and I talked about on this week's episode.

Blake's a guy who hunts with traditional archery equipment, chases deer and elk in country that earns every inch of access, and has a relationship with hunting that goes a lot deeper than punching tags. When we sat down together, I wasn't expecting the conversation to go where it did -- but that's the thing about talking to people who actually hunt hard. The real stories always surface.

Blake told me about a breakdown that happened mid-trip in the middle of nowhere. Not a dead battery, not a flat tire -- a full vehicle failure at the worst possible time, in the kind of country where that actually matters. What unfolded after that wasn't a disaster story. It was a testament to what hunting communities actually are when things go sideways. People showed up. Problems got solved. The hunt continued.

We also spent a serious chunk of time talking about time. Not time management in the corporate-seminar sense -- actual hours in the field, boots on the ground, eyes on animals. Blake's a believer, like I am, that you cannot shortcut your way to understanding a piece of ground. Trail cameras help. Scouting helps. But there's a kind of knowledge that only accumulates when you've watched a particular drainage long enough to know what it does in a particular wind. That doesn't come from an app.

The conversation shifted into the mental side of hunting -- the anticipation that builds before a season, the way a hunter's mindset evolves after years of close calls and missed shots. Blake's had both. He talked about visual confirmation and how trail cameras changed -- and didn't change -- how he thinks about hunting. There's a version of the scouting game where cameras become a crutch, and a version where they sharpen your decisions. The difference is the hunter using them.

This is the kind of episode I started this podcast to make. Two guys who love the woods, talking honestly about what it actually takes. No shortcuts, no highlight reel -- just the real thing.

Listen in. You'll leave with something useful.

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Failure hits different in hunting.

When a quarterback throws an interception, there's film. A coach. A coordinator breaking down every footstep and finger placement. The feedback loop is immediate, structured, and relentless. When you blow a shot at a giant buck, you drive home alone with your thoughts and a pile of questions that don't have easy answers.

That's the part nobody really talks about. Not the failure itself, but what comes after. The silence of it.

I've watched hunters handle blown opportunities in two ways. Some bury it. They chalk it up to bad luck, move on, and repeat the same mistakes the next time a buck steps into the wrong lane. Others spiral. They replay the moment so many times it becomes more about self-punishment than actual learning. Neither one makes you better.

What actually moves the needle is treating a failed hunt the way an athlete treats film study. Structured. Intentional. Without ego.

That's what this episode is about. I wanted to pull apart the process of reviewing a hunt, not just emotionally processing it, and give you something practical you can use when things go sideways. Because they will go sideways. That's hunting. The question is what you do with it when they do.

I work through four questions that I think every hunter should be asking after a failure, whether that's a missed shot, a bad stand decision, or a deer that just evaporated before you could close the deal. These questions aren't about making yourself feel better. They're about pulling real information out of a frustrating experience so it actually means something next season.

The hardest part of all of this is that hunting doesn't give you instant feedback. There's no referee. No stat line. No slow-motion replay from three angles. You have to build your own system for reviewing what happened, and most hunters never do that. They just wait for the next opportunity and hope the outcome is different.

Hope isn't a strategy.

If you want to grow as a hunter, you have to get honest about where things broke down. That means getting past the emotional weight of a failure fast enough to actually examine it. Not dismiss it. Not wallow in it. Examine it.

This episode is for the hunters who want to get better every single year, not just the ones who get lucky.
SHOW NOTES AND LINKS:

—Truth From The Stand Merch

—Check out Tactacam Reveal cell cameras

— Save 15% on Hawke Optics code TFTS15 

—Save 20% on ASIO GEAR code TRUTH20

—Check out Spartan Forge to map your hunt 

—Save on Lathrop And Sons non-typical insoles code TRUTH10

—Check out Faceoff E-Bikes

—Waypoint TV

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's a version of deer hunting where you show up every fall, do roughly what you did last year, and hope things go differently. A lot of hunters live there. I've lived there. And for a long time I didn't even realize it was a choice.

That's really what this conversation came down to. Chad and I kept circling back to this idea of hunting as a craft versus hunting as a habit. And the more we talked, the more I realized how easy it is to confuse the two. You can put in a lot of hours and still not be getting better. Hours aren't the same as learning.

The hunters who actually improve year over year aren't necessarily the ones hunting more. They're the ones who are honest with themselves about what went wrong. Not in a self-critical spiral, but in a practical, diagnostic way. What did I do? What did the deer do? What does that tell me? Most of us are pretty good at remembering our kills. We're not nearly as good at sitting with our failures long enough to learn something from them.

We talked a lot about fundamentals, and I think that word gets watered down. Fundamentals aren't just "play the wind." They're the boring, repeatable decisions you make whether you feel like it or not. Entry routes. Timing. Pressure management. Knowing when to sit and when to stay home. None of it is complicated. It just requires discipline on days when discipline is inconvenient.

Versatility came up too. There's a tendency to find something that worked once and lean on it forever. A stand location, a hunting style, a strategy. But the conditions change. The deer change. The hunters who keep filling tags are the ones willing to adapt, not the ones most loyal to what used to work.

What I kept coming back to after this conversation was how much of consistent success is just self-awareness. Knowing your tendencies. Recognizing when you're making a decision out of impatience versus out of sound reasoning. That's not a hunting skill exactly. But it might be the skill that unlocks all the others.

SHOW NOTES AND LINKS:

—Truth From The Stand Merch

—Check out Tactacam Reveal cell cameras

— Save 15% on Hawke Optics code TFTS15 

—Save 20% on ASIO GEAR code TRUTH20

—Check out Spartan Forge to map your hunt 

—Save on Lathrop And Sons non-typical insoles code TRUTH10

—Check out Faceoff E-Bikes

—Waypoint TV

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices