Michael Waddell — Country-raised Georgia hunter and TV personality behind Realtree Road Trips and the Bone Collector brand, who pioneered fun, personality-driven hunting television.
The gist
Joe Rogan and Michael Waddell open with Bigfoot, ancient civilizations, and arrowheads before settling into a long meditation on hunting as a spiritual discipline rather than a sport. Waddell traces archery history through Saxton Pope, Arthur Young, and Fred Bear, and shares stories of hunting Mongolia, Africa, and the Yucatan jungle near unexcavated Mayan ruins. They discuss predator management, ballot-box biology, the negative media portrayal of hunters, and how podcasts let real people be seen. Waddell recounts rising from a $100-a-day turkey-hunting guide to a hunting-TV star despite his blue-collar family thinking it was a foolish dream. The conversation closes on authenticity, gratitude, and the welcoming nature of the hunting community.
Big reveals
- Waddell relays the claim, via Casey Means, that Ishi (the Native American who taught Pope and Young to bowhunt) got fat and sick once he was westernized onto grains and sugar.
- Waddell describes hunting Zimbabwe during Mugabe's reelection when Mugabe simply killed his political opponent, the internet was shut off, and Waddell's ~$7,000 cash was stolen.
- On one ranch a trail cam captured 18 different mountain lions at a single water hole, far beyond the old biologist estimate of one male per 28-mile diameter.
- Waddell reveals his mother died when he was 16 and his father had a ninth-grade education, shaping his relentless work ethic.
- At film school in Maine, classmates protested and threatened to walk out rather than edit his real hunting footage, his first encounter with anti-hunting hostility.
- Waddell tells his daughter that in a school shooting she should escape to the woods and flag down a stranger with an NRA sticker or four-wheel-drive truck for protection.
- On his own 500 acres Waddell trapped 22 coyotes in a single year, plus foxes and bobcats, to illustrate how dense and unseen predators really are.
Things worth remembering
- A gigantopithecus, a bipedal 8-to-10-foot hominid in the orangutan family, lived around 100,000 years ago.
- Plains hunters used a buffalo jump on the Milk River in Montana, and one rotting pile of bison was so large it spontaneously combusted and blackened the cliff.
- Spanish bowhunter Pedro Ampuero travels to Tajikistan, Greenland, and Mongolia, where Mongolia has a large Rocky-Mountain-style elk population.
- Archaeologists used lidar to discover Valeriana, a massive Maya city in Campeche, Mexico, found by accident when a researcher browsed data online.
- Studies once held that one male mountain lion controlled a 28-mile diameter, a figure now overturned, and a single lion can kill up to 100 mule deer a year.
- Early Bushnell laser rangefinders did not have angle compensation, which adjusts yardage because arrows travel faster on uphill and downhill shots.
- Female dolphins mate with many males because male dolphins commit infanticide, killing babies they don't believe are theirs to bring the female back into breeding.
- When mountain lions are killed in the San Francisco Bay Area, roughly 50% of their diet is found to be pets.
- Waddell shot a 10-year-old elk whose teeth were worn down to nothing, an animal close to starving or freezing to death naturally.
Recommended in this episode
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The Adventurous Bowman
Saxton Pope
“my favorite book of all time is called The Adventurous Bowman a friend of mine Jeff Johnson who's a writer gave it to me and I read it all the time” — Michael Waddell 00:17:35Find it on Amazon