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No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
The Elk Hunter's Journey: Leadership, Adaptability, and Self-Discovery in the Wild with Gilbert Ornelas and Joe Giglia
This episode explores the profound life lessons derived from elk hunting, emphasizing adaptability, decision-making, and self-awareness. Joe and Gilbert from the Elk Brothers discuss how their coaching transcends hunting, offering insights applicable to personal development and leadership.
• Coaching as an interface for personal growth
• 95% failure rate in elk hunting and lessons in perseverance
• Importance of adaptability and understanding the external environment
• Comparisons of elk and turkey hunting dynamics
• Utilizing the OODA loop for successful decision-making
• Insights from hunting and teamwork principles in business
• Recognizing self-awareness as a key to success
• Encouragement to connect nature with leadership development
NWO Intro with Boyd
March 25, 2025
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
Moose, when you think about decision-making complexity, engaging with the external world, I don't think elk hunting is at the top of your list. But for our guest today from the Blue Collar Elk Hunting Podcast, the Elk Brothers Blue Collar Elk Hunting Network, we have Gilbert Arnelis and Joe Giglia here today to share with us some insights about how they're continuing the world of reorientation when it comes to hunting elk. So welcome to the show, gentlemen. Joe Gilbert, how are you today, hey?
Speaker 2:thanks man. Good morning fellas.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having us. Thank you, Thanks for coming on. Elk hunting decision-making coaching. You have a podcast about this, a pretty unique podcast, if I say so myself. Are you able to connect personal development, professional development, to elk hunting on your show, Dude?
Speaker 2:so elk hunting is just an interface. It's all the same life skills. You know what I mean. So in fact, I've been a coach. I've been a coach for uh, I coached at the high school level for 34 years.
Speaker 2:I've been coaching elk hunters ever since somebody came and asked me one time what it was I loved about, because we were very successful in in coaching, and Gilbert's also a coach, um and, and they asked me one time. They were like what is it that you love about track and field? Because that was that was what I was really known for at the time. And and you know, it was funny because I never thought about that question and and when I looked at it, I was like it really has nothing to do with track and field. Track and field is just an interface. It's just something that I use to be able to teach others how to be successful.
Speaker 2:And we do the exact same thing with elk hunting. The only difference is people are coming to us because they're not finding success and they're wanting to know how they can succeed. So it's even better. Man, it's kind of like being that person trying to sell real estate, you know, or that person that's trying to, you know, get the dream job, or that person that's trying to accomplish something in life that they haven't been able to do, and they go to life consultants and life coaches to be able to do that and believe it or not. Yes, we're coaching elk hunting and we are passionate, we love elk hunting, but it's just an interface man. You can take the same type of things that we do and change that to anything in life.
Speaker 3:Yeah, whatever sport you love, whatever hobby you love, I mean we can absolutely step out of that arena and into another one. We can absolutely step out of that arena and into another one. I've spent 17 years coaching in the women's fastball, women's fast pitch travel ball organization, so we've been helping young women get to the next level and play college softball. I was fortunate to be mentored by one of the greatest softball minds in the world, the late Mr Dick Haskell, and coaching females is much different than coaching males, right, females have to feel good to play good and boys have to play good to feel good. So it's totally different, the mindset, right. The same thing with our elk hunters that come into camp. These guys have different personality traits, right, so you have to learn what works with them, where their hot buttons are, where we can teach in that mode, where they understand it right.
Speaker 3:And let's face it, guys, when it comes to elk hunting, you guys from out east, or even guys from out west, a lot of people don't understand how to get to the mountains and set up camp and then or even find a tag, right.
Speaker 3:So we start with some of the very basic skills on teaching guys how to hunt out west right and from you know we start months in advance before we ever get boots on the ground. Joe's developed an extraordinary compact but filled with unbelievable hundred plus years of knowledge in our base camp program, where guys can go online and get a leg up on that start to head out West Right so guys can go to oakbroscom and check that out. A shameless plug, but at the at the end of the day, fellas, that's what we're passionate about. We're passionate about elk hunting and we're passionate about teaching guys how to elk hunt. My grandpa taught me a long ago. If you catch a fish and give it to a man, you can feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, he can feed himself and his family for a lifetime.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have a similar thinking process here that if we can help you with your decision-making process, understand the external environment, it's scale-free, it works in every domain. So some of the things that I've seen on your podcast and heard on your podcast which align well with what we talk about here and we talk a lot about John Boyd's observer oriented side act loop how do we make decisions? How do we perceive reality? How do we make sense of the external world? How do we learn? How do we adapt? But one of the episodes you have is on about pace, like tempo. And then you have some other episodes on decision-making and the conditions in the environment and getting inside the mind of an elk, Like how do you do that? How do you create mismatches? How do you do that? So a lot of overlap here. I kind of want to throw it over to Moose to check in with him and see what his initial thoughts are. As far as far as what you heard so far, yeah Well, I love hunting.
Speaker 4:Most of my hunting up to now has been birds. So, uh, dove Turkey. Uh, pheasant, I've, I've uh tried deer hunting once and I fell asleep, but I can't sit in those blinds either, bro.
Speaker 2:That's why I'm not able to do that, which was the cool thing about turkey hunting, because it was a lot.
Speaker 4:You know, I was officer in marine corps. It's a lot like that where you're on foot you gotta do a patrol and you gotta outthink your enemy. Um, the turkeys don't shoot back, but if you spook them or whatever, they disappear. You never see them again. And I've gotten the opportunity to do that in Ohio, virginia, michigan, wyoming, south Dakota and other places. To Poncha's point, you have to have the right kind of framework and kind of what Gilbert was saying too, and you too, joe. I mean you have to really apply concepts that can work in any domain. I felt both my parents were born in New York City. I grew up an army brat. I never hunted. I went to high school in Pittsburgh. I lived in the city. I was not much of a hunter until after I got out of the Marine Corps and I felt like, hey, the concepts I learned in the Marine Corps, heck yeah you could actually chase birds with these through the woods and they work.
Speaker 4:And I've seen a lot of the stuff on elk hunting and I have some friends that pull tags and they get to do it in Colorado and other places In Pennsylvania where I'm from. They have a very small population actually do draw tags for like a very it's not a very big herd, I guess, but the whole entire thing it's like if I don't understand where I'm at, if I don't understand the tempo, if I don't understand how the animals behave and what the environment's like, there's no way I'm going to be able to make the right decisions and actions to get a, get an elk. And to your point, gilbert, if I mean if you get, if you get an elk, you can feed a family for a lot longer no doubt than with a fish.
Speaker 1:So, hey, moose, I'm wondering if deer hunting is more like a passive oodle loop you know, um, sit back and wait whereas elk hunting is more active and that's kind of oh no, no, I digress.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we are very passionate about deer hunting here in South Texas. We rattle deer in and we call them in religiously, okay. No, there's a lot of parallels. The only thing is in the environment that you do it in. It's very hard, right? I mean everything. Deer are hypersensitive.
Speaker 4:It's going to depend on the type, right. I mean everything. Deer are hypersensitive. It's going to depend on the type, right? Right, Gilbert, It'll depend on the type. 100% Deer are very hypersensitive animals.
Speaker 3:One little crack of a twig, and I mean they're in another county, right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but when I'm driving my Chevy Suburban down Route 80 in Pennsylvania that deer doesn't move at all, but if I hit a twig that thing's gone yeah because it's natural environment, right?
Speaker 3:They're used to hearing those cars going up and down the highway. They're not used to hearing that twig snap and not be a bear or a mountain lion or whatever else that's trying to sneak up on them and kill them, right? So they get a little bit different how they react to certain situations in their environment. Same way with elk, but deer are just more hypersensitive about it. In the area we hunt them in, everything sounds like you're walking on cornflakes, right? So spotting and stalking makes it extremely hard for that to happen. Even our wild hogs down here are very smart.
Speaker 4:So down there in South Texas, say, versus up here in the Northeast where you'd want to be in a blind, your range is probably very limited, your ability to shoot at greater distances is probably limited in you know, say, pa or you know New York or wherever. Yes, down in Texas you're saying, it sounds like it's more of an active process where I can more or less like in the Marines we'd say, go on patrol. It really depends man.
Speaker 3:We do do a lot of blind hunting, much like in Pennsylvania when you're hunting on the edge of a cornfield or Michigan. On the edge of a cornfield you can shoot several hundred yards if you're able to use a centerfire rifle. A lot of areas in Michigan you only use a shotgun or a bow.
Speaker 1:Yeah or a bow.
Speaker 3:Especially in rural areas where there's housing, urban areas where there's housing around. A lot of times it's bow only or shotgun only. So you know we have to adhere to all the rules that are there. But, like this past weekend when I was in South Texas, I could shoot up to 500 yards. You know. I mean that's a long way to shoot at a deer and a lot of countries to look at.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a lot of country to look at. And then I go down in the river bottom and I'm limited to 50, 60 yards with my bow right. So there's so many different aspects of you know. It just changes and our environment in the oak woods do too depending on the region and the area that we hunt. Right, you can hunt up in Colorado where you're hunting huge expanses of big canyons and things like that and not a lot of timber, and it's just totally different than when you get in the thick black timber in New Mexico or Oregon or something like that, where it's super thick, or even in the bush in Canada, where we were in a couple of years ago, where you can't see like that. I mean, it's super different, right, but it all transcends on the area that you're hunting in, right?
Speaker 3:So there's a couple of points here we still have to be mindful of the wind, we still have to be mindful of our noise and, depending on the critters that we have, the cool thing about elk is you don't have to be all that quiet. In certain stages you do need to be quiet, but for the most part they're big, dumb, clumsy. I say dumb, they're not dumb at all, they're big critters like cattle, bovine cattle. They're big critters and they're kind of clumsy. When they're kicking stuff around they make a lot of noise. So they're not as noise sensitive until it is in that moment where you're calling them into what we call that bubble and then they're pretty hypersensitive on their senses, right?
Speaker 1:So there's a point in this that I want to bring up, and that is when we talk about observer-oriented side act and complexity theory, and that is that control is outside and bottom-up. That context determines the method, it determines the approach that we use, and that's what I heard from both of you. There is the external environment. The landscape determines how we're going to do things. We also have constraints. It could be different laws in different parts of the nation or different states that determine what we're going to do. So the point there is again, and this scales through everything the environment determines what you're going to do.
Speaker 2:You really can't control that. The environment, the um, your opponent, the uh, the forces that your opponent has to work with, the forces that you have to work within budgets, money, um, you know, uh, uh, goals, all of these things that all these external forces are going to change a lot of the things that you're doing along the way. So, like I'll pull this to you know to where you it's going to help you punch, I'm going to pull what we do to where you're at, because you talk about the OODA loop. Am I saying that right? Right, so, which is the decision-making process? Right, observation, orientation, decision, action. Right, it is basically, you know, you think about it when we go into the woods, when we go into it, the observation part of it. Right, taking a look at the environment around us, what's going on, what's happening, with all of our senses in fact, and then the orientation taking, what we're observing at that moment, with the knowledge set that we have, what our goals are, what it is we need to do, what we want, achievement, what our opponent looks like, what their strengths and weaknesses are. We're taking all of that, then making a decision, going into an action. Right, you know, you look at what we do as that zero sum game. Competitive environment All right, and you know, for us, for most people, the key to success in a competitive environment is in their ability to operate inside an opponent's OODA loop, right, okay, I want to take that a step further in that I think and I'm going to add some parts to this so that you can take our mindset, what we do for our interface, into any interface out there so I'm going to take it a step further in that I think our success really comes in trying to manipulate our opponent's OODA loop. All right, in other words, by knowing the habits, by knowing the strengths, weaknesses, what's driving their decisions at that time, at that time of year? Right, that's driving their behavioral instincts within their loop. We want to know those things and then use those to our advantage to then direct their decisions to act. You know, I think that's one of the biggest issues, that a lot of.
Speaker 2:So if you take a look at elk hunting, you take a look at elk hunting success rates and basically we talk about archery. We're archery elk hunters. Yes, we hunt with weapons and rifles as well, but our passion, our drive and to really know the intimacy of the animal that we work with archery takes you to a whole different level. All right, now I'm not saying that you don't have to understand them on the rifle basis. It's a whole different game and it has its own difficulties and we talk about those as well. But when we take a look at archery and we take a look at what we're trying to do to direct their decisions right, we actually get in situ.
Speaker 2:There's two ways. There's people that go out there and there's a 95% failure rate in archery, elk hunting. 95% failure rate, basically a 5%. Now if you look at, you can say there's a 90% failure rate and say there's a 10% success rate. But 5% of those people out of that 10% are the same people every year, every year. That other 5% are people that are just finding success here or there, right? So when you take a look at that and you're like well, why is 90% of the people failing? It's because they don't operate inside the critter's OODA loop. They operate hoping to be a part of that OODA loop, all right. In other words, they're waiting for that animal to, for their time and their place to cross paths, All right.
Speaker 2:So basically, you know, I know elk live in the woods, so I'm going to go in the woods. You know, I know that in September elk bugle and this is something that I'm going to give you a little education here, ponch. So during the rut, which is the mating season of elk, bull elk make a bugling, whistling noise that they use for letting know where they're at. They use it for different things. They use it to imitate other suitors, they use it to attract the females and they gather them up in a harem basically right and tend them for breeding purposes. So people know that. So they go out in the woods and if they don't hear an elk, then what they do is they hike around in the mountains. Maybe I'll go to where there's water, maybe I'll go to where I think they have food and hopefully our paths will cross.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's basically them operating and making their decisions in the environment off of minimal knowledge and hoping that the destiny of that critter and their destiny cross paths. That's why we have such a high failure point. What we do is we're so I would say that you have people out there in their decision-making that are very passive, and then you have people that are very aggressive. We're on the aggressive side and what we do is we not only want to be inside that critter's OODA loop, knowing them intimately, what their behaviors are, how they operate, but we want to actually manipulate that and convince them to act differently, or not really act differently, but act the way they would, in a way that's going to bring them to us. That's going to help us, right, all right, that's going to help us, right, all right. So by mimicking the language, by going out and being able to speak the language, it's a way for us to have them find us.
Speaker 2:We have a rule in Elk Bros Our goal is not to go out and find elk, our goal is for elk to find us. Find us Because it's a lot easier. It's a lot easier and we have more of an advantage when we're still in there, moving, than when they're still in. We're moving, trying to approach them. Okay, now how could you apply this to the business world? You do things so that people you understand their OODA loop, you get inside their OODA loop and you do the things that are going to manipulate their actions and I know that seems like a negative word, manipulate, but I don't think it's. I'm not taking it in a negative sense. You're doing things so that those people want to come look for you. They want to look for the service you provide.
Speaker 3:They're buying styles right.
Speaker 3:I'm a salesman by trade, fellas. That's what I do for a living in oil and gas sales here in the US and all over the world. I've worked all over the world and what we do with our clients is try to figure out their buying tendencies or their buying signals right. It's no different than when we're in the woods we really need to study our prey and understand their tendencies. And in the corporate world we're doing the same thing, whether it be with global procurement. People, supply chain managers or I work in the drilling and completion sector of oil and gas and have for over 30 some odd years, and it's really important for us to understand our clients right and understand their needs. We want to be a trusted advisor, not just a salesperson. You know so, at the end of the day, what they look at me as somebody that can be trusted in their business and getting their business done right.
Speaker 1:So I want to build on this. Value is often in the eyes of the customer, right? So what you're trying to do is deliver value. You got to understand what they value. So there's a connection to the Toyota production system that John Boyd made with his observer oriented side act loop, and that that is, he actually included a lot of these concepts from TPS and Lean into it. So that's where we get control is outside and bottom up. You start looking at respect for people. You start looking at empathizing with your customer, understanding what their orientation is, how they see the world, and so you can manipulate it. And I don't disagree with you on the word manipulation.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes we say manipulation, leadership are opposite sides of the same coin. It's leadership, it's manipulation, because when you're leading an organization, you're trying to lead people to get them. You're trying to change the environment to get them to do what you want them to do. It's the same thing you're doing with elk hunting, right? You're mimicking the environment. You're using exacted practices from, I guess, ecology, what we'll call biomimicry, uh, mimicking something in the environment to get them back or bring them back into your, uh, your OODA loop. So what you're saying resonates, uh, very well with me Uh, it's, it's 100%, and I think what you're doing, imagine this, imagine you're doing this already. You can bring leaders in from any organization, take a milk hunting and have them apply the lessons they learned through a five day, six day hunting trip back to the organization. Am I, am I wrong or right in saying that? 100%, right, yeah.
Speaker 2:And, and I think it's interesting, but you can talk to people that have come into an elk hunt with us and they it's life-changing for them. You know, in a lot of ways, Because here's the thing like so if you think of elk hunting as a competition, so that zero-sum game with winners and losers, right, you know, either I'm going to go hungry or an elk's going to lose its life to feed me. Right, it's as zero-sum as you can get right, me right, it's as zero-sum as you can get right. But you take a look at that and you think that that's the competition. But really there's two opponents in this game. That's you against the animal, and when you think of zero-sum and you against yourself, all right.
Speaker 2:So I think that's the part of it that a lot of these guys come out basically thinking about. It's them within. You know them against the animal, and they find out very quickly that their toughest opponent on an elk hunt is themselves. So when you think of the OODA loop, they forget many times that. You know, a lot of people forget that the greatest opponent is themselves, because they forget to observe themselves the most important components of their success their preparation, their knowledge, their skill development, their mental strength, their physical prep, their perseverance, their attitude, their whole confidence. That wraps all that together Right, and I think a lot of people that come out to hunt with us and you guys don't know the back history of us but Gilbert at one time was a client of mine that became a best friend, that became a partner and when I first met Gilbert, elk hunting changed that man's life.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, am I right, bro? Absolutely. Yes, sir, enriched my life in ways that I couldn't be. It's a whole other podcast, fellas. At the end of the day, they pay me to talk too.
Speaker 3:So, guys, I can run on and on and on about my passion, right, which is elk hunting, or you know? Or you know doing what I love to do around our clients and customers. But you know, hunting and fishing with my kids and my bros from elk bros is what we love to do. But in itself it's not always easy. It's not, it's not. And you know, we have to make schedules match up. We have to make schedules match up, we have to make everything match up. And when we're in camp with our clientele, it's really about the time we spent before we get to camp with them and understanding them.
Speaker 3:But for me it was life changing. It was something that I knew was going to be difficult. And the guy that really set all this up if y'all have heard any of our backstories a guy named Carl Arlen Gamage. I hunted with him for my 40th birthday. I'm 55. So Joe and I've been hunting together for over 15 years and I was just a client, right, and Joe, it was like a whole bunch of men that met up on the mountain from obscure places and it was a lot of men that had some really struggles growing up with their father figures and stuff like that. And it was a lot of men that had some really struggles growing up with their father figures and stuff like that. And it was like God assembled us together, right. So you're going to hear a little bit about my faith, but it's like God assembled us together and had us all meet and heal man, because a bunch of us were broke. You know and and, mark, I know you, being in the military, you've been through some. You know some personal tragedies and things like that, and there's a lot of healing to be done with PTSD and everything else, man, and being able to forgive yourself for some things that have gone on in your life or you've had to do in the name of God, country or whatever. It may be Right. So for me it was an unbelievable time of healing. I had to really look within myself. I weighed about 365 pounds when I showed up there, so it was totally unbelievable, transcending much better for my health.
Speaker 3:These guys motivated me in ways that and I challenge myself every year. Yes, joe dude, you know I'm an asthmatic. It's really tough on me in the mountains but I can kill elk and hunt elk with the very best of them that are out there. And it's not because I'm all that great, it's just because I love it and I push myself to the very dying limit. I had pneumonia two years ago, walking pneumonia, and I'm up there with clients pushing myself every day. You know when I should have been probably in the hospital, you know. But at the end of the day, this is the kind of stuff Joe's leadership pulls out of you, right? Yeah, uh, we've had guys show up to camp, get hurt. They don't back off, they just keep right on rolling. You know, um, but it is.
Speaker 4:It changed my life, you know so some of the me I wanted to be able to give back some of the best hunts I ever went on.
Speaker 4:I didn't, I didn't kill anything yeah, you know, I mean I my brother I think of my favorite hunt was this past november, it was this past november and you know I was hunting with my 17 year old son, uh, trying to get his first, his first turkey. We, you know, we came up empty. He was really frustrated. The other thing too, to your, to your point, about how you have to do the learning and that you know, start to understand it and understand the sounds and the sights and the smells and everything you know, he, he learned really quick. Hey, it doesn't matter that you're wearing under armor ridge reaper, that's not going to bring the turkeys. No, look, you look really cool.
Speaker 4:No, one's going to dispute that and he's a hell of a pheasant shot. I mean, my boys will bag pheasants right and left. They're phenomenal.
Speaker 3:They range from chickens, man. They're good eating.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, they're phenomenal eating. The best part of that is working the dogs, and that's a whole other discussion about the-.
Speaker 2:But you said the key word though mark work. Yeah work.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's work it is work it's a labor of love and even when you come up quote-unquote empty-handed, you know you don't really, because of so many other factors, you know to be, to be with nature, to to learn about the animals and how they operate, and they're all different. You know, elk are different than turkey, they're different than pheasant, and I found that miriam birds are different than Eastern birds. You know what I mean. There's just all kinds of different things that you have to factor in your orientation because it's going to have a direct effect on how you shape and make decisions and actions. Of course, the we're talking about Oodaloo, but we're also talking about, you know, all warfare is based on deception, so you better be camoed up and you better be, uh, in the case of turkeys.
Speaker 2:You know have y'all hunted turkeys before? Absolutely yeah, I mean you know that turk turkeys are good.
Speaker 4:What's going to kill a turkey is not a, not a load, a turkey load that shoots it. What's going to kill a turkey is its blood lust. Yes, at somebody he thinks is moving in on his women and he's going to come down and fight, and that's how you get them every time.
Speaker 3:You ever seen a schoolyard brawl. Everybody wants to come watch the fight. Right. Same thing with turkeys.
Speaker 2:Those turkeys are crazy and turkey hunting and elk hunting dude are very, very similar.
Speaker 4:Oh, they are Very similar, so tell me so, as a turkey hunter, fill me in on the orientation of elk hunting and where you would see the corollaries between the two me, or I give the sound of a Jake in there, or I set up decoys that I've got a Jake with a hen.
Speaker 2:You know. What you're doing is you're you're playing off their breeding need at the time and you're playing off their breeding temperament and you're deceiving them to think that there's another suitor or there's a hen that's ready. You know, um, she's over there for and ready to be bred. So he's coming to that, to that, and what's he doing? As soon as he gets in where he thinks he can be seen, poof he, you know he's out and he's strutting and he's showing himself telling that hen, here I am, come to me, right, just like that. Well, a bull does that both visually and auditorily. He does it with his bugle, he does it with his other.
Speaker 2:There's so many variances in languages of elk, right, um, you know a lot like. There are different things and different types of yelps, there's tree purrs, there's clucks. There's the different things that you do with turkeys, where, in elk, when you're doing cow talk, you got muse, you got um chirps, you've got wines, you have um, where they're telling something that they're lost, right, or or they're trying to regather. So it's the languages and the the object of what you're doing during that time of year. So much similar now the the deal is, and I'll tell you this if turkeys would smell, you'd never kill one, we never yeah you'd never be able to see one I
Speaker 1:mean they hear a sound.
Speaker 4:Yeah, they hear they see something off back to oodaloop. They see they identify a mismatch. They're gone and they're done. And you're not gonna. You're not gonna see them for hours and they're. They're coloring even the males. Their camouflage is remarkable um, the first one I ever kill. I'll tell you the story. So we get, so we our. Our methodology was always try to get to the ambush them at the roost, you know, pre-dawn or dusk, and then yep.
Speaker 1:And then if you.
Speaker 4:If you miss, then you, you know you spend the day on foot.
Speaker 4:Then you spend the whole day on foot and you're walking several miles then you spend the day on foot, then you spend the whole day on foot, you're walking several miles. Elk honey, elk honey. So the first one I ever got was on an ambush out of the roost where a turkey popped its head like a periscope over a small knoll where we had some hen decoys set up with a weak jake, and that turkey got one look at the weak jake and he heard the call that the guy did and he went down there. I am going to fight, I'm going to take all those women Right, I'm going to, I'm going to kill that little boy and I'm going to run down. And he came flying down. He got one, one final Yelp or whatever, and then put his head up and you know, I got him.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:If you don't know that, if you don't orient to that, if you don't understand that, there's no way you're going to leverage that to your advantage. To get a turkey, get an elk.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you just described a whole elk hunting scenario. One of the biggest differences those turkeys are going to. Yes, they move through the hills, but at the pace they move and generally how far they move. They have a place they like to bed, which is called a roost. They have a place that they like to feed, right, which is their feed area. Same thing with elk hunting, Same thing with any critter, basically right. They have areas that they want to bed, where they're going to be safe, and they got to then move through to other areas where they're going to need food, where they're going to need water, all those things that are there. You know they have driving forces. So to understand that now you take elk hunting and compare it to how far the turkeys move, Now you can be covering miles and to go at the pace that they go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, ooh, buddy, they can cover six miles just to go to water.
Speaker 4:Well, I think too, like Ponch I I'm gonna loop you into this on a carrier battle group, right, like a carrier, carrier battle group's, got the carrier and then you have all these other things out there around the carrier, like the, the frigates and the destroyers and the submarines, kind of providing a screen. And turkeys correct me if I'm wrong, gents, but don't they kind of travel that way? There's like the core tom.
Speaker 3:They have a century yep.
Speaker 4:Yeah and then they have these other hens that are kind of screening and they're on the lookout for threats and whatever. And then if there's a certain type of cluck that the hen makes, that alerts everybody hey, danger radar and then they just go and then you never see them again your radar and then they just go, and then you never see them again.
Speaker 2:Every, every animal in this god's creation, first instinct is to survive yeah and you know you can take that to the most basic principle um the most primal principle in the woods to taking it to um.
Speaker 2:A person in their home, a person in their relationship, a person in in their relationship, a person in business is that instinct to survive in whatever realm that they're working in right. So there's always going to be red flags and there's always going to be walls that are built up that are protections for that. That's going to affect your decision-making by what another person does. And it's funny funny, when you first start out in business you're not as jaded as when you've been in business for a while right.
Speaker 2:Because you haven't had so yeah, you haven't had so many of these things hitting you from all over to where your instincts of protection are one of the first things that go up right. So it you're exactly right in that. I mean you can, you can take anything at any level and take it to our basic human need to survive, and then that's what we use to make our decisions. And you know, when I go back to where I say people don't think enough about themselves, about them against themselves, you know, I think there's a lot of people that go out military business, you know whatever it is and when they're going and putting themselves in a situation, a lot of times we always think it's that it's, you know, all dependent on our opponent. You know their strengths, their weaknesses, right, and our yeah, we run the standard.
Speaker 2:SWOT analysis. Yeah, and a lot of times we base our successes on ourselves and our failures on them. Yep, right. So because this is how they act, we never, a lot of times and people that are good in business, that are good in the, in developing um organizations and corporations or whatever it is teams I'm, you know, I was a coach in doing that they take a look at themselves and say what are my weaknesses? If I'm failing here, it's not always my opponent's fault. A lot of times that failure is because of myself.
Speaker 1:But, Joe, there's an ego block in there and I'm curious when you're out with your clients, do you see those egos getting their way too?
Speaker 3:Some yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, the good thing, though, is-.
Speaker 3:I know mine did when I first started elk hunting. So I really speak about myself and not really expose any of our clients or anything like that. But I'm going to speak on myself and 100% my ego got in the way Right, and I think as men, we don't ever want to view ourselves as weaker than or less than, but in the end of the day, when we have our quiet times with ourselves, we know. We know that we weren't good enough or we weren't prepared.
Speaker 4:It goes back to what Joe said at the beginning If you don't have self-awareness, there's no way you're going to have situational awareness Right boy.
Speaker 3:This gave me the big dose of that humble pie brother. I mean, every year I make mistakes, I'm probably my worst own critic and Joe's probably the best teacher I've ever had coach-wise and I've had a lot of coaches in my life, but Joe's probably the very best and what he's really good at is never shaming you but always having you reflect right, and that took me a long time to understand that. That's the part that made me get better was not having that ego right.
Speaker 4:Not having that. So let me ask then so when you get clients and they come from, say, manhattan or whatever, I would think it's not like the coaching that Ponch and I do and the leadership we talk about. You better be coachable when you show up.
Speaker 3:Heck yeah. That all starts with managing expectations before they get here.
Speaker 4:When we manage those expectations as Ponch was saying, too, controlling their ego too. You have to control your ego, you have to have the humility.
Speaker 3:It's hard for you to figure that alpha male out, right?
Speaker 4:yeah, with with a little bit of conversation, because there's also a lot of danger on a hunt too, that when people don't have the self-awareness and people don't have the right situational awareness, it's really, it's really easy to blow your leg off. You know, it's not.
Speaker 1:It's really easy to fall down and, you know, fall on an arrow or something like that yes, sir, yeah you just uh, sir, you just triggered something for me, and that is when you're hunting, you're actually in a flow state, right, because you have some risk, some novelty, big time flow state. You have to get you know, deplete the ego a little bit, you have to have some skills. So I imagine when you're out there you're engaged in some type of state of flow. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:Yeah, is that correct? Yeah, absolutely so, joe. Joe works with guys. We work with them months before they get here. But it's very evident, when they show up early and they don't go to camp with us like first day, they'll show up three or four days early and let that mountain get a hold of them for three or four days. And and what ego they did have it runs out the crack of their rear ends really quick, right, cause they're like, oh my God, this mountains the equalizer, right, it just absolutely tears into them. And that day three, man, they're not even wanting to get out of bed half the time, you know, cause it's super tough man.
Speaker 2:So I used to work with at-risk kids, um, that were, um, basically locked up, right, uh, you put them in their environment. It's a whole different ego than when we took and put them out in the mountains. And one thing about a lot of the elk hunters that we got they're coming to us because they don't know right and so really they're stripped of their strengths, of that. So it becomes more of a partnership and becomes more of a partnership and becomes more of a mentorship. And I think that I think the ego lies in. Sometimes some people are like um, if I do a, b should happen, and it's just like that should happen. If it doesn't, what's? What's wrong? You know?
Speaker 4:it's like a formula Like yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like OK, so tell me what I have to do to succeed. I got to do A, b and C and then I succeed. Well, in life, in anything you know, and you take a look at the OODA loop, it's always in flux and I mean when you go in and you do an action, you get a reaction. You've got to go back and reassess and reorient to then decide on what you're going to do for the next flow. And that's the great thing about elk hunting is again, these are animals trying they live to survive.
Speaker 3:That's it, they survive to live.
Speaker 2:That's what they do for a living right. So you can make a decision. And because this is an animal with its own temperament, with its own decisions, with its own, you know its own persona. Really, because all the elk act different. They have personalities, just like we do. They have different voices, sometimes, like we do. Some are more aggressive, some are more passive, and a lot of that depends on age and different things. But you can make a. They have different voices, sometimes, like we do. Some are more aggressive, some are more passive, and a lot of that depends on age and different things. But you can make a decision. And then that's not necessarily going to succeed and guys are like, well, what did I do wrong?
Speaker 4:And I'm like nothing, that's elk hunting. That's elk hunting man.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's what you got to tell a 17-year-old boy on his first ever turkey hunt, because in his mind he's thinking okay, I've been fully equipped in uh, under armor, ridge reaper head to toe, I've got a really good rifle or you know shotgun with a turkey load and uh, we're in a great area and I hear the turkeys they're coming. But it's not a checklist, it is what ponch is saying. You got to be in that state of flow and you have to be flexible and adaptable.
Speaker 2:That's the huge word. Adaptable is the huge word.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and understanding the quarry, you know I mean when you understand it. So like turkey is a little bit different. You cannot fool a turkey's eyes Right, they are extremely gifted with their eyes. Elk are different. You can fool an elk's eyes right, Especially if they're moving. If they're moving, you can move right and they catch. When they're static, when they're standing still, they catch movement very easy.
Speaker 2:They see 240 degrees.
Speaker 3:Yeah, 240 degrees around them and they catch movement like a turkey, okay, but when they start moving they don't. They don't pick up movement like that. So in the turkey woods, when the turkey's coming in and you're, you've got them working and they're coming to a decoy or they're coming to some yelps and purrs and clucks, they're working in, you can see them. It's like coming to a fight, right, school kids coming to a fight. But if you move at the wrong time, king's x it blows up in your face. Right, this it's different with elk. You're, they're expecting to see movement because they're expecting other critters that are moving. So we draw in while they're looking at us the whole nine yards, whereas, man, you draw with a turkey looking at you. Good luck, good luck. Yeah, they have. You know, I.
Speaker 3:I got up yesterday morning and went hunt, deer hunting, in my, my place in south texas, and when I got up in the tree okay, up in my stand, I hunt a big ladder stand and on a river bottom, I got up there and I happened to be fumbling with some equipment to get it set up, my camera and this, that and the other and other, and I heard it's pitch black six o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 3:I'm like what was that? And I happened to turn my headlamp up and there were 38 hens above me and my tree roosted so watching them fly down. After it got daylight they were freaked out that I was in that tree already. They didn't know if I was a bobcat or what climbing up that tree, but they knew it had a big light on the head of it. When they came down it was 38 of them Again. As soon as they saw me in the daylight they got the heck out of there. They were totally different in the darkness. The same thing with elk. Elk will let you get away with fooling their eyes when it's a situation that they should be seeing things moving.
Speaker 1:There's an interesting leadership connection here, Gilbert and Joe, and that is you have to understand your people too, right when you're leading an organization everybody has a different perspective of the world. It doesn't mean we have different sensory capabilities not necessarily. But at the end of the day, as a leader, you have to understand your people, those are the best leaders that understand their people and care about them.
Speaker 1:Right, so you can learn this in the art of hunting. And I'm curious about what you do, gilbert how do you take these lessons from the field and apply them to another field that you just brought up drilling and completion? Yeah Right, are you able to?
Speaker 3:do that. You know, for me it's been kind of a parallel road right when I've rode that road for a long time. I'm a long time hunter and fisherman, spent time in the professional bass fishing world as well and hunted all over the world, fished all over the world. My job's taken me to far corners of the world. So for me it's almost been a parallel of the leadership style that you have in business and the leadership style you see on the mountain. We get really and Joe expects that leadership out of his coaches and I think, if anything, our clients and the people that were around give us enough praise and Joe does too about how well we lead by example. Right. And for me in the business world I got to be willing to do more than my employees or my brothers that I go to battle with every day. I got to be willing to ask more out of myself than I do out of them, and for me I will never ask somebody that works for me more than I would do on my own. Does that make sense to you guys? I expect more out of myself than I do out of the guys that I'm leading and for me that's what's kept me employed. It's kept me, my family fed and everything else. Because you become a trusted advisor and not just some everyday salesman that shows up with a taco or a donut to feed everybody, right. So for us it was about I had some very strong mentors in my life in the hole in gas field that they cared if you stayed out till three or four o'clock in the morning, you better have your butt in the office at six, right, because they did it every day, you know. So we had some very strong leadership. Same thing with Joe.
Speaker 3:When my life transformed, you know formed, when I started elk hunting with Joe, he demanded it. You couldn't hunt with Joe unless you were prepared, and I so wanted to hunt with Joe. He goes look, dude, you're too fat, you're too slow and you've got to fix your life before I'll hunt with you. And look man, joe has softened quite a bit as we've moved forward with our relationship. But that is one, and I needed that.
Speaker 3:I needed to be coached hard, right, I've been that way my whole. I needed to be challenged and I need a challenge every day in my life. I know that about myself, but it took me years to figure that out, fellas. Right, it took me years of, you know, scratching around in the dark, working in Africa, working in China, to understand that man. Yeah, this is pretty simple man, it's pretty easy, but I really need a challenge, right. So I think leadership is what you make of it, but it parallels my career path and has, and then one day, you know, elk Bros will be my total career path, right? So not plan B but option A. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:When you talk about knowing your people right, it's just like those. Everybody has their own personalities, they have their own quirks, they have everything like that. But there is a basic need that everybody has Ponch. Everybody wants to belong, everybody wants to do well, everybody wants to feel self-worth, right? So all you have to do is you let them know what it is they can do to have those feelings to belong. This is the expectation they can do to have those feelings to belong. This is the expectation you know, and you don't have to. You don't have to belittle. You can demand, you can say, in order for you to be a part of this, and it's not difficult. You just have to do this, this and this.
Speaker 2:You want to be on our track team. Well, you're not going to drink, you're not going to smoke dope, you're going to show up every day. These are basic things, man. You're going to do the work and you're going to be unselfish. That's the things that we had to do in order for us to succeed, right? And I think when you're working with people, everybody has those basic needs. Everybody wants to belong, right, and I think you know when you take a look at why people are attracted to elk grouse. We do a podcast and you talked about our podcast, blue Collar Elk Hunting, and people that listen to that. You know it's funny. A lot of people learn things about elk hunting when they listen to us, but that's not why they always listen to us. I get so many emails and letters that said we love the camaraderie.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know the case fire chat, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they. They feel like we're making them a part of that, they feel like we're not talking down to them. They feel like that they're coming into some place, that they are welcome, and and I think that says a lot for things, right, right, so that was one thing I wanted to say about what you said, ponch and Mark, I've been thinking about that whole thing with your son about you get to a point and they go like it didn't work, right? Well, I think that happens a lot again in everything in life. All of us, we go okay, I'm going to put myself out there, I'm going to do this, whether it's a sale, whether it's going for a job or you know any of that, I'm going to put myself out there and you get a door shut in your face right A lot of people.
Speaker 1:That's the end of it.
Speaker 2:That's the end of it and I really think success I think a lot of that success is that perseverance, that dog on a bone, that people that won't quit. Right, we have a saying that. That I always told my kids all the time man, winners never quit and quitters never win.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And so I think that's another thing that you know, when we go into Gil's been with me plenty of times when we get into a situation, we have a bull come in, it blows up and it doesn't work, and he's like, oh, and I'm like, that's done, let's go, we're going to go hit the next one man. And just because we blew at that time or just like that gobbler that went out there, that doesn't mean I can't call that booger in another time or move and change what I'm doing, change my strategy, go back, you know, observe, reorient, reorient.
Speaker 2:Yeah, make another decision on an action.
Speaker 4:Right, yeah, I mean the whole.
Speaker 4:It's a constant ebb and flow of learning man, it's a constant ebb and flow I mean I would tell anybody that was hunting that, just like I would tell anybody I want to be in athletics or golf or whatever. If you're not learning, forget about it. You're not adapting. And if you're not adapting, you're dying or you're not going to be successful at your craft. And, by the way, animals are no different. So one of the things that John Boyd studied extensively was evolutionary biologies. And if animals don't evolve, they can't adapt. If they can't adapt, then they go extinct.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I'll even take it a step further. I think you know you take a look in our nation at the amount of divorces and said a couple. You guys have said a couple of times uh going up to the mountains.
Speaker 4:Tell us where they are and what's the uh? Tell us more about where they are. What, what you know, what? What can we expect on the mountain? Where are they?
Speaker 2:and everything else so you want us to tell you where say yeah, where do y'all?
Speaker 4:where do y'all hunt and where do?
Speaker 2:you yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:So like when you say when you say, say up on the mountain, give us a little more geographical idea where that might be.
Speaker 2:So we're in northern New Mexico and different areas which part East, the only reason. I asked, my dad lives in Santa Fe. Yeah, it's actually more north central, it's more in the northern part of the state. Where I live, here in Cimarron, I am basically 45 miles from the Colorado border. In fact, some of the areas that we hunt in we're only 20 miles from the Colorado border. A lot of times.
Speaker 2:So northern New Mexico in some ways is a lot like southern Colorado and vice versa. On that we have very, very in terrain. We've got low grasslands heading up to mesa-type hills that go up into higher, more alpine, Not the type of alpine like you see in Colorado-type alpine type alpine. We do have a lot of beautiful, incredible, massive areas of what we call vistas and aspens and pines. It's just gorgeous up here, man. To me it's God's land.
Speaker 3:Joe Wheeler Peak is in our area.
Speaker 2:Yes, it is.
Speaker 3:Wheeler's the tallest peak in New Mexico. It's 14 000, is that right, yeah?
Speaker 4:yeah, well after I mean after hawaii 14 not including hawaii. I would say new mexico is likely our most beautiful state and it's a surprise. Um, I had never been until my dad had moved there years ago. I remember going there and thinking I was expecting just like desert and tumbleweed. But when you go up and you see these beautiful places like the caldera around Los Alamos and things you just named elk hunting heaven it's unbelievable so I actually live.
Speaker 2:I'm just as a crow flies, I don't know 15, 20 miles from the center of the via vidal. That is another 200 000 acres. That's like the via caldera it is okay it's, it's just um. It's like the yellowstone in new mexico, and without all the tourists and the photographers it's so covenant.
Speaker 3:You can only draw one tag in a lifetime.
Speaker 2:It's a lifetime.
Speaker 4:I want to say was it one of those Netflix series? Was it Yellowstone? It was filmed there.
Speaker 2:You're talking about Lonesome Dove, lonesome Dove.
Speaker 4:Well, Lonesome Dove, but there was another one not long ago, maybe the last 10 years that was filmed up in the caldera.
Speaker 3:Johnny Depp's movie maybe the last 10 years that was filmed up in the caldera.
Speaker 2:Johnny depps? No, he's. He's thinking about longhorn along, longmire, longmire. There you go, okay, yeah, I mean, there's a lot.
Speaker 4:New mexico has a huge film industry.
Speaker 1:Yes, a lot of movies are filmed there, but anyway so what's interesting about the connection to the therapeutics that gilbert brought up earlier is that connection to nature going outside, right, and not a lot of leadership. I guess workshops or anything like that do what you can do, which is connect people back to nature right, and that's that unfolding interaction with the environment that matters and that's part of the OODA loop there as well, and that's. I think we're missing a lot of that in today's tech-driven world where people don't go outside. So what I think you're offering folks is a way. It's not just about hunting, it's about connecting with nature, connecting with others, that collaboration, that oneness.
Speaker 2:And getting out of their normal environment.
Speaker 1:Right and getting out of their comfort zone and getting unplugged and this is absolutely essential when it comes to building leadership and teamwork capabilities is you have to take people outside of their environment into another environment and they exact those lessons and bring them over to, whether it's drilling, completions, whether it's exploration, whatever it may be, and this is why the conversation I knew we were going to have a fantastic conversation today. There's so many other connections to mismatches, updating orientation, building that implicit guidance, control, those skills that you need to be outside to handle weapons, whatever weapons they may be. Yeah, sure, so I think what you're doing is absolutely fantastic. And going back to Mark's question there, take us through how you would. Who's your ideal candidate to come through? Do they have to have any experience with hunting? Come through. Do they have to have any experience with hunting? Who do you want to bring into whether it be New Mexico or wherever it may be in the US, into a program where you can?
Speaker 2:help them build their leadership capabilities. I want somebody that wants to learn to hunt.
Speaker 3:Joe, talk about the Hunt Wars guys that you first started out with and the way that they've won their series of hunt wars. It's an actual television game that these guys you apply and you get picked to come on a TV show to hunt against other hunters, right.
Speaker 2:It's a competition.
Speaker 3:It's a competition. It's a competition. Our company has been doing that for three seasons, is that correct, joe? Actually, five seasons, okay, five seasons now, and we coach those hunters into their styles, right, we coach them on how to call elk, the whole thing from getting boots on the ground to e-scouting, to everything, and those guys that had been very successful. We actually have two coaches in camp with them at times and two of our elk hunting coaches and I'll let Joe expand on that. But these guys that have are very green, probably never elk hunted in their lives. They are the ones that absolutely come out on top.
Speaker 2:So they've had it for five seasons. We've actually coached for four seasons, going into the fifth season. But so the whole synopsis of this thing was they were going to create an elk hunting competition with four teams. You have a shooter and a caller as a team, right, and what they did was people could apply for this. They paid I think it's $100 to enter in for their application, and then they select and they have more than just the one elk hunt. They have all different kinds of hunts going on.
Speaker 2:But the whole idea of it is if you get selected, then you and your teammate whoever you pick comes into camp. One of you is going to be a shooter, one of you is going to be a caller and you're going to hunt elk for I think they go seven to 10 days like that and they're going to be there filming that grind, those people coming in and the actual grind of the elk hunt and the success and the way you win. This is by number one. You have to shoot an elk. Well, I'll take that back. If nobody kills one, they have a shoot off in order to find a winner on a target, but you have to kill an elk. And then they have certain rules that we loved about. That was how far your shot was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how far you shot. If it was over 40 yards, you got points deducted. You got additional points by the age of the animal right, so there were things that really fell into our principles of ethics right.
Speaker 3:What's hilarious, guys, is how we even got involved in this is. I asked Joe to go on the show with me. I said, hey, man, we need to do this and go kill it, and before I know it, we're coaching them. It's crazy, serious man. It was crazy. I'm sorry, joe, I just had to get that backstory in.
Speaker 2:So so, um, the first season when I watched it. So think about this, anybody can win this hunt. So you could be from Arkansas, pennsylvania, georgia, florida and have never hunted elk in your life and you're going to be on an elk hunt. Well, for a show about the grinding, about elk hunting, you have people that show up that have never hunted elk before, so they're trying to learn how to call in camp and you're out there filming them every day and it's like groundhog day, making the same mistakes, not having a clue, not knowing where they're going, you know, and it's painful to watch, actually, right, um, especially if you're an elk hunter. And it was difficult to learn from them because they were making the same mistakes. They were making the same mistakes. So I went to the owners of the show and I said what if these people were coached before? What if they had that? And what if they had coaches in camp? Well, man, they jumped right on it.
Speaker 2:So, season two, the four teams that we had we had a team from Arizona that was fairly good at elk hunting. We had a team from Wyoming that had elk hunting. We had a team from Colorado that elk hunted and we had a team from Idaho that had never hunted big game with a bow and hadn't hunted elk, right? So I'm coaching all four of these teams and basically these other three are figuring oh, it's between us to who wins this, not paying attention to team number four. Well, team number four, not knowing anything, soaked in everything I taught them, went by the Elk Bros playbook. They worked their butts off to learn everything so that they would have a chance, and then they went with this great attitude. Well, guess what? Season two, the team with the least going in won that competition and all they did was follow exactly what we taught them to do with the skill sets that we gave them. A lot of these other three teams fell back on their same habits that they had done in the places they did, and they struggled.
Speaker 1:Joe, I got a question on that. These teams did they know each other before they came on the show or did they?
Speaker 2:form no, so the four teams don't know each other, right?
Speaker 3:Two participants do, the team, the two guys that were the team do, but the teams didn't know one another.
Speaker 1:There's an interesting connection here to teamwork. What we talk about is generally when you create a high performing team, you don't want people that already been working together in the past. You don't want domain expertise. You actually want people that don't have that, because they're more likely to learn and be open to outside coaching.
Speaker 1:So what you just explained is what we do in organizations and we ask them to go through a cycle of destruction and creation. Take your teams apart. We're going to help recreate it and you're going to improve rapidly, more rapidly than you would if you did it the other way. And I think this is hard for people to understand, that expertise oftentimes quote unquote expertise often gets in the way right.
Speaker 2:It does. Yeah, because you're less coachable. You think that everything that you know is going to apply to the environment that you're going in, and then you might start to go with the structure people have given you, but as soon as you find any bumps in the road, you fall back on what you know. Every single time we coach an organization.
Speaker 1:We see that same pattern and you actually described earlier my second and third year being an instructor in the f-14. I could write down all the things they're going to do wrong when we went flying and just leave it in the debrief room and come back and pull it back up, because I've seen it enough times. Right, but we've seen this enough times in organizations, where they get excited about the things you coach them, the things that scale, and then they go back. They fall back to a type of the things that they've they're that's part of the orientation and and, uh, you know, about three months later they realized, wait a minute, we should have really listened to you guys. I'm like, yeah, you should have, but you wasted three months. So I think what you're experiencing in your world is exactly well, it scales right. Humans are humans.
Speaker 2:Um so thanks for that insight, and I'll tell you, the same thing happened in in season three. The guys that won in season three were the lowest man on the totem pole that took the most in, you know. So it's it's really cool.
Speaker 3:When you listen to seal team guys talk about putting their seal teams together, it's never the high performer that they seek out, it's these guys that just are middle of the road but they never quit. They're not the biggest, strongest, fastest, they are the guys that are just the most in tune with adapting and tenacious, that won't quit and they band together to form a stronger group. They can almost tell when they meet you whether you're going to wash or whether you're not, because of the way that you're perceived within in the group Right. So we try to. We try to focus everything as humbly as we can, especially with our guys that are don't have a whole lot of um experience in the elk woods, um, but I'm going to tell you you, we had, we coached a guy that was a world-class athlete. I mean world-class Swam with Phelps. I mean the dude's an amazing athlete.
Speaker 3:His name is Adam Messner and I'm telling you, adam was an absolute demon on a mountain right, just a physical specimen. But when he got up there in the mountains, those mountains tamed him, man, and he had never elk hunted a day in his life. But he went through our course, day one, first time ever, bow hunting elk. He kills an elk. Now, getting that elk off the mountain was a whole different story. But at the end of the day, what Joe and our teachings taught Adam was how to become successful. Then he was like I used to hear guys get altitude sickness, blah, blah, blah, and I thought it was just a bunch of you know, a bunch of hanky panky. He goes, but I mean, at the end of the day he went through it right and he will tell you. As awesome an athlete as he is, he was still very humbled by what went on.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We have a saying in the complexity world, which is it's not the quality of the individual or the agent, it's the quality of the interactions. Right, and that's going back to your SEAL team example is it's how you can work together as a team that matters, and you're spot on about it.
Speaker 4:So no, this has been a fascinating conversation. We have an episode we just recorded with a friend of ours there's. We just recorded with a friend of ours there's a SEAL just the other day that's going to be coming out soon, and he said exactly that kind of what you were just saying, gilbert.
Speaker 3:Well, from the oil and gas side we're pushed from a lot of those teams that train right People that have been ex-SEALs or ex-military. They're in our organizations and they're very high functioning, very highly successful. So I come from a little bit of that background and Joe has a lot of that imparted in our teachings too, and you know, I would even call it a curriculum of how Joe teaches, because Joe teaches from the success moment backwards and so it's inverted and it's an unbelievable way to train and to learn. So for me, I thrive in that environment. I thrive in that pressure cooker whatever they want to call that in the flow state. I thrive in that environment. But a lot of that's due to my training and then growing up in this oil and gas monkey up and down cyclical nature of what we do here in the oil and gas network.
Speaker 1:I have to ask you you watching the TV series Landman, Absolutely All right.
Speaker 2:I'm not. No, I haven't yet.
Speaker 3:So you know, and I love the acting in the show, I love certain aspects of it, but he's more of a field superintendent than he is anything right, land men are just different, they do different things, but not on that scale, right. But I think we empathize a lot in some of the situations that they portray right, and I, I absolutely love the show. So Billy Bob Thornton is he's a heck of an actor. If anybody's never seen Sling Blade, you should. Probably one of the greatest acting jobs of anybody I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker 1:So yeah, Is it safe to say that El Cunning is a team sport?
Speaker 3:You can make it that for sure, Okay, Okay. Yeah, Joe and I as a team, I'm telling you right now if I'm picking a guy to go to war with when I'm in the elk woods, it's Joe, Julia. Every day and twice on Sunday. He is that guy Right. So I and I don't know if he'd say the same about anybody else, but I promise you my pick is Joe Right. So that'll tell you. I mean, I've hunted with a lot of guys over the last 15 years. None of them. They pale in comparison to the skillset that that guy's got and the way he teaches Right. So it changed my life.
Speaker 1:All right. So if our listeners want to go take some lessons from you, or whatever it may be, how do they reach out to you? How can?
Speaker 2:they find?
Speaker 1:you.
Speaker 2:Everything is elkbroscom or elkbrosadventurescom or ElkBrosAdventurescom. Our ElkBroscom is basically our that's. You can get there and you can find our course. We have our products that we do because we make our own elk calls, our own elk bugle tube, and it'll take you to everything. Elk Bros, whether it's our podcast, whether it's our YouTube stuff, you can get everything there. If you go to elkroseadventurescom, that is what they you know.
Speaker 2:I mean we have to describe it as our outfitting side, but we are not true outfitters, we are. We're pioneering that model. We've totally changed it from you know where you buy a hunt and you come in and it's basically when you buy a hunt and you're outfitted generally, that is like a point and shoot type hunt. My job as a guide is for you to be on my rear end. You be a passenger, I'm going to put you in a situation. I'm going to create an encounter, you kill that animal and then I've succeeded. And we've totally changed that model where we don't want our clients to be passengers, we want them to be drivers. Change that model where we don't want our clients to be passengers, we want them to be drivers. So we're actually educating and raising that level of the experience and putting them in position of making decisions of, of you know, in being in the hot seat, getting them ready to do this on their own Right.
Speaker 3:So explain a day. Explain, explain an adventure series. Hunt in a real short, in a real short synopsis. Explain that, because it's unbelievably innovative.
Speaker 2:When somebody purchases a hunt from Elk Grove Adventures, they right away purchase access to all of our success squad materials, to our webinars, to our knowledge, to my academy, to discounts all this stuff that is happening months prior in preparation, before they actually come to camp.
Speaker 2:And then when they come to camp, they get there. It's a seven day deal. They get there about half day. So as soon as they get there, as soon as they get everything, they get their camp set up, we start training them immediately at camp, where we put them into situational scenarios, where we start to we work on their calling we're already working on their proficiency in shooting, putting them in different shooting things and then the next morning we have what we call gray light. Training starts right then. So immediately again, we're putting them in actual, you know, situation, situational training that we're taking them through on that day and we're doing all of this training for a day and a half before they ever get in the elk woods with one of our coaches and then on day three that hunt starts and it starts with our coach, basically now that they have them in an actual place with boots on the ground, showing them the rhythm, showing them like what they do when they're hunting elk, and pulling them into from observation to participation and having them get into that, whereas, depending on how they develop on their skillet, our goal is by day three that they, we become their partners.
Speaker 2:They're telling you know us, you know getting in situations, making decisions, and we're coaching that from the backside, right, just like any coach on a sideline. You know you can give the skillsets, you can give the strategies, you can give the techniques to players, but they got to play it on the court and then we, you know they make a little bit of mistake, or we know what strategy might work. We give them options and we talk to them about some of the decisions, because in elk hunting there is no right or wrong. You know, if I go up and I stand up and I go, hey, elk, yes, that's absolutely wrong, but most guys are going to try to use techniques that we show them. And you know what's funny is we laugh at that. But one of my very good friends who's a coach now and is an incredible elk hunter, the first time I took him out and he saw an elk out in front of him. He turned around to me and he goes elk, elk.
Speaker 3:This is true.
Speaker 2:And I was like buddy, I think we've got to tone that down a little bit. You just told him we're here too, so yeah, and so we do that for five days. And you know people, when you buy a guided hunt, hunting is hunting. You're never buying an animal. You're never buying a kill, you're purchasing an experience, right?
Speaker 2:Well, with us it's even more so. You know, like my coaches, my coaches are such strong leaders that they want everybody to fill their tag, and punch A tag is what you put on an animal after you kill it. Okay, so everybody wants to punch that tag, but what I tell my coaches is you can take somebody out and get them to punch their tag and they'll have not learned a thing. So you gave them a fish, you didn't teach them a fish, right? So our success is in the growth of our client. Did our client leave a better elk hunter than when they came? If they didn't kill an animal, well, they're just like a freshman on my track or basketball or football team. Sometimes they got to go through that sophomore junior year for everything to come together. Sometimes you got a super freshman, right, that happens like that.
Speaker 2:But our goal is the education is to make them a better hunter on there, for them to have their own OODA man so that they know what to do within that, so that they're not limited in those parts that are going to make them successful.
Speaker 2:So our goal is actually to coach ourselves out of a job we want them to become you know, do it yourself, hunters that are strong, that can go out and then actually teach other people that they're. You know, our problem in the United States is we're losing hunting because you don't have the grandpas, the uncles and the dads that are taking kids into the woods. So you know, it's hard to get those skill sets for a lot of people now. So what we want to do is give those skill sets. So now we have people that can share, those, that can keep this tradition alive, that can have these experiences, these life changes that they're not enabling, they're empowering. And that's the big thing that we want to do is we don't want to enable our clients, we don't want them to feel like they're having success because of something that's false. We want them to be able to determine their own destiny and success. So that's a quick shot at Elk Grove's adventure.
Speaker 1:That's great, joe Gilbert. We share a lot of overlap, a lot of same philosophies, principles. One of them you just brought up is we learn more from failure than we do from success. I think that's critical, and Joe and Gilbert, I want to thank you for being on the show today with us on no Way Out. Thank you for picking up the phone and saying, hey, what can we do for you, punch, and it's been a fascinating discussion.
Speaker 4:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for being here.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for having us guys.
Speaker 1:Thank you guys.
Speaker 3:Happy New Year and best to you and your families, god bless.
