Truth From The Stand Deer Hunting Podcast

Clint Campbell
  • 4.7 (754)
  • Wilderness
  • Updated Weekly

Truth From The Stand is a weekly whitetail deer hunting podcast built for serious DIY hunters. For 10 years, we've been covering the tactics, strategies, and real stories that help hunters consistently kill mature bucks. From early season scouting and food plots to scrape hunting, rut tactics, and late season pressure, we cover it all. Each week we sit down with experienced whitetail hunters, bowhunters, and public land hunters to break down what's actually working in the field. Whether you're chasing bucks on public land or private ground, managing a property, or just trying to punch your tag on a mature deer, this is your podcast. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow the show so you never miss one

  1. 4d ago

    EP. 501: Why Your Worst Hunt Last Season Was Actually Decided In July | HOS

    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

  2. Jul 8

    EP. 500: The Hunt Was Never The Point

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

  3. Jul 1

    EP. 499: Stop Waiting for Perfect | Hunting Aggressive When Time Is Short

    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

  4. Jun 24

    EP. 498: The Truck Broke Down & The Hunt Got Real

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

  5. Jun 17

    EP. 497: Why Most Hunters Never Learn From Their Failures | HOS

    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

  6. Jun 10

    EP. 496: One Thing The Best Hunters Do

    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

  7. Jun 3

    EP. 495: The Hunt That Broke Everything He Thought He Knew | Ty Jennings | Discomfort Is The Strategy

    There's a version of every hunter that gets comfortable. You find a stand you like, a pattern that's worked before, and you ride it. You tell yourself it's strategy. Most of the time, it's just fear dressed up as confidence. Ty Jennings knows that feeling well, and he blew past it. In this episode, Ty sits down with me to dig into the kind of hunting conversation I live for: not the highlight reel stuff, but the honest reckoning with what it actually takes to grow as a hunter. Ty's journey from tree stand hunter to dedicated ground hunter isn't just a tactical story. It's a mindset story. And if you've ever felt stuck in the way you do things, this one's going to hit. We talk about what it looks like to build a real foundation of hunting knowledge. Not the stuff you pick up from watching YouTube clips, but the hard-earned understanding that only comes from reps in the field, from mistakes you actually had to live with. Ty's got that kind of experience, and he's generous enough to share where it came from. The shift to ground hunting didn't happen because it was trendy. It happened because one specific hunt cracked something open for him. It forced him to be creative, to be present, to stop relying on elevation as a crutch. He made a decision in the field that most guys wouldn't have made, and it worked. But more importantly, it changed the way he sees hunting entirely. We also get into something I think doesn't get talked about enough in hunting media: the home front. You're not hunting well if things aren't right at home. Full stop. The guys who try to compartmentalize that, who keep the stand life and the real life in separate boxes, they burn out or they lose one or the other. Ty gets that. He talks about how harmony at home isn't a soft topic. It's a prerequisite for being the hunter you want to be. By the end we're talking about where deer hunting culture is headed. Lower barriers to entry, the trophy conversation, what it means to measure success when everyone's got a trail cam and a mapping app. Good stuff. Honest stuff. Come for the ground hunting breakdown. Stay for everything else. WHAT TO EXPECT FROM PODCAST 495 Hard-won experience quiets the noise. Trust it. Creativity isn't a plan. It's a response to what's in front of you. Discomfort is the curriculum. Lean into it. You have to be willing to fail. The deer will teach you if you let them. Balance at home makes you better in the woods. Hunt for the experience. Nobody else cares about your scorecard anyway. 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

  8. May 27

    EP. 494: Hunting Dead Ground | The Mental Game of Finding Whitetails

    There's a particular kind of restlessness that hits a hunter in the off-season. It's not impatience exactly. It's more like a low hum in the background of everything you do. You're mowing the lawn, you're half-present at dinner, but somewhere in the back of your mind you're replaying last season's misses and mentally walking new ground you haven't set foot on yet. That's where K.C. and I found ourselves in this episode, and honestly, it's where I think most serious hunters live from February through August. We got into the anticipation of a new season and that electric feeling of scouting fresh country you've never hunted before. There's something almost spiritual about standing in a new piece of woods with a stick bow on your shoulder and nothing but questions in front of you. Ground hunting with a trad setup doesn't leave you a lot of margin. It demands that you close the distance in a way that most hunters never have to think about, and that changes everything. How you move, how you think, how you manage the inevitable doubt that creeps in when the woods go quiet. Because here's what K.C. and I kept coming back to: doubt is part of the deal. Despair shows up on long trips. There are mornings you climb out of your sleeping bag wondering why you drove eight hours for this. The hunters who kill consistently aren't the ones who never feel that. They're the ones who've learned to respect the feeling, sit with it, and keep putting one boot in front of the other. We talked about the mental side of all of it. Confidence, visualization, the kind of self-awareness that only comes from time in the field and honest reflection. The best hunters I know treat the mental game the same way an athlete does. You prepare for failure as much as success, and you build systems that hold up when emotion wants to take the wheel. We also got into deer behavior, being in the right place at the right time, and how skills from completely different disciplines can transfer into better hunting. That last part is something I think gets overlooked constantly. If you've ever walked back to the truck empty-handed and wondered what you're missing, this one's for you. Pull it up on the drive to work. It might not give you all the answers, but it'll remind you you're asking the right questions. 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

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Truth From The Stand is a weekly whitetail deer hunting podcast built for serious DIY hunters. For 10 years, we've been covering the tactics, strategies, and real stories that help hunters consistently kill mature bucks. From early season scouting and food plots to scrape hunting, rut tactics, and late season pressure, we cover it all. Each week we sit down with experienced whitetail hunters, bowhunters, and public land hunters to break down what's actually working in the field. Whether you're chasing bucks on public land or private ground, managing a property, or just trying to punch your tag on a mature deer, this is your podcast. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow the show so you never miss one

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