Truth From The Stand Deer Hunting Podcast

Clint Campbell
  • 4.7 (753)
  • 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. 6d ago

    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

    22 min

  2. 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

    1h 8m

  3. 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

    1h 21m

  4. 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

    1h 17m

  5. May 20

    EP. 493: Why Mature Bucks Live Where You Won't Go | HOS

    Most hunters spend their off-season trying to make things easier. Better gear. Warmer clothes. Closer access. And honestly? I get it. Comfort is seductive. Your brain is literally wired to chase it. But here's what nobody in the hunting industry wants to tell you: comfort might be the single biggest thing standing between you and consistently killing mature deer. In this episode, we're digging into something that underlies everything we've talked about in the Hunter's Operating System series. Discomfort. Not suffering for the sake of suffering, but deliberate exposure to hard things that builds the kind of conditioning most hunters never develop. Here's the reality. Mature bucks don't live in easy places. They live in the margins. The nasty, hard-to-reach terrain that most people look at and immediately write off. If your threshold for discomfort is low, you'll never consistently go where the deer actually are. Or you'll go once, decide it isn't worth it, and head back to the easy spots everyone else is hunting. I talk about what training jiu-jitsu taught me about this, because a hard round on the mat and a brutal November sit have more in common than you'd think. Both put you in a place where your body wants out and your brain starts building its case for quitting. The difference between hunters who punch tags and hunters who don't often comes down to whether they recognize that negotiation for what it is: a feeling, not a verdict. I also get into a two-week Midwest hunt that nearly broke me. Eight days in. Same buck. Two misses. Tag still in my pocket. I almost went home. I didn't. And in the last 30 minutes of the last day, everything came together. That's the hunt. Not the one on day one when you're fresh and fired up, but the one that happens when you're exhausted, beaten up, and your brain has assembled a genuinely reasonable argument for quitting. The hunters who separate themselves aren't the ones who never feel that pull. They feel it just as much. They've just built the capacity to stay anyway. Every hard thing you choose in the off-season is a decision you've already made before the season starts. 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

    21 min

  6. May 13

    EP. 492: Why Most Hunters Are Doing Too Much and Enjoying It Less

    There's a version of hunting that looks great on the outside. Big buck, good photos, done by noon. Then there's the version most of us actually live, which is messy and complicated and tied up in kids and jobs and the slow realization that your priorities don't stay the same forever. That's what Greg Litzinger and I got into on this one, and I'll be honest, it's one of those conversations that kept going in my head long after we stopped recording. Greg isn't out here pretending that hunting exists in a vacuum. He talks openly about what it means to chase deer when you've got a family counting on you, and how the calculus of a day in the woods changes completely once other people are in the equation. That's not a complaint. It's just the truth, and it's the kind of truth that doesn't get said enough in hunting media. We spent a good chunk of time on burnout, and I think that part will hit home for a lot of people listening. It's easy to grind yourself down chasing something that's supposed to bring you joy. Too many sits, too much pressure, not enough honesty with yourself about why you're out there. The fix isn't complicated, but it requires admitting something most hunters resist: that more time in the field isn't always better, and that scouting smarter beats sitting longer almost every time. We also got into location and intel, which Greg treats as the serious discipline it is. Knowing where deer want to be before you ever climb a tree is the whole game. That part of the conversation is worth a relisten if you're building a strategy for the fall. But what stuck with me most was Greg talking about fitness and time. He's not dramatic about it. He just lays it out plainly: the physical demands of hunting don't get easier, ignoring that is a mistake, and the window you have to bring your kids into this thing is shorter than you think. The memories made in the field are the ones that last, not the antlers on the wall. Whether your kid is old enough to run a treestand or just old enough to tag along and ask a hundred questions, don't wait for the perfect season. Lead by example and enjoy the process. Hope you get as much out of this one as I did. WHAT TO EXPECT FROM PODCAST 492 Scouting and historical sign tell you more about a buck's potential than any single trail cam photo ever will. Don't chase scrapes. They're exciting, but they'll burn you. Focus on the habitat instead. Knowing where a deer isn't is just as valuable as knowing where he is. Eliminating country keeps you from burning good setups at the wrong time. Mature bucks will humble you. Missed opportunities and close calls aren't failures, they're information. The shot is just one moment in a very long process. The anticipation, the tracking, the recovery, the emotional weight of it all. None of it is clean or simple. When you've chased a specific animal for years, every decision carries real weight. This episode gets into that honestly. 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

    1h 15m

  7. May 6

    EP. 491: What Years of Hunting One Buck Actually Teaches You

    Tom Murphy and I have had a lot of conversations about deer hunting, but this one felt different. We got into the kind of detail that most hunters never talk about out loud, specifically what it actually takes to hunt a mature buck over multiple seasons without losing your mind or your confidence. Tom's account of finally closing the deal on a deer he'd been after for years is worth the listen on its own. The shot, the tracking, the emotional weight of the whole thing. He doesn't sugarcoat any of it. We also dig into scouting, historical sign, habitat quality, and why knowing where a deer isn't can be just as valuable as knowing where he is. Simple idea. Hard to actually put into practice. If you've ever locked onto a specific animal and let the whole thing consume a few years of your life, this episode will feel familiar. If you haven't, consider this a fair warning. WHAT TO EXPECT FROM PODCAST 491 Scouting and historical sign tell you more about a buck's potential than any single trail cam photo ever will. Don't chase scrapes. They're exciting, but they'll burn you. Focus on the habitat instead. Knowing where a deer isn't is just as valuable as knowing where he is. Eliminating country keeps you from burning good setups at the wrong time. Mature bucks will humble you. Missed opportunities and close calls aren't failures, they're information. The shot is just one moment in a very long process. The anticipation, the tracking, the recovery, the emotional weight of it all. None of it is clean or simple. When you've chased a specific animal for years, every decision carries real weight. This episode gets into that honestly. 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

    1h 15m

  8. Apr 29

    EP. 490: Why You Blow It When It Finally Happens | HOS

    There’s a moment in every hunt that matters more than all the scouting, all the prep, all the miles you put in. It’s the one where the deer finally shows up. And if you’ve done this long enough, you know it doesn’t always go the way you thought it would. Your heart rate jumps, your breathing changes, and all of a sudden you’re not thinking as clearly as you were ten minutes before. You rush something, force something, or just come unglued for a second. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. This episode is about that moment—what actually happens when pressure hits, and why most of us aren’t as prepared for it as we think we are. Not from a gear or setup standpoint, but mentally. Being present, staying composed, and letting the moment play out instead of trying to control it. A lot of it connects back to things I’ve learned on the jiu-jitsu mat. Same kind of pressure, just in a different setting. When things tighten up, your instinct is to react fast, to get out of it. But the guys who are good at it don’t panic. They slow down, breathe, and make better decisions because of it. Hunting’s no different. If you can learn to recognize that feeling when it shows up—and not fight it, but work through it—you give yourself a better chance when it actually counts. Because in the end, that one moment is usually what it all comes down to. WHAT TO EXPECT FROM PODCAST 490 Most hunting mistakes happen under pressure, not from lack of skill. If you don’t train for pressure, you’ll default to panic when it matters. Presence and patience are what separate clean execution from rushed decisions. Pressure doesn’t create problems, it exposes them. The best hunters slow down when things speed up. Learning to sit in discomfort leads to better decisions. Consistency comes from managing the moment, not forcing it. 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

    22 min
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4.7
out of 5
753 Ratings

About

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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