Joe Rogan Experience #2059 - Adam Greentree
Narrator, Adam Greentree (guest), Joe Rogan (host), Narrator, Narrator, Narrator
In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, featuring Narrator and Adam Greentree, Joe Rogan Experience #2059 - Adam Greentree explores bowhunting, Survival, and Sanity: Adam Greentree’s Frontier Mindset Unpacked Joe Rogan and Australian bowhunter Adam Greentree dive into ultra-hard backcountry hunting, predator management, and the mental game behind pushing physical limits in the wilderness.
Bowhunting, Survival, and Sanity: Adam Greentree’s Frontier Mindset Unpacked
Joe Rogan and Australian bowhunter Adam Greentree dive into ultra-hard backcountry hunting, predator management, and the mental game behind pushing physical limits in the wilderness.
Greentree recounts recent 26–30-day solo elk hunts in Colorado, close calls with injury and exhaustion, and earlier near-death episodes in New Zealand’s mountains and crocodile-infested Northern Australia.
They contrast American and Australian wildlife policy, from wolf reintroduction and grizzly management to Australia’s mass aerial culling of deer and strict meat-import laws.
The conversation broadens into modern society’s fragility—COVID policy, homelessness, pharmaceutical power, and the importance of purpose, hard challenges, and self-reliance for mental health.
Key Takeaways
Hard hunts can be more about self-discovery than killing an animal.
Greentree frames 30-day solo elk hunts as “vision quests,” where breaking himself down, accepting failure, and enduring hardship is the real goal, with a bull elk almost a byproduct of the process.
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Wildlife management needs balance, not ideology.
They argue that predators like wolves, grizzlies, and crocodiles must be managed alongside healthy prey populations and human safety; purely protectionist or purely eradication approaches both create new problems.
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Policy decisions can massively waste natural resources.
Australia’s practice of helicopter-shooting thousands of deer and leaving them to rot, while ignoring their value as high-quality protein, is held up as an example of ideology overriding rational resource use.
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Archery success hinges more on system consistency than any one “magic” component.
Greentree emphasizes a durable, repeatable setup—solid two-blade fixed broadheads, heavy arrows, simple wrist releases—over constantly chasing gear trends, especially when hunting big-boned game like buffalo.
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Survival in extreme environments requires both preparation and psychological composure.
His New Zealand glacier fall story shows that gear (GPS SOS, shelter, basic fire plan) matters, but the decisive factor was refusing to mentally quit, reassessing, and forcing himself to take rational action while hypothermic.
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Modern society under-serves our evolutionary needs for challenge and purpose.
They connect cubicle life, lack of physical struggle, and constant comfort to depression and anxiety, arguing people need a demanding pursuit—like hunting, building, or serious training—to stay mentally healthy.
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Trust in institutions erodes when profit and politics drive health policy.
From COVID vaccines and ivermectin narratives to proposed livestock vaccines, they argue that opaque incentives and media alignment with pharma and government have made people deeply skeptical of future public health directives.
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Notable Quotes
“I'm not really here to kill a bull. I'm here for the whole package.”
— Adam Greentree
“Every time you're doing it, you're getting an education.”
— Joe Rogan
“I hate being labeled as a hunter. We're just human—and I really do think hunting's a big part of being a human.”
— Adam Greentree
“You do stupid stuff enough and your time comes up.”
— Adam Greentree
“Most men live lives of quiet desperation. You don’t want to be one of them.”
— Joe Rogan
Questions Answered in This Episode
How would North American wildlife policy change if more decision-makers actually lived with large predators like wolves, grizzlies, or crocodiles the way rural hunters do?
Joe Rogan and Australian bowhunter Adam Greentree dive into ultra-hard backcountry hunting, predator management, and the mental game behind pushing physical limits in the wilderness.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Is it possible to scale Greentree’s ‘vision quest’ style of hunting or adventure into something accessible for people with regular jobs and families without losing its transformative impact?
Greentree recounts recent 26–30-day solo elk hunts in Colorado, close calls with injury and exhaustion, and earlier near-death episodes in New Zealand’s mountains and crocodile-infested Northern Australia.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What concrete reforms could prevent the kind of resource waste seen in Australia’s aerial deer culls, while still addressing land, erosion, and biodiversity concerns?
They contrast American and Australian wildlife policy, from wolf reintroduction and grizzly management to Australia’s mass aerial culling of deer and strict meat-import laws.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How can individuals realistically balance skepticism of pharma and government with the need to respond appropriately if a truly dangerous future pandemic occurs?
The conversation broadens into modern society’s fragility—COVID policy, homelessness, pharmaceutical power, and the importance of purpose, hard challenges, and self-reliance for mental health.
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For people stuck in cubicles or urban environments, what are the first small, practical steps to build a demanding, meaningful pursuit that can provide the mental health benefits Greentree and Rogan describe?
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Transcript Preview
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music) Hello, Adam Greentree.
Hello, Joe Rogan.
What the fuck's happening?
(laughs) Everything.
How are you enjoying my country?
I'm loving your country, yeah.
(laughs)
It was good, um, it's good to be back.
Yeah, you were here, uh, you did another one of those wild backcountry elk hunts, which you haven't been able to do because of COVID, for three years?
Four years.
Four years.
Yep.
Wow.
And five years since the last podcast.
Did you document the whole thing like you did the last time in your internet stories?
(laughs) I did, yeah. Yeah, I tried to capture as much as I could. Sometimes it's hard 'cause you're stuck in the moment, so the last-
Yeah.
... thing you want is, like, a phone in your face, right?
Yeah, it does fuck with it, right?
Yeah. So I couldn't capture it all, but I tried to at least mention everything that I was going through. But there was, like, one stage I just felt like I was in the war and, and I actually slipped between two fallen down trees and it f- I nearly broke me legs, like, straight across the front of me shins.
Oh, shit.
And it's like, I didn't capture it and I'm sort of hurting, so it's, you don't get to see the whole story, but I reckon I at least give the people 80% of the story, you know?
What happened where you almost broke your legs?
(laughs) Well, I was fucking rooted, for starters, like stuffed. Like, this is day 26 or something like that.
What does rooted mean to your people?
(laughs)
You do- you do know what it means, right?
No.
Really?
Yeah, just guessing.
Yeah.
Rooted means really exhausted.
Oh, okay.
Like, just, you're fucked, you know?
Right.
And, uh, I was coming back in the dark. You know, you're trying to, you know, um, conserve everything as you're going, so you're trying to use your headlight as less as possible as well. Like, you're out there for a month.
Right.
So a lot of the times, your headlight, yeah, torch is turned right down if it's on at all. So it's turned right down and I'm coming back down the mountain to camp. Pretty much stepped on one bit of deadfall, like a big fallen pine tree, and then slipped off it. And then there was another pine tree only, like, a foot apart. So I went between the two of them and normally about body weight come over the top of it.
(sighs)
And then, yeah, like, I just remember, I, like, at least bruised the bones 'cause it was hard to walk, you know?
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