Experience, Grit, and Persistence: Jordan's Tool Kit

Ever wondered how practical experience, grit, and a little instinct might change your outdoor game? Let me, Jordan Budd, take you on my decade-long journey in the outdoor industry, sharing valuable lessons learned and daring adventures. We discuss the core of the Tool Kit community, where good gear is appreciated, but experience reigns supreme.

I am inviting you to reignite your connection with the outdoors by joining the conversation. Your thoughts, your questions, your suggestions - they matter. Through email, voicemail, or a direct message on Instagram, share your passion for the outdoors and help us shape the content of the Tool Kit podcast. We're building a community where your voice is heard, questions are answered and your next adventure awaits. So, gear up, tune in and let's get started!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introducing the Toolkit Podcast
• 8:24 Getting Involved and Providing Feedback

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey everyone and thanks for tuning into the Toolkit. This is the pilot episode. I am Jordan Budd and this will be, I guess, my new podcast. I've been in the outdoor industry now for about 10 years. I've hosted a couple of different podcasts. We have the Rockcast on Rocks for Rockslidecom and those are still out there. You can still listen to some of them that I did. I did that for a couple of years and then they have taken it over now and it's now kind of a Mulder podcast mixed in with some gear. Then, more recently, I did a podcast with Meat Eater, with Janis Patelis, called the Gear Talk.

Speaker 1: 0:38

While we absolutely love that platform, we just decided that it was a little better off in a more visual, with a visual component to it. Here I am today doing this. I thought that it'd be a little bit helpful for those that are new to me and just for a pilot of a podcast to go into a little bit more of my background and why. I feel like I have something that I can bring to the table. Hopefully, see, you folks can get something from it when you go into your next adventure With that. Yeah, I'm just going to dive into a little bit my vision for the podcast is to cover I want to cover the topic of gear, but the reason I gave it the name Toolkit is just because, whether it's knowledge about how to use something, or whether it is the thing itself that you're using, or just knowledge of how to run something how to run Onyx or some mapping software or whatever that's all a part of your Toolkit in my mind. That's why I called it the Toolkit. Hopefully I really want to cover gear from super intricate details to big, high level overviews of just what I like to carry or what my guests like to carry with them. Overall, I just want to help listeners make better purchasing decisions for their next adventures and things. We are in my office right now in Idaho. This podcast is going to be YouTube based as well as audio based. If you're listening to this on an audio version and you would like to see it, you can go to YouTube. Just type in Jordan Budd and then I'll pull it right up and all these episodes will be able to come to you on YouTube as well. Or there's just a lot of folks that really don't care. They just want to listen to it on audio. That's why I've got it on audio as well.

Speaker 1: 2:45

First, a little background on myself. I grew up in Northwest Nebraska on my family's cattle ranch. I started out teaching myself how to use a camera recording my own hunts when I was in high school. Eventually I started writing articles and making videos with a website called Self Filmedcom. I gained a few years of experience with a camera in my hand, taught myself how to edit and was eventually given an opportunity to film for a television show on the outdoor channel called Best of the West in Wyoming. I literally dropped all of my classes that fall.

Speaker 1: 3:18

For my sophomore semester of college I headed to Wyoming for my first ever filming job, which happened to be a big horn sheep hunt. Actually, there's a few of them right there. Back to back that fall I filmed a few sheep hunts. I actually edited those ones that I filmed for the outdoor channel, which was big at the time still can, I guess. I filmed sheep hunts and then some elk hunts through September and October. I learned a ton about living in the back country in that time and living with what you have, dealing with what you have and also not having too much Kind of finding that balance. There were some big learning curves and I want to cover that in some episodes. That's one thing that's super cool is being able to ask guests about their learning curves, whether it's when they were building gear or when they were out on the hunts themselves. More adventures, whatever. I think that'll be really cool to cover as well. I went on to film that show for four seasons. I would just literally go film in the fall and then I would go back to college in the spring, eventually offered me a full-time job. So I did that for a couple years, but four full seasons.

Speaker 1: 4:39

After I left the TV show I revived my media business called Running Water Media where I just went on the next couple years to film some hunts for Crispy Boots, rocksidecom and I had a few private clients as well that I would go out with. We did sheep hunts no-transcript, I would say mostly sheep hunts. There's some elk hunts thrown in there, some deer hunts, things like that. And then in that time I also started the podcast, the Rockcast, with the help of Rocksidecom. It was a Rockside podcast Still going on today. They are doing mule deer content mixed in with some gear. It's a great podcast. If you haven't listened to it yet, after a couple more years of doing that.

Speaker 1: 5:22

I was brought on to the meat eater team. In a more recently cohosted podcast, gear Talk with Yannis that was on the meat eater network. It's still up. There's a few episodes on there that you can listen to and we loved it, but gear definitely has a visual aspect to it. So that's really what we wanted to do and that's really why I'm here today trying to start this thing up myself.

Speaker 1: 5:47

And one thing I wanted to bring up real quickly with just gear in general is that, while it is awesome, your experience and time in the field is going to bring you probably arguably the most success. Good gear is going to make you stay out there longer a little bit more comfortable, probably but time in the field is undoubtedly probably the most important. So I literally came up with a tagline while I was in Nebraska on the ranch last month in a tractor Gear is great, experience is key. So boots on the ground in the field, like learning your areas, learning your behaviors or animal behaviors, is going to contribute a large amount of your success in the field. So don't take new gear purchases. Don't let them take up all your gas money. Good equipment is going to give you comfort and let you stay longer, but it's not going to replace your knowledge. So, and oh yeah, something I forgot to mention earlier was the outfit that we also have in Nebraska. So back in high school I started an outfitting business on the family ranch called Running Water Hunting.

Speaker 1: 7:04

A few twists and turns through the years aside, we now offer fully guided hunts in Nebraska mostly for we have Whitetail, we have a little bit of mule deer hunting as well, merriam's turkeys if you're a Nebraska resident and you're putting in for elk, we do have elk in Unit 9. And you can actually catch an episode we did with Stephen Clay hunting deer a couple years ago on the meat eater TV show on season 11. So I have a lot of irons in the fire in the industry and luckily that lets me spend a lot of time in the field, from the mountains of Idaho to the sandhills of Nebraska, guiding, and allows me to try a ton of different products and a ton of different scenarios. And my goal with this podcast is to kind of dig through what I've used, kind of my evolution of gear, share some of my experiences, pick the brains of other folks that are in the industry or just out of the industry and hunt a lot that make the equipment and I hope that I can help folks just have a better experience in the field. The first episode coming up is going to be a gear breakdown of my first hunt of the year after early season mule deer down in Utah. So tune in for that episode.

Speaker 1: 8:24

Next, if you have any questions or if you'd like to have any of my questions answered, or if you have any suggestions on topics to cover, on things that you want to hear, I have a couple of super cool options lined up for you.

Speaker 1: 8:39

So kind of the landing page of this thing is going to be the website Jordan dash bud BUDD, which is going to serve as the landing page, and then in there you can like submit a message just like via email, or you can do something super cool, I think you can submit a video message via voicemail and then I can play it on here. You can get a little bit of a voice time on the podcast and then I can answer the question or bring somebody on the can. And another good way to get a hold of me is just Instagram. At Jordan dot bud, on Instagram you can shoot me a DM and I can throw it into the queue for questions to answer. I plan on do some question and answer podcasts, I just think you know then the listener, like you guys, can really steer the conversation like how you want, how you want it, like what you want to know, things you want to listen to. So with that, thanks for tuning in to the pilot episode of Jordan's toolkit and I'll look forward to bringing you some more content.