In Paul Kirtley Podcast episode 28, Paul Kirtley is joined by Joe Robinet, a Canadian bushcraft and camping filmmaker who has built a large following through his long-form outdoor videos on YouTube. Joe discusses how he turned a love of camping, backcountry travel and filming into a full-time livelihood, as well as the practical realities of creating regular videos in the woods, from filming canoe trips to balancing the camera with simply enjoying time outdoors. The conversation also explores authenticity online, dealing with comments and criticism, Joe’s background in natural resources, and his candid reflections on taking part in the first season of Alone, including the lessons learned from mistakes made under pressure in a genuinely challenging environment.

You can listen to the full episode here: Paul Kirtley Podcast Episode 28.

You can download a PDF of the transcript here: Paul Kirtley Podcast Episode 28 transcript download

Podcast Episode 28 Transcript

[00:00:00] Paul Kirtley: This is the Paul Kirtley podcast episode twenty-eight.

[00:00:04] Podcast Announcer: The Paul Kirtley Podcast wilderness bushcraft, survival skills and outdoor life

[00:00:18] Paul Kirtley: Welcome welcome to episode twenty eight of the Paul Kirtley podcast.

[00:00:24] Paul Kirtley: Now this podcast is sponsored by Frontier Bushcraft, delivering trusted wilderness skills training courses and expeditions. Visit frontierbushcraft.com to find out more on how you can hone your outdoor skills this year, including practical field courses, online courses, and wilderness trips. Thanks to Frontier Bushcraft’s funding for making these podcasts possible.

[00:00:54] Paul Kirtley: So, on to today’s guest. I’m sure many listeners to this podcast will have looked at bushcraft-related videos on YouTube, some maybe to find out how to undertake a particular technique, others to watch for inspiration and entertainment. My guest on today’s podcast is Joe Robinet, a name that will be familiar to many listeners. Joe has built a large following on YouTube publishing bushcraft and camping videos.

[00:01:27] Paul Kirtley: And at the time of recording this podcast, his subscriber base was just over 500,000. Yes, that’s half a million subscribers on YouTube, which is no mean feat. Now, I’ve been intrigued by the proliferation of outdoor video blogs and specifically bushcraft and camping videos on YouTube. And I thought given Joe’s success on the platform, he would be a good person to have a conversation with to explore this phenomena in more detail.

[00:02:02] Paul Kirtley: From filming and editing videos for my blog and for YouTube, I know that it’s quite a time-consuming process and I wanted to find out more about Joe’s motivations for making videos regularly as well as how he manages to juggle his outdoor life with the demands and constraints of filming. And I know this was something a fair few listeners were also interested in, particularly those who have their own YouTube channels.

[00:02:29] Paul Kirtley: Via my Facebook page, I asked for listener questions to put to Joe, which we cover throughout this episode and that lead to various discussions including a candid conversation around his experiences being on the first season of the History Channel series Alone. So, without further ado, here is my conversation with Joe Robinet.

[00:02:55] Paul Kirtley: So, I am very glad to be able to have Joe Robinet on the podcast today. Hi Joe, how are you doing today?

[00:03:06] Joe Robinet: Yeah Hello.

[00:03:07] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, good. Good Yeah.

[00:03:10] Paul Kirtley: We were just talking before we started recording, had a bit of a stressful day yesterday, so it’s nice to be doing something a little more productive today and creating something to share with people. So that’s, I’m feeling a little bit calmer today. So, you’re at home at the moment between trips? Thank you.

[00:03:27] Joe Robinet: I am yes.

[00:03:28] Paul Kirtley: Cool Where have you been recently, Joe? Where have you just got back from?

[00:03:32] Joe Robinet: Recently in my last trip I was up with buddy Sean James at his log cabin he’s building with his hands. So we it’s been a while since I saw him. They’re good buddies and went up there.

[00:03:45] Joe Robinet: It’s a good good eight-hour drive up into the real Canadian wilderness, up into the snow. So we stayed there for a night and hung out and chopped some firewood and just got lay of the land near his place and then the next day we got up and we packed all our sleds and our snowshoes and stuff and we hiked out from the cabin and we went to a couple separate smaller lakes back in some crown land and we were able to pull up a few pike and some bass and…

[00:04:14] Joe Robinet: What else did he say? Oh, perch through the ice. So some ice fishing out there. It’s pretty cool.

[00:04:18] Paul Kirtley: That’s cool. That’s cool. So they were they were biting pretty well then.

[00:04:22] Joe Robinet: They were, yeah, over the course of the one day we probably got seven or eight fish and by the end of them the pike were starting to be pretty big hogs. They were good eating. We ate some up and then Sean brought some back to his cabin and I brought some home to Windsor.

[00:04:35] Paul Kirtley: Cool. Cool. What’s your ’cause a lot of people don’t like eating pike. What’s your favorite way of cooking pike?

[00:04:41] Joe Robinet: I like pike with just a little bit of lemon on it. So, I like the taste of pike a lot. I think if I’m not mistaken, a lot of people don’t like the bones in pike, right?

[00:04:50] Paul Kirtley: It’s those weird little Y-shaped bones, isn’t it?

[00:04:52] Joe Robinet: Yeah, but why though? They’re hard to get out and then they stick into your throat. So, yeah, there’s a five filet method you can you can do and you can get kind of a back strap off it and a couple of small fillets and then the tail.

[00:05:06] Paul Kirtley: Yeah.

[00:05:06] Joe Robinet: Those don’t have if you do it right, those don’t have any any bones in it and then I just like to you know maybe just a little water and butter with lemon, just kind of boil it up a little bit. That’s really good.

[00:05:18] Paul Kirtley: So you kind of poach it rather than pan-fry it, yeah.

[00:05:21] Joe Robinet: Exactly Yeah, and I like pan frying and I like breaded it as well too. But pike is that nice soft white clean kind of tasting fish. So I do like to just do it minimal as possible.

[00:05:31] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, no, I’d agree with you. I enjoy pike as well. I mean, it has a bit of a reputation over here for being a bit muddy and it can be if it’s in muddy ponds, you know. But generally it’s a pretty good fish that a lot of people underestimate, I think. And all the all the pike I’ve had in Canada’s great, you know. As you say, do do as little as possible to it and it’s really tasty.

[00:05:54] Paul Kirtley: Shh

[00:05:55] Joe Robinet: Readily available too. Like they’re very easy to catch.

[00:05:59] Paul Kirtley: Yeah.

[00:05:59] Paul Kirtley: So, Joe, we should rewind a little bit here because some people listening to this will know who you are and they’ll have a load of context as to where you’re coming from and what we’re going to be talking about, but you know, you have a big following on YouTube, but for the people who don’t know who you are, could you give us a little bit of a bio, maybe as sort of not not not where you came from necessarily, but just a little bit about how you got to where you are, what you’re doing now, and then we can kind of maybe expand on some of those areas?

[00:06:30] Joe Robinet: Yeah, okay.

[00:06:31] Joe Robinet: Yeah. Well, right now I’m for the past couple years I’ve been doing YouTube full-time, which means that’s how I make my income. I’ve quit my job a couple years ago to do this full-time. So, I’m really into camping, into the outdoors as you can probably tell.

[00:06:47] Joe Robinet: I live in Canada, so I’ve got a lot of opportunity to go camping and do these backcountry camps. I’ve really tried to make my YouTube channel into more of like almost a TV series, a TV show where once a week I have an hour long or sometimes two hour long video of myself by myself or sometimes with my dog, sometimes with a friend or two. Backcountry camping, whether it be canoe camping or building a survival shelter or building like a snow shelter, a quinzee. Just yeah, kind of out there doing that thing and I’ve made that my career.

[00:07:22] Joe Robinet: I was on History Channel the show Alone on the first season. So yeah, I’ve been been around for a little bit and yeah, this is this is kind of what I’m doing. This is kind of who I am right now.

[00:07:34] Paul Kirtley: So when you when you say, again just for people who don’t know, I mean I’m fairly familiar with how it works, but in terms of making your living from YouTube, that’s mainly advertising revenue? Is it on the on the videos? Yep.

[00:07:47] Joe Robinet: Yeah, exactly. So, the way it works is, um,

[00:07:50] Joe Robinet: You know those little annoying ads that pop up and sometimes you can get rid of them and sometimes you can’t. Well, those things give me like two pennies each time, right? Mhm. So it kind of just adds up and adds up and adds up. I can control the ads, I can can put it put as many as I want on a longer video. On a 10-minute video, I think you can only put one ad. But I tend to put four or five ads on like a two-hour-long, hour-long video and um

[00:08:14] Joe Robinet: Because I have such a backlog of videos, I’ve probably got 300 videos or something like that. And I get decent views now, 400,000, 200,000 views each video. All those pennies add up, and my backlog of videos add up, and then it just yeah, it works out. So Google pays me monthly through YouTube.

[00:08:32] Joe Robinet: It’s all legit. I pay taxes on it. I’m my own… I’m my own business, I’m my own company. Yeah, it’s when I first started the YouTube thing like eight years ago, nine years ago, there was no money. You know what I mean? It wasn’t for monetary gain. There was no there was no… It was it was only out of love for it. It was only out of a hobby and it just turned into this.

[00:08:53] Paul Kirtley: Mmm, so you managed to turn that hobby into a livelihood, which is which is great. It’s a dream for a lot of people.

[00:08:59] Joe Robinet: Sure is.

[00:09:01] Paul Kirtley: And um

[00:09:03] Paul Kirtley: You talked about a TV show. I mean, that is basically, I mean, people sort of scratch their head at YouTube, but effectively, I mean, that’s the model that TV’s been work commercial TV’s been working on for years, isn’t it? Make decent programming that people are interested in watching and then sell advertising while you’ve got eyes on the content. It’s no different, is it? But you’re your own you’re you’re your own TV station now.

[00:09:25] Joe Robinet: Exactly. I have less, well now with, yes, you’re exactly right. And I would have said now and I have complete freedom, but I don’t anymore because YouTube’s changed its rules like like crazy. But I have way more freedom than I’ve than if I were to be working for a television show, obviously.

[00:09:42] Paul Kirtley: Mm, and you’ve you’ve had you mentioned that you were on the Discovery Channel a good few years ago.

[00:09:48] Paul Kirtley: Would you like to contrast, you know, ’cause a lot of people still see TV and they say it to me as well and they probably say it to you as well, maybe not so much now, you’re doing so well on YouTube, but people say, “Oh, when are we going to see you on TV? You should you should have your own TV show or you should be doing this.” And I don’t know about you, but I’m not that interested in television. To me it seems like a dying media. That there’s much more exciting outlets for what we’re passionate about. But I don’t know what your thoughts on that are.

[00:10:18] Joe Robinet: No, you’re a hundred percent right. The I have every day, I have producers emailing me, and I normally do not even take the time to respond, but sometimes I do when it seems legit and I’ll and I’ll get into conversations with them. And they’re literally modeling television after YouTube. They’re asking me for ideas, you know what I mean? So it’s, I can see it, I can see it everywhere and I can see it personally. So you’re a hundred percent right and I agree with you. And I’m not opposed, like I’m not opposed to being on TV.

[00:10:50] Joe Robinet: If I could get a decent show that wasn’t completely blown out of proportion and stuff and I if everything was right I wouldn’t mind doing it. For the simple fact that it would make me more of a household name than than I am right now. But also, I would never do anything to jeopardize my YouTube career. If they said that I couldn’t put out YouTube videos or if I were to have to be gone for a couple months at a time, it would be a no-go because to me, exactly what you’re saying, TV’s on its way out, YouTube’s booming, social media is booming, internet stuff is blowing up. I would never throw myself under the bus that way.

[00:11:29] Paul Kirtley: Yeah.

[00:11:30] Paul Kirtley: And I’ve heard about people that have done that and they’ve regretted it, so yeah, I think that’s sensible to me anyway. You’ve got, you know, you’ve got control. I mean, ultimately, and I think it’s the same with, you know, it’s the same with what I’ve done with my blog over the last seven years and this podcast. There’s no way that A radio station would ever make this podcast and second, I would be allowed to be a radio presenter and I’ve got no aspirations to do that. But because we’ve got all this, we’ve got the internet and we’ve got these different technologies available to us,

[00:12:08] Paul Kirtley: We can go straight to the audience, which is which is brilliant because our audiences as big as they might be are still relatively niche in the grand scheme of things. And that’s, you know, I think survival and bushcraft has got more popular on television and Discovery Channel certainly, but generally, you can you can go a lot deeper into a subject when you’ve got control over the outlet than you can if you hand over some control to a production company, I think.

[00:12:34] Joe Robinet: Yeah, definitely. I completely agree. Yeah.

[00:12:37] Paul Kirtley: One thing I do have to ask you at this point, Joe, is Bamson.

[00:12:47] Joe Robinet: Yeah

[00:12:49] Paul Kirtley: Right, I mentioned to a few people Joe’s coming on and they’re like, Bamson, ask him, ask him about Bamson. And I’ve heard you say it. It’s like, where did that come from?

[00:13:00] Joe Robinet: I don’t know.

[00:13:01] Joe Robinet: Honestly, it might have, like, part of it might have come from the Trailer Park Boys TV show, like, a long time ago I used to watch that and there was like a pew whenever he was excited he would say that. It’s just kind of evolved from there. I’ve been saying it for I don’t even know years, ten years. It just, it’s picked up now lately because I, whenever I get excited on a video or something, it’s just something I, just something that comes out like unfiltered, like for real. And people have picked up on it and then started quoting it back to me and stuff.

[00:13:34] Joe Robinet: So it just it just grew actually it’s grown like very big in the past like year or two yeah. Ah, so I feel like when I when I put the T-shirts out with the Bam Sun, that’s why they’re that’s why they’re all selling because I just put out T-shirts that say Bam Sun on them.

[00:13:49] Paul Kirtley: Right

[00:13:49] Joe Robinet: I didn’t want to put my name. I didn’t want to put Joe Robinet on a t-shirt. It sounds so pretentious to me. I just, I just don’t like that, you know what I mean? So, so something else, you know what I mean? That’s why I came up with the Scout logo, the logo of my dog. I thought originally, that’s my logo.

[00:14:03] Joe Robinet: It’s like a Nike swoosh. I don’t need to put any kind of words or anything. I could just put that logo on a t-shirt. But when we did it just didn’t work out. It didn’t look correct. We have to we have to move things around to make it look better. So the Bama son was just the next original like for sure it has to be this kind of thing.

[00:14:21] Paul Kirtley: Little little catchphrase that everybody knows Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

[00:14:25] Joe Robinet: And there’s more too. I have like I’m gonna I’m getting doing a shirt now that says two on the inside one on the outside and it’s just about doing a taut line hitch because I whenever I’m tying a taut line hitch, I always say two on the inside one on the outside and I pull it tight and it’s just become a thing too. So now people and obviously this is not a widespread thing. This is just a very, very niche amount of people who will know what this thing means.

[00:14:46] Paul Kirtley: But again, going back to what we were saying, you you’ve got that direct access to that audience and that’s the brilliant thing about this. That we there are no gatekeepers there anymore. And you know, there are critics of YouTube and YouTubers and, you know, that anybody can get up there and make any old crap that they want to. I mean, what would you what would you say to that?

[00:15:13] Paul Kirtley: You know, that

[00:15:14] Joe Robinet: I would say try it.

[00:15:16] Joe Robinet: Go ahead and try it and see how hard it is. You know how many people they just YouTube just cut off because they’re not they don’t have a thousand subs and four thousand watch time minutes in the past year? A ton of people. And it’s like, the fact of the matter is, it’s not easy to get these these people watching you. Like, especially in our genre. Sure. If you want to go and sit on your couch and talk about like Logan Paul and the stuff that that’s going on, in current events, you could probably get a bigger YouTube channel than I have in about a year. You know what I mean?

[00:15:54] Joe Robinet: But that’s not what we’re doing that’s not what I’m doing

[00:15:56] Joe Robinet: That’s not what you’re doing. We’re out creating content, camping, and trying to connect with an audience that is small. It’s probably one of the smallest genres on YouTube. Imagine if we were into cars or imagine if we were into, even hunting as a separate genre, but it’s in the same kind of genre as us. All that stuff is huge, you know what I mean? The even camping is bigger than bushcraft. And that’s how I started out. That’s the genre I started in, that’s the genre I’ve kept up. I would say to those people, go ahead and try. And if you can make something out of it, then then your opinion is going to be changed.

[00:16:33] Paul Kirtley: No, fair enough. And for those, because I’m sure there’s a lot of people that look up up to you, particularly maybe the younger end of the audience who think, yeah, I’d like to do that. I aspire to be like Joe. I want to go and make videos in the woods and put it on YouTube and do that for my living. What advice would you give to those guys and girls?

[00:16:54] Joe Robinet: Oh man, there’s so much. First and foremost, be yourself. There’s no um…

[00:17:01] Joe Robinet: It doesn’t make sense to go on as a persona because you’re not going to keep that persona up. You’re not going to be able to, even if you can keep that persona up, hiding things from people, you’re not going to be able to do it personally. You’re not going to be able to continue being a fake person. It’s just not going to happen. So you need to be yourself and people are going to pick up on that and people are going to connect with that. That’s the biggest thing.

[00:17:23] Joe Robinet: I could be doing whatever. Really, I could be doing whatever I wanted and

[00:17:28] Joe Robinet: It’s my personality that people pick up on, right? And it’s like that across the board. Be very, very open with your audience, try to try and have conversations, try and then when it goes to filming, like you don’t have to have the most expensive camera in the world, you can use your phone and a lot of people do. It just all comes down to angles and

[00:17:52] Joe Robinet: Time that you keep one clip on. Don’t you You watch a TV show, they’re moving camera angles every 10 seconds, right? And a lot of problems I see with aspiring YouTubers is leaving the camera in one spot and just talking to it or walking around and not not editing that out and not changing camera angles often enough. But honestly, the biggest thing is your personality.

[00:18:14] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, no, that makes that makes sense. And that authenticity for people to connect with you. Yeah, that

[00:18:20] Paul Kirtley: That makes total sense. So basically for the young aspiring YouTuber, just get on and do it, basically. Get your phone out. Everyone’s got a phone now, get your phone out and record some stuff.

[00:18:30] Joe Robinet: That’s exactly right. And yeah, don’t be afraid to be yourself. That’s the thing.

[00:18:34] Joe Robinet: And don’t pay attention to the negativity because there will be a bunch of negativity and if you let that if you let that be the main thing what you’re thinking of, it’s going to control you, it’s going to consume you. So you just have to remember that for every dummy that’s commenting some crazy remark, there’s ten people that like you and are leaving likes.

[00:18:57] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, no, it’s very it’s very easy and I think we’re probably all guilty of this at some point, you know, we put a video out and you get, you know, you get so many hundred likes and then you get two dislikes and you’re like, those guys! They’ve they’ve given me two, you know, those you just focus on the negative, you know, rather than the hundreds of people that have liked your video, it’s the three guys who’ve given it a thumbs down in the first ten minutes that you kind of focus on if you’re not too careful. So,

[00:19:23] Joe Robinet: I’m guilty of that too, man.

[00:19:25] Paul Kirtley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and YouTube is, I mean, it always has been a sort of feral pit of abuse, hasn’t it, really? In terms of the comments. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:36] Joe Robinet: You know what? I’ve seen a change actually, lately where being mean on the internet isn’t that cool anymore and people are getting called out for it, at least in the comment section and in where I look. So, that’s cool.

[00:19:48] Joe Robinet: It’s kind of if I’m right, it’s kind of the paradigm’s kind of shifting to more normalcy.

[00:19:53] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, I’ve noticed that a little bit. I’ve noticed it on Facebook for sure. I’ve noticed fewer douchebag remarks on YouTube as well, although there still are some. But yeah, but you also, as you say, you do see people that like your stuff jumping in and defending you or at least trying to bring some rationality to the to the argument.

[00:20:17] Joe Robinet: Which I really appreciate.

[00:20:19] Paul Kirtley: Yeah. Yeah, me too. Me too.

[00:20:22] Paul Kirtley: Question for you, just going back a little bit because again, you know, people people again, if it’s sort of the negativity, if we’re on that, people go, oh, you know, Joe is just a YouTuber, whatever that means, but people do use it as a sort of derogatory statement as well. But I mean, you just again, a little bit on your background, you studied forestry at college, didn’t you?

[00:20:44] Joe Robinet: Correct

[00:20:45] Joe Robinet: Yeah, I went to Sioux College, Sioux College up in Sault Ste. Marie. So that was, I moved north about, well depending if you drive through the states it’s about a six-hour drive, if you drive through Canada it’s twelve, twelve-hour drive. So I was pretty far up there. Took college, took a natural resources program in college. I learned my trees, I learned survival, I learned tracking. Lots of lots of good info and I retained a whole lot of it. I had a great time in college.

[00:21:12] Paul Kirtley: No, I remember I remember you did a winter a short winter camping video with Kevin Callan maybe a couple of winters ago and you guys were just walking around looking at looking at trees which was pretty cool.

[00:21:26] Joe Robinet: Yeah, exactly, yeah. Tree I named trees. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a fun I like to do that a lot actually.

[00:21:32] Paul Kirtley: ‘Cause that’s the other thing about Kevin, you know, Kevin comes across as this sort of goofy guy with it sort of gets excited as well about stuff, but he’s got a sort of deep background in teaching about natural resources as well. And I think, you know, I going back to the authenticity point, I think it’s difficult to kind of go out into the bush and be authentic and not know anything about it. And not look like a complete dick.

[00:21:57] Joe Robinet: That’s very true.

[00:22:01] Paul Kirtley: But again, it’s the perception, isn’t it? It’s the perception.

[00:22:05] Paul Kirtley: So have you have you kind of come upon a kind of style of video you like to make just by trial and error? Is that how you’ve basically got to where you are now with making these longer form videos, a bit more like a TV show? Is there a particular type that you like to make?

[00:22:22] Joe Robinet: You know, it’s exactly what you said, it just kind of happened. Like it evolved

[00:22:27] Joe Robinet: I had no… Again, I’m 33 now and I’d say almost 10 years, we’re gonna call it nine years ago I started. So I was relatively young. I had no idea about any kind of filming or editing or any kind of anything to do with the process. If you look at my super old videos, it’s really rough. Like I’m narrating what I’m doing as I’m doing it, you know what I mean? It’s just not not great, but yeah, it just evolved and it just kind of happened. Like like you’re saying earlier, everybody the whole algorithm was make five-minute videos, don’t make longer than 10-minute videos. And I’m so like…

[00:23:05] Joe Robinet: Long-winded and feel like I need to really explain things and go into detail about things that those five-minute videos I did those for a couple of years, but most of those just had music over top and I was just doing skill-based things, right? So now when it becomes more of like a personal thing, it’s like, yeah, I’m talking to the camera a whole lot more. Half my video could be me talking.

[00:23:27] Paul Kirtley: C

[00:23:27] Joe Robinet: Know and I get a lot of not a lot but I get comments saying man this guy talks so much but it’s like well it’s obviously working You know what I mean? Start watching right

[00:23:37] Joe Robinet: So I’m not going to change it. No, I like my favorite types of videos to do are when I have my dog with me and I’m going to a place that’s somewhat familiar and I’m going with a tarp or I’m building a natural shelter and I just have a good time with the dog and it’s like I go in the morning, I spend the whole day there setting up my camp and getting ready for food at night and that’s kind of the culmination of it. I have a nice beer, I hang hang out with the dog and sleep with the fire in front of me and that those are my really my favorite kind of videos to make. That was the first video that ever, I don’t want to say blew up, but any got any kind of traction from me was called Overnight Bushcraft Camp.

[00:24:16] Joe Robinet: And it was a 20-night, sorry, it was a 20-minute video of just what I said. And that yeah, I always look back at that as my like really my launching point and kind of things I base off now, but it’s just, I put so much more feeling into my videos now. I talk so much more about how I’m feeling about what’s going on with my life and things like that. So, yeah, just the long videos, man.

[00:24:41] Joe Robinet: It’s what I really like to do. I like to show what I’m doing, I like to show how the weather is, how I’m feeling, and yeah, just how I’m making myself comfortable really. I do I do plan on branching out and I’m going to be doing a second second video a week because one video a week really isn’t cutting it right now. I need to I need to amp it up a bit. And that second video a week is going to be basically I’m going to make a studio in my basement. I’m going to just basically talk, talk about current events, talk about current outdoor events, I mean, current things what’s going on in the outdoor community, all across the board and I’m going to have guests on and things like that. Oh, cool. Yeah, but that’s not going to that’s going to be slower growing.

[00:25:20] Joe Robinet: I can tell because that’s not what my core audience wants, but that’s okay. I can I can still give my core audience what they want on Friday nights on my my long videos and hopefully yeah, branch out a little bit.

[00:25:32] Paul Kirtley: Mhm. No, that makes sense. Good to have a bit of diversity. Definitely. Definitely. And you’ve got to you’ve got to scratch your own itch, I think, with these things as well.

[00:25:40] Joe Robinet: Exactly

[00:25:42] Joe Robinet: Yeah, because I’ve been doing the same thing, like I’ve been doing it for a long time. And I love it, and it’s great and I’m going to continue to do it, but I do have, like you’re saying, scratch your own itch. I do have these other things I want to do and talk about, and maybe it’s just not the right platform on those other videos.

[00:25:57] Paul Kirtley: Sure. Yeah, and you don’t want to you don’t want to dilute a formula that’s working for a good proportion of your audience.

[00:26:04] Joe Robinet: No, that makes sense.

[00:26:05] Paul Kirtley: That makes sense. That makes sense. I have a bunch of questions from people and I think rather than kind of throw them all in at the end like I do sometimes, if I if I can manage to be clever enough about this, because I’ve read through these a few times, I might throw some of these in as we go because they’re kind of relevant points. So, one of the questions, this is from Peter Forrester who’s he’s got his own Foz. Yeah, Foz, exactly. He’s got his own YouTube channel as well.

[00:26:37] Paul Kirtley: His question, because it’s kind of relevant to what we’re talking about now in terms of going out and filming, how does he find so much time to film his videos whilst out on his trips? Personally, I find this really challenging to do and would love to learn how he balances his time between shooting film and doing all the stuff necessary for being outdoors. So, what would you what would you say to that, Joe?

[00:27:01] Joe Robinet: Man, that’s a really good question and I honestly don’t have an answer for it.

[00:27:07] Joe Robinet: I just do it. Like I’m not even I’m not joking like I it’s been so often that I that I’ve done it now. Like literally once a week or more for the past years. It’s second nature to me. I go out and I film everything I do. That’s my answer. I film every single thing I do. So it’s not like like I’m walking in to wherever I’m going and I’m getting two three four walking shots and I’m grabbing the camera as I’m walking and talking to the camera. And I’ll use maybe one of those walking shots and talking to the camera as I’m going. I get to where I’m going, I’m filming myself putting the backpack down. I film myself opening the backpack.

[00:27:44] Joe Robinet: I literally film a clip of everything I do while I’m out there. And I’m not saying I film the duration of everything I do, but parts of everything I do out there, the start, the beginning, the finish of something that I do out there. Man, I come home with a lot of footage, a whole lot of footage and I really don’t get rid of most of it is I guess another thing. It’s like, I’ll come home, I can go, I can literally go out to the woods for four hours and come home and get an hour completed footage out of it. No joke.

[00:28:19] Joe Robinet: And it’s not hard for me to do either. Like I sometimes I’ll talk to the dog and show what the dog’s doing and just really, really pay attention to filming every single thing that I do out there. And it’s nothing’s boring to people. I literally got comments saying like, this is part of the reason I really like your videos. Like I you film yourself doing things like putting steak spice on your steak. As you do it.

[00:28:43] Joe Robinet: And he’s like, and it makes me feel like I’m out there with you. Yeah. I get these comments all the time with makes me feel like I’m out there with you. So I think that’s part of it is just like, okay, now I’m, you know what I mean? I’m not talking while I’m doing these things. I’m opening my backpack super close, you can hear the zipper really open.

[00:28:58] Joe Robinet: You know what I mean? Just things that are

[00:29:00] Joe Robinet: Very real, that people connect with. I guess that’s my answer in a roundabout way. I just really film whatever I’m doing and it’s just second nature to me. I honestly sometimes I wish that I had projects to do or hobbies. Like I don’t smoke a pipe, I don’t carve a spoon, I don’t, you know what I mean? I’m not I don’t I’m not I don’t have things that I do while I’m out there and it kind of bummed me out for a little bit and I was talking to my buddy about it and it’s like, oh I don’t I don’t feel as crafty as you. I’m not out here carving a spoon or cook so while we’re sitting around the fire. And he said, Joe, you’re filming. He said, that’s what you do.

[00:29:39] Joe Robinet: He’s like, I’m spending my time carving this spoon, but you’re constantly filming. You’re thinking about the next shot and it made sense to me. It really hit the nail on the head.

[00:29:49] Joe Robinet: It’s like you’re right. I don’t I don’t have time to have hobbies because filming is my is what I do while I’m out there constantly. So if I was to do these some of these things that I do while I’m out there, it would take me a third of the time if I didn’t film.

[00:30:04] Paul Kirtley: No, that makes sense. So you’re you’re basically taking video snapshots of the bulk of what you do and then you’re editing editing it together into a sense of what you’ve what you’ve done and what and people can follow along with that and feel like they’re there with you is basically the gist of that, isn’t it?

[00:30:23] Joe Robinet: That is, yeah.

[00:30:24] Paul Kirtley: Yeah. So if you if you so some of the trip so I get so just to sort of interrogate a little bit more based on Peter’s question, just for Peter’s benefit. Yeah. Okay, you’re going to you’re going out to a fixed camp place you’re relatively familiar with, you set up, you’ve got plenty of time to set up. Like you say, you can spend, you know, an afternoon or a good part of a day setting up and preparing your food and whatnot and that might take you three times longer than it would do normally because you’re filming.

[00:30:52] Paul Kirtley: What about when you’ve done some of your paddling trips, you know, where you’d say the fishing trip that you did with Sean in Woodland Caribou or some of the other stuff that you’ve done, you know, Algonquin and places? Is it is it harder then to film, would you say?

[00:31:09] Joe Robinet: It’s different. It’s different for sure. I really have my um

[00:31:14] Joe Robinet: Like I’ve got my my boat set up where I have my GoPro on my boat, my canoe itself, in an accessible spot where I can turn it on and off on my thwart very easily. So I really have that there all the time. It’s harder to film with my DSLR in my boat, yes, physically, not really mentally but physically harder because it’s bigger, it’s bouncing around, I have to tie the tripod down. I’ve almost lost it over the side of the boat countless times.

[00:31:42] Joe Robinet: What I find difficult about canoe trips and things like that is the editing, is trying to not make it stagnant because as you know, going on a canoe trip, you say you’re gone for six days, you your routine is pretty much the same every day, right? Yeah. You’re getting up, you’re you’re cooking, you’re heading out, and it’s hard to make that not boring. That’s my point. That’s hard to make that not come across as boring in a video.

[00:32:05] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, I agree.

[00:32:07] Joe Robinet: You have the same routine every day and you don’t really want to show that every day but at the same time my style of filming is that is showing what I’m doing as I’m doing it so I don’t really want to skip out on a breakfast either. Do you know? So it’s that’s my difficulty with it. I don’t find necessarily the filming of the canoe trips difficult. I like I like trying to set up more artsy shots on that like trying to get like a sunset or something along those lines maybe a time-lapse of us canoeing around or things like that but there is a lot of opportunity to film while you’re on canoe trips. There’s lots of more lots of things that I don’t see normally.

[00:32:46] Joe Robinet: What I do find hard is backpacking actually. A backpacking trip is a lot more difficult for me to film because you’re walking the whole time. Right.

[00:32:56] Joe Robinet: In the canoe trip you can break it up, you’re you’re canoeing, you’re portaging, you’re stopping for lunch. Yeah, things like that. With a with a backpacking trip, it’s pretty straightforward, right?

[00:33:05] Paul Kirtley: Yep. Yep. It’s and it’s on one level it’s monotonous and

[00:33:11] Paul Kirtley: But on a macro level, I mean you you’ve got to take joy in the little details, haven’t you? And that’s hard to convey perhaps on a on a film for other people.

[00:33:21] Joe Robinet: Yeah.

[00:33:22] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, no, that’s interesting. Related question, sort of flip side of that, from Kath O’Hara.

[00:33:30] Paul Kirtley: She asks, does he go off and have time in the woods just to appreciate and be when he’s not having to cope with filming? How does he cope with this hobby becoming his full-time job and coming up with new material? So there’s two questions there really. One is, do you just go off and have a bit of chill time sometimes, or do you just are you just thinking about filming all the time? And then the second part of the question is, how do you how do you know, this thing about turning our hobbies, our passions into livings is that then we we’re kind of on a little treadmill, aren’t we? So how do you come up with new material?

[00:34:05] Joe Robinet: Right. So I guess the first part of that, yeah, I do. I make it a point to go to the woods without my camera because it really, it is exactly what you’re saying and what Kath is saying. It’s a job now. There’s no getting around it, right? So as much as I love it and as much as I enjoy filming, there are that is a job. And I like I said, I don’t have hobbies while I’m out there and stuff, so that is that is what’s taking up my my mind and my time and stuff.

[00:34:35] Joe Robinet: So, I make it a point to go to the woods with my dog, with my daughter, with my wife and stuff without the camera, or if I do bring the camera, it’s just purely for pictures for us. To enjoy it that way. While I’m out there, I still do enjoy myself and there are times more so on things like backpacking trips or canoeing trips or multiple day things where I do have downtime because like I’m saying, it gets monotonous filming the same thing over and over. So, I do have downtime, I do have time to appreciate things and nighttime is a good time for me too to sit around the fire and appreciate and reflect and things like that.

[00:35:13] Joe Robinet: And I do film some nighttime stuff, but that’s 20 minutes here or there of a full night. You know what I mean? So that’s a full multiple hours I get to sit there and kind of reflect. So

[00:35:24] Paul Kirtley: Yeah.

[00:35:25] Joe Robinet: The second, yeah, the second part of the question, it’s hard. It is, it is, it is a job. And it is, my hobby turned into a job, exactly what you’re saying. So there is, there is a sense of that. And but I’m grateful and I’m and I’m happy and I’m appreciative and I wouldn’t change a thing. So, yeah, it is, it is, it’s a catch-22, man. You know what I mean?

[00:35:51] Joe Robinet: I’m sure you felt the same way sometimes it’s uh

[00:35:54] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, yeah.

[00:35:55] Joe Robinet: There’s a there’s a pressure to get content out as well.

[00:35:59] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, there is. I mean, particularly for you. I mean, my my business is not, I mean, I’ve made good use of content to drive, you know, interest in what I do overall. You know, I’m not dependent as dependent upon the content to generate income for me directly, but I clearly do use content to

[00:36:19] Paul Kirtley: Raise people’s awareness of what I do and how I do it and what my philosophy is and what my approach is and if they want to come and do other things with me then then they can. You know, my my YouTube following is reasonably okay by most people’s standards but it’s not I’ve not focused on my YouTube channel anywhere near as much as you or Sean or other people have and you know, I use it for slightly different purposes to you guys. And so I’m not I do make a little trickle of ad revenue from it, but I don’t I don’t need it for my for my income as it were. So, yeah, I can appreciate that pressure to come up with something that people are going to watch.

[00:36:59] Paul Kirtley: Do you, I mean the question for me, do you see a lot of variability in your videos? Do you sometimes think that this is this one’s going to be a winner and you put it out and it’s like tumbleweed and nobody’s watching and or is it, have you have you are you pretty confident when you put a video out now that it’s going to get a good response?

[00:37:16] Joe Robinet: Yeah, I got it down to a science. Like, I know when a video is gonna blow up for sure. I know the taglines to use. I know, I know the thumbnail. I know, I know when my thumbnail’s on point, I know when my when my title’s on point and when I have great content in the video. And when it’s a longer video, normally it’s when I’m by myself, sometimes with the dog, but mainly no other people with me. That’s when those videos blow up. I get five, six thousand, five, six hundred thousand views. Some have gone to over a million and stuff like that. I do know, yeah, I know when they’re gonna go. And I know when they’re not gonna go.

[00:37:55] Joe Robinet: And I can’t do the hit videos every time.

[00:38:01] Paul Kirtley: No, I mean, do you do you still put, I mean if you think, oh yeah, this one’s not going to go as well as those other ones, you still put it out anyway?

[00:38:07] Joe Robinet: I mean, a hundred percent. Right.

[00:38:09] Paul Kirtley: Yes. So again, it’s back to scratching your own itch. It’s put it’s putting out stuff that you want to put out.

[00:38:15] Joe Robinet: There’s a balance, right? Yeah. It’s doing that and it’s doing what my core audience wants. So I and I’m fine with all of that. I realize that that’s how it has to go. I can see exactly what they want. I can see exactly what the audience wants by my previous videos. I did a dollar store challenge overnighter video and I had that in my head for about a year to do it and I just kept putting it off and putting it off because I didn’t want to I didn’t want to sound gimmicky. I didn’t want to come across gimmicky and it was kind of on the verge for me. And that was really the only time where I didn’t really know if it was going to go good or not. And that one blew up.

[00:38:54] Joe Robinet: That one’s one of my better video over a million in a month or something on that one. And then the second part of that’s kind of I find the second part of my videos never do as well. That one only has 400,000 which is still great but it’s weird with a million people watch this build up and then only half watched the finale.

[00:39:10] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, that’s just people in general though, isn’t it? It’s again it goes back to attention spans. Yeah, it’s yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve noticed similar things with when you put multi-part stuff out that it kind of fades out towards the end. So

[00:39:25] Joe Robinet: Yeah.

[00:39:27] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, while we’re on the subject of adventures, question from Brian Trubshaw who’s a friend of Foz’s actually.

[00:39:37] Joe Robinet: I don’t know if you know, bro.

[00:39:39] Paul Kirtley: He’s asking what’s a big outdoor adventure that he’d really like to do in his life, in his lifetime, but hasn’t got around to doing yet.

[00:39:47] Joe Robinet: Me

[00:39:48] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, you.

[00:39:49] Joe Robinet: I used to want to go and live on off off the land for a long time by myself. Um

[00:40:02] Joe Robinet: But the whole alone thing kind of put that into perspective for me. So, I don’t know.

[00:40:09] Joe Robinet: I have I have a couple really good trips. I have I have some bucket list trips coming up. Something like going out to like, like the real the real winter, you know, like somewhere up like Arctic Circle or something along those lines and doing like a dog sled trip. Maybe maybe with like an Inuit guide. And building building an igloo and living that way, maybe if possible getting in on like a seal hunt, not even doing it myself but just witnessing it. Things like that. Things that would the normal person would have never seen or experienced.

[00:40:46] Joe Robinet: Though those are the kind of things I like to do that just as like a resume as my own catalog, right? Like I’ve done this, this, and this kind of thing. Something along those lines, something really hardcore like that or I don’t know, I have actually a trip coming up to the Great Slave Lake in the summer here of 2018 and for people who don’t know where that is, that’s far up Northwest Territory kind of thing. And yeah, that’ll be really great.

[00:41:12] Joe Robinet: I don’t know, man.

[00:41:14] Paul Kirtley: What are you doing up there? Is that a is that a personal trip or are you going to be filming that or?

[00:41:18] Joe Robinet: Yeah, I’m filming that. So what I’ll be doing, I’ll be flying into Yellowknife and then there’s a Frontier Fishing Lodge, that that’s putting me up for a week. And I’ll be doing some fishing for like monster lake trout up there and other big fish. And then they’ll be dropping me off on an island, on a secluded island by myself and I’m going to be minimalist at camping for two nights. There’s musk ox up there. I have the chance of seeing musk ox, which is crazy.

[00:41:45] Paul Kirtley: Pretty cool. Yeah.

[00:41:46] Joe Robinet: Yeah, so that’ll be really cool. I’ll be doing I’ll be doing a couple different videos, a fishing video and then like a survivally bushcraft camping video. I’ve done, to be honest with you, I’ve done a lot of things in the past couple years that I really never thought I would even be able to get to do. So I’m really, I’m really happy and really, really excited about those kind of things and more things will happen like…

[00:42:08] Joe Robinet: Maybe going to a desert, maybe going to like a desert kind of kind of environment and learning and living there for a little while because I’ve not done anything like that. Just things that seem pretty epic and that every not everybody has had the chance to do. Those kind of things appeal to me.

[00:42:26] Paul Kirtley: Mhm. Now that makes sense. Now I’m kind of on the on the same page in a lot of respects with some of those things.

[00:42:34] Paul Kirtley: Just scrolling through some of the comments here. Because I asked on my Facebook page if people had any questions for Joe and there was a really great response actually. So there’s there’s a ton of questions here. Tom Edmonds asked, can can I get one of his Bamson t-shirts please?

[00:42:51] Paul Kirtley: How do people get hold of them? Do they on your website or

[00:42:55] Joe Robinet: Oh, and it’s such a it’s so right now, he’s probably from the UK. I’m just speculating.

[00:43:01] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, sounds like a British name, Thomas.

[00:43:04] Joe Robinet: Okay, so the thing is, it would have been over $20 to ship the shirts to the UK or overseas. It’s just crazy right now. So it’s I’m they’re getting drop shipped from from America, where the shirts are being printed and stuff like that. So it’s all being done in the States and shipped from the States. So even my fellow Canadians are paying over $10 shipping on it, which I hate, but it just is what it is right now. It

[00:43:26] Joe Robinet: So there it’s not from my website, it’s from it’s from a separate website and maybe we can just put it in the show notes because I don’t know it off offhand, it’s a long URL.

[00:43:37] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, no, yeah, no worries. I mean, it’s the same it’s the same with me. I mean, I’ve got things for sale on the Frontier Bushcraft website and I get people, particularly people listening to the podcast, as well as people who read my blog. I mean, it surprises some people, but about 35% of my readership on my blog is in the US and Canada. So, yeah. But then you get people saying, oh, you know, that kettle you’re using or that thing that you’re, can I can I get hold of one? And you know, I’ll either point people in the right direction of where they can get them or if we sell them, I’m say I’ll say, but it’s always the shipping. And then people get people get stung for duty as well.

[00:44:15] Joe Robinet: Yes, big time.

[00:44:16] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, it’s a real on small value stuff like t-shirts and kettles and things, it just ends up being as much as the thing you’re trying to buy. It’s ludicrous.

[00:44:27] Joe Robinet: That’s exactly it, yeah. So we’re right now we’re in the process of getting a different shipping method so that we can ship to the UK or to overseas with hope because I have I have a lot of list subscribers on in the overseas, not just UK but like everywhere, like Australia, everywhere.

[00:44:45] Joe Robinet: So I really I do feel bad about that and they voiced their opinion about that for sure. So, we’re we’re in the process right now of trying to find a cheaper, I’m hoping to get it down to ten twelve bucks. Is crazy and I don’t blame them.

[00:44:59] Joe Robinet: It’s ridiculous.

[00:45:00] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard.

[00:45:02] Paul Kirtley: Question here. I will come back to some of my questions, but it’s there’s one from Alex Rayner here who is in the is in Canada. He’s I know him online and his question is well, his comment and question is, I like his canoe trip videos quite a bit, both the solo ones and the ones with Doug and Sean. Or is it does he mean your dog? I’m not sure.

[00:45:31] Joe Robinet: No, probably not.

[00:45:33] Paul Kirtley: All right, okay, yeah, yeah, sorry, I don’t know Doug. As a fellow, is he the guy you did the Algonquin trip with? Yeah. Yeah, okay, right, I do know Doug. As a fellow Canuck, I’d be interested to know who his big influences were in the outdoors and what, if any, training he’s had or has he just picked it up here and there?

[00:45:49] Joe Robinet: Right. Yeah, big time. So a few. I have I have a few. So Dick Proenneke, I’m sure you know. Yeah. American gentleman who built an off-grid cabin in Alaska and before the words off-grid were a thing.

[00:46:06] Paul Kirtley: Before there was as much of a grid as there is now.

[00:46:08] Joe Robinet: Or there was a great, back when he was fifty and he stayed there till he was eighty. Really big inspiration. Awesome dude.

[00:46:16] Joe Robinet: Alone in the wilderness it’s called I believe. Les Stroud Survivor Man was a big thing for me. He was probably him and Ray Mears to be honest were probably the big two for me. Growing up. But also Mors Kochanski, that book was the Bible to me. His his Northern Bushcraft book. I taught myself how to do the bow drill from that book. When I when I learned when I taught myself how to do that, this was before the age of like just popping on YouTube and typing in bow drill and like one billion results showed up.

[00:46:47] Joe Robinet: Yeah. This is like, I was lucky to get like some old blog articles from like Alan Beauchamp back in the day. I don’t know if that name rings a bell.

[00:46:56] Paul Kirtley: Yeah.

[00:46:57] Joe Robinet: So that and the Mors Kochanski book, really, I taught myself, took me two years to learn that bow drill, man. Trial and error, trial and error, and finally when I got it, I was the most happy I’ve probably ever been.

[00:47:10] Paul Kirtley: I think that’s that that’s I think that’s the story for a lot of people when they get it for the first time, it’s just like you’ve passed through the eye of a needle or something and come out in Nirvana, I don’t know. It’s

[00:47:21] Joe Robinet: Exactly

[00:47:22] Paul Kirtley: If it if it if you if you’ve had that much motivation to get it in the first place when you do it’s an amazing experience.

[00:47:31] Joe Robinet: That’s right.

[00:47:32] Joe Robinet: Yeah, so that those kind of things and then so I don’t want to leave anyone out. I did have I was on a forum a bush called Bushcraft USA for a few years back probably in the infant stages of it and of me doing this stuff and there’s a guy named Terry Barney and he goes by the handle Iowa Woodsman, IA Woodsman on YouTube and on social media. And he’s a former Sear instructor and that guy really was my mentor in person and online. He put out a bunch of classes that you could that you could do online for free and then in person and I had the great pleasure of becoming like an instructor next to him, right?

[00:48:11] Joe Robinet: So we were I was a student for the longest time and then in person I got to instruct right alongside him a couple times. So that was a that was a really big honor for me. I really still feel blessed to be able to do that.

[00:48:23] Joe Robinet: Yeah, so he was big.

[00:48:25] Joe Robinet: So him, Les Stroud, Ray Mears, Mors Kochanski, Dick Proenneke, guys like that. And then, like we were saying, I did I did go to college for some of it and I did take courses from the Midwest School of Bushcraft in person from him. Three or four. And yeah, I learned learned very practical survival slash improvisational things in the woods more so than wilderness living. More more so like survivally bushcrafty stuff.

[00:48:57] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, well if he if he was a Sierra instructor, he’d probably have that tendency. Yeah, yeah.

[00:49:03] Paul Kirtley: That makes sense. So, in while we’re on the subject of sort of all of these overlapping areas, like, you know, wilderness living skills and woodcraft and camping and bushcraft and survival skills and backwoodsman ship and all of these other terms that get bandied around. I remember you putting a video out, God knows, it seems like five minutes ago but it was probably like three or four years ago, where you said you were kind of moving away from using the word bushcraft or you or you had a love-hate relationship with bushcraft. And I remember I remember I don’t comment on YouTube videos very much because I just don’t have the time.

[00:49:41] Paul Kirtley: But I remember leaving you a comment there on that because that kind of resonated, even with me, that kind of resonated about this interesting relationship we have with this word. How do you feel about that now?

[00:49:56] Joe Robinet: Well, first off, I remember that and I remember you commenting and I was like over the moon because you were somebody that I looked up to, you’re somebody in the field who knows the deal, who yeah, and for you to agree with me and actually leave a comment because you’re right, I never saw a comment from you forever. I didn’t know if you knew who I was or anything. But yeah, I was very happy about that anyways. So, I still do feel the same way. I don’t feel as like adamant about it anymore. I honestly, I think it’s tapered off a bit too because people were using it all the time and I felt at one point that if I didn’t put the word bushcraft in one of my in my titles for my videos, then I wasn’t going to get views.

[00:50:36] Joe Robinet: And it actually did matter for some time. The word bushcraft in your title did get you the views. And then I went so far as to take it out of my name, right? ‘Cause my name was Joe Robinet Bushcraft on YouTube.

[00:50:53] Joe Robinet: Yeah, I didn’t want to be that guy. I didn’t want to be like if you’re not out there building a shelter using an axe and like cordage that you made from cedar roots, then you’re not a bushcrafter or you couldn’t be called that or whatever. So that was part of the problem for me, right? Just labels and yeah, I it’s not that big of an issue to me anymore when I when I feel like I’ve done a video where I’ve done some bushcrafty kind of stuff, I’ll throw it in the title. If not…

[00:51:23] Joe Robinet: I don’t and even in my even in my description or my about me page on the on YouTube, I give this whole spiel and then I go, my definition of bushcraft may differ from yours.

[00:51:38] Joe Robinet: So it’s just yeah, I’m not so adamant about it anymore. I really have kind of calmed down on it, but So what The sentiment’s the same.

[00:51:48] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, sure. Okay, okay, that makes sense. So, two questions from me that follow up on that. One is, what does the word bushcraft mean to you now?

[00:52:01] Joe Robinet: Right now it means the same thing it’s always meant to me. Going to the woods and being comfortable. Carrying less, the whole doing more with less thing, I agree with. But in the same respect, like I said in the video, I have a Gransfors Bruks axe, right? That’s a that’s an expensive tool. I didn’t make that in the bush, I didn’t craft that from the bush. But if I’m using that to build a bed or a shelter, I’m gonna call that bushcraft.

[00:52:31] Paul Kirtley: So how do you, how so second part of the question then is, how do you perceive yourself? How do you know, do you consider yourself a bushcrafter? Do you consider yourself an outdoorsman? How do you frame yourself in your own mind these days in terms of all these things that you’re documenting and putting out on YouTube?

[00:52:50] Joe Robinet: In my own mind, I like I just like camping.

[00:52:53] Joe Robinet: That’s what it is. And that’s what I’ve said that for a long time. I just like camping. And I guess that’s a really, really, really broad term because that can mean anything from glamping with your with your kids or like maybe your grandparents or whatever, to what we do, backcountry camping or even wild camping where you’re where you’re building a shelter or even survival stuff.

[00:53:20] Joe Robinet: But in my mind what I like to do is I just like to be outside, I like to go outside, minimalistic camp, maybe with a backpack or a canoe and just enjoy it. Yeah, I don’t I just like camping.

[00:53:34] Joe Robinet: I just like camping.

[00:53:35] Paul Kirtley: Now that makes sense. That makes sense. That makes sense.

[00:53:39] Paul Kirtley: So it sounds like you’ve kind of got to a sort of solid understanding of what your what your motivations were. I’ll touch on something that a lot of people seem to think is a touchy subject for you, but before we got online, and started recording, you said there was nothing off limits. And you you’ve mentioned you’ve mentioned the Alone show already and you mentioned that put certain aspirations in perspective for you. How how do you feel about that whole episode now?

[00:54:15] Joe Robinet: Ah

[00:54:16] Joe Robinet: I got a pretty sour taste in my mouth about it if I’m being honest. I yeah, things things happened that shouldn’t have happened on screen and off and there was a yeah, I have a sour taste in my mouth about it. I if I was offered to do everything again, I would. I would have done if without knowing anything, I would I would go into it doing the same exact thing.

[00:54:43] Joe Robinet: Sorry, with knowing, with knowing, I would go back go into it doing the same thing. Obviously my outcome would be different, but I don’t know. It’s if they ask me to be back on it again, it would it would be a toss-up to me because in one in one respect I have something to prove to myself. I didn’t even if I didn’t if I stayed on that thing and it changed and I didn’t win, I would have been fine.

[00:55:07] Joe Robinet: I didn’t I went there to prove something to myself. When we all showed up to try out, nobody knew that we were going to get what we were getting paid. Nobody knew anything about it. You know what I mean?

[00:55:20] Joe Robinet: Money wasn’t what wasn’t a motivator for ninety percent of us on the first season.

[00:55:26] Paul Kirtley: This was the first season wasn’t it

[00:55:28] Joe Robinet: This is the first season. So no, we were guinea pigs, nobody knew anything.

[00:55:30] Paul Kirtley: So what year what year was this show? Because I’ve seen bits and pieces of the show, but like a lot of the Discovery stuff, I’ve not watched a huge amount of it. I know people who were involved in behind the scenes stuff, as you know, that you know, the safety side of things with a lot of these shows, but I don’t really watch a lot of them.

[00:55:46] Joe Robinet: Right. I don’t know what year it was. This is about three years ago. I’m not hundred percent what year they put it out.

[00:55:52] Joe Robinet: Yeah, it was about three years ago. So I think they’re on season, I think they just finished filming season five and this was season one. But they’ve been doing more than one a year. Right.

[00:56:02] Joe Robinet: So, yeah, it was yeah, we didn’t so we didn’t know what we were getting paid. I went into it all, I’d say 90% of us went into it because of the love love of it and wanting to like, as a kid growing up, you were probably the same, like how cool would it be to be to do like a Dick Proenneke thing where you’re you just you have the option of going and getting going in the middle of nowhere and living for a month or living for however long you could on just what you can carry. Like that’s a very romanticized thing in our genre, right?

[00:56:32] Paul Kirtley: No, absolutely, yeah. You it and I and you used exactly the word I would use there, romanticized. Yeah, yeah.

[00:56:38] Joe Robinet: Yeah, so, yeah, I did that going into it thinking that like that was that and if I would have lasted two weeks, Paul, and been been okay with leaving, left on my own terms, then that would have been fine too. I didn’t need to win, but the way that things turned out really sucked for me. It was no closure and kind of just all up in the air for a few different reasons. But I’m happy to have I’m happy to have done it, happy to have been part of it. It was an experience that nobody can ever take away.

[00:57:07] Paul Kirtley: Do you do you think part of the issue with those experiences is that, I mean, we all we all try stuff and fail things, you know, we’ve all we’ve all done that. I mean, that’s how you ultimately, that’s how you learn, that’s how you get better at things. And, you know, we talked about, you know, learning bow drill. I mean, I don’t, you probably don’t remember, but the number of times you tried and it didn’t work, and then you get it to work, and then you build up the consistency. And there’s many other things, you know, like I can think of, you know, my early days canoeing, how much I used to fall out, and I still have days where I fall out and

[00:57:42] Paul Kirtley: We all make mistakes, we all fail at things, but do you think one of the problems with those shows is that people fail publicly and then it kind of it’s kind of crystallized in the sense that, you know, because your memory fades and your experience builds and you learn as long as you don’t die in the process, you learn from those experiences if you’re half intelligent and you move on and you can build on that. But the problem with those shows is that that’s a moment in time that gets crystallized.

[00:58:12] Joe Robinet: Yeah, definitely. So everybody makes mistakes like you’re saying. Like everybody. And losing your fire steel Really? That’s not a far stretch. Okay.

[00:58:21] Joe Robinet: I just did it on national TV. Mm. You know what I mean? So it’s like it was a dumb mistake to not have a lanyard tied to my my Firesteel right off the hop, but we weren’t allowed to. We weren’t allowed to have extra cordage and I didn’t have a Firesteel loop on my Firesteel or sorry, on my on my on my knife.

[00:58:41] Joe Robinet: So therefore I needed to put it on a lanyard. I didn’t. And that was a very, very dumb mistake, but it’s just a mistake. And for the longest time, I beat myself up about that like crazy. But exactly what you’re saying, everybody does them. Hulk Hurtley makes mistakes.

[00:58:56] Joe Robinet: You know what I mean?

[00:58:57] Joe Robinet: Everybody makes mistakes. But mine was cemented in time like you’re saying. So that is a problem with the show, but in the same respect, I think a whole hell of a lot of people started tying some bright ass lanyards on their on their steels after that. You know what I mean? So, it yeah, it really it really affected me for some time there and I actually got people saying like, the only reason that your YouTube channel blew up was because you were on Alone. Well, that’s completely the opposite. It hurt me more than helped me.

[00:59:30] Paul Kirtley: It did, yeah.

[00:59:31] Joe Robinet: Yeah Big time. Yeah, I didn’t start blowing up till years, like two years after that.

[00:59:37] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, ’cause I remember, I mean, not that long ago, you were sort of sixty eighty thousand subscribers and it’s blown up to multiples of that now, hasn’t it?

[00:59:47] Joe Robinet: Five something, yeah

[00:59:49] Paul Kirtley: Yeah. Now which is pretty cool. In the YouTube world, definitely. Definitely.

[00:59:54] Paul Kirtley: So what would you say you learn from that experience? You know, clearly other people you say it’s good to learn from other people’s experiences, so people people are tying lanyards to their to their fire steels. What would you say you’d learn from that experience?

[01:00:14] Joe Robinet: It’s hard to gain your composure in a new environment even when you know you’re going there. It’s hard to, I’ve never been anywhere like that. I had a full backpack full of gear. I wasn’t, it wasn’t, it was a good survival situation. It was an on-purpose survival situation with a tapout, with all the safety measures in place, with a bunch of gear and with food and with knowledge that I was going there.

[01:00:48] Joe Robinet: Okay So imagine all of that and it’s still very hard for me to gain my composure. It’s still it was, I don’t care what anybody says, it was hard for anyone to gain their composure for probably the first week. You know, you’re not used to that. You have to get into it.

[01:01:03] Joe Robinet: And it’s the same thing as like a canoe trip. You’re not really into it till the first few four days are done. You know what I mean? So it’s like, so imagine that. So this is what I’m saying.

[01:01:13] Joe Robinet: So imagine that. Me with all this information, knowledge, gear, and everything going out there and

[01:01:20] Joe Robinet: As much as I seemed okay on the video and stuff like that, and I was okay, for the most part, stupid mistakes and stupid things because you’re not thinking, your composure’s not there. I’m not thinking about the law. I’m thinking, I need to get a fire going in this ridiculously wet environment so that I can drink some water because I’m super dehydrated already. You know what I mean? That’s what I’m thinking. I’m not thinking, okay, I need to make sure I put this fire still back in my pocket because if I put it on top of my black rain jacket, when I pick my rain jacket up, it might fly in the black sand and I might not see it and it might get washed away by the ocean. You’re not thinking those things.

[01:01:59] Joe Robinet: So you’re thinking very like step by step. So imagine you get dropped, imagine you are in an actual survival situation with no tap out, with no gear, with no knowledge of being where you’re going to be. Imagine your mind frame then.

[01:02:16] Joe Robinet: So that’s my biggest takeaway. It’s like being right in your head no matter what, and I don’t know how to do that.

[01:02:27] Paul Kirtley: Hmm.

[01:02:28] Paul Kirtley: That’s interesting. That’s honest and that’s interesting. Would you say that is a useful lesson then for, as you say, there’s this romanticized idea in the bushcraft and survival world? And you know, I see a lot of people. So this is one of my bugbears, yeah.

[01:02:47] Paul Kirtley: I see a lot of people on the sort of prepping end of the bushcraft and survival sphere, and it is kind of one end of the spectrum where there’s this idea of bugging out. And you know, some of these people are probably capable outdoors people, some of them are probably ex-military, you know, that have that mindset. They often seem to go hand in hand. But

[01:03:14] Paul Kirtley: A lot of these people are not even hikers, they’re not backpackers, they’re not you know, they’ve got the gear, they’ve got a backpack, they’ve got stuff packed in it ready to go, but they’re not conditioned physically or mentally even to go on a backpacking trip, never mind escape a natural disaster or a civilian breakdown in, you know, order and the onset of anarchy or whatever it is they feel like they’re preparing for. And I think it’s interesting because a lot of people just think that, yeah, I know in theory what I have to do, I’ve got this gear, I’ll have it with me, I’ll be okay.

[01:03:54] Paul Kirtley: And I and I think it’s an interesting experience when it actually, even if it is a training exercise, which effectively that was, wasn’t it? It was a filmed

[01:04:03] Joe Robinet: Definitely.

[01:04:04] Paul Kirtley: Training exercise, it never pans out how you expect it to.

[01:04:07] Joe Robinet: Heh heh heh heh. You got that right.

[01:04:10] Joe Robinet: Yeah, no, it’s the same man. Like even on I’ve seen it on canoe trips where I’ve been with people who who weren’t very used to it or hadn’t been used to it and yeah, you just really see it in them after a couple days, it’s like the fatigue, the wear out, and that’s like a fun thing. That’s a canoe trip thing, right?

[01:04:32] Joe Robinet: Yeah, just amplified like crazy for what you’re talking about.

[01:04:35] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, I mean, I remember I did a course with before I even worked with Ray Mears, I did a course, did a series of courses with him and he runs this course or his company now, he doesn’t run them anymore. A course called The Journeyman, which is up in Scotland. It’s run early October, so it’s normally not the best weather. It’s getting a little bit cold at night, can be wet during the day. But it’s not a bad time of year in terms of foraging, you know, there’s a few…

[01:05:08] Paul Kirtley: You know, ’cause Scotland’s a bit later, so there’s a few berries around and nuts and, you know, it’s the end of the summer so there’s some tuberous roots and things and there’s the opportunity to do a bit of fishing and you can get some cattails and things. But you don’t know where any of those resources are. And they do, they don’t give you a lot of food at the beginning and you’re quite active and then you have to go out on the land for, it’s only three days which, but you’re going out with basically no glycogen in your system. Or you know, you’re already you’re already low blood sugar. You’re only going out with a few essentials that you’re allowed to take with you.

[01:05:45] Paul Kirtley: And you’re in that situation where you’ve just got the clothes you stand in, a knife and a saw and a cooking pot and a few fish hooks and a snare. No fire steel. You have to do fire by friction. You’ve got to build a shelter in a group of three. But I remember we got very little food the first day we’re out ’cause, you know, all we could manage to do was get a fire going and build sort of half build a shelter we had to finish it the next day. We’ve got no sleeping kit. And this was my kind of first, I’d done some sort of rough camping things when I was younger.

[01:06:21] Paul Kirtley: I remember trying to sleep out in an orange survival bag when I was like 14 and built natural shelters and things, but you know, in terms of doing all of that together and trying to get food and, you know, the fact that we went out empty to start off with, it was super hard just to motivate to build a shelter that was protective. And then the but then that was kind of okay, you expect the physicality to be difficult. You expect, okay, well I’ve got to light fire by friction, that could be difficult and particularly if I’ve not got a lot of energy in me and da da da, and we’ve got to find the right materials and all that kind of stuff. But it’s the it’s the other things that hit me. So like,

[01:07:00] Paul Kirtley: That thing you say about dehydration, we struggled to get our fire going until later in the day and so we hadn’t had anything to drink all day and we’d been building a shelter up and down a hill, getting materials, and I just had this thumping headache. Yep. And it was probably a combination of low blood sugar, dehydration, lack of caffeine, and I just felt totally shit.

[01:07:28] Paul Kirtley: And then we got a little bit of food, we got like a few chanterelle mushrooms, some, what else did we get? A few bits of greenery. You know, the sort of stuff that foragers are always getting excited about, you know, we got some, but you get it’s going to give you about four calories, you know, that’s it’s all, you know, we had like opposite leaf golden saxifrage and a bit of brook lime and a few of the bits and pieces. And we got some sedge seeds which we kind of roasted, but we burnt a little bit in the bottom of the billy can that we had.

[01:07:57] Paul Kirtley: And then we kind of made this shitty soup of like burnt burnt sedge seeds and mushrooms and a bit of greenery and it tasted awful. And then you’ve got to sleep, you know, with no sleeping kit. And it’s hard if people have never done it before. People have got this romantic idea that it’s going to be like, oh, I’ve got a knife and I’ve got a, you know, it’s just freaking difficult.

[01:08:24] Joe Robinet: You just curl up by the fire and everything’s fine, right?

[01:08:27] Paul Kirtley: No, and we had we didn’t have enough firewood the first night and then we kept getting cold and had to get up and, you know, this is this is back, you know, like 20 years ago nearly. I mean it’s a long time ago but those experiences are invaluable, you know, because you build on that. And the other thing that hit me was the next day, I don’t know what it was, whether it was the shitty soup we’d had or whether it was just drinking a lot of water and not eating a lot of food, but then I had the shits the next day. I just had like di- I just like, “ah, I need to go.” We had no toilet paper because we weren’t allowed it. So I had to go and f- you know, it’s like I had to grab some sphagnum moss and wipe it. Oh, friend sphagnum moss.

[01:09:07] Paul Kirtley: And it’s just like it’s those little things that we all take for granted, you know, like good hydration, good nutrition, your stomach working properly. All of that stuff it goes it goes out the window and I think, you know, people would do well to go out and do those sorts of training exercises, but it’s hard because you do need the safety net. You need ’cause you make stupid mistakes when you’ve got low blood sugar and, you know, I ended up running that course eventually.

[01:09:36] Joe Robinet: Nice.

[01:09:37] Paul Kirtley: A number, you know, good number of years later. And every single foraged food that came in, the students had to have that checked. Even if it was relatively straightforward because they they’re low on energy. And the game that we played with that was that rather than them poison themselves was that if they brought something in that was not edible, they’d have to forfeit a piece of equipment.

[01:10:07] Paul Kirtley: So there was a consequence to them getting it wrong. And they couldn’t just bring a bunch of stuff in and go, is this edible? Is this edible? Is this edible? They had to come in and say, I think this is X. And there was, and there was a bit of extra training at the beginning in edible, and poisonous plant ID as well as, fungi ID as well. But they had to say with confidence, this is what I think this is. You know, if they brought in, you know, poisonous tubers or berries or what have you, they were losing kit. You know, one so so that put the consequence there without the danger.

[01:10:43] Paul Kirtley: And I think those those experiences are so valuable because they’re a lot harder than than you ever imagine they’re going to be.

[01:10:49] Joe Robinet: Right.

[01:10:50] Joe Robinet: I think that that’s actually a really good way to do it is taking away the kids so there isn’t a consequence. That makes a lot of sense. What you were talking about that but your pounding headache, it really rang a bell to me I had to crawl there’s the when I was on the island there was no land. It was I got dropped off on in this marsh. A lot of other people had a beach with rocks and sand.

[01:11:11] Paul Kirtley: Was this up in British Columbia somewhere, wasn’t it?

[01:11:13] Joe Robinet: Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is on the west coast, northwest coast there of Vancouver Island. So, a lot of other people had a sand beach and I didn’t, I had like this marsh. So the tide would come in and just fill right up into the forest. There was no incline, there was no elevation from from the shore. So, I had to really get far into the forest in order to not get flooded out. So I had to crawl through all these salal bushes. I’m not sure if you or the listeners know what salal bushes are, but they’re like this rubbery shrub that grows probably about as tall as you and they’re branches are everywhere and it’s like impossible. I didn’t have a machete.

[01:11:51] Joe Robinet: I had an axe. You know what I mean?

[01:11:53] Joe Robinet: Like these these these plants would not, it wouldn’t be worthwhile to try and cut them with an axe. Anyway, so I had to crawl through them and under them and around them and on top of them and for like the length of two football fields to get to the forest where there was actually forest where I could set up a tarp where there was no salal bushes, where there was a little bit of opening and the water wouldn’t come in. So I actually had to set up on a bear trail, on a game trail, because that was the only clear area and the only game there was black bear.

[01:12:25] Joe Robinet: So, I sat up back in there and now I’m so far away from my water source and it’s dark and it’s like a cedar swamp where I am. So I’m dehydrated, I’m trying to hike back in and out trying to get all my gear back into the to the location, trying to get out to get just sunlight for my own well-being. I couldn’t sit in that dark dank place anymore, trying to get out and get back and trying to get water and get back and everything. I was so dehydrated and that thumping in my head was exactly, it rang a bell. My heart and my head were pounding on the same beat and it was just like a thud thud thud.

[01:13:01] Joe Robinet: I remember trying to climb this big incline way back in the woods there to try and get up and try and get a view of where I can get to a beach where I can actually access water. Where I ended up moving camps like day three or whatever, but yeah man, the dehydration and the hunger and just the rundown on your body makes you start thinking real weird.

[01:13:25] Paul Kirtley: Yeah. Yeah. No, I can relate to that. I can relate to that.

[01:13:30] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, and I think the answer to the answer to those things is you kind of have to go through that in training. I mean, if you look at like you’ve mentioned your Sear instructor, mentor, if you look at the sort of training that they do for whether they’re, you know, helicopter pilots or fast jet pilots or whoever it is that they’re training, they put them through that stuff because that’s you have to experience it to kind of know what’s coming.

[01:13:53] Joe Robinet: Yeah Actually, he did it in that same location, his his exper his training.

[01:13:59] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, so that’s interesting. So yeah, I mean thanks for thanks for talking about that because a lot of people seem to think that’s a they did mention that in one way or the other and they seem to think that was a touchy subject, but thanks for being open and honest about that experience. Must be must be must be quite tough for people because people still go on about it. It must be a bit annoying for you that people still latch onto that all this number of years down the line. No, not at all.

[01:14:26] Joe Robinet: Yeah, it’s whatever, man. It’s the internet, I understand. Like people are, you know what? And a lot of times I get it from people who who don’t even really mean anything bad by it. They’re just like, aren’t you that guy that lost his Firesteel? Ha ha ha

[01:14:37] Joe Robinet: And it’s like, yeah, okay, I can see how that might be funny for you still, whatever. Like, I don’t get upset about it. It’s just, it is a bit old. Like three years down the line, but on the same respect, like that’s gonna probably stick with me for the rest of my life, you know what I mean?

[01:14:52] Joe Robinet: So it’s okay. I’m owning it. I’m fine with it and I make jokes about it all the time in my videos, you know what I mean?

[01:14:58] Joe Robinet: So it’s all good, man. If people want to talk about that, I have no problem talking about it. It was a the whole thing was a cool experience as a whole. So yeah, it’s a cool thing to talk about.

[01:15:08] Paul Kirtley: Okay, cool.

[01:15:09] Paul Kirtley: Thank you. Thank you. And on a on a related subject, I mean, did you learn anything about, I mean, the show is called Alone. I mean, did you learn anything about, you know, having all of that mental space, that loneliness, that just being on your own, that sense of isolation. I mean, did that was it informative in that sense?

[01:15:30] Joe Robinet: Well.

[01:15:31] Paul Kirtley: Or were you just too wrapped up in getting shit done that it didn’t kind of

[01:15:35] Joe Robinet: That was basically it. Like I was really so the first part I like yourself I do I’ve experienced it before. You know what I mean?

[01:15:44] Joe Robinet: I have experienced being alone before for a week, like for extended amount of time. So that part of it, like I was expecting to get more delve more into that, more psychological to myself, like figure things out about myself and that’s what I was really looking forward to, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen till later on, you know what I mean, a couple weeks or whatever. So no, I if I’m being honest, no, I didn’t didn’t get anything like that from it. What I was really, I was really, really focused on filming. I really wanted to stand out as the guy who knew what he was doing filming-wise and if you look at that first season, I do have the best footage.

[01:16:23] Joe Robinet: They’re still showing clips of my footage three years ago and I was only on for three days. I only have three days of footage and they’re showing clips from that on promos still. So I really did take a lot of time filming and spent too much time thinking about filming and shots and stuff like that. When I should have been more worried about just kind of holding up like maybe the winner did.

[01:16:47] Joe Robinet: You didn’t see much footage from him or the second place guy at all until like later on and stuff because really they were concerned on living and making themselves survive out there, which is obviously what I should have been doing. But in the same respect, they were breathing it down, they were they were throwing it down our throats, you need to film. Like the production crew, like you need to film.

[01:17:09] Paul Kirtley: Right. So they’re put that was before they even dropped you off, there’s a there’s a pressure there that you’ve got to get a certain amount of footage, yeah.

[01:17:17] Joe Robinet: Oh, 100%.

[01:17:18] Paul Kirtley: Mhm Did they give you any training?

[01:17:22] Joe Robinet: Yeah, a little bit.

[01:17:23] Joe Robinet: I picked up on I probably grabbed two or three little bits of info from it. The yeah, the training filming wise you’re talking about. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The I learned that I need to make every scene a story almost, like a beginning, middle, and end to every scene almost. And yeah, when I’m panning my camera, I need to stop on a on a subject, not just continue to pan. But I think really those were two the two only things that I really picked up from it because of the years and years and years I had of just learning it on my own on YouTube. And really this is a glorified YouTube show.

[01:18:02] Joe Robinet: Like this is just people this is how people on YouTube are, you know what I mean? They’re just talking to the camera, run and gun kind of thing. Like there really is no film crew film crew legit. There is no film crew.

[01:18:14] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, well that’s it’s cheap it’s cheap TV.

[01:18:17] Joe Robinet: No doubt about it.

[01:18:20] Paul Kirtley: And I don’t mean that in like it it’s it I don’t mean cheap in the sense of derogatory, inexpensive for them to make.

[01:18:28] Joe Robinet: No, I completely get you, yeah.

[01:18:30] Paul Kirtley: Yeah. Cool. Beer

[01:18:35] Joe Robinet: Yes. Hehehehe. All the time.

[01:18:41] Paul Kirtley: Another shared interest I think. Where did is that is that just that’s kind of become a thing for you, which is good. I think I think to me it’s good to see that you’re relaxed and you know I was I kind of like that about an aspect of Canadian outdoor culture. You know for example I did a little trip on the French River.

[01:19:08] Paul Kirtley: In September we did a bigger trip on the Missanibi but then Amanda and I stayed in Canada for a bit extra and we did a we had a sort of a five days off just sort of chilling and walking a little bit and staying in a cabin and then we did a short trip on the French for like four days I think it was. And down at the bottom end where it’s near to Highway 69, it was quite busy and it was a really nice weekend and there were these there was these guys sort of they’d sort of driven up with their in their tin boat they’d kind of stopped on the beach. It was the beginning of a portage trail that we had to do.

[01:19:46] Paul Kirtley: And they’re there with their like their barbecue and they’ve got their, you know, bratwurst or whatever they are and beers and little chairs and I kind of like that aspect as well. You know, there’s a kind of hardcore aspect to some of the act some of the backwoods stuff in Canada, but then there’s also this kind of pickup truck, tin boat, barbecue, beers kind of side of things which is and fishing which is pretty cool as well.

[01:20:14] Paul Kirtley: So, I always struggle to find good beers when I’m in Canada.

[01:20:19] Joe Robinet: What are you what are you

[01:20:22] Paul Kirtley: Hello

[01:20:22] Paul Kirtley: I mean, actually, some of some of the some of the stuff is some of the stuff I’ve had’s okay. It’s not as difficult as it is in the States. I’ll put I’ll give that. But what should I be looking for, you know, if I’m presented with a beer menu in Canada? What should I, you know, what would your recommendation?

[01:20:41] Joe Robinet: A loaded question, Paul.

[01:20:42] Paul Kirtley: This is this is the, well, okay, what would you what would you go for? I mean, if you, okay, if you were putting together a beer menu and what would your like top three beers on there be? Let’s frame the question that way. Yeah.

[01:20:56] Joe Robinet: Okay, so so let’s, I like an IPA, and I like a specific type of IPA. I know a lot of the British IPAs are very malty, and I like more of a citrusy, grapefruity, pineappley kind of IPA. And I know that sounds so weird, but until you’ve tried it, don’t knock it.

[01:21:16] Paul Kirtley: I’m not I’m not knocking it. I’m open-minded.

[01:21:19] Joe Robinet: There you go. Okay, so I would like Collective Arts is a very, very popular brewery. They’re out of Hamilton

[01:21:26] Joe Robinet: So collective arts, any kind of like IPA from them. They also have a sour beer that I really like. Anything by Great Lakes Brewery has a lot of really good ones. They have a beer called Kanuck.

[01:21:41] Joe Robinet: I’d go for that. Or octopus wants to fight

[01:21:45] Paul Kirtley: That sounds interesting.

[01:21:47] Joe Robinet: It

[01:21:48] Joe Robinet: There’s a whole and it’s that craft beer thing, right? It’s all these puns and these like witty witty beer names and stuff, but yeah, man, those are like the kinds that I like. They’re really, really like and they’re sometimes they’re pretty pretty potent, like nine percent, eleven percent. Yeah, I like a I like a light fruity hoppy, light in color, fruity hoppy IPA. Another good one would be like Muskoka Detour.

[01:22:18] Joe Robinet: Yeah.

[01:22:19] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, I’ve had I have had some stuff from Muskoka actually, that’s been quite good. Yeah. Cool Right, so I’ve got I’ve got I’ve got a shopping list there, Joe.

[01:22:28] Joe Robinet: Thank you.

[01:22:29] Paul Kirtley: Collective Arts out of Hamilton, Muskoka Deep Eater, Great Lakes Brewery, Canuck or Octopus Wants to Fight.

[01:22:35] Joe Robinet: Let’s watch the fight.

[01:22:37] Paul Kirtley: Got it. It’s on my list. It’s on my list.

[01:22:40] Paul Kirtley: Awesome That was easy. That was easy. You just have to frame the question.

[01:22:44] Joe Robinet: Right, right.

[01:22:47] Paul Kirtley: Just have to frame the question. Okay, let’s dive into a few more questions because as I say there were a ton of questions.

[01:22:56] Paul Kirtley: We’ve talked about alone. So I’ve kind of paraphrased so apologies to some people because they’ve asked similar questions. So if I if I don’t read you out by name, if people are listening, it’s not that I’ve ignored your question, I’ve kind of amalgamated it into maybe something I’ve asked or we’ve talked about it already just as it’s come out of it. This is kind of a good quote. You’ve kind of you’ve kind of talked about your background a bit, but this is a slightly different approach to the question. This is from Danny Barrett who’s he’s a great guy, he’s done some courses with me in the UK.

[01:23:30] Paul Kirtley: Here’s a question is what attracted Joe to bushcraft and what was the first skill he learned?

[01:23:39] Joe Robinet: I guess I was really attracted to the outdoors first off before I kind of knew what any kind of like bushcraft stuff was. But really when I the first like inkling of bushcraft I got was from Ray Mears, watching like I don’t even remember what it was, not it was after Country Tracks, but anyways, just the idea of making things out there or like being comfortable because growing up I had no idea about being outside and stuff like that and I didn’t know you could be comfortable with still bringing minimal gear. So I think that was the biggest thing.

[01:24:19] Joe Robinet: Being able to carry what I needed on my back

[01:24:24] Joe Robinet: And being able to camp or spend the day or whatever, being very comfortable. And I and I and I always wanted to learn like edibles and things that I could improve my life with while I was outside if I didn’t have that piece of gear or so I wouldn’t have to bring that certain piece of gear. And I think really the first the first actual bushcraft skill I did learn uh

[01:24:51] Joe Robinet: Would have been the bow drill. Like I learned things like, like how to use a fire steel or tracking and not, I’m sorry, tracking was after, but little things here and there, but that I would really wouldn’t call certainly bushcraft. I think the first thing would have been the bow drill that I learned.

[01:25:09] Paul Kirtley: The first sort of substantial skill

[01:25:11] Joe Robinet: Yeah, I think so. The first thing that I’m really like proud of that sticks out to me in my head for sure, yeah.

[01:25:17] Paul Kirtley: Mhm. Mhm.

[01:25:18] Paul Kirtley: And sort of related to what you’ve already talked about a little bit in terms of who your influences were, but somebody’s asking what books, like top top few books that you would recommend. I mean you mentioned Mors’s Mors’s book already, which I think has been a bible for a lot of us. What else would you recommend? Maybe things that people, you know, wouldn’t necessarily think of first or things that you think are particularly good that aren’t the obvious choices?

[01:25:45] Joe Robinet: Yeah, there’s a really cool book called Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties, and it’s by a guy named Dan Beard. And that’s a really, really good book. It was written a long time ago and it has so many different options of things that you can build shelters, shacks, or shanties, obviously. But it’s like a it goes through things like that Boy Scouts can build, like all the way things that you can build by yourself in a day to like a village.

[01:26:10] Joe Robinet: You know what I mean? And it’s really, really, really cool. There’s pictures, I really got a lot out of that.

[01:26:18] Joe Robinet: I don’t know. Any tree if it depends on what you’re trying to do, but like there’s the Trees of Canada book that I really liked that I learned a lot of trees from. I don’t know. I don’t know.

[01:26:29] Joe Robinet: I didn’t really shelter shops and shanties, the bush, the bushcraft. I have a couple of Rameur’s books, just stuff like that. I think the Rameur’s stuff is more mainstream that people would have heard of.

[01:26:41] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. It’s interesting you say that because I mean I, you know, I kind of moved from, I moved from an interest in hike, you know, I was really into hiking and backpacking. I had an interest in, so I had an interest in survival skills when I was in my teens. My dad bought me Lofty Wiseman’s Survival Handbook when I was thirteen back in the sort of mid eighties and my mates and I used to go out and try stuff out of there and I used to read it and I built, you know, built myself a survival pouch and a survival kit and all those things.

[01:27:14] Paul Kirtley: But then I kind of got into more mainstream outdoor activities and you know, backpacking and I all of those sort of longer trips I started doing and solo trips. And then I kind of got to the point where I was like, I want to learn more about wild edibles, I want to learn more about how to not have to be completely reliant upon all the kit that I’ve got in my backpack, you know, want to know more about lighting fires and all those things. And then I kind of came back round to the survival end of the bushcraft stuff initially, but then I found Mears after that. And I kind of then consumed everything, you know, books, videos, you know, TV shows.

[01:27:51] Paul Kirtley: I videoed all the, you know, VHS videoed all the TV shows and watched them. And I knew those, I knew that stuff off by heart. And that was before I even really started working with him.

[01:28:00] Joe Robinet: Right.

[01:28:01] Paul Kirtley: And what I find interesting now is there’s so much that I take for granted in terms of background knowledge that a lot of people have never seen, and it amazes me that it wasn’t that long ago that he was putting those shows out. Right. And they’ve not seen it before. And it’s almost now it’s being sort of recycled, you know, you kind of see it come filtering back to the surface on YouTube and people people are kind of watching it and saying, and this isn’t a veiled thing at you, it’s just it’s something that I’ve noticed generally. That you get younger people commenting, oh, that’s really cool, I’ve never seen that before, and it’s like, you know, I could have shown you that.

[01:28:40] Paul Kirtley: I just, you know, you so take it for granted that people people know this stuff and so yeah, so you

[01:28:47] Joe Robinet: I do the same thing. Yeah

[01:28:49] Paul Kirtley: So yeah, I think while you say, you know, raise raise books, you know, that mainstream, I think a lot of people haven’t really read them. Because there’s a there’s a lot of stuff you can get out of those books if you really delve into them.

[01:29:01] Joe Robinet: There sure is.

[01:29:02] Joe Robinet: You’re you’re exactly right. I do take for granted the information today. I for some reason for some sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that not everybody has the same core info. But there’s there so the going back to Dick Proenneke, he has a book called One Man’s Wilderness and that’s a fantastic book as well. There’s a there’s a documentary you can watch but the book is great.

[01:29:27] Paul Kirtley: You know what? I’ve seen the documentary, but I’ve never read the book. So I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m gonna seek that out actually.

[01:29:35] Joe Robinet: It’s pretty cool. He goes into detail about how he trapped the wolverine and chasing it all over the place, and it’s really, really cool.

[01:29:42] Paul Kirtley: That sounds good.

[01:29:43] Paul Kirtley: I’m gonna I’m gonna get a copy of that. So I, you know, that that’s the thing, you know, I’m very open-minded about learning what I can from who I can can. And there’s I think it’s an old Japanese saying. I used to do a lot of martial arts and I think, you know, I used to read books on kind of Zen sayings and things, you know, you get into all that stuff. And there was one saying it’s like something along lines of everyone everyone knows at least one thing that you don’t.

[01:30:09] Joe Robinet: Hmm.

[01:30:10] Paul Kirtley: And I and I like that. You know, and I think a lot of people would do well to remember that you know, you can always learn something from everyone. If you’re if you’re open-minded enough, so.

[01:30:22] Joe Robinet: That’s the mark of a good teacher, they say.

[01:30:25] Paul Kirtley: Yeah. Nah So, I’ve got a few more questions here for you, Joe. I know we’ve been going for a little while and I do want to respect your time, but

[01:30:34] Paul Kirtley: Few people asking about coming to Europe. Any places you’d like to go in Europe and visit? Or have you not thought about it at all really?

[01:30:43] Joe Robinet: Yeah, oh definitely. Finally, I’d love to come to Europe. There’s um… Okay, I might sound a little silly here. Do you… Is Scotland considered Europe as well? Yes. Okay, so yeah.

[01:30:54] Paul Kirtley: Well, it depends. It’s not a silly question because you’ve probably heard of this whole Brexit thing that’s going on at the moment.

[01:31:01] Joe Robinet: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of like the Quebec stuff over here.

[01:31:05] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, geographically, whether or not you consider it politically and economically part of Europe, geographically, Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland are part of Europe, definitely. And all part of all part of Western Eurasia. Let’s not be, you know, stupid about this. That yes. Yes.

[01:31:29] Joe Robinet: Okay. So yeah, definitely Scotland. I’d love to go check out the Callahan Forest. I’d love to I’m Irish. I’m half Irish.

[01:31:37] Joe Robinet: So I’d love to go to Ireland. I don’t know how much natural stuff they have there, but I have a huge Irish following and I would love to go there and even just hang out at some pubs with some subs. Pubs with some subs. Yeah.

[01:31:50] Joe Robinet: Yeah, I think I don’t really know much. Actually, what the heck was it? Was it the why? The river Wye?

[01:31:59] Paul Kirtley: There is a there is a river Y, yeah.

[01:32:01] Joe Robinet: I watched the Rainmakers thing about that and that seemed pretty cool. Four seasons maybe. There’s some places right in England I think are that are pretty decent to go to, isn’t there? Isn’t there like a Lake District that’s pretty decent?

[01:32:12] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, they’re all nice. I mean, none of none of those places, I mean, the Wye is a nice little river to paddle. It’s not technical, it’s not wild, but it’s nice. The Lake District is beautiful, but it’s, you know, you get plenty of tourists there. You know, I think one of the thing one of the things for you guys is that a lot of our a lot of our places here would seem relatively crowded. But it doesn’t necessarily detract from the physical beauty. Scotland is more sparse once you get away from the habitation, definitely. But it’s bigger, lower population.

[01:32:51] Paul Kirtley: Yeah

[01:32:52] Joe Robinet: Yeah, I would I would I would go to Scotland, definitely. I would do go to a trip in Scotland bar none.

[01:32:59] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, yeah. And what and I’ve got a guy here, Jose. He’s asking, do you want to go to Spain?

[01:33:05] Joe Robinet: Spain. I don’t know. I don’t know much about Spain. Maybe, I don’t know.

[01:33:10] Paul Kirtley: Could be. I’m not sure they do many IPAs in Spain, but they Good wines, good good wines in Spain.

[01:33:17] Joe Robinet: Hey, I’m not opposed to a good dry red.

[01:33:19] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, yeah, good rye ocker. You’ll be you’ll be away. You’ll be sorted. Yeah, so.

[01:33:24] Paul Kirtley: Um

[01:33:26] Paul Kirtley: Anything else from people here that we haven’t really, I’m just sort of, something about, apologies if this is a, an off-color question because it means nothing to me or, something about three shells. What are the three shells for? Does that make any sense to you?

[01:33:44] Joe Robinet: No No

[01:33:46] Paul Kirtley: Frederick Flintstone, I’d really like to know what are the three shells for. Sorry, couldn’t resist. That makes no sense to me at all.

[01:33:53] Joe Robinet: No, and with a name like Frederick Flintstone, I’m kind of guessing that’s a joke.

[01:33:58] Paul Kirtley: Yeah. Well, it hasn’t worked because it’s like we we’ve no idea what he’s talking about. So it’s just like completely over both of our heads. So

[01:34:06] Joe Robinet: Sorry, Alfredo.

[01:34:09] Paul Kirtley: Maybe maybe it’s a Flintstones reference that neither of us get. Who knows?

[01:34:14] Joe Robinet: Be really into Flintstones, yeah, I don’t know.

[01:34:16] Paul Kirtley: Who knows?

[01:34:18] Joe Robinet: Sorry if that’s a legit question. I really don’t understand.

[01:34:21] Paul Kirtley: Nee, nee. Follow up with Joe in the comments on his YouTube channel somewhere. That’s kind of it. I think oh I think there was a quote there was a question or two on Twitter. Let me just double check.

[01:34:33] Joe Robinet: Can’t leave it with the shells question.

[01:34:34] Paul Kirtley: No, that’s a bit of a like, what? Just leaves us scratching our heads looking, squinting into the distance, not looking dumb.

[01:34:46] Paul Kirtley: Ah, that was it. I don’t know that this guy’s real name, but under the name of Wild Odyssey on Twitter. He was excited about us chatting together and he said ask Joe what he thinks about people who say tarps are great until it rains. Thinks thinks he has said what’s that say, think he had this said to him basically in his camping in the lightning storm video. Keep up the great war work.

[01:35:17] Paul Kirtley: Does that make any sense?

[01:35:18] Joe Robinet: Yeah, I think that they work great in the rain. I think that that’s what they’re made for.

[01:35:25] Joe Robinet: I think maybe what this gentleman is referring to is I camped in a thunderstorm and I had a hammock and I had a tarp up and it was maybe I didn’t have a lot of protection from the side if it would have rained sideways. Right. But I would have just changed my tarp configuration. That’s the beautiful thing about tarps, man, is like you can pretty much do whatever you need to do with them. And really, my only the only time that I sleep in anything other than a tarp is when there’s bugs. Yeah. And maybe in the winter I’ll use a hot tent sometimes, but I’ll definitely still use a tarp in the winter time. That’s like my preferred method.

[01:36:04] Joe Robinet: The only reason, like I like I’m saying again, the only reason I’ll use a tent is for screened protection and that would be be because of bugs. If there’s a thunderstorm, if it’s raining, if it’s spring, if it’s winter, I’m using a tarp because it’s lightweight. I like the breathability of it, I like the ventilation, I like the options that you can use it with it with a fire if possible. I think the people that maybe say those kind of things should go out and try.

[01:36:35] Joe Robinet: Before thinking that it’s just not an option.

[01:36:38] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, yeah, you’re you’re you’re being a bit more polite about it than I think I’ve been I’ve been in the past. Yeah, yeah. I’ve had a few rants about this ’cause I get these comments like, you know, that tarp’s too small, you’re gonna get wet if it rains sideways and, you know, it’s like, man.

[01:36:54] Joe Robinet: Well, first off, I can probably count half the time, as many times as it’s rained sideways on one hand. You know what I mean? It’s not a common thing.

[01:37:04] Paul Kirtley: Not in the woods it isn’t.

[01:37:05] Joe Robinet: And the ones here ’cause they’re free. And I normally camp in the woods.

[01:37:12] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, maybe on a hillside in Scotland in November with no trees. Yeah, you

[01:37:18] Joe Robinet: Thing too. Maybe some of the that’s a that’s a very good point actually.

[01:37:23] Joe Robinet: Geographical. So someone lives somewhere in a certain spot and maybe that’s all that they really understand. And that’s understandable too, but you gotta kind of open your mind and kind of think and realize that that’s not the case all over the place.

[01:37:35] Paul Kirtley: Exactly.

[01:37:36] Joe Robinet: Right, like with ground protection, I get people like freaking out from Brazil, not freaking out. I get people commenting a lot from like places like Brazil or even Arizona and things like that saying like you’re going to get eaten alive by scorpions and ticks and snakes and all these things you’re going to get bitten up. And it’s like, well, no, no, no, because this is Canada. Yeah.

[01:37:58] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, no, I get I get the tick thing and the bugs thing and you know, it’s this kind of bedroom commentary of like, you’re going to get, you know, even though I probably camp, I mean it varies for me, you know, it varies a fair bit depending on whether I do any big winter trips or not, but I spend I would say I spend at least 180 nights away from home a year, I would say at least. Yeah. Some of some of that’s traveling, of course, some of that might be in motels and hotels and things as I’m getting to and from trips, but you know, combination of running courses, running trips, doing my own things, I spend a lot of time away.

[01:38:38] Paul Kirtley: I’ve camped out thousands of nights and I still get people saying to me, “Oh, you’re going to get eaten alive in that.” It’s like, if I, you know, it’s just like, “What planet are these people on?” It’s like it doesn’t happen. Yes, okay, Canada in July or June.

[01:38:54] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, whenever the whenever the mozzies are starting to come out wherever you are. Yeah, I’m going to be I’m not going to be in the backwoods like unprotected in a under a tarp because I am going to get eaten alive. You’re right. But in, you know, in Britain or in Oct, you know, in at the end of September on the Bloodvein or something, it it’s not a problem.

[01:39:16] Paul Kirtley: It’s like, ah, man. Yeah Anyway, sorry. I can feel I can feel my blood pressure going up, so.

[01:39:24] Paul Kirtley: But yeah, the joy of YouTube comments. And I’m sure I don’t see the half I’m sure I don’t see the half of it that you see.

[01:39:32] Joe Robinet: I’ve really really stopped looking so much because it’s yeah, it’s just disheartening. What I like to do is after I post up a video, I’ll stay online if I’m at home because a lot of times I schedule them and I’ll be on a trip or whatever. Yeah.

[01:39:48] Joe Robinet: I’ll stay around, I’ll read comments and I’ll reply to comments for a good half an hour, forty five minutes, and I will I’ll try to ignore the ones that aren’t good, other than giving them attention like we were saying earlier. And yeah, and then after that I kind of just stop looking because then just it really becomes a cesspool after that and nothing good can come of it. But like I said, I do want to still be connected to my audience and stuff, so for a good half an hour, forty five minutes, I’ll reply.

[01:40:16] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, it’s a difficult one, isn’t it? Because you wanna you wanna kind of… I find that difficult with YouTube comments as well. That, you know, with my blog, I feel like I engage with the audience, we have an intelligent conversation, I try and answer, I read every comment, I try and answer the ones that I feel like need an answer, either just to say thank you for their comment or to answer their specific question. I find it really hard to do that with YouTube, because of the just the feral nature of some of the… The comments. It’s but then but then there’s some good people on there. Of course, there’s plenty of good people on there and you wanna…

[01:40:55] Joe Robinet: Ninety ninety seven to three is literally my ratio. Like it’s great. I have amazing subscribers, amazing people who watch me and I’m very, very lucky about it for it.

[01:41:06] Paul Kirtley: That’s good. That’s good.

[01:41:08] Paul Kirtley: I just found another question, sort of related to coming to Europe. Have you have you said some, I don’t know whether this is just like a speculative question or whether it’s in response to something, but when is the trip with the British Bushcrafters?

[01:41:24] Joe Robinet: No. Nah. There isn’t any. Right.

[01:41:29] Joe Robinet: I might yeah, if I come over there, I’m gonna stop and see you know what I mean? I’m gonna stop and see I’m gonna stop and see MCQ and Zed. Yeah. But other than that,

[01:41:39] Paul Kirtley: Hey, Zed’s coming on a navigation course with me soon.

[01:41:42] Joe Robinet: Nice Nice, that’s awesome. Have you met him before?

[01:41:45] Paul Kirtley: No, we’ve communicated.

[01:41:47] Joe Robinet: Yeah, yeah. Great guy. Yeah, I’ve only communicated with him too obviously, but yeah, he’s a great guy.

[01:41:51] Paul Kirtley: Yeah. Yeah, and I might I might bump into you, I gather.

[01:41:55] Joe Robinet: Yes, maybe on the dock, I think.

[01:41:58] Paul Kirtley: Maybe

[01:41:59] Joe Robinet: Please

[01:42:00] Paul Kirtley: We won’t say where or when. ‘Cause this will go out before then. We don’t want a bunch of… We don’t want a bunch of groupies there waiting for us to…

[01:42:09] Joe Robinet: Yeah, that would be cool. That would be really cool but no, I don’t have any any like bushcraft group plans with the with the UK guys at all. Okay. If they if Zed or you or MCQ wants to come to Canada, come on!

[01:42:24] Joe Robinet: Hello

[01:42:25] Paul Kirtley: I’m coming to Canada twice this year, so

[01:42:27] Joe Robinet: Well, there you go. Maybe we’ll meet up.

[01:42:30] Paul Kirtley: Yeah. I’ll have to maybe do a trip and film it one day.

[01:42:34] Joe Robinet: Great Yeah, that’d be great.

[01:42:36] Paul Kirtley: It’s fun. Get get like this gaggle of like that press corps of people with cameras. I wonder if that would just be a complete cluster mess of like if you got a bunch of YouTubers together that everybody just be trying to film everybody filming everybody.

[01:42:50] Joe Robinet: So I’ve done it a couple times. I went on a French river, actually French River Trip with Sean, Doug, Guy Scrambled O and myself and we all we all put out videos. It all kind of worked, but you really have to um

[01:43:06] Joe Robinet: You know, there’s always things that you can’t put in video, so you really have to trust the people that you’re with, kind of thing. Yeah. Whether it be things that are just said or just banter even so it’s just not all not all acceptable for YouTube. Yeah.

[01:43:19] Paul Kirtley: No, that makes sense. And you I guess you got to take it in turns to film as well, so.

[01:43:24] Joe Robinet: Yep. Yeah. Yeah, and you don’t all want the same content either. You don’t want to all be filling the same thing, which that’s the hard part. Yeah.

[01:43:30] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. When I when I did that trip with Kevin Callan, basically just let him do most of the filming that he wanted to do.

[01:43:40] Joe Robinet: Mhm

[01:43:41] Paul Kirtley: You know, I organized the trip and then he did the filming. But we had Justine Curgenven along with us as well, who’s done a lot of great, you know, she’s trained as a journalist and she’s put out a lot of good films. So she did a bit of filming as well, particularly when Kevin couldn’t be filming. And that really that worked really well. It was kind of like Kevin’s going to do, it’s kind of Kevin’s gig, he’s going to do most of it, he’s going to put the stuff out on his channel. But we’ll do some filming and then he can, and this and this is kind of a, it’s kind of a poison chalice, isn’t it? And he can do the editing.

[01:44:16] Paul Kirtley: It’s like, yes, I don’t have to do any editing afterwards, so

[01:44:20] Joe Robinet: That’s the best way to do it, I feel like, when, ’cause I’ve gone out with my buddy Mike before, and this is on a smaller scale, like we’re just two guys, but

[01:44:29] Joe Robinet: Like Joe’s gonna do the editing and then when you need help, like you you’re gonna film Joe or whatever and like, you know what I mean? But like just be there helping kind of thing. That that’s the better way to do it than everybody trying to clamor to get a video done.

[01:44:41] Joe Robinet: But yeah, Kevin’s a cool guy. I like Kevin a lot. Was that lady you mentioned, Justine, was she the kayaker?

[01:44:48] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, she’s the sea kayaker. Yeah, she’s she’s the lady that’s done a lot of awesome trips in by sea kayak. Yeah, she’s she’s based some of the time over on Vancouver Island now.

[01:44:59] Joe Robinet: Oh, nice.

[01:45:00] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, yeah, so

[01:45:01] Joe Robinet: Yeah, she seemed very, very cool person, very knowledgeable, very, very happy person.

[01:45:07] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, and she’s hard as nails as well.

[01:45:08] Joe Robinet: Oh yeah, yeah, no doubt.

[01:45:09] Paul Kirtley: She’s really tough.

[01:45:11] Joe Robinet: You have to beat a MSc heck anyway.

[01:45:13] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, well, she did, I don’t know if you if you haven’t listened to it, I did an interview with her a few years ago where her and Sarah Uten, Sarah Uten was doing a round the world, human-powered journey and she’d originally had the plan to row across the Pacific.

[01:45:31] Joe Robinet: Oh man.

[01:45:32] Paul Kirtley: But that didn’t work out because of currents and whatnot, and she ended up landing in the Aleutian Islands, up in the north of the Pacific. And paused the journey there and then had to sort of scratch her head and think about what she was going to do. And she she’d done some sea kayaking with Justine before, so she they’d sea kayaked across the English Channel for example as part of the journey. And they’d done some other sea kayaking, and so Sarah got in touch with Justine and said, “What do you think about sea kayaking the Aleutian Islands?”

[01:46:02] Paul Kirtley: Onto the Alaskan peninsula and then getting to North America that way. And so eventually that’s that is what they did and it was the most epic journey. They made a film of it. I mean it just some of the tides, some of the swells and the tides and stuff they were dealing with were just incredible. And then and then bears, you know, grizzlies that had never seen humans before and

[01:46:25] Joe Robinet: Oh man.

[01:46:26] Paul Kirtley: Just incredible stuff. Yeah, it’s worth seeking out that if you can find that film, it’s worth

[01:46:31] Joe Robinet: What is it called?

[01:46:32] Paul Kirtley: Kayaking the Illusions, I think it’s called.

[01:46:34] Joe Robinet: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I will. That sounds awesome.

[01:46:37] Paul Kirtley: Yeah. Yeah, that was a good one.

[01:46:39] Joe Robinet: Yeah, water is like you’re saying the sea swells and stuff, water is something that scares me a bit to be honest with you.

[01:46:46] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, well, I think rightly so. I think everyone should be definitely respectful of bodies bodies of water. There’s a lot of power there.

[01:46:56] Joe Robinet: Bill Mason went out on Lake Superior, right? Let’s have a look. Crazy.

[01:47:03] Paul Kirtley: Yeah, good stuff. I think we are just about there. For people who don’t know, Joe, where can people find you on the internet? YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, anything like that? Instagram? Yeah, definitely.

[01:47:18] Joe Robinet: My my biggest thing is YouTube. You’re gonna find two new videos a week and you can find me at Joe Robinet, just my name.

[01:47:27] Joe Robinet: Twitter, I’m on there.

[01:47:29] Joe Robinet: Joe Robinet Bushcraft. I don’t really do too much on Twitter if I’m being honest. Instagram’s pretty big for me. I got, I don’t know, 50,000 followers, something along those lines. So I post pretty regularly on there too. I’ll do small videos and pretty good pictures of my trips. I go on these trips and I take a lot of video footage and put it all out on YouTube, but there’s a lot of stills, a lot of pictures that I take as well. So, Facebook and Instagram are really my outlets for those. Facebook you can follow me, Joe Robinet. Instagram again is Joe Robinet Bushcraft. That’s basically where I’m at. I have a website that I sell patches, some merchandise, grills and stuff like that, and that’s just joerobinet.com.

[01:48:09] Paul Kirtley: Cool.

[01:48:10] Paul Kirtley: Excellent. Good. Well, we’ll stick all of that in the show notes and people can find you, if they don’t already follow you in those places. And that’ll be cool. They can connect with you and say hi. And do say hi, you know, those of you that are listening, do say hi to Joe. It’s nice to do these things, but it’s nice when people roll up, whether it’s in person or on the internet and say hi, I enjoyed that or, you know, let us know what you think. Yeah, it’s always good. And as always, people can find this when it’s finally published, which won’t be too long actually.

[01:48:48] Paul Kirtley: When it’s published, it will obviously be on all the normal podcasting platforms like iTunes, Apple Podcasting app, Stitcher, and some of the others that it’s now finding its way onto. Just go on to your favorite podcast platform and search on the Paul Kirtley podcast and if it’s on there, you will find it. Please subscribe. But also on my blog, don’t forget, every episode has a set of show notes and all of the stuff that we talked about, any links to Joe’s sites, maybe the Dick Proenneke stuff, a few of the bits and pieces, maybe if I can find some links to the Canadian breweries, I’ll stick those on as well.

[01:49:23] Paul Kirtley: Ooh! So, all the stuff that we that we talked about, there’ll be links in the show notes there and this will be episode, let me just double check, twenty-eight I think. Yeah, it’s episode 28, so that’ll be…

[01:49:37] Joe Robinet: Good round number.

[01:49:38] Paul Kirtley: It is. Yeah, it’s a good solid number. Number of days in February, which is always good. Yeah, which which fits, doesn’t it? There you go. Excellent.

[01:49:46] Paul Kirtley: Good, well, thank you so much for taking the time, Joe, and sharing some thoughts and being quite candid about various aspects, which was which was good. Appreciate that. And I look forward to maybe bumping into you on a dock in Canada sometime in the not too distant future.

[01:50:05] Joe Robinet: That sounds good, man. Thanks a lot for having me.

[01:50:08] Paul Kirtley: No, my pleasure. My pleasure. It’s been fun. Cheers.

[01:50:13] Paul Kirtley: Thanks again to Joe for joining me for episode 28 of the Paul Kirtley podcast. I very much enjoyed this conversation and I hope you the listener enjoyed it too. I’d love to know what you thought. Please let me and of course Joe know in the comments below this episode of my blog. You can go straight to the relevant page which includes the show notes that we talked about, all the links of things that we talked about using the link to my blog paulkirtley.co.uk/podcast28. Podcast28.

[01:50:49] Paul Kirtley: Thanks again to our sponsor today, Frontier Bushcraft, for making this podcast possible. And thanks of course to you, the listener, for your attention and interest in these podcasts. If you don’t already subscribe via a podcast app on your phone, tablet, or iPod, please do. These podcasts are available via iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, Stitcher, and Player FM, as well as others. With that selection, there’s something to suit you there, whether you use an Android phone or an iPhone. So please do subscribe.

[01:51:26] Paul Kirtley: It really helps this podcast and me if you subscribe via one of the apps I’ve mentioned. I look forward to speaking with you on the next episode of the Paul Kirtley podcast. Until then, enjoy the outdoors and farewell.

© 2026 Paul Kirtley. All rights reserved. This transcript is provided for personal use only. Please do not reproduce or distribute without permission.

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