EP 484. Rocky Leflore–The End of The Line Podcast

 

Where Did You Ever Hear of a Podcast?

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I have got the man, the myth, the legend, the godfather of Waterfowl podcast himself, Mr. Rocky Leflore, host of End of the Line podcast back in the day. Rocky, how the heck are you, man? Long time no see, no talk to, how are you?

Rocky Leflore: I am great, I was so used to doing the countdown, all those episodes that we did together, I was the 3, 2, 1 guy. I was sitting there thinking to myself, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever been on the other side of the 3, 2, 1 countdown.

Ramsey Russell: You did a lot of interviews back in the day. I mean, I looked forward to, I think every Thursday we met back in the day and I listened to an episode this morning just as a precursor to our meeting today. And I was thinking, my gosh, that was 6 years ago. Now, for those of you all listening, I’m going to tell you how this all went down was Rocky and I go way back to this thing called chat rooms back in the day on Duck South, which was started as MSDucks and virtual coffee room, I called it. But one day I’m driving down the road and I remember where I was, I was coming on an I 20 heading home from camp and I get a phone call from Rocky Leflore telling me about, something about a podcast and I literally, my first words out of my mouth were, what the f bomb is a podcast? Never heard of it. Rocky, you were on the cutting edge of this stuff, man. I mean, where did you hear about podcast? How did that even throw up on your radar?

Rocky Leflore: I had been reading, marketing is something that I kept up with a lot and read up a lot on and YouTube was really starting to gain traction at the time and along with that, I think the biggest way of building a relationship with an audience was through a podcast. I just dove deep into it, read everything up on it I could, because besides, I think back to myself as a podcast host, I really wasn’t that good and you can, look, there’s going to be people that say, oh, man, you did some great episodes, but I think it was the consistency that made Duck South great, The End of the Line podcast, I think the consistency of everybody knowing that it was going to be there made The End of the Line so great is I could, because now I found myself listening to Joe Rogan, all these different hosts and I’m like, man, I’m not even in the same hemisphere with these guys, kind of reminds me back when I used to play basketball years and years ago when you were the best guy at the high school, but, man, when you went to a college recruiting camp, you figured out real fast you weren’t that good.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. That’s exactly right. But that’s what I like about the podcast format is we all find our own place and whether you’re a listener or an interviewer or a guest, it’s a new dynamic. It’s not just cookie cutter, CNN, Fox News Radio, whatever, it’s kind of free form and I like that and I appreciate it, but you’re right about consistency, because in the last 6, 7, 8 years, whatever it had been since podcast been around, man, I have deleted so many people I had subscribed to and listened to because they Monday and then they miss 2 weeks. I’ll give you a week, everybody give you a week off or 2 weeks off, starts dragging on, starts becoming inconsistent, boom, I’m out of there. There’s too many people trying too hard and delivering good content and being consistent for just hit or miss.

Rocky Leflore: Well, I think the other combination that I left out of that part of the come you and I talking was passion. You got to have passion about a certain topic if you’ve got a passion and you can be consistent, man, you can be successful through a podcast, you can be successful through YouTube, you can be successful online. But you got to have those 2 things. Look, I’ll say this, I watch some of these guys that I would have never imagined myself watching on YouTube. But you know what, man? They’re passionate about what they’re doing and they’re consistent about putting their videos up and it’s in the same goes for the podcast. I’m sure, let me ask you this, so when you’re traveling out and about the – How many people walk up to you, say at a show or when you’re on a hunt and say, these people, because you’ve talked so much on these podcasts, they feel like they know you and they start talking to you about a story that they heard you talk about on an episode.

Ramsey Russell: All the time. And that’s one of the great things about the podcast platform, social media can be transparent, often times it’s not. And I always go back to the Disneyland picture that we all see in social media of your neighbor, it’s a hot day, you’re working overtime, you’re doing this, you’re hating life, you’re behind on the bills, you got a barking dog, a yelling wife, a mean boss, you name it, a broken lawnmower, grass is growing leaps and bounds and there’s that smarmy ass neighbor you got sitting down in Disneyland having the time of his life. There they all 4 are just smirking at you through the lens in front of a rollercoaster, like, I mean, it’s the best place in the universe to be, but that don’t match with reality. That’s what I’m getting to transparency, it don’t match with reality, reality is mama just threatened to beat little Johnny’s ass within an inch of his life. He don’t quit whining about the hot weather and daddy don’t quit complaining about the $15 Coca Colas and the mile and a half long lines, getting on a roller coaster that lasts 35 seconds and everybody going to smile for that instant, for the picture. But, man, podcasts are hard to hide behind, I mean, because you’re out there and you don’t, you ask a question, he don’t know what you’re going to ask, you don’t know how he’s going to answer and it begins to take a life his own, you can’t really hide in a podcast platform and we’re just already open still you can’t hide. So, I think it is letting people into who you are and what you represent as a person and everything else. So, yeah, I mean, I agree with that, I get those questions all the time.

How Do You Make a Successful Podcast?

They give up, and podcasts are so easy to quit.

Rocky Leflore: All right, let me ask you this, Ramsey. How many podcasts since End of the Line was at its peak? Have you seen and we’ve talked about this years ago, how many podcasts have you seen come and go because they run out of that, hey, what joke runs the best or which decoy is the best or because they run out of those topics, they don’t figure out that, man, it’s not about those things that people are listening to you or it’s the things that you’re talking about and if you can ever escape, it’s a ceiling, holding you back as a podcast host. And if you can ever get past that ceiling, man, you find success because there for a long time is The End of the Line, you’re wondering if you’re ever going to burst through the ceiling and I was because we would have not going to sound like anything but one to 300 downloads there for the first 6 or 9 months. Are we ever going to break through? Because a lot of people will quit before they break, go bursting through the door, that makes sense.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Rocky Leflore: They give up, and podcasts are so easy to quit. But once you get through that door, man, it explodes and it happened the same way for The End of the Line, I can remember, golly, Ramsey, you were one of the first stories, kind of those episodic series as a podcast episodes that we did where we would do a story on that person once a week, I want to say Troy Ruiz was one of the first.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, Troy Ruiz and who else, Jake Latendresse.

Rocky Leflore: Yeah, Jake, because Jake was easy to do, he was a host, man was easy to do because I was going to be there every day. But I want to say that yours was one of the first 3 or 4 that we did. And I can remember just sitting there listening to you tell your story and the fire, the horror of what you had to go through in your early life, early adult life and that’s when I knew that all of these people are coming to me, emailing me, sending me messages on Facebook, man, people connected with you and that was after we got through with that story, I was like, Ramsey, you need to be on here once a week, man. People love listening to you and it was part the story, part you, but you connected with people. People wanted to hear more and more. You were seeing things that they were passionate about, but you were getting to do it, what, 300 days a year?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, seems like it. Boy, I tell you, you’ve got a good point, all these how to topics just don’t have it, don’t interest me, I don’t think it interests a lot of people, I think there’s a value for it. I mean, outdoor magazines have existed forever on the how to and the wherefores and whatnot of outdoors, but duck hunters are people and we’re humans and we like human stories and we connect with people in the duck blind or at duck camp or just as a part of life, that’s what people do. And I have found personally, I find a lot of interest in just meeting with people and hearing their stories, it was Jake Latendresse on End of the Line that talked about how everybody’s got a story and it’s the truth, in fact, after you wrapped up and decided to go in a different direction with life and I know life pulled you in a different direction, but I had been wound up and hopping down the trail like the Energizer Bunny recording podcasts with an iPhone for End of the Line podcast. We called it, what we call it Ramsey Russell worldwide or something like that and I started doing these stories and actually reached out to somebody that’s got a successful podcast and they said, well, let me be honest with you, if I can be honest with you. They said, you ain’t going to do well with this thing. It’s terrible because everybody wants to hear your story, they want to hear your story, they don’t want to hear whoever you’re talking to story and I disagreed because honestly the people I spend time with, the years that you and I spent a on Thursdays recording or offline visiting and talking or the people I spend time in a blind with or on a plane with or the people whatever, just the people that come into your life, we are a sum of our past and for that reason, that is my story, when I’m traveling around and I’m sharing camp with this guy or that guy, that becomes a part of who I am, so therefore, it is my story. And that’s what, my wife said you have found your calling with this podcast stuff because I just I love people and I love their stories. And anymore, Rocky, I’d tell you what, man, if I never shoot another duck in my life, it’ll be too soon and I’m going to shoot plenty more because I love the duck hunt, it’s what I do, but really and truly what I look forward to and find myself, the moments I enjoy the most are the stories that I get to share, the times I get to share with people, whether they’re first timers or hundred timers or experienced or not experienced or collectors or volume, I just enjoy the whole people thing. And if you think about what do duck hunters listen? What do we talk about while we’re sitting in a blind? What do we talk about? We ain’t talking about shoots, we ain’t talking about ammo, we’re not talking about ballistics, we’re not talking about anything technical lead on a duck, we’re not talking none of that how to stuff, we’re talking about people, things, food and other stories and that reminds me of that time or hey, did you ever see Lynyrd Skynyrd’s live in common? We’re just talking, we’re sharing the human experience and that’s what kind of draws me into it the most, the absolute most, you talked about doing, I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a podcast that did series well as you did. And I really, as a podcaster myself, I miss it, I feel like I know the guest better than the listener does but it’s real hard to find people that can just keep on and keep on telling. And I guess I enjoyed the series, the serial interviews better than a one off, in the same way that you might go see a movie and you watch it for 2 or 3 hours, that’s a whole lot different experience than just imagine Breaking Bad, pick a great TV show you like, I like Breaking Bad, just imagine if I was trying to be compressed in a 2 or 3 hour movie, you wouldn’t get near the depth, you wouldn’t really have that transparency, you wouldn’t get into each character and the whole drama going on in 2 or 3 hours like you would in multiple seasons. So I really enjoyed the series that you did, it was a deep dive into a story, but also into the human element of the storyteller.

Rocky Leflore: Let me ask you this, because I know that you listen a lot to Rogan, but by any means, I’m not comparing myself to Joe Rogan by asking this question, but don’t you think that Rogan does kind of the same thing, but he wraps it up in one day?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, because he’ll go that long format.

Rocky Leflore: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: But he also, what makes Rogan such a good interview is he rolls with the punches, he gets a lot of experts on, he’s big enough, he can get a lot of these experts on and he just kind of falls in and adapts to whatever their pace and stuff is and follows that trail down. Like I’ve heard him interview everybody from some crazy radical type folks to Dr. Phil. And I don’t listen to them a lot, but I do find myself browsing and seeing who’s got on there, I might want to listen to. It’s a good way, podcast is a good way to consume information and when you start listening to some of those kind of podcasts, some of those kind of topics, you’re just not going to hear in mainstream media type news, which has got a preconceived narrative, what you’re going to hear in the podcast world, which is not subject to FCC, it’s not subject to politics or nothing else, it’s just humans talking and interacting and expressing opinions and educations and insights and perspectives. And I think that’s how we all are engineered to process information, I find a lot of benefit, a lot more benefit to podcasts than to any other, quote, news, unquote, outlet.

The Art of a Podcast Storyteller

Because it’s just trying to pull, one thing I love about podcasting, it’s hard to get this sometimes, is we’re going to talk about a topic, I’m going to sit down and interview somebody about a product or about a shotgun or about a technique, something, just pick a subject anywhere, we got 470 of them to choose.

Rocky Leflore: I agree. Just like you said, it is the new way of getting information out, yeah. The connection, it all goes back to the connection, you feel like you’re a part of that conversation, every time I think about a podcast, yeah, you usually at duck camp, you got a couple of strong personalities sitting around a fire pit, they kind of run the conversation, right. And you just kind of sit back and listen to those 2 guys, it’s same concept as a podcast.

Ramsey Russell: Yep. And what’s so interesting is when I’m in crowds, the bigger the crowd, the quieter I get and the more I listen.

Rocky Leflore: Yeah, I am same way.

Ramsey Russell: And I enjoy that part of it, I do like to just kind of consume rather than talk and lead and carry on, but I enjoy that, too, because it’s just trying to pull, one thing I love about podcasting, it’s hard to get this sometimes, is we’re going to talk about a topic, I’m going to sit down and interview somebody about a product or about a shotgun or about a technique, something, just pick a subject anywhere, we got 470 of them to choose. But every now and again, you sit down with somebody and I’ve got a few bullet points so I’m not caught flat footed looking for a question, but when it begins to take a life of its own, it’s almost like I envisioned this, I’m sitting there talking to a guy and it’s happened many times over the years, I may think we’re going to sit down and talk about this subject, but just pursuant to 2 people talking and it’s like I see this little thread on his coat pop out and I pull it and this beautiful story begins to unravel. And it’s like, wow, I thought I was going in this direction, but when we get done, it’s another direction. And it sounds crazy to a lot of people, I think, in the world that do not duck hunt, but duck hunters are human. And one of the most amazing things that I’ve noticed in just sitting down at a coffee shop or in a pickup truck or on a tailgate of a truck or at a meeting room or wherever the millions of different places we record is, what has shocked me the most is you start pulling that thread and getting down beneath the limits and the ducks and the techniques and the decoys and the place and you get down to this human level around duck hunting is the number of grown men, as I’m sitting there talking, I look up from my notes, I hear their voice crack and they got tears rolling down their cheeks. Because this duck hunting, especially as you start getting in that old geezer age, like I’m getting, it’s a real personal thing and how beyond the face value of duck hunting and probably the same thing could be said about any other pursuit, passionate pursuit that we engage ourselves with, but as I meet with a lot of these older duck hunters especially and people around the world, waterfowl aren’t just something they do 60 days a year, it’s not just something they think about going out and shooting, saying post a picture, it becomes a part of their cultural identity and they become extremely passionate. You hear a lot of right now, the narrative on the Internet is the implosion of the North American population of ducks and a change in migration and a change in distribution and a lot of disappointed hunters, are we shooting too many? Losing too much nesting ground? There’s all this, but if you just dismiss all that, however, anybody from anywhere, especially in the Deep South, is promoting themselves or the narrative they’re pushing or how they’re pushing it at the root of that cause is that, it’s not just about the trigger pull, it’s about how the ritual and the history and the tradition in their lives alone of duck hunting, the connection to past generations, it’s how much a part of who they are as an individual and a human being and that part really attracts me a lot to it all, Rocky. It’s like I’ve said a million times before and I’ll say it again the past is never dead, in fact, it’s not even past because we are a product of our past, whether it’s duck hunting or golf or going to Mississippi state football or whatever the case may be, it’s very integral to who we are at this human level. And I hear a lot of people bad mouthing the scientists about they’re turning out the science or the biologist or the federal agencies or the state agencies or I pick somebody the industries, this product, that product, this, this, the list goes on and on, but every single one of them that I know is first and foremost a duck hunter, a waterfowler and some of these smart rocket surgeons out there, Rocky, they could have worked anywhere, that skill set is needed and made a lot more money than they’re making in their present feel, but they do it because they are passionate about it and they’re consistently to go back to what you said first, they’re consistently passionate, it’s a part of who they are and that’s one of the biggest revelations I’ve ever had pursuant to duck hunting a lot. Duck hunting a lot of different places throughout the year, throughout the years combined, podcast and conversations is just how passionate and utterly committed a lot of individuals are, in fact, every individual to this way of life.

Is There a Decline in Duck Hunting?

We got more people and less land and less access than we’ve ever had and there’s a lot of reasons to be frustrated with this thing.

Rocky Leflore: Let me ask you something, this is off topic. What would happen to duck hunting if you don’t get those 10 days in January this year? What would have happened to it, do you think this would have been the year that, because right now, duck hunting is kind of like golf and I think I’ve used this analogy with you before, there’s one good shot that brings you back to golf, playing golf from this game to the next game, but if you wouldn’t have had those 10 days, do you think, there would have been a huge decline in duck hunting this year?

Ramsey Russell: You talking about the last 10 days of January?

Rocky Leflore: Yeah. That big winter storm that –

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it could have been. A lot of people are getting frustrated, a lot of people are getting comparing it to what it was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, the papa’s day, just I don’t know, Rocky. That’s a million dollar question and there’s a lot of people, man, these boat ramps are crowded, there’s a lot of people off in the woods, there’s a lot of people on the waterways that at the end of the day, duck hunters are becoming more highly concentrated in a shrinking and fragmented landscape. And there’s no getting around it. We got more people and less land and less access than we’ve ever had and there’s a lot of reasons to be frustrated with this thing. And a matter of fact, I’m interviewing somebody later today, former chief of migratory birds and we got deep in the bushes on adaptive harvest management and the science and the wherefores and whatnot of it all, but after the recorder went off, we had another conversation as it continued and brought up the point about, really you can manage numbers, you can manage habitat, you can manage populations, you can cope with all these changes, but how do you manage hunter expectation? Because we all expect something different. How do you really manage hunter expectation? And that’s a loaded question, how do you manage that? Because wildlife management and output of this natural resource is no different than if you were growing produce or growing timber or producing cattle or whatever the case may be, it’s maximum sustained yield. And if you look at the maximum sustained yield charts, it’s the more you hunt, the less fish you catch or the less ducks you kill or the less deer, it’s inverse of more kind of equals less. And there’s a lot of people that I hear and see that wish they could show up, like myself, I would love to show up to a public property and be the only one at the boat ramp, that would be wonderful. But at the same time, what do we do now? Because here’s my biggest worry in the world of duck hunting, about declining numbers in duck hunters, on the one hand, heck yeah, I would – Competition and pressure are really making these ducks do increasingly way different thing, harder to hunt, but on the other hand, is it really going to be the public land duck hunters that quit? I don’t think so. It’s going to be the private land duck hunters. Now, to anybody listening, goes, well, by God, I hunt public land and I resent because I have had people resent and send stuff my way bounces off like water on a duck’s back when they say this, but there is a little bit of harbored resentment toward the private landowners. But we’ve had biologists on here several times had this conversation that 70%, 3 quarters of all habitat value is expressed in kilocalories, energy for a duck is on private land and that ain’t happening by accident, I mean, when you start thinking wetlands and impoundments, whether it’s moist oil management or sago pondweed, emergent part or flooded crops, there’s a lot of time and money that goes into maintaining those levees, somebody’s got to put the boards in, there’s a lot of time and money that goes into that. So if I’m spending and I’m not, but if I were spending 50 to $100,000 a year and you start cutting back my days and cutting back my ducks and doing this and doing this, who’s going to quit? The guys that aren’t spending much money or the guys that are spending a lot of money? And if the guys that are spending a lot of money on private land begin to say, well, instead of spending this much money to have 6 impoundments, I’m going to have only 3 impoundments or 2 impoundments, well, now habitat loss is habitat loss. Now what are the ducks going to do? It’s a very daunting process, Rocky. It worries me so I don’t know, I don’t even want to think about what would happen, if you’re asking me my personal opinion, I’ll change my tune to say this, I would have voted for Trent Lott, in 1998 when it got caught up in the federal budget, Bill Clinton’s federal budget got sidelined by the Republicans that run the House and the Senate. And out of all the gazillions of pork they put in that budget before it passed, one of them was an extension of duck season in the Deep South. I think we went from like January 17, 18 time frame to the last Sunday in January, I voted for the man for president based on that, didn’t take me but 2 or 3 seasons to realize, bullshit, I’m going somewhere else, I’m doing something else, I mean, we’re out there, yeah, you keep killing ducks, but it’s not the same enjoyment as it was in November, December. Those mallards ducks especially, they’re starting to pair off, they’re in a different frame of mind and I always equate it to as the season progresses, let’s pick on mallards for a minute, you got these flocks of mallards, whatever, kind of working around, doing their thing, coming into big spreads, but it’s kind of like when you started dating, you started back in the day, you dated this girl and you all would go to a party and you’d go to a tailgate and you go to a bonfire and you go to a ball game, but let’s face it, as things start getting serious, you start sitting around cooking at your apartment and watching HBO and then you’re married for 30 years and you don’t ever leave the house, I mean, it’s kind of like that and I think those mallards are. They’re in a state of mind, they really don’t need to be messed with and they become extremely difficult to kill. And pressure is pressure, right? So, I don’t know, I would vote for a US closure of duck season back in January 17, again, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings, it wouldn’t be any skin off my back –

Rocky Leflore: That’s a great analogy.

We Need More Duck Hunters

Ramsey Russell: On the one hand, we want more ducks going back to that equation, that graph of maximum sustained yield, we want more ducks, we want greater success, we want easier success, we want heavier straps on times we are allowed to go. But on the other hand, the longer the season, the more pressure, the longer we go, we’re just digging a deeper hole for ourselves and so we can’t have it all, we’ve got to make some tough decisions. So I don’t know what would have happened to duck hunting, but I know this and I may have said this recently with some other guests, Rocky, but we need more duck hunters because we need more time and money going into this crowdfunded model of conservation we’ve got in America, it’s dawned on me as I started doing some Internet searches, there are no hard and fast numbers of harvests down in Mexico. But I know this, I know when you talk to the people that do have a good idea, when I run the math and say, okay, there’s 20 outfitters in Mexico and a 3rd of them are really killing numbers and I know what those numbers are because several of them are our outfitter partners and I start extrapolating, it really ain’t that far off the 100,000, 150,000. But let’s say it is, let’s say it’s a half million, let’s say it’s 5 times the number of ducks harvested 5 times, 500,000. In the last 20 years the best harvest estimate Canada ever came up with was 650,000. 650,000 ducks died in all of Canada in the last 20 years. And you talk to anybody in the know and they’ll tell you Canada’s harvest estimates are without reproach, they’re accurate. So let’s take 5x the number of estimated harvests in Mexico, half million ducks let’s say, 600,000 here in the best year in 20 years, that’s 1.1 million ducks got killed on across the border, south and north of America. A million dead ducks. Well, in 21, 22 season, just in the lower 48, 8.2 million ducks got killed in the United States of America. 5 states killed half of them. I would say that that 8.2 million represents the next number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or some odd countries worldwide in what they killed that year, maybe all of worldwide, it’s insane the amount of expectation and demand for that resource we’re putting on it and the fact that we can do it despite all the habitat we’re losing leaps and bounds from clear up to the freaking boreal forest down to the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of Mexico if you start looking at the marsh and from California clear out to North Carolina, if you look at the conversion of habitat we’re doing, draining of wetlands, conversion of wetland type habitats to crops or concrete, it’s amazing we can still produce that, but it ain’t happening by accident, it’s happening because a lot of these passionate duck hunters, all of them public land hunters, private land hunters, all of them are putting a lot of time and a lot of money that are buoying this crowdfunding thing called the North America model. That’s why we need more hunters, that’s why we got to tough it out. How we’re going to do that, I have no idea. Rocky, I got a question for you, changing the subject completely, I got a question for you and it’s kind of – Of all the time, you ran this successful podcast, a lot of high profile duck hunters, a lot of deep serials and everything else, but no question I’ve always wondered is how did Rocky Leflore get into hunting or duck hunting at all?

Rocky Leflore: I think I told a little bit of this in the Mossy Island Outfitter story, but I didn’t have a parent that, a dad that duck hunting, he had duck hunted in the 70s and he had quit somewhere in the 80s, that was at a time where if you didn’t kill 70 or 80 ducks, it wasn’t a successful hunt, that was the days of Kroger sacks, I guess what they called them back then, they tote ducks out and that’s always what you used to hear and then he got into deer hunting and I tagged along deer hunting with him. And then in the kind of the rise of duck numbers, it’s what probably you really started to see duck hunt and take a duck numbers take a turn early to mid 90s.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s about right.

Rocky Leflore: 92 was, I think, the first time I ever went hunting. And I always remember that hunt for 2 reasons, one, I can remember walking around in shorts the day before when we were scouting for ducks, everybody talks about this weather deal when it comes to duck hunting, deciding the success and failure of duck hunting, but I remember walking into a flooded timber hole in 1992, walking around with boots and shorts on and there were ducks everywhere. I mean, it was just slapped full of mallards and gadwalls, this old cypress slough. And anyway, the second thing I remember about that day was it was right behind this poor old lady’s house, the slough was and I think I told this story, but I’ll tell it as quick as I can.

Ramsey Russell: Tell it again.

Rocky Leflore: But we were out there scouting, looking at those ducks that afternoon, before. I never been anything but dove hut, that was the closest to wing shooting I’d ever been besides a BB gun and as a kid, shooting him out of a tree, that was only birds I’d ever really ever killed. But anyway, this lady walked out of her house and I’ll never forget, I can play it in my mind, she had a bathrobe on at 04:00 in the afternoon, Virginia Slim, which would used to be a real popular cigarette.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, that’s the Deep South story right there, yeah.

Rocky Leflore: And, man, she had the ability, she had a just world renowned ability to hold an ash on a cigarette. I mean, that ash, it was half of the cigarette and she was talking and that ash held onto that cigarette and I’ll just never forget that part of it and she’s standing on the front porch drinking coffee, smoking Virginia Slim. Now, don’t you all shoot my pet ducks like Russ Hutton. Russ was my cousin one got me to go duck hunting with him. I said, Russ, how the hell we going to know which ones are pet ducks? And he said, I don’t know. They said, we’ll be hunting far enough away from our house that our pet ducks, they probably won’t come in. And anyway, the next day, somewhere during the night, a cold front had come through, it got cold. Oh, my gosh. I mean, the north wind was blowing 25, 30 miles an hour, it was cold, low 20s and that was back in the days, just the old rubber, I can’t think of what you called those waders back then.

Ramsey Russell: Red ball probably, something like that.

Rocky Leflore: They were almost a rubber outside and it was almost on the inside, it was just like a LaCrosse boot.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: Just a green LaCrosse boot. It’s pretty much a green LaCrosse boot covering your body, that’s pretty much what it was. Anyway, we got out there and broke daylight, I didn’t know what the world I was doing, he kind of did. And through helped him throw out decoys, first duck comes in, it comes in on my side, I shoot it and it passes by us after I shoot it, I see it hit the water hard, walk down there and pick it up. And anyway, I come back to my cousin, he said, man, where’s the duck you just shot? 5 minutes have passed, I said, man, I buried that duck, he said, why the hell would you bury the duck? I said, we just killed one of those pet ladies ducks. He said, why do you think you killed a pet, that one of her pets? And I said, well, that this silver band.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, my gosh.

Rocky Leflore: This silver – First duck I ever killed was a banded hen mallard and I didn’t know what I’d done, I had no clue. And my cousin was like, Jesus, I mean, he walked on water and I had buried it up under some sticks and mud on the bank and anyway, the story just go, it went from there and at the same time, I kind of had a basketball, I was real passionate about basketball. Michael Jordan is the peak of his popularity and in 1992, 93, that that’s they were, everybody wanted to be like Mike. But I took it to a whole new level. I think the biggest fault you keep saying the statement about our past is not our past, that is so true, it’s so true, we are a product of our past and I saw the same thing in my dad. If I had a fault, per se in my life, it is that when I get passionate about it, man, I freaking go all in on whatever it is and that’s the way I was about basketball, duck hunting still wasn’t a huge part of my life, it’s just something I did with my cousin every once in a while, for fun, go to have a, I think, a pretty good career in high school playing basketball, just when you hear about people working out, this was in the day of, you played all 3 sports, when it came to sports in high school, I was kind of pre travel ball days. Now you’ve got the dads that work out with their kids, they get out of school, they work out 3 hours a day. Man, he’s going to be the next Jose Canseco or whatever. A lot of you listening probably don’t know who Jose Canseco is, they just overdo it and the kids end up hating it because their kids didn’t choose to do it, the dad chose it for them.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Best Duck Hunting Years Ever

I mean, you had twice as much grasslands in the form of WRP than you got now and the prairies were wet and so the duck population exploded continentally and that’s what happened then. 

Rocky Leflore: But man, I would shoot a basketball, I’m not kidding when I say this, I would shoot a basketball 2, 3, 4 hours a day, every day I never missed, when I came home from working on a hot farm of whether it be spot spraying or chopping cotton or picking up sticks after we cleared up some land dump, I shot basketball, no matter how tired I was. So it took me on into college, well, I say all of that to say this, about that time 1995 happens and you and I have talked about this many times, 95, 96 was probably one of the best duck hunting years ever.

Ramsey Russell: Sure was, yep.

Rocky Leflore: 95, 96, 97 right in there. Right?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: I mean, it explodes.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, you had all that WRP. I mean, you had twice as much grasslands in the form of WRP than you got now and the prairies were wet and so the duck population exploded continentally and that’s what happened then. But go ahead, a lot of ducks, back in those days when you got cold fronts, I could go hunt, you wouldn’t believe the places I hunted back in those days when I was in college, that I could kill a duck that I can’t no more, it was unbelievable. But go ahead.

Rocky Leflore: Well, I got to college, started playing basketball, I realized that I couldn’t communicate with my feet as fast as I thought I could because I went from a pretty high level playing basketball to I wasn’t really that good, but anyway, so I started hunting a lot, I became super passionate about duck hunting. You can get the gory details of all of this in that old Mossy Island story, but I ended up getting married real early, I think I was 21, married a rich, huge farmer’s daughter and they had access to a lot of acres and then I had access to a lot of acres that my family had, that we duck on and I’ll never forget I think it was a seed rep, a chemical rep. He said, hey, man, can you take some of my clients hunting from, like, Georgia or something. I said, sure I’ll be happy to take them and I think they left me – we murdered the ducks, we made them pay rent, oh, man and I think they left me a $500 tip. And I said, holy crap, I can make money doing this. Yeah, I didn’t charge them anything to take a month and they left me, like I said, like $500 tip. And he sent me some more and he sent me some more and I said, man, I need a place for these people to stay, so we threw up a double wide trailer house, 5 bedroom, 3 bath, place for them to stay and more and more and look, in the 98, 99, that was the era of pharmaceutical reps, dude, they were spending big money on doctors and what doctors love to do, duck hunting.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Rocky Leflore: And so, man, we were rolling through, good grief, 12 to 18 people a day, in and out. And I would say 90% of them at that time were doctors through pharmaceutical companies and I just loved, I absolutely loved to wake up every single morning when at that point, being a duck guide. And then you had that stop and so we went through kind of a transition year and we’re like, man, are we going to be able to make it? Because all of our return customers were from pharmaceutical reps bringing doctors and they cut all, the government cut all that out. Well, then you had the boom of the construction business pre 2008 and man, we were blowing and going again and it went on for I guess, 21 years.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Rocky Leflore: And I’ll tell you this, looking 2010 to what, 14? And I don’t know if I’ve ever said these numbers on the podcast before, but I’m way past that now, I give a crap. But there for a long time, we were probably killing in some numbers, some people are going to be like, man, that’s a lot and then some people be like, that ain’t crap. But we were killing around 1800 to 2400 ducks a year.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Rocky Leflore: 2010, 2014. And then, man, 2015 hits, it drops, we get cut by, what, a 3rd?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: At the highest, I mean, we go to 800 ducks, 16 we kill 400, 17, we don’t kill 200 and something ducks in the state of Mississippi. I am not ripping people off, I gotten to the point where I built my customer base up where it was mostly, I would say 90% return, 80% return that hunted with me year in and year out. I got to the point these people were my family and I felt like I was stealing from them.

A Hell of a Duck Hole

It hasn’t ended yet.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s a tough business to be in when the ducks aren’t flying, isn’t it? Speaking of Mossy. Oh, whatever happened that story, that’s one of them stories that was progressing along, one of them serials that just stopped, big water want me to ask you, how did that story end?

Rocky Leflore: It hasn’t ended yet.

Ramsey Russell: It hasn’t, it’s still going on.

Rocky Leflore: That’s the crazy thing about it, I was actually talking to the guy that bought my lodge the other day and he was a huge fan, huge follower of The End of the Line podcast and let’s just say that it’s still going on. And if you see an End of the Line podcast episode pop up on your phone, you need to listen to it, because we’ve actually talked – that it is finally coming to a head where I’m not going to be a part of the ending chapter, but somebody else is, but it finally will, it’ll be sealed, it’ll be done, it’ll be wrapped up and I think you’re going to, once he tells, it’ll probably be a couple episodes, but it’s going to be pretty cool because I think that it’s going to change, that this thing is going all the way to the Mississippi Supreme Court.

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Rocky Leflore: And so I don’t want to record it until we get a kind of a finality for what happens there. And that’s, who knows when that’s going to happen? It’s going to happen this year, but it’s been, it’s got way more layered now that I sold out and they’ve kind of taken over and they pushed it to the limits way further than I ever did, not to the point that, if you remember in the Mossy Island story, people getting, I mean, we had customers get shot, peppered or we would say, but peppered at 80 yards with 3 and a half inch, 2, number 2s didn’t, I wouldn’t call that peppered, threatened, I had word get to –

Ramsey Russell: Basically, multiple parties fighting over a public water that had a few boundaries running through it or something.

Rocky Leflore: Yeah. I mean, they threatened to burn my house down. That was one of the reasons, I guess, that I got my family out of there. Can you imagine knowing that your family, let’s just say that as crazy as it may sound, it never happened, but the worst case scenario, somebody lights your house on fire and one of your kids can’t get out over duck hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Over duck hunting. Wow. It must been a hell of a duck hole.

Rocky Leflore: It was really good. Look, when you were clamoring for ducks in 20, what, 14, 15, 16, 17, it was a hell of a duck hole because you can consistently go kill some pretty good ducks.

When You Learn About Duck Hunting, You Learn About People

Ramsey Russell: Well, I want to – So that’s how that ended, because it hadn’t ended. And if I see The End of the Line podcast pop up on my phone, believe I’m going to go listen to it, but if you want to come tell it here, too, you’re welcome to. But here’s another line of question I got for you, Rocky, change the subject a little bit, is when you came out with this podcast, you didn’t just come out with the podcast, you also kind of came out, you converted a chat room, a small, very regional it felt like backyard, I just think of it like going to my favorite coffee shop in the morning where everybody, all the locals you know everybody, you get together, you sit there and BS for a little bit and eat a biscuit and MSDucks wasn’t just, to me, a chatroom, it was like the local biscuit pit. And so many people in my life today, you, my lawyer, my dentist, my doctors, my insurance guy, everybody come off that podcast and I’ve still got relationships decades later with these boys. But you converted it over to social media and then you started this podcast and that’s a lot of irons in the fire. And that was a big conversion, I don’t know how I’m saying this about it being a big conversionist, because recently I went over and posted up a few times with some friends of mine over at duckboats.net and, man, I made the first post, I’ve made in a decade back in old chat room. And it’s kind of like, the only way I can describe the difference in being in social media all the time versus going to an old chat room like this. It’s kind of like you’ve been on a, 2 week binge down on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras, that’s where you’ve been for a long time and next thing you know, you’re sitting there having a cordial conversation with your mama after church, you’re eating dinner with your mama, I mean, it’s just real different mindsets, real different decorums. Chat room versus social media and I did not realize that until very recently just how different it was. So you had a lot going on with that going on. But then you also had this podcast and the first question I’ve got about this podcast along this line of questioning is kind of sort of what did you expect going into the podcast space when you had conversations with a lot of the people you named and versus what reality was, like, how did, all right, I’m going to have this podcast, I’m going to have these people on, here’s what I expect versus reality. And what did you learn about duck hunting? What did you learn about other people that you might not have, that might have surprised you, hindsight 2020 looking in? And I guess those questions would be, you could apply it to either your social media experience, running a big public chat room on social media or the podcast itself those intimate relationships you had, those intimate conversations you had with people. What did you learn about duck hunting and what did you learn about people?

Rocky Leflore: Let’s talk about Ms. Ducks first, because that’s a big part of the Duck South story. MSDucks was the, for those of you that don’t know, Msducks.com was the original board forum that Ramsey’s talking about and it was a 97, 98, Mike has built that in his fraternity house at Ole Miss and it was probably, what, a hundred of us, Ramsey, that were probably on there, maybe a hundred –

Ramsey Russell: I mean, this core people.

Rocky Leflore: This is in the days of the – days.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: I mean, you were dialing in, you didn’t stay on, you got on the Internet, what, probably twice a day. You got up early in the morning to go to work, you would get up early and run in there and check it and you go to work and then come back home, kids get to bed, you check it again. I mean, it was a waterfowl forum, it was a tighten knit group of guys.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, it was.

Rocky Leflore: You had a Internet relationship with these people that a lot of times, even through, past MSDucks, MSDucks that started having like, get togethers once in a while.

Ramsey Russell: And that was where the rubber hit the pavement is because you knew everybody from their alias. But all of a sudden, we’d meet at Rob Heflin’s catfish pond to go till hunting or go eat pizza or go drink beer and that’s where the rubber hit the pavement and aliases and on screen names became people and birds of feather flocked together.

Rocky Leflore: And so, all right, say this, so that was a tight knit community, everybody knew one another. Besides my involvement just online, a lot of people had never really except if they stopped by my lodge to talk to me, it never really put a face with a name. So when I took MSDucks, which somewhere in the mid 2000s, Mike had an issue online that he had and he had to change the forum name to Duck South, that’s where the name Duck South came from, still had MSDucks.com, but for some reason, I think Mike have realized that there was a lot more duck hunting in the United States, past Mississippi. So he wanted to utilize a name that made people feel included from all states. If I’m getting this story right, Michael will probably text me and correct me if he listens to this podcast. So he named it Duck South but you still got all these guys from MSDucks that had been getting together for years, they knew each other well, like I said, I wasn’t a huge get together, I was super busy. And I should have, if I have one regret when it comes to Duck South and those, I would go back and get to know people face to face.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: During those days, because the pushback, so, all right, so in the – And I wanted to leave the story. So somewhere around 14, 13, must have been about 2012 or 13, Mike comes to me and says, hey, that the forums are dying off. Yeah, he knew that I was huge into kind of knowing and understanding Internet marketing at the time. He said, hey, what can you do with this thing? I said, well, I think that if we can incorporate it into the social media aspect of it into it, I think we can get people back to it and my idea at the time was maybe take a real popular post and put it, run it through social media, redirect people back to the site and go from there. But kind of a few months after we talked, groups were introduced, the groups of Facebook.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: I said, maybe we don’t need, really, we can still have the 2 that punches harder using both of them. The waterfowling forum, Duck South, plus have a duck south group on Facebook. But I guess the part that I was kind of naive about and that, so I got a lot of pushback and I’ll get to where I’m naïve, I get a lot of pushback from the old members on MSDucks and Duck South. Hey, why are you doing this? I thought the whole deal was to, they didn’t want new members they were happy with where everything was.

Ramsey Russell: Sure.

Rocky Leflore: Do you remember? You remember that?

Ramsey Russell: I do.

Rocky Leflore: So you’re happy with dying because it’s dying right in front of your face and it caused a lot of angst and anyway, so we started Duck South group and what I was naive about that these other guys paid more attention to in the forum days was there’s a lot of assholes in the world. I’m happy go lucky, I don’t pay, look, I don’t let a lot of stuff bother me. I just don’t pay attention, I don’t know what it is, I don’t pay attention to a lot of bad and how does that pertain to a waterfowl forum? Well, you had all these people coming and signing up to be a part of this waterfowling forum they would just come on there to pick a fight. You remember that?

Ramsey Russell: They would just troll.

Rocky Leflore: Troll, that is the best word for them. And little did I know there was even more when it came to social media. So, in a way, these guys were right, but they were wrong, we could continue on with the forums, they were dying. Nobody was going to an Internet site, so you had to incorporate Duck South to what people were on every day and at that point, that was Facebook. Facebook was the most popular, hottest thing out there.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: And sure enough, you spent so many freaking hours, you had to read every post or somebody was sending you a message, hey, you got to get this troll off.

Ramsey Russell: You’re trying to sell this guy.

Rocky Leflore: Yeah. And I was just trying to create a community, reproduce what I’d been a part of for so many years on Facebook and I thought that and it was, there was a lot of good, don’t take this as bad, but you spend a lot of time as an admin getting those people out of there. But you get to a point, what are we doing this for? I’m not making any money for the podcast. This is pre, whoever your hosting company was or whatever, hey, we’ll do a rev share with you. So nobody at this, if you went to a Primos and said, hey, you want an advertise on my podcast, you know how fast they would laugh you out of the building.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s right.

Rocky Leflore: He didn’t know what a podcast was to start with and, dude, we’re spending our money on magazines and TV because that’s where we’re making our money. And some funny story, I almost was hired one time in, as I did a huge interview at Primos one time for being the, I don’t know what the exact title was, but it was over their Internet marketing part of their company and I remember the guy looking at, the guy that was the head of marketing and that was his word, man, we’re spending all our money on magazine, this is 2013. We’re spending all this month, this budget, on magazines and TV. Well, man, I begged you to spend it on YouTube and social media and I know that’s kind of past now, but anyway, it died. All of that avenue of marketing died. But back to the Duck South, so we got this group that I’m sitting here admining or moderating, which, what did it have in it, Ramsey? 27,000 or something like that members?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: Yeah. And I probably skint half of if it. You left everybody in there that had joined and then you had to run off, it would probably been close to a 100,000. I mean, we probably ran off, it was the cream dela cream there at the end. But you just had so many people then you had, Rob probably kept that thing going longer than Rob Croom.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Rocky Leflore: Who a lot of people hated the old MSDucks people hated Rob Croom. For those of you that listen, you remember Mondays with Rob? It was huge, Mondays with Rob was huge, the Thursday get ducks with Ramsey was huge and then we had an episodic probably 2 or 3 days the other days of the week. But anyway, Rob was a controlled troll, I guess you’d say. I think that would be the right term. But Rob is a great guy.

Ramsey Russell: Sure.

Rocky Leflore: Rob was a really good guy, but back to the story. How do you make money? You’re spending all of these hours and you’re not making anything off of this, editing podcast episodes, recording podcast episodes, admining, moderating these people and we started trying to incorporate some small items just to kind of recoup our expenses and time that we were putting into that thing and it worked okay. And the more and more we did the more pushback I got from those people. Man, I can’t believe you’re doing this with Duck South. And these are people that I respected, I had known through an Internet forum for years and so it starts wearing on, it really does. It starts wearing on you mentally. Well, you start questioning yourself, these people that you respect, why am I doing this?

Ramsey Russell: That was a tough conversion and it’s like I’ve been asked in the past, well, why don’t you have a Duck Season Somewhere Facebook group or Duck Season Somewhere Instagram group? I’m like, nope. Hell, no. Just after seeing what, I mean, you’re inviting, I mean, I spend enough time prowling around social media and I’m on one of these –

Rocky Leflore: Because you’re going to protect your brand.

Ramsey Russell: I’m on one of these, here’s the guy I am. I might be on somebody else’s group or somebody else’s page and some asshole trolling whatever, he speak in his mind, like mind reading, like back in the old days, pre Internet, people didn’t always say what crossed their mind.

Rocky Leflore: No.

Commercial Duck Hunting Then & Now

And, man, I built long lasting relationships of people doing that, they felt like they accomplished something every day, they got their limit, that’s the goal of every hunter that comes, that walks into your business…

Ramsey Russell: And they began getting comfortable with that, especially behind an alias online, to where now, on Facebook, in front of God and everybody, their mama and your mama and everybody, they’ll just say, whatever, it’s crazy. No decorum, no manners. And I’ve gotten to where, man, I’m not going to say daily, but often I almost find relaxation and kind of like part sport, but part just, like emotional purging and cleansing and I feel better when I get done with it. Anytime I see an asshole on your page, his page, their page, I just go block, I just block them completely from my social universe, I don’t know that’s pertain from Adam, I don’t know nothing about them, how they grew up, what they’re thinking, what their angle is. But if I don’t like the way they present themselves, I just delete them. And they don’t know me and I don’t know them, but I just purge them. Now they’re nowhere to be found in my universe. So social media is a wreck and I guess I’m going to get back to my question, I’m going to ask you, having been through all that, what did you learn about other people and what did you learn about duck hunting in general or what? You’ve duck hunted forever, man. You’re a commercial duck hunter, you’re a private duck hunter, you grew up in the delta, private landowner. Whatever, what was your opinion of duck hunting then versus now, then before this, before the podcast, before social media and after?

Rocky Leflore: Yeah. The one thing that’ll never change as far as duck hunting goes and I think it’s the main attract, it is the only hunting that you can do with a group of buddies. You can, there’s downtime where you can cut up and have fun, you can’t name me another sport that you can do that in, turkey hunting a little bit, maybe take a one with you, deer hunting, you’re sitting out there by yourself and that will never change, that won’t always be the constant in duck hunting, the thing that’s changed to me is duck hunting itself. I’ve seen the highs and I have absolutely, I don’t know if I’ve seen the lows of the 80s, the early 80s, like, like people have talked about to me before, but I’ve seen definitely the highs and the lows and that door closed, I didn’t want to – What did I learn? I learned that, I guess it goes back to what I originally said, I just, man, I felt really bad about taking money from people that, I’ll just be straightforward and honest with you in what I’m about to say, I got to the point from where we ran a business that we would kill 3 or 4 gadwalls and mallards in the morning, pretty much consistently, every single day and just for fun, we’d go to a catfish pond and kill a couple of shovelers in the afternoon just to hang out, they’d drink a couple of beers sitting in a blind on the side of a catfish pond. And, man, I built long lasting relationships of people doing that, they felt like they accomplished something every day, they got their limit, that’s the goal of every hunter that comes, that walks into your business, they want to limit out and we were able to do that, we were killed 3 or 4 – and they felt like they did something because we killed 3 or 4 mallards and gadwalls in the morning. Then we’d go out and kill 2 or 3 shovelers in the afternoon, even in the peak and there’s a lot of days that we killed nothing but mallards and gadwalls when the weather was perfect. But there at the end of my business, man, I found myself a different person. I was chasing a bluebill to or butterball, as Rob used to call them, to try to satisfy clients and I said, this is not who I am. I almost got depressed, man.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: And I said, it’s time to close the chapter. And so it kind of brings me to this point, the worlds are colliding all at one point, fast forward to 2020 and I guess the last year that I took clients, because we closed the doors on the lot, sold it and I started traveling with all my clients. We started going to Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Louisiana, all these different places that a lot of these people had never seen, Utah and it was a lot of fun. And at the same time, I’m having kids grow up and I’m like, man, I don’t want to be away from home, seeing my kids grow up. Duck south is the mob of, hey, this is nothing but a bunch of crap, you need to shut this down, this place sucks, these are, like I said, goes back to what I said. People that I respected and spent my, pretty much all my duck hunting career talking with through a waterfowling forum, they’re having a little bit of influence, then COVID hits. Gosh dang, man. I think the last episode that I recorded was me and you and Irah. I think that was the last episode I recorded and I remember slipping off into that reality, that COVID reality, dude, that one hit me hard.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: That not so much and I mean, I still don’t, looking back on it now, I still don’t understand that world. That what in the world happened? Being put on lockdown and if I would have been smart, I probably would have just kept on recording episodes because people had nothing else to do.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Rocky Leflore: But then we had a, my wife and I had a late accident, surprise.

Ramsey Russell: A new son, that’s what you’re trying to say for anybody listening. I mean, you know how that stuff happens. It wasn’t no accident.

Rocky Leflore: Yeah, no, I apologize. My phone buzzed in the middle of me saying that, so it sounds kind of awkward and it was a lot of things that just came together. He was born that May and there’s just a, man, there’s so many things that came together at that point that I had told my clients, hey, you need to find a new place to go duck hunt, now, I’m done. My kids are growing up, I want to spend time with them, I’m not going to leave home. And I guess the thing that was always in the back of my mind, Ramsey, was, did I think that I did pretty good with the podcast? Yes, I do. But the thing that I guess that I thought part of it that made me successful was my authority, because I did it every day.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: And that that authority was no more. So who were, who am I to get on a podcast every day and talk about duck hunting when I’m not even going anymore?

A Change in Duck Hunters

Ramsey Russell: Well, now, see, I was going to ask you that and still want to know kind of what you learned about yourself throughout all this trial and tribulation of social media conversion and podcasting and meeting with folks because like we’ve said a million times you are your past, right? You are a function of your past experiences. There I was minding my own business in Mexico, shooting white winged doves and I was on fire, it was just one of them days, I’m like, boy, I can’t miss and the phone rings and it’s Rocky Leflore and I said, oh, that son of a gun, I didn’t say son of a gun, but I said, that son of a gun probably butt dialed me, but I said hello anyway and there you were, I ain’t talked to you in a while, been a long time and because the doves were so good, I just, I put it on speakerphone and kept hunting and we had a good visit. But one thing I remember us talking about recently is you said, man, I’m done, I don’t duck hunt, I’m done with duck hunting. And that’s kind of getting back to this, was it a function of just becoming so immersed? Because people that don’t do podcasts, don’t understand podcasting is a grind. Trying to manage a social media page is a grind, I mean, is that kind of what did it or was there something deeper about a change in hunter expectations or just a change in duck hunters in general? Was there something that just push you out of it or is it just as simple as my life stage change, I just went on to another change. I’m raising a family and living a new life, I mean, is that simple.

Rocky Leflore: I think it’s that simple, I really do. At the same time of the last couple of years that I was guiding hunts, my wife had opened up a vet clinic in Oxford and that thing exploded, it had gotten to the point where she couldn’t be a doctor and a manager and she asked me, hey, can you help me out with this thing? I said, sure. And I don’t mind at all and so that consumed a lot of time.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: And I enjoyed business. I love, every day management of business and it gives her the free time just to be a doctor, because the thing that sucks about owning a, I don’t care if you’re a medical doctor or veterinarian, the thing that sucks is trying to manage employees and be a doctor, because you can’t be both when somebody’s pissed off at you because you jumped their ass. Now, she gave me that authority to jump ass and she gets just be a doctor.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: And so. But it takes a lot of time, so I was finding myself without the time in a day to be able to record these episodes, manage that business, be a good dad and like I said, I think the thing and the biggest thing in the back of my mind is when my authority was removed and not so much removed, but given up in that part of my life, because ever since you talked to me about being on this episode, I’ve been – Because I know people want to know the answer to this and the thing that I keep coming back to is that it’s that simple, is, who am I to that isn’t doing this day to day anymore to sit here and try to talk about waterfowling.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Rocky Leflore: Eventually, it’s going to wear off and nobody’s going to want to hear me anymore.

The End of The End of the Line

Man, we should cherish and continue on with relationships and my biggest fault through that whole End of the Line was, man, there were so many worlds colliding at that short term is, I just kind of went silent.

Ramsey Russell: That makes sense because just in the last couple of years or since pandemic, I mean, it’s just different topics, different issues, it just emerge in the world of duck hunting and the world in general. And I think just being on top of it, being involved and being active kind of helps you stay on top of all that stuff. So I find myself responding, especially recently, to a lot of topics, searching down answers for a lot of questions that other people’s questions have or my response to their response, I find myself almost chasing my tail sometimes, but I want to know these answers. I mean, I did a deep dive in Mexico, did a deep dive in how many ducks North America killed just based on some social media discussions, some of them directed very pointedly at me, it made me do a little soul searching. Rocky, you talk about shooting 2500, 3000 ducks back in a day in Mississippi Delta and, man, there are lodges down in Mexico that shoot, I know for a fact because the math is that simple, this many hunters, this many days, this kind of limit boom equals 12,800 ducks a season. And you go, myself, oh my God, they’re killing all the ducks, until you realize there’s single clubs and the grasslands in California that are shooting that many green winged teal in a season. It’s crazy, I mean, 8.2 million ducks one year, I don’t think it’ll be that much upcoming season with the drought kicking in. But nonetheless, millions of ducks are getting killed and a lot of what I see happening in duck hunting, I don’t think, I very, truthfully don’t think in my heart of hearts dealing with a lot of people and a lot of conversations and a lot of social media and a lot of text and a lot of inboxes and a lot of customers and a lot of sitting around dinner talk table, I don’t think that the heart and mind of duck hunters has changed except for the best, that’s what I think. I think it’s changed for the best, I think that most duck hunters today want to know answers, want to be informed, want to shoot the hell out of ducks, but do so within the context of a sustainable type output. That’s what I do believe, I do believe that about my fellow duck hunters today. And then when I do see people reacting very frustrated, very angrily towards different topics, it’s probably predicated just in some obscure science they don’t understand that defies common sense. Dead hens don’t lay eggs, well, true, but not all hens lay eggs anyway. The changing continental populations, we had a guy on here one day because everybody’s worried about this drought, everybody’s worried about fewer ducks coming down south or fewer ducks in general I mean, less is not always more. Sometimes in the world of duck populations, less is, in fact, less. But just the way it was described to me by rocket surgeon type guys like, it is my words, not his, but I want a handle of old charter, that’s what I want, I’m going to go buy me a half gallon on the way to duck camp. But it don’t matter, if all I’ve got is a shot glass or a solo cup to carry it all in. Even if I could produce 10 million ducks to send back to the nesting grounds during a drought, with less nesting grounds and less habitat, it don’t matter, because it’s only going to sustain that red solo cup worth not a whole half gallon. And that’s just the reality of the world, if we want more ducks, we’ve got to have more grasslands, we’ve got to have more habitat and factors beyond our control, we’ve got to have better environmental conditions which comes in the form of rainfall and snowfall and things of that nature. It’s just a frustrating time, this day and age, but I miss our days, I miss our weekly conversations, I really, truly do, because leading up to those conversations, I had to do a lot of thinking and now, as a surrogate, I have found, my footing still in the podcast world, I told somebody literally just a week and a half ago, we were talking about the Owen and Lyme podcast. And I said, shoot, man, I kind of wish Rocky was still doing this, because all I’d have to do is record it and send it to him to do all the heavy lifting and I’d still be recording on you. But I am glad to see you doing good and hear that you’re doing well, a lot of people, Rocky, a lot of people you’re talking about bumping into somebody and then them asking me questions. Well, a lot of people have asked me, whatever happened? What became of Rocky? What’s Rocky up to these days? Whatever happened to End of the Line podcast? Because as far as I can tell, it was probably the most successful of all podcasts and it was so interesting like I said, I listened to one this morning and I know it’s very difficult to spend that much time and passion and energy in a non monetized setting, but as just a listener and a consumer of information and owner of a podcast even, it was, I turned on your podcast this morning and it went straight to the podcast intro podcast topic and it was done. No interruptions, no ads, no nothing and I found that extremely enjoyable and I missed those days.

Rocky Leflore: The biggest thing that I would say and it’s the reason you had contacted me back in October.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: And look, if I have a fault in my life, one of my biggest faults is how I deal with loss, I find this when I’ve lost family or friends to death and I just kind of shut myself off, I don’t think that’s how God intended us to be, I know it’s not. Man, we should cherish and continue on with relationships and my biggest fault through that whole End of the Line was, man, there were so many worlds colliding at that short term is, I just kind of went silent. I just kind of went off into my own little world to deal with my loss or not, it’s kind of comparable in my mind, to a loss. And I kind of lost touch with so many people during that time period that you reached out to me last fall and I don’t know if my son may have had my phone. I didn’t even know that you had called until I saw a voicemail, I think you may have been heading to the airport or somewhere, I don’t know where you were going, you were traveling, going somewhere –

Ramsey Russell: Well, you live in Oxford, Mississippi and I’ve never held it against you that you’re an Ole Miss fan, but you live in Oxford and the closest I get to Oxford, Mississippi ever in my life, is I55 and when I pass through that Batesville, where you turn, was that 6 that goes into Oxford. You’re really one of the very few people, if not the only person I know, now, Tom Beckby’s got a great story there on the square, but you’re one of the very few people I know and I think about you every time I pass by that exit and I said, I ain’t talking Rocky, I don’t give him a shout. But it’s, you’re busy and everybody listening has busy times of their life. And I came home, going to be home for 6, 8 weeks and got caught up, got some fires put out, got some stuff done and man, I have got some really, good friends and by that, I mean people, lots of people that I really value in my life, but it’s very difficult to have a relationship with them and with me gone so much, I can’t be on a jet. I mean, man, if I could make phone calls on the way to Australia when I’ve got 30 hours in travel status, I’d catch up with everybody, like Christmas cards. But I can’t and then when I hit the ground, I’m being pulled into directions and I don’t have or the time zone’s different. So once in a blue moon, when I’m driving, usually when I’m driving on these road trips, I run through my roller decks and talk to people I hadn’t talked to in a while, need to talk to, want to hear from them and I sat here for 2 nights on my recliner, who are you talking to? I said, people that I hadn’t talked to. Now, I’m going to tell you, I’m going to share something with you and I talking about how people grieve and my old buddy, Mr. Ian, my best friend in the world, passed this past year and I’d known he’s my best friend for a long time, but it’s funny just how a single duck hunt, 30 years ago a single man, the stories that come out of that one duck hunt and then just every duck hunt builds onto another for 30 years. Before you know it, this dude who used to be your professor is your best friend. The guy you called, the guy you talked to and, hey, how’s it going? What’s going on? He passed this year and that was tough, man, it was a tough loss. And I still just haven’t dwelled on it and I can’t. But there’s a lot of people, there’s a lot of friends from in the duck hunting world and outside the duck hunting world that I just, I cherish the experiences we’ve had together and the things they’ve said to me over the years you talk about COVID I’ll give you an example, just one example of an older guy, a good client, who became a friend because we traveled a lot together and he was just, texting just wasn’t his thing, it just wasn’t his generation. So normally, when he contacts you, he called and normally, it had to do with travel or business or something like that, every now and again, it was personal, like, I just call, check on you. How’s it going? But right before the shit hit the fan with that pandemic, he sent me and my wife a text, a fairly long one. And we read it, we looked at each other and we talked about it and I called him and he said Ramsey, this man had big game and everything else, then he got into waterfowl and all that good stuff, kind of a collector type. He said, no, Ramsey, I’ve been doing this for 50 years, I’ve been traveling around the world and you and your wife have taken better care of me as a customer than anybody I’ve ever done business with and I meant every single word I said to you in that text, I’m done, is what he said. I’m done traveling, because by the time this world opens back up, I would have aged out, but you 2 need to take care of yourself. You all need to batten down the hatches and take care of yourself, take care of your clients, but take care of yourself first, because I don’t think you all understand what’s fixing to happen and I’ll be honest with you, even hearing him saying that, we did not understand what was fixing to happen until about 6 months or a year into it and, buddy, here they come, it’s like the white walkers on Game of Thrones coming at us and we took care of all our clients that we could, I would say all of them, but it was a really hard time, we survived and I would say we even prevailed after COVID, because you know what COVID taught most people? I better get it done that you only live once, man, that’s probably the number one reason anybody in this world today that’s an American or went through pandemic, saves money, I save money, you save money. That’s a generational thing, most people don’t save just copious amounts of money. They spend it and they spend it because you only live once and for that reason, travel is through the roof, experience collecting is through the roof, we did okay with it. But one of my breaking points in the last several years since we talked Rocky, on the podcast was there were upsides to the pandemic, I wasn’t traveling. Thought I was going to be home for 2 months, I was home for 2 years almost, I learned to cook again, we hardly ever eat out anymore, a lot of upside to it. I caught up, I cleaned up, I just went through my life and started it, rebuilt the webpage, so forth and so on, a lot of catchup time. But I never will forget making a sandwich on my counter and it just occurring to me that 20 years or some odd nearly 20 years, every single waking moment of my life, I had been building this. And for reasons beyond, completely beyond my control, snap of the fingers, gone forever. And that was a scary time, just gone. And I know lots of people, lots of clients, lots of friends, they didn’t recover. They had worked their lives, maybe some of them for generations, building a business that they fed their families with that never recovered because of that wicked ass shutdown, gone and it was, I don’t know how I got to talking about that, but that’s scary. I know how I got talking about it was just the things we take for granted, and so, like yourself, I think it’s we all get busy, we all get going on and anybody listening that I hadn’t talked to in a while, call me, I’m always trying to try to catch up with my friends when I can.

Rocky Leflore: Let me say this, Ramsey, the crazy thing was, I think that was a Friday when you had called me. They’ve been a Friday, Friday morning, if I remember right, man, when I listened, I remember where I was when I listened to that voicemail because I didn’t even know I had it, I was walking to want to say it was the Ole Miss Kentucky game. It was a home ole Miss game as the SEC opener this past year and I remember me and Wilson, we were walking to the stadium and I hear your voice and that’s the first time I’d heard your voice probably since the last time we recorded a episode and man, I just remember, it was almost like this fire reigniting when I heard your voice. And nothing personal or anything like that, but man, your voice had just been a huge part of my life that for so long and it was kind of behind me. But man, golly and we never did catch up until what, month and a half ago? Month ago?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, mid March.

Rocky Leflore: And I really mean this because it been on my mind, on my heart, because man, you sacrificed time the most valuable thing that we have, you don’t realize this until you get older is time. And man, you want to figure out what people love and what they’re passionate about. Where are they putting their time? And man, you gave up a lot of time every single week, sometimes twice a week. And it’s not the easiest thing in the world to sit here and record these episodes, edit them and put these things out. And I didn’t want something to happen to me and you not know what you meant to me and I know that’s kind of sappy. It can come across as to some people as sappy. But man, I wanted you to know because you sacrificed to be to be with me every week and to help me build something, man it was huge, back in those days terms, it was humongous. There was times that we were running right there behind meat eater and it was people like you, like Rob, that oh gosh, man, you could go through a whole list of people that just sacrificed time to help build that up and I wanted you to know that how much I appreciated it.

Ramsey Russell: Well, Rocky, I appreciate you because you put, I didn’t know what the hell a podcast was when you called, but I do now.

Rocky Leflore: I do remember that.

Ramsey Russell: And you put my life on a whole new orbit and we’ve run real late on this episode, but I’ve just so enjoyed catching up with you, I think we did bring a lot of closure to a lot of folks listening and we’ll all be looking forward to an episode popping up for the end of the Mossy oak story when it comes.

Rocky Leflore: Yeah. It’s going to happen this year, they’re supposed to get some kind of ruling that’s going to happen this year from the supreme court. So final nail in the coffin to the old Mossy Island story and people, because that’s probably the most requested or question that I get still in private messages, probably one a week, hey, when are you going to finish that story? All the time. And I mean, I guess if I can say one more thing before you close it out, Ramsey, there’s always, elbow to the rib all the time when it comes to The End of the Line podcast, because I see stuff like with Brian Warden, these the tags, man, I don’t think that I’ve seen a picture in a couple of years of people that don’t have tags somewhere on their waterfowl.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, isn’t that something?

Rocky Leflore: I like that. I’m very proud of Brian and what he’s done with that and he built his whole, God, I don’t want, I’m not trying to take credit for that, but every year, Brian puts out that story that he told me online or on through that podcast and he built his whole business around those podcast episodes, getting the word out. Hey, this is why you need to use my tag, this is why I got busted and it’s pretty cool and now you see all of these people using these tags. Jeff Fowls, man, what a huge story. People talk to me all the time. You’re spring boarded in all, I will always say that your story and having the courage to come out and tell that story it was, again, you didn’t know what the heck we were doing, trying to do an episodic series and it was huge.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I’ll say this, too, man. That was years ago, that’s been a while ago, not quite 10 years, but it’s been a while ago I actually told that story and it was hard to believe that after telling that story, my life blew up. I mean, I heard from people that I had not heard from since high school that had never heard that story, from high school principals, from friends, from strangers, my kids. And I did not realize until telling that story what a burden it had been not telling that story, I really didn’t. And I don’t, I still this day, don’t want it to identify me, but it does. But I don’t want it to identify me but just the burden of carrying that story, I did not realize I thought that stuff happens. You talk about it a little bit, but you don’t get the nitty gritty and I know I felt ten pounds lighter, 20 pounds lighter maybe, like an elephant had got off my chest after telling that story. And it put us out there. It answered a lot of questions that apparently a lot of people had been wondering but were too polite because it wasn’t in social media to just ask. And even if they had, I wouldn’t have got that deep. But just something about sitting like at the time, I was sitting right there in a recliner with headphones on in a dark room, just talking, I made a big difference versus standing in front of people talking about that kind of stuff.

What The End of the Line Was All About

Rocky Leflore: I think that, that’s the last thing that I’ll leave with people. What made End of the Line successful? It was, I think, the vulnerability of it, there was nothing ever fake about me, there was nothing that I ever remember Ramsey being fake about, you got what you got and you got us and that’s just who we were and we never tried to fake anything. And I listened to some of these new podcasts for waterfowling or whatever, hunting podcasts come out. I don’t think you’re getting the real person and I think that people can, they realize that, so that’s why they don’t stick with it, listen to every episode now, I think that’s why it falls apart. But man, what you saw was what you got with The End of the Line, that’s who I am in real life and that’s who I was on the podcast. That’s the same thing, that’s the things that we talked about, you and I, opening a podcast up. You remember how we used to do podcasts Ramsey, where we would talk about stuff the Seinfeld way, stuff that really didn’t matter, but people talk about it the water cooler, that’s who we are, that’s what you get from me if you see me in public and I think that that’s what, that determines if you’re going to be successful or not in the podcast world, because man, if you put up something fake, people are going to figure you out.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. That’s exactly right. There’s just, you got to be vulnerable, you got to be authentic. And I think too many of us nowadays can just sense inauthentic stuff, we don’t want it, I mean, we’re so bombarded by fake news and fake everything else, who wants that in their life?

Rocky Leflore: See, I think that the thing that people mistake weakness, is being able to talk about your weaknesses or I think it makes you more authentic. And everybody’s not this Instagram person all the time, man, if you can show your faults and talk about them and laugh about them and cut up with about them and also your strengths, I think that’s the mistake is people just want to go out here and pound on their streaks in their life when we’re all human, we have faults and we’ve got streaks.

Ramsey Russell: Exactly right, Rocky, I’m going to end on that note, man and I have so enjoyed catching up with you and I appreciate your time, I really do and hope to get you back on here again.

Rocky Leflore: Yeah, I really enjoyed it.

Ramsey Russell: Hope to see you sometime soon. But thank you so much. Folks, you all been listening to my buddy from a long way back, Mr. Rocky Leflore, the man, the myth, the legend, the godfather of waterfowl podcast, End of the Line podcast, he was the host of. See you next time.