Kurt Belding

Kurt Belding sold off every business he owned at 40 so he could hunt full time and film it.

Belding came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast from the McBastard's Studio, and the first four minutes went to fixing the audio. Brad opened by asking about the television show, and the two of them found common ground inside a minute. Belding grew up hunting in Nebraska. Brad married into a hunting family and learned everything he knows from his father in law, Gary Bennett, and his brother in law Billy. Both of them keep coming back to the same word for what hunting actually is. Solitude.

The business runs on two tracks. Belding goes on hunts, films them, and turns them into Western Obsessions TV. He also consults, connecting hunters with outfitters he has personally hunted with, and takes a referral fee from the outfitter. The filming is where he breaks from the rest of his industry. He refuses to cut the mistakes. On an Alaska grizzly hunt, after his crew decided a bow was too dangerous with a bonded sow in thick alders, his guide handed him a rifle at a hundred yards and Belding missed. He put the miss in the show. His reasoning is that a new hunter watching perfect shot after perfect shot comes away thinking he is the only one who screws up. Belding calls himself an amateur on a different amateur level.

The businesses came first and nearly buried him. He had sports nutrition stores, a gym, his own supplement manufacturing, meal preps, an ad creative agency. By 40 he owned so much that none of it made money and all of it made stress. He shut it down, sold what he could, and told his wife and kids this was the plan. Then came five years of not knowing how to earn a living in the hunting industry. His early self filmed footage was unusable. He hit slow motion when he meant to hit record, blew his own hunts babysitting a GoPro, and killed nothing. He says most people quit inside three months. When the government ordered businesses closed, he still owned the retail chain of sports nutrition stores. He posted that the shutdown would wreck small business, and took a wave of hate for saying it.

Belding has killed an elk six miles deep at 13,000 feet knowing the pack out would almost break him, and he takes every ounce of meat off the mountain because he thinks that is what he owes the animal. He lives in Colorado now and goes to Patagonia in April to hunt free range stag. What he says to men who tell him they feel stuck, with the mortgage and the family and the security, is to burn the ships.