Raised at the Ranch
Tyler's roots in the outdoors go back to 1995, when his grandfather bought a ranch in Bosque County in central Texas. Tyler was six. He shot his first deer at seven with his dad and fell in love with it from the start.
“I didn’t care what time it was when the game ended,” Tyler says about his high school football days. “If it was 11:30, midnight before we got on the road, we were making that two-and-a-half-hour drive to the ranch.”
That same pull followed him to Texas A&M, where he earned a wildlife and fisheries science degree and skipped Friday classes to spend weekends at the ranch with his grandparents.
From the Diamond to the Deer Stand
Jared and Josh grew up on their own family ranch, a property their dad bought 27 years ago. Andy introduced them to bow hunting at age 10, and neither brother has picked up a rifle since.
“There’s something about how difficult it is to get that close to an animal and make a clean and ethical shot,” Jared says. “Once he introduced us to that, I was eaten up with it.”
Josh’s commitment ran deep enough to quit basketball over it. When his coach told him he’d have to practice after Thanksgiving Day, Josh chose the ranch.
“The outdoors, hunting, being out at the ranch was always our first love,” he says. “We fell in love with it before baseball ever came along.”
The three met about 10 years ago in Hawaii. Tyler invited the brothers hunting, and they’ve hunted together every year since.
Three Years in the Making
Tyler first pitched the idea for a standalone outdoor channel about three years ago at the Pettitte ranch, inspired by shows like Buck Masters and The Incomplete Deer Hunter.
The launch involved calculated risk. With 60 million subscribers on the main channel, a hunting-focused spinoff might polarize fans. Tyler wanted a mix of hunting, fishing, camping, and cooking in the first year, not all one type of content.
The culinary angle was personal. Tyler’s grandmother cooked wild game he brought back to the ranch, and he wanted to bring that connection to food back into focus. “If I could choose a meal for the rest of my life, it would be axis back strap sliced on a cast iron skillet with salt and pepper,” he says.
Slow Down and Soak It In
The DPO tone is a deliberate departure from the high-energy, high-volume DP main channel. Tyler says the calm matches who he is off camera. “Even when people meet me in person, they’re like, ‘Wow, you’re way more calm and chill than I would have expected from the videos,’” he says.
Tyler was protective of that tone from the start. He didn't want filming hunts to feel like a job. The team includes moments like ranking sunsets in their duck video or sitting still to watch thousands of mallards fly into a flooded corn field, no gun in hand.
The team doesn't shy away from hunts that end without a harvest. A Colorado elk hunt last September produced only one kill out of the whole group, but the footage of rainbows rising through fog in mountain valleys was worth sharing on its own.
Tyler took his six-year-old son Colton turkey hunting this spring without getting a shot. When Colton asked, “When does turkey season open back up again so we can try again?” Tyler counted it as a win.
Faith, Family, and What Holds It Together
Faith runs through everything DPO does. Josh says he feels God's presence most in the Colorado mountains, disconnected from technology. “You can't sit there and not think, ‘Wow, we have an amazing creator who is a beautiful artist,’” he says.
Tyler traces that shared faith back 17 years to when the original five DP co-founders met at a Bible study at Texas A&M. “There is not a world where, if the five of us were not believers, we would still be doing this 17 years later,” he says. “This thing would have fallen apart 10 times.”
Tyler sees conservation as part of that responsibility. On his first trip to Alaska, a guide on Lake Iliamna handed him a cup and told him to drink straight from the lake.
“You hold it up and it looks like bottled water,” he says. “I do feel some sense of responsibility to try and maintain places like that for the next generation.”
Why MKC?
All three were Montana Knife Company customers before DPO existed. When Tyler built his list of brand partners, he had one rule: the DPO team had to already own and use a company's gear before any conversation started.
Josh got his first Speedgoat as a Christmas gift from his dad years ago. Their ranch manager, who has skinned tens of thousands of deer, put the Speedgoat to work and told Josh it was the sharpest knife he'd ever used. Jared has carried his Speedgoat for about five years and says it's “rugged at this point but still gets the job done” from heavy use.
Tyler reaches for his MKC culinary set on a weekly basis at home, with the Smith River Santoku getting the most use. “There's a level of authenticity that when you're excited about a product, it comes across on camera,” he says.
Keep up with Dude Perfect Outdoors by following their YouTube channel, @DudePerfectOutdoors.
