Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast on a hot summer day. I’m in the studio with the real Little Riddle, and it starts like a phone call the other day from my buddy John Blake Riddle. He sounded almost overwhelmed, my words, not his, but he did sound a little overwhelmed about this sudden social media attention he’s been getting. John, how the heck are you?

John Blake Riddle: Oh, I’m doing pretty good, just like you, trying to stay out of this heat right now, buddy.

Ramsey Russell: I stay out of heat. It’s a rule at my house. If I wake up this time of year and I can see the backyard through the glass, and it ain’t fogged up enough, so the air conditioning needs to go down, not up. That’s how I survive this hot weather. John, how’s the fishing because you are a fisherman. I mean, you’re a fisherman, you’re a duck hunter, you’re a quail hunter, and some other stuff we’re going to talk about. But you’re a fisherman. And you’re not just the guy like myself that goes out to make the grease pop. And just for the record, let me set it straight, I go fishing for one reason, and one reason only, and that’s to hear grease pop later with fillets in the grease. But you’re a fisherman. What’s a guy like you do this time of year?

John Blake Riddle: I mostly spend a lot of time tying crappie jigs because it’s too hot to fish, if you want to be in my book about it. Because I’m about like you, I mostly just fish to bag the meat, you know what I’m saying?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Where are you from, and what do you do? Where are you from?

John Blake Riddle: So, I’m actually from northeast Mississippi, in a little town called Amory. And that’s right here on the Tenn-Tom Waterway, so if it has anything to do with boats and the water, pretty much, I’ve made the joke that I’m just an old river rat from northeast Mississippi. So, duck hunt, fish, I’ve trained dogs, guided hunts, and now run a crappie jig company. And somehow I’ve gotten stuck doing social media content. So, I do a little bit of it all if it has to do with water.

Ramsey Russell: I want to get into every bit of it too, John, because it’s very, very interesting. It just goes to prove when you come to a fork in the road, take it. And that’s a lot of what your life has become at a fairly young age. But speaking of Amory, Mississippi, going to school in Starkville, I would pass through Amory some over there in that prairie. And there used to be a little hamburger joint downtown. Is it still around?

John Blake Riddle: Bill’s Hamburgers.

Ramsey Russell: Bill’s Hamburgers! And it was like the original Crystal Grill, only better, because it was just little simple sliders. Do you ever eat there?

John Blake Riddle: Whenever I have somebody that’s a guest, you know, and you got to take them to the most historic place you’ve got, Bill’s Hamburgers in Amory, Mississippi.

Ramsey Russell: How historic is this? It seemed like it’s been around forever.

John Blake Riddle: I think it’s been there since 1929.

Ramsey Russell: 1929. And as I remember because it’s been, boy, it’s been 20 years since I ate there, but isn’t it something that 20 years later, I remember them little old burgers. It was just simple little sliders, like maybe just a little mustard, a little onion, boom, put in between two buns, and that’s it. And I think you’d order three or four of them at a time, and they were just amazing. So, in other words, you stop every time you pass through there.

John Blake Riddle: There’s not a lot of cheeseburger places I haven’t found in the state of Mississippi, to be honest.

Ramsey Russell: Amen. Amen. I’m right there with you. I would classify real cheeseburgers and I’m not talking any fast food chain, but, you know, a real cheeseburger like this place Bill’s is hard to come by anymore, am I right? When I find one of them good old greasy burgers coming off a griddle at a place that’s been around a long time, where they almost toast the buns, I’m always going to stop and get one, double bacon cheeseburger.

John Blake Riddle: We always figured, see I watched them cook the cheeseburgers back there. What they do is they take the bun and mop up all the grease on it, you know what I’m saying?

Mississippi Hunting & Fishing Origins

I mean, northeast Mississippi is almost a part of Mississippi unto itself. It does have some legendary history.

Ramsey Russell: That’s the secret sauce, that’s the secret sauce, I guarantee you it is. John, Northeast Mississippi, what are your hunting and fishing origins? Totally different than my world. I mean, northeast Mississippi is almost a part of Mississippi unto itself. It does have some legendary history. But what are your origins? Who got you into hunting and fishing? How did it start? What are some of your earliest memories?

John Blake Riddle: So, my dad was the one who got me into hunting when I was a kid. I literally remember being four or five years old, and mostly from the pictures that I’d have my little Daisy Red Ryder BB gun sitting in the duck blind, shooting at coots, you know what I’m saying?

Ramsey Russell: I do.

John Blake Riddle: So, it’s been most of my life I’ve been in the outdoors at some capacity. And I think the hunting and fishing thing just kind of bleeds together at some point.

Ramsey Russell: Well, where were you all duck hunting up in that part of the world? Was your daddy taking you over to the Delta, or we all actually hunting somewhere up in that part of the world?

John Blake Riddle: So, the Tenn-Tom Waterway comes through this town called Amory that we were just talking about. I live about six miles north of Amory on this same river, the Tenn-Tom Waterway. And in between these two places is a little town called Smithville, where my dad bought probably 60 acres on when they built the Tenn-Tom Waterway. So, I actually grew up hunting on a little 60 acres that I still have, and I live two miles from it right now. And that’s mostly still where I go duck hunting every day.

Ramsey Russell: Really? What is it, a swamp or oxbow or what?

John Blake Riddle: So, it’s actually, this Tenn-Tom Waterway has a lock and dam system in it. So, when they impounded the river in like 1985, there’s a constant pool of water that’s spread out across the landscape. So, floodwaters from the river flood about half of my property. So, it’s the only spot in the country that’s got buckbrush and willows whenever there’s a drought. So, it’s a constant body of water that has a little bit of buckbrush and willows in it, and the rest of it’s just beaver slashes. And it’s a neat little place because it’s one of the few parts in the world left here that you’ll get a few mallards, still making good traffic going from the river back to the roost. And we just scream at a few of them, kill a few every day.

Ramsey Russell: Those are the kind of habitats I grew up hunting, that shrub scrub habitat. I’m sure, having hunted south of there myself, you probably shoot a lot of wood ducks. There’s an abundance of wood ducks all the time. I can see where you catch some mallards. You all don’t ever kill any black ducks up in there, do you at Gadwalls?

John Blake Riddle: I killed three black ducks last year. They came in with a big group of mallards. The first one did. It was about a group of 15 mallards came in, and I shot a hen black duck and two greenheads. The other two, it was during that ice storm last year that we got them. You know, whenever there’s an ice storm, you kill the weirdest stuff in the world. So, there were a few black ducks that came down the river, and we shot them.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, I tell you what, you don’t think of East Mississippi as being duck central in the state of Mississippi. You think of being closer to the Mississippi River. But having lived in Starkville for ten years, I did quite a bit of hunting in that Tenn-Tom waterway. And boy, when those, I called them blue ball northers, when those freaking fronts would hit hard and freeze out down to Reelfoot Lake in that part of the world, there really wasn’t no telling what the next morning was going to bring, you know. I enjoyed the heck out of it. What are some of your earliest memories like, do you remember your first fish or your first duck?

John Blake Riddle: Oh, I remember my first duck like it was yesterday.

Ramsey Russell: Tell me about it.

John Blake Riddle: I think I was seven years old. And it’s kind of funny, you know, when you’re a seven-year-old, you can’t really go too many places. So my dad being the thoughtful guy he was, he bought one of these big blow-up, you know, inner tubes like they fly fish out of. So we walked in, it was on my property that we have now, and we walked down this little gravel road. My dad put me in one of those fly-fishing tires, and Ramsey, he pushed me out there to where a few wood ducks were just coming and landing on the water, you know, and I had my little .410 shotgun. A wood duck came in, and I shot him about two feet off the water. Scared to death, he died and there I was holding my first duck, you know.

Ramsey Russell: Golly. Is your dad still around?

John Blake Riddle: He passed away in 2005. He had a massive heart attack while we were living in Memphis. He actually worked on the BNSF railroad and was a train master. And Amory is a big railroad town.

Ramsey Russell: Sure is.

John Blake Riddle: So we moved up there to Memphis for two years. He passed away, and then after that, my mom and I moved back to Amory. So there I was 15 years old, following my driver’s license, and I was going to go conquer the ducks.

Ramsey Russell: John, growing up in Amory, Mississippi, eating at Bill’s, hunting this little old 60-acre duck hole you got, hunting and fishing with your daddy. What’d you want to be when you grew up?

John Blake Riddle: I really think I wanted to be a hunting and fishing guide.

Ramsey Russell: Who doesn’t? Yeah. Well, how did you end up from there to here? That’s the interesting thing. When I talked to you, and as I’ve known you and talked to you over the years, you went on to be a hunting and fishing guide and a lot else. What led you to that? I mean, did you go to college? Where’d you go to college? And how did you end up through so many of these experiences you’ve done along the way?

Moving to Oxford for the Blondes and the Sardis Reservoir Backwaters

John Blake Riddle: So I’ve made the joke for years that I try to avoid the real world at all costs. So with that mentality, it kind of led me in that direction. So when I graduated high school, I went up here to Itawamba Community College. It’s just on this same river we’re talking about. I stayed there for three years. I didn’t attend class too much. I was shooting ducks and catching fish. And then I transferred to Mississippi State for a year, and all I did down there was duck hunt and fish, like in that Starkville area. There’s a bunch of actually good duck hunting in those potholes in that high ground up there. But then I liked to party a little bit, so I transferred to Ole Miss, and by golly, there it opened up all the crappie fishing, the pretty blondes. Man, I tell you what, anything that you wanted was in Oxford, Mississippi. And we had Sardis’s backwaters right there. So needless to say, I never attended class. And while I was in Oxford, I was actually working for Wildrose Kennels. So it’s just been this weird journey of just always trying to get back to the outdoors. After I left college, I started working as a quail hunting guide.

Ramsey Russell: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. So you moved to Oxford, Mississippi, for the blondes and the Sardis Reservoir backwaters?

John Blake Riddle: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: The heck would learn anything? And you ended up working for Wildrose Kennels while you were in college, was that before Prairie Wildlife or after?

John Blake Riddle: So that was before Prairie Wildlife.

Ramsey Russell: Did you have dogs? Did you have bird dogs? Did you grow up with bird dogs or labs, I mean, is, okay, how’d that come about?

John Blake Riddle: I just called them on the phone, asked if they needed some help with all those dogs, and there they put me shoveling poop, you know what I’m saying?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, we got a job for you. And then how’d you end up from Ole Miss over to back over to the Prairie, working for one of the most preeminent bobwhite quail plantations in the state of Mississippi? Certainly the one in Mississippi, but one of the most preeminent in the South. How’d you end up going to that, making that connection?

John Blake Riddle: I literally called them on the phone and asked if they had a bird problem, if they were getting overrun and needed somebody to help them shoot them all. That’s really not a joke, if you want to be honest. They laughed and said, “We’ll give you an interview.” So I went down there and interviewed, and I think I stayed down there for seven years guiding their hunts, not a full-time employee, but it was like contracted labor as a quail hunting guide. And I would actually guide about 80 to 90 days of the year before duck season and then after duck season. So there was a time period that I was guiding wingshooting trips for 130 days of the year.

Ramsey Russell: Golly. You told me the other day on the phone you were also guiding over in Arkansas for ducks. Who were you working for over there?

John Blake Riddle: So the guy, he’s actually sold the duck club after COVID. But it was a place called Black Dog that had been there since the 1980s. Todd Britton was his name. And they actually started that duck club, set up to be a guide service running through Bayou Meto before in 2000, they said that you can’t guide in the woods anymore. So he’d been guiding over there with, like, Lester. He knew Lester Caps. That was weird. I actually blew Lester Caps’s keyhole. He had one of them in the duck club, but it’s just been this weird journey of waterfowl history. I left there and then headed to West Tennessee because they had more mallard ducks in West Tennessee, you know?

The  World’s Fastest Duck Boat

102 miles an hour.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Wow. And now you got the world’s fastest duck boat. True or false?

John Blake Riddle: I do possess the world’s fastest duck boat.

Ramsey Russell: How fast is it?

John Blake Riddle: 102 miles an hour.

Ramsey Russell: Is that all? That’s all it takes to be the world’s fastest?

John Blake Riddle: So what I figured out, Ramsey, is when those canvasbacks get on that big water at Pickwick, if you can just run fast enough, you can find out where they’re going. You know what I’m saying?

Ramsey Russell: Is that what possessed you to get the world’s fastest duck boat?

John Blake Riddle: No, it was actually a bunch of young kids that, so when I moved, my wife and I got together probably in, like, 2017, and we lived in Memphis or around Memphis for about three years, and I was still training bird dogs and Labradors. And we moved back here, back home on the river. And that first duck season that I got back here, I had a bunch of kids that had hopped up 50s, and they kept running to this big point that we all 1914

Ramsey Russell: Where were you driving at the time, if I hopped up 50 was smoking you.

The Ultimate Blend of Speed and Stealth

And, you know, they spent all summer, they were tuning their motors up, and I bought a 20 XD bullet hull, which is a bass boat, and put a 300 racing on the boat. So we then painted it camouflage, and at that point, I had the world’s fastest duck boat.

John Blake Riddle: I had a 15 horse on the back of a 15-foot boat. Because it’s been four or five years since I’d been home. I didn’t know that duck hunting got so popular. So, I come back and everybody’s trying to run to my point. I think it was because I moved away for a few years, and they all finally started hunting it. So I told them boys, I said, “You all enjoy it this year.” I said, “Because there’s one thing that can solve this problem, and that’s money.” And I told them, “I’m going to have a faster boat next year.” And, you know, they spent all summer, they were tuning their motors up, and I bought a 20 XD bullet hull, which is a bass boat, and put a 300 racing on the boat. So we then painted it camouflage, and at that point, I had the world’s fastest duck boat. Those young boys never beat me to that point again. And funny enough, about halfway through duck season, they came up to me and they were like, Man, this boat’s awesome. Blah, blah, blah. You know, you win the race, Haha. So there was a bunch of redheads flying that day, and I’ll never forget it. I told them, “Look, let’s go out there.” And I’m using that big fiberglass boat as the layout boat, weirdly enough.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

John Blake Riddle: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And the ducks will come into it.

John Blake Riddle: Oh, run straight at it like it’s nothing. So out here in the middle of the river, a lot of these ducks, the diver ducks, will raft up in between, you know, where they’re going to feed and everything. And a lot of the mallards and pintails actually go get in the middle of those divers and coots because they feel safe in there. You know what I’m saying?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

John Blake Riddle: So what I did is I took about a 20-foot nylon rope and tied it to 28-foot logging chains, and I clipped them on the back, the two back clips of that boat. So what you do is you run out there on the river about 08:00 before those divers get to flying good, and the wind starts blowing. You go out there, run up a few of the divers, and I take a long line with 2-liter Coke bottles on it, just so it doesn’t weigh down my boat. So I can run 102 miles an hour, but we’re using a long line with 2-liter Coke bottles on it. And then what I’ll do is reposition the boat with a trolling motor, put out those logging chains, and I let the wind blow me straight downriver or straight downwind.

Ramsey Russell: So you’re anchoring those long lines out in front of you, or are they drifting out in front of the boat?

John Blake Riddle: They’re behind the boat.

Ramsey Russell: Behind the boat trailing behind you. I saw you on your TikTok the other day, how you use those logging chains, very ingenious. Did you invent that, or did somebody tell you about that trick?

John Blake Riddle: So that was one of my good buddies, Ronnie Capps, if you might know Ronnie.

Ramsey Russell: I know of Ronnie Capps, yeah.

John Blake Riddle: Yeah. So he was an eight-time world crappie fishing guy. And so, you see how we were buddies, and then we actually duck-hunted a lot together in Reelfoot and all across west Tennessee. And I told him, I said, I’m going to take those logging chains and do like we do fishing for crappie. And I said, “I’m going to drag them out the back of the boat, and it’s going to be an anchor.” So if you can imagine the trailer clips where you strap the trailer on the back of the boat, that’s where you clip those dudes. So when the wind’s blowing you, it points you straight downwind. So you set that long line out at an angle, and when those ducks come running down that long line, by the time they flare at the boat, they’re dead.

Ramsey Russell: That’s the craziest system. So you’ve got these chains dragging behind you. You’re not stationary, the wind’s just gently blowing you in the current, but those chains are slowing you down?

John Blake Riddle: Stationary, stationary.

Ramsey Russell: It’s actually anchoring you, perfectly anchoring, okay.

John Blake Riddle: Yeah. So that’s what you do is—I pull the long line out of the rod box, and I run on the trolling motor, drop the anchor. I set my line in a crosswind, and then I take my trolling motor and go downwind of myself and point the boat straight at that long line. So it’s those ducks. So it’s a fixed system. The decoys are on the long line. I’m 5 to 10 yards behind them with the layout boat. So as those ducks come running down the river and they see that long line, they run the long line, and there they are coming upwind. You see what I’m saying? They’re coming into the wind, and it’s poop, poop, poop.

Ramsey Russell: How big is this bullet boat again?

John Blake Riddle: 20 foot.

Ramsey Russell: That’s one heck of a lot more comfortable layout boat than a layout boat, I can tell you right there. I don’t see water sloshing over me or nothing else. I’m comfortable, I can stretch out. That’s gotta be the way to roll.

John Blake Riddle: And I really, this is going to sound crazy, but I built that boat to long-line hunt divers in places like Pickwick Lake, Gunnersville, Wheeler, like these huge Tennessee reservoir impoundments. And you really needed a boat that big, a motor that big, to really deal with a lot of those windy days trying to shoot divers. My favorite’s actually hunting diver ducks in big water. And a lot of people just don’t have the literal equipment to get out on a big island in 15-mile-per-hour wind and 3-foot swells, and that big fiberglass boat will eat it to pieces, you know. So it was a safety thing. Plus, I just wanted to go conquer the river out there in the big water, you know?

Ramsey Russell: I heard that. How many of those painted 2-liter pop bottles are you putting out for decoys?

John Blake Riddle: So I have 24 of them.

Ramsey Russell: You know, you’re not really a duck hunter. You’re not really a duck hunter if you’re putting out pop bottles. You know that, right? Now, of course, you admitted it in front of everybody. You ain’t a real duck hunter no matter how many ducks you kill, because you ain’t using decoys. You’re using black-painted pop bottles. That is about as old-school as it gets.

John Blake Riddle: I learned that from Ronnie Capps and them, you know, at Reelfoot they’ll have. Well, they can’t use the pop bottles, but they have, like, pool noodles that are real big that they set up, and that’s where I really learned that from. Like I said, I’ve gotten to duck-hunt with a lot of really interesting people, and I really, in my life, figured out that that black just shows up so much better from a distance. And weirdly enough, I don’t tell everybody this, but I have about a four-foot mojo duck that I put on the back pedestal of, like, where the seat would go in a bass boat behind me. And I’ve got it wired and rigged to my switch panel, so I have a four-foot mojo behind me. I flip on the switch, get them looking at me in that big water, turn it off, and they run straight down the black Coke bottle line. Yeah, there’s this system—I’m hardcore about these divers in this big water.

Hunting Ducks with the Bullet Boat

Ramsey Russell: I believe those black pop bottles are good. I got in a discussion just the other day. Somebody was like, “Well, you know, I think a white decoy would be much brighter, much more visible.” I said, “No, absolutely not. Black is where it’s at because it absorbs light.” You think about it, all that water is reflecting—white reflects, water reflects, black absorbs, and it’s highly visible. And, I mean, countless are the ducks worldwide outside the United States of America, but also in America. But Argentina comes to mind, or Azerbaijan, where the decoys are just black. And if they ever had paint, the paint ain’t been on them in your lifetime, probably mine. And we’re killing the fire out of ducks. And just you sit there in the pre-dawn looking at those black decoys. Oftentimes just duck decoys that were never painted or the paint’s come off. They’re down to the black, or they were painted black just sitting out. And they’re just highly visible. Extremely visible from a distance. I think it’s one of the best on earth.

John Blake Riddle: Yeah, especially in muddy water, too. Like when a river jumps up and it starts cresting and you’ve got a lot of that muddy water coming through. We’ve flown drones up there and looked at it, and white versus black versus a painted decoy, black wins every day. You know, it does.

Ramsey Russell: 20 something years ago, I hunted Reelfoot Lake for the first time. It was one of the only great times. It was a really, really good hunt. I wish I could remember that boy’s name. Some college kid had won a two-man, two-day trip on Reelfoot Lake, and he wanted $100 a person to go. I waited until about, well, he called me. I low-balled him, and he called me up a few days later, like two days before you had to go on this trip, and said, “Alright, I’ll take that hundred dollars.” I offered him $100, and he said, “I said, no, I’ll give you 50.” So me and my brother went to Reelfoot Lake for two days, guided hunt for $50. And that first day was one of the most insane hunts of my entire life. There was one of those real big Alberta clippers blowing through. Day two was terrible. It was just solid ice. The whole lake was up. But that day, boy, it was something else. What I never will forget is we pulled into that—you know they got those little Reelfoot blinds. If you’re sitting down, it’s about as tall as your head. You gotta lean your head down so you don’t bump it on a stud. And that duck hole at man’s was, I’d say, 10% decoy, and the rest was cypress oak blocks, two by two by twelve, painted black, just blocks, literally, it was covered with blocks, with enough decoys mixed in that it made sense from there. And that taught me, 20-something years ago, all I need to know about having a black block on the water. These kids today think if you don’t spend $79–$80 per decoy, you ain’t going to kill no ducks. And that just, that can’t be further from the truth. It’s a duck. He’s got the brain the size of a lentil, you know? He doesn’t reason, and he doesn’t have faculties or abilities like a lot of animals do. You know what I’m saying? It’s just a duck. But anyway, is that how you commit all your duck season, is the world’s fastest duck boat? Have you been challenged for the world’s fastest duck boat, any challenges?

John Blake Riddle: As far as duck boat races, no. I’ve had a few boys on the internet. I’ve raced a few of them, and I think that might be the reason I have all these social media followers, though. I have one video where I raced a pontoon with a 400 on it. I think that video got 73 million views. So the whole world has watched me race this boat once or twice, you know?

Ramsey Russell: Is that where the guy is hanging out, acting like he’s paddling when you passed him?

John Blake Riddle: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I saw that video. Talk about your crappie fishing, because you know, that’s something. I’ve done some crappie fishing again just to make grease fry. But man, you take it to a whole other level. I mean, you’re big time into that crappie fishing.

John Blake Riddle: It started from being at Sardis, you know, at Ole Miss. I told you my love for crappie fishing started because I said, “You know what, boys? The bar shuts down at 12:00; there isn’t a restaurant open.” I said, “We’ve got to have something to feed these old gals and we can get them all to come back with us, fried crappie sandwiches at 01:00 in the morning in Sardis. I mean, in Oxford, because all the restaurants were shut down.” So it was like a necessity that we had to have fish constantly. You know what I’m saying? So that’s actually where the love of crappie fishing started, around Grenada Lake with a buddy of mine named Wesley Montgomery. They had a cabin at North Graysport, if anybody knows where that is. Listen to this. So back then, what we always did was wade fish for the crappie when the males came up into the shallows. I’ve always made the joke that I had to have a really good pair of waders because it has to get through duck season and then another two months of wade fishing for crappie. So we’ve crappie fished over there for years and years, and eventually this piece of technology called the Live Scope came out. And man, I’ll tell you what, that changed the world of crappie fishing. I think for the better.

Ramsey Russell: Well, some people say Live Scope’s cheating. I hear people say on your own page, “Live Scoping is cheating, but so is your girlfriend.” But now, seriously, is LiveScope cheating?

John Blake Riddle: I don’t think it is, because in reality, there’s a huge skill set that comes about with using that Live Scope. So a lot of the time, especially this time of year, those fish will try to run away from you because they know that you’re coming up behind them in a 20-foot boat. So the skill set’s changed to where we’re actually having to follow behind the fish and set a bait down moving a mile and a half an hour. So the fish adapt to whatever pressure gets on them, just like those ducks do. You know what I’m saying? When it first came out, it was like shooting fish in a barrel, just like when the mojo came out when I was a kid. But everything kind of adapts to it and the pressure that humans put on them. So the fish will show. If anybody thinks it’s cheating, I tell them to go run down and catch one running a mile and a half an hour, running away from you. If you can catch him, tell me how much of a cheat that was, you know?

Ramsey Russell: I heard that. It was crappie fishing, that’s something you started in college. How many days a year do you think you crappie fish and duck hunt in aggregate? 365 days in a year. How many days is a guy like yourself out on the water hunting and fishing?

John Blake Riddle: Before the social media stuff happened probably 150–175 days, I mean, a year. The social media content stuff, the weird thing was, Ramsey, is that I started a crappie jig company in about 2020, before I had the social media stuff really going. The crappie jig company that we make bucktail crappie jigs. You know, we pour the lead, we go to the processors, get the deer tails, doll the deer tails ourselves. We make everything from scratch. We sold a lot of crappie jigs when the Live Scope came out because we were making a bait that was showing up better on the Live Scope.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, actually.

John Blake Riddle: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: So did the Live Scope steer you all’s jig-tying style and pattern?

John Blake Riddle: Well, what it did, we realized that color didn’t matter nearly as much or what it was the profile of the bait that they would commit to body, and that’s the Little Riddle Jig Company, the name of my business. All of our jigs that we make actually have that profile that we found to be the best at getting a fish to bite. Plus, they’re all super glued together, made of bucktail. So we figured out that durability was actually the best thing about, you know, a bait that you use because you catch so many of them. We tried to make a bait for the market that you could easily catch 150 to 200 fish on that wouldn’t fall apart on you. And that’s where we got almost, like, a cult-like following of guys that really enjoyed our baits.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Double-Reed Duck Calls

 So, because of social media, I sold a bunch of those duck calls.

John Blake Riddle: And so that accidentally turned into social media. I accidentally flipped on a camera, and we started selling hats and t-shirts and everything when all the followers came on social media. So it actually put me back to work at almost a real job for a while until I got a lot of help with the crappie jig manufacturing the duck calls that we make.

Ramsey Russell: You all make duck calls, too?

John Blake Riddle: It was a lifelong dream that I always wanted to make my own duck call, and we finally pulled it off and made it last year. So it’s a double-reeded duck call that anybody can blow. It’s really modeled after that West Tennessee style hunting. It’s really easy to blow. It’s super loud. And we also made it out of a material called Delrin, which is a temperature-resistant, high-impact plastic. We’re CNC machining these days, so they pop out perfect every time we cut a set of reeds in it. You can blow it all day long. Because of the tolerances of the tone board, you never have a problem with sticking or freezing. It’s a pretty neat little deal. So, because of social media, I sold a bunch of those duck calls. About the middle of duck season, I was in there cutting reeds instead of duck hunting as much.

Ramsey Russell: Work will do that to you.

John Blake Riddle: Fast forward a year and a half later almost. I have a lot of really good people helping me with all the stuff because weirdly enough, the apparel sales and stuff like that, I was so overwhelmed, I didn’t know how to ship anything at all. I shut down two local post offices trying to send out all the hats and t-shirts, and I finally had some people come help me with the distribution of all the apparel. So I finally have a team, and this year I’m going to really try to film a lot of the hunting and fishing stuff and show everybody the kind of unique stuff like we’re talking about the black coke bottles, maybe breaking some of the myths people have about duck hunting. Now, I may finally be able to go duck hunting and fishing again.

Ramsey Russell: I forgot to ask you just a minute ago, and I’m going to ask you. Boy, I tell you what, you’ve been all over—you’ve been a quail guide, you’ve been a shooting instructor, you’ve been a duck guide, doing all this kind of stuff right here. I noticed on your TikTok the other day, somebody asked, you got the world’s fastest duck boat. They said, but that ain’t all. I can’t remember how they asked the question, but it’s like, in your words, you said, “It ain’t nothing but money. Oh, them boys with the 50 will beat me this year, but it ain’t nothing but money. I’ll beat them next year.” Man, you came out rolling with more than a hopped-up 50. You came up with a fast duck boat. And somebody asked the other day, “Where do you get your money, John?” They asked you, “Where do you get your money for the world’s fastest duck boat, plus all them other boats and trucks and cars and house and everything else in your backyard? Is that all coming from social media?” You told me a story the other day about the dog training and everything else that comes back to who you are and how this was all possible.

John Blake Riddle: Yeah. So, I’ve had the world’s greatest partner as well—my wife, Lily. She and I have really worked our tails off for years training dogs. She’s actually a psychiatric nurse practitioner, so she has a private practice doing that. I’ve been training dogs and guiding hunts for years and years. I saved and invested a lot of the money and took a lot of that money and tried to reinvest it back into myself, whether it be more dog kennels. I started a crappie jig company. I’ve always just been a hustler. And I make the joke that I’ve never had a vacation since I left Ole Miss. Since I’ve done this social media stuff, I literally work 16 hours a day for 400 days straight. My thing is, if you get a little bit of money from training a dog, you might as well go ahead and flip it into something else, if you can, because years of that compound, whatever you want to call it, gives you the ability to—whatever you dream of, you can try to achieve it. So, that’s where a lot of the money came from, actually.

Ramsey Russell: What kind of dogs were you training? I mean, what was your specialty in the dog training world?

John Blake Riddle: I was really good at training, let’s imagine, like a bird dog. You know, they’re crazy.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah. They’re full steam ahead.

John Blake Riddle: So that’s the perception of it. Because I was in that Orvis world, I got exposed to a lot of people that had a need for a bird dog, but they needed it to fly, let’s say, on a private jet or live in the Ritz Carlton in Boston. That’s, weirdly enough, been done. I made a very well-rounded family dog that was perfectly obedient and could be a bird dog. There weren’t a lot of people in the country doing that, so I just carved myself out a niche from everything that I learned at Wildrose, at making those really good Labradors. So, that’s about how it went.

Ramsey Russell: When you say bird dogs, are we talking English Pointers that’ll range a mile and a half, full steam ahead, and disappear over the horizon, dragging anybody hanging on to them with them? And you were able to make that dog to where he would sit like Char Dog, at my feet on a private plane, or walk quietly into the Ritz Carlton, and then when you turn him loose, he’d go hunt.

Best Hunting Dogs for Waterfowl

The best dog for that pointers are actually my favorite.

John Blake Riddle: The best dog for that pointers are actually my favorite. If you get this breeding called an Elhew pointer, they’re a little bit more soft, and they don’t range as far because the average, let’s imagine, like the average guy who wants a well obedient bird dog probably doesn’t want a dog that ranges 400 yards away from him on the back of a horse. So a lot of your German Shorthairs, Elhew pointers, a lot of those closer-working, preserve-style dogs, that’s the perfect candidate to be in my system that I had. I did have one huge, big-running, you know, field trial-style dog, and I still had him perfectly obedient. But you would have to honk the horn in the car to get him to turn left or right and come back, if that makes sense. I used to take that dude and drop him in the Holly Springs National Forest, and we would run like, 18 miles through those dirt roads, and I’d be honking him from the car, running 15, 20 miles an hour behind him, telling him to come out of that place and come back to the road. I’d honk the horn, and buddy, he’d kick in your gear and keep running.

Ramsey Russell: God, dog. So how does a guy like yourself even start on TikTok? You know, a man’s got to draw a line, and I’m an official old geezer. I’m not getting on TikTok, not in the foreseeable future. Although I do get on there and cruise around. I don’t have an account. How did you, how did somebody from northeast Mississippi, duck guide, quail guide, dog trainer extraordinaire, crappie fisherman, how does a guy like yourself get into TikTok? I mean, did it start as simple as, like I’m imagining maybe you got bored during COVID. You had one too many beers, and you started doing that little, that little dance all them folks were doing. Is that how this TikTok stuff started? Come on, John, tell me the truth. It’s okay.

John Blake Riddle: So let’s go back to a story we were telling earlier. You remember the young boys with the hopped-up fifties that were beating me to the duck hole?

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

John Blake Riddle: So in the middle of duck season, when they finally succumbed to the fact they couldn’t beat me, I started telling this story a little bit ago, but I put two of them in my boat. We were shooting a bunch of redheads in the river back here, and they were laying there in the boat just doing this, flipping their phone. Flip, flip, flip. I said, what are you all doing right there? And they said, it’s TikTok. I said, what’s TikTok? So they just showed it to me, and they’re scrolling through all these videos of all this goofy stuff. This was in 2023, so, like a year and a half ago. And they were scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and I said, do you think the world would like to see the world’s fastest duck boat? And they said, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I made an account, flipped on the camera, and talked to it, and the first video I did got like 400,000 views.

Ramsey Russell: What was that first video, John?

John Blake Riddle: So I didn’t know anything about the rules of TikTok. I broke every one of them at first. So I had an account for two weeks before it got banned because I was like, I’m going to show all these boys.

Ramsey Russell: What rules would you break? What rules were you breaking? I don’t know a damn thing about TikTok rules.

John Blake Riddle: I tried to film shooting ducks, like dead ducks. Everything that you could imagine. I didn’t know that you couldn’t show guns or kill stuff. So I actually got that account banned in two weeks. And I literally told my old lady, I said I had 8,000 followers in two weeks. But I told my old lady, I said, I’m done with this stuff. Those boys don’t want to let me shoot ducks. I ain’t going to do TikTok. And she was the smart one and said, just go back and do it. You know, just try it again. And February 13, I flipped on the camera again in the middle of Grenada Lake. And that first day was 400,000 more views. And I haven’t broken the rules since.

The Social Media & Duck Hunter Relationship

 It’s very, very, very tough to be on social media as a hunter, it is. But you found your niche.

Ramsey Russell: No death stuff. Social media does not like duck hunters. It doesn’t like shotguns. It doesn’t like stuff dying. It doesn’t like dead animals. It’s very, very, very tough to be on social media as a hunter, it is. But you found your niche. So what was the first video that got all them views? What were you doing in the middle of Grenada Lake?

John Blake Riddle: I literally flipped on the camera, and I told them, I was like, boy, so if you’re going to be standing here in the middle of one of these ditches in Grenada Lake, all you gotta do is take your rod, swing it a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right. I was like, you see this tree right here. It’s got shade on it. There’s probably going to be a big one in it. It was like a 30-second video, and everybody watched it. And then I literally walked over beside a ditch and filmed myself fishing beside a ditch for like, 10 seconds, and they got like 600,000 views, you know?

Ramsey Russell: Come on.

John Blake Riddle: I know, its strange how all this works. TikTok’s kind of funny because, like if it’s duck season, people really care about duck season. And when I made that TikTok about the crappie fishing there, it was the very beginning of crappie season. I was the only one out there filming, and there were a million eyeballs ready to see something.

Ramsey Russell: You make up a good point. Because, like, I’m duck hunting this duck season somewhere, okay, 365 days a year, I’m chasing ducks, and I see lots of seasonal variability in the engagement and everything going on in Instagram. I see a lot. You know, how many accounts are being seen in the last 30 days? It’ll go from 2 million to 20,000 on the flip of a switch. And I’m made to feel sometimes like I’m being shadow-banned. All—hell, they owned it. They own me now. But it may not be. I mean, do you think that function of engagement, John, is that a function of the algorithm knowing it ain’t duck season, or is that a function of duck hunters going to do something else instead of engagement, or a little bit of both?

Packed Seats for Duck Fall Hunting Season

Yeah, there’s plenty of people that are ready to see something for duck hunting. But, you know, in the dead middle of the summer, there’s just not as many people there to fill up the auditorium to listen to you. And it’s really weird.

John Blake Riddle: It’s actually both. So the best way that I figured out to explain this to people is, imagine opening day of duck season. There’s a lot of people to fill the seats in an auditorium room. See what I’m saying? Yeah, there’s plenty of people that are ready to see something for duck hunting. But, you know, in the dead middle of the summer, there’s just not as many people there to fill up the auditorium to listen to you. And it’s really weird. If you’re explaining how to do stuff, that gets shared no matter what, because it’s people gathering information, and they think it’s good enough, they share it to their buddy, like a duck calling tip or using, you know, black spray-painted decoys as being the best decoys in the world. That kind of stuff will always get video views and engagement because you’re trying to help people. And, you know, that’s what I figured out the most with this social media stuff. The more that I tried to help people and give them some entertainment, the algorithm kind of thanks you in a way and lets your videos get it viewed . The weirdest thing about being a—whatever they call this, an influencer.

Ramsey Russell: Are you an influencer, John?

John Blake Riddle: They say that once you get a hundred thousand followers, you’re an influencer, and I got 300,000. So, I might qualify. I don’t know if I’m a professional.

Ramsey Russell: How comfortable are you calling yourself an influencer? Oh, Northeast Mississippi crappie fisherman, duck hunter with Ronnie Captain. How does a guy like Riddle, John Riddle, feel about it? I mean, do you have a business card that says social media influencer?

John Blake Riddle: I don’t.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

John Blake Riddle: It’s so strange, man. Like, halfway through this, like, it’s funny because I was a social butterfly, and I knew a lot of people in the state of Mississippi because I went to two different major universities, and I was always the one who would go up and talk to anybody.

Ramsey Russell: Plus you had the fried fish sandwiches at two in the morning. So, yeah.

John Blake Riddle: I fed everybody. Yeah. So it was really weird to me whenever it’s like the rest of the world came in. It’s like I don’t even live the same life, in a weird way, the life before 330 million people see your face. It’s a strange transition and the weirdest part to me was, all the people that I knew from, like, high school and college, they’re like, “Man, we can’t believe that you’re an influencer.” And I had to write back, “What’s an influencer?” And then I literally had to go Google, “What is an influencer?” And there I was as an influencer, and I didn’t even know what it was, you know? And in the past three or four months, I’ve kind of understood a little bit more of it. But it’s strange, man. We live in a completely different world.

Ramsey Russell: It’s such a weird world, John. It’s a weird world because, you know, here’s John Riddle, Little Riddle Crappie Jigs, you know, an influencer, a legit influencer, 330 million followers. And nonetheless, I bet you there’s 330 million freaking people out there that I see on social media all the time that want to be, that have committed their life, I mean, I’ve asked myself, when the hell did “influencer” become a job description? I mean, is there a college major in this now? Because all these people are turning out with these Only Fans accounts, and not Only Fans like you, but Only Fans and all this stuff, trying to be an influencer. And it’s almost like you either got it or you don’t. It’s like you walk in front of this magical electronic algorithm-type king that says, “You’re an influencer,” or “You’re not, you’re not, you’re not,” or boom, you’re anointed. “I’m going to let you be an influencer.” And I’m no influencer. I just post content, but at the same time, there’s so many people that want to be an influencer and you just made a post about crappie fishing, and bam, it blows up. Isn’t that weird?

John Blake Riddle: You know, see the weird thing that’s happening in the world, and the reason if I had to figure out why I did, what I did work, like you can take for instance a lot of your social media content that we look at now, those are actually fake people talking because this artificial intelligence has gotten so good that you can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake anymore. And as goofy as I am, you couldn’t fake it. So I think the world’s just really wanting, you know, something that’s really authentic and people to be really authentic. And, I don’t know to say therapy or anything like that, but I’ve done a lot of work on myself to try to be comfortable as I am with myself. And for doing that, it requires you to get away from a lot of the bad people in your life. So I think that maybe because I was just being myself the whole time, I’ve noticed that those accounts that are just themselves and are an authentic person, they’re the ones who this algorithm let’s get seen the most.

Ramsey Russell: So you think this script, this algorithm, whatever an algorithm is, and I don’t even know what an algorithm is, I imagine it’s just some equation that runs through the internet, but it can sense, I mean, on the one hand, an algorithm is artificial intelligence, but on the other hand, it craves real human authenticity. And it can sniff out the stereotypical bikini chick pulling back a fake bow versus the real guy. And it’s going to give street cred to that.

John Blake Riddle: Yeah, that’s in a way. You know, the bikini girls, they go and fish and they serve the purpose, but that’s only when it’s hot outside, if that makes sense. But that algorithm, what it’s really doing is none of it works unless there’s a lot of engagement. So if somebody sits there and watches it for more than 5 seconds, instantly it’s going to push it to more people. So it’s actually like the user of social media is what’s causing the algorithm to favor people more and more. The likes, the comments, the shares, the time spent watching the video. So it’s actually the artificial intelligence and the algorithm taking data from the users. So that’s actually how it works. But it’s strange but I think I’ve got it figured out pretty well.

Ramsey Russell: I think you do. You alluded to something just a minute ago, and it’s something I’ve wondered about. Regular folks like yourself, hunters and fishermen, want to be a guide like every other little boy out there, hunting and fishing and just, heck, living a regular life, hunting and fishing, and all of a sudden, bam. All this world, it’s not just the folks in Amory sitting around a counter at Bill’s anymore. It ain’t just the folks going to church or whatever, you know, at the boat ramp. It’s the entire world. The entire world is being fed through this app, a snapshot into your life. So at what point is Little Riddle a function of what that algorithm wants you to be versus who he is? That makes sense. I mean, in other words, how is it beginning to shape who you are and how you act and how you approach life or is it?

John Blake Riddle: I’ve noticed that the more I’m just myself, the better it gets. It’s really funny because when you become a creator, or an influencer, or whatever this is called, you really kind of have to put yourself, you know, second and follow what the audience wants to see. Now, they may at times want to be entertained. They may want to be, you know, they may want to learn something. If you’re constantly just having the self-awareness to say, “What am I doing right now?” and reflect that back to the audience, it usually works. The hardest part about it is actually being yourself every day because, you know, I’ve gotten pretty used to it. But I’ve seen 10 million comments of, you know, “This boy’s an idiot. This is the dumbest thing.” I mean, just the most negative things in the world. And a lot of that even started bleeding over into my real life of people saying, “Oh, he thinks he’s better than everybody,” you know, blah, blah, blah. And the truth is that, you know, with great charisma comes great responsibility. So, what keeps me going every day is that I made a promise with God when I was younger. I said, if I ever got the opportunity to be something influential, that I’d like to be there for all those kids that lost their dad when they were 15 years old and don’t have anybody to look up to.

Ramsey Russell: What I call Internet orphans, John. I think there’s a lot of them on social media, you know, and it goes back to 20 or 30 years ago on the Internet when somebody, back when it was handles, you know, in chatrooms, somebody would post a picture of a duck. You could tell by the hands holding it that it was a little boy asking what kind of duck it was. And all these Internet experts would just waylay him. And I’m sitting there, and it dawns on me, like, this kid ain’t got a daddy. He didn’t have a granddaddy to show him. He didn’t have somebody to put him on their shoulders and teach him this. But he’s wanting to be a part of this. And that’s what I think of as Internet orphans, they’re wanting to be a part of this thing. So why don’t we embrace it and bring them in, to your point?

John Blake Riddle: And that is exactly, so that’s what makes it kind of easy for me. You know, I’ve watched a lot of creators start, go on a rise, and then they fall off because they run out of material or they run out of being authentic to themselves. But I just keep it in the back of my mind that I’m out there for anybody who is in a bad situation and needs some help. I literally respond to every comment, every message. I’ve had people on their deathbeds, you know, write me saying, “You’re the only thing keeping me going.” So that’s the weird thing about being an actual influencer. I see how much what I’m doing affects people out there in the real world, which makes it pretty easy for me to show up and be myself, because that’s what people need the most, a relationship. Because, you know, we’re pretty isolated now that we live on the Internet. And I think how I’m coming across to people, they’re receiving it pretty well because I really just want to help people, whether they want to kill a few more ducks or catch a few more fish or they just want to see me act like an idiot racing boats. I just show up for them every day. You know what I mean? There’s somebody, I’m making a difference in their life. And if it was just one, I think that’s good enough.

Facing Down Trolls

So what I did was, TikTok has this beautiful function called “respond to comment.” So when they would write the comments, I’d get on there and slowly slaughter them in front of 100,000 people. 

Ramsey Russell: How do you deal with the trolls, John? Because, you know, it’s like there are people that exist on the Internet, you wake up in the morning thinking, “What part of my life, what am I going to show these kids? What kind of how-to, what am I going to do?” They wake up saying, “Who am I going to gut like a fish today just because the Internet gives me the opportunity.” How do you deal with that?

John Blake Riddle: So what I did was, TikTok has this beautiful function called “respond to comment.” So when they would write the comments, I’d get on there and slowly slaughter them in front of 100,000 people. You know what I’m saying? So they would bombard me, bombard me. And I just went through and fought every one of them as hard as I could. And I think I’m actually at the point where they don’t want to mess with me anymore because they know I’ll do it. I have a zero-tolerance policy for somebody picking on someone or coming to my page and trying to just troll on me for no reason. I’m okay with the funny stuff, but there comes a point. Like, I had this boy making fun of my dad being dead, you know, he was making videos about it with a hundred thousand followers.

Ramsey Russell: So that’s a line crossed right there. That is a bad line crossed.

John Blake Riddle: I know. So I finally, just in a calm way, called him out on it. I said, “Hey cuz, you know, I’m sorry that you feel so bad about yourself that you’re going to pick on somebody.” And it turned out his daddy, he didn’t even have one. I shut him down from picking on everybody. But at the end of the day, you just don’t do certain things. And I’ve done enough of that in front of the whole world and been that vulnerable in front of so many people that it’s weird that I almost have a little army that goes and attacks people now. I’ve seen a lot of them quit social media, get off the Internet.

The Impact of Social Media on Personal Life

My only dealings, really and truly, with stuff like that was this past year coming back from Australia, posting up a picture of a goose, that can only be found on a very small part of the Earth just because of its distribution. And it’s an ever more long trip getting down to Tasmania, let me tell you. And the anti-hunters from Australia came in. You’d have thought there were 50,000 of them, there probably weren’t but about a hundred.

Ramsey Russell: What a crazy world. You know, my only dealings, really and truly, with stuff like that was this past year coming back from Australia, posting up a picture of a goose, that can only be found on a very small part of the Earth just because of its distribution. And it’s an ever more long trip getting down to Tasmania, let me tell you. And the anti-hunters from Australia came in. You’d have thought there were 50,000 of them, there probably weren’t but about a hundred. And, I mean, they were committed, son. And well, I didn’t have anything to do for 72 hours but fly through, you know, get home. So I responded to them. And the irony of it is, I would say to them, keep commenting, all you’re doing is driving the algorithm to post more because I’m getting engaged more, so by all means. And it took about a week and a half, two weeks, before they finally caught up, like, whoa, we’re making this thread explode. And then they went radio silent on me. But it’s a really weird. God, again, what a strange world we live in that you’re having to talk to people you don’t even know, that don’t know you, over, I don’t know, something going on in this biosphere called the Internet. It’s just weird. It’s weird. So, I wonder how a guy like yourself copes with that. When you go fishing, when you go duck hunting, when you go spend time with your family anymore, John are you on the clock, the TikTok clock? Or do you ever just go out without your phone? I mean, you see what I’m saying? It’s hard to do. It’s like I’m holding both hands up saying, you know, I went, just got back from Argentina for ten weeks, and there wasn’t a time walking to the duck blind, hardly that I didn’t have my phone, you know, gotta take a picture of this, gotta take a picture of that, gotta take a clip, I’m almost a slave to this little old thing. And I’m not near your standpoint, but man, when I get to crawl into a duck blind, I’m thinking of a conversation with my buddy Pat Gregory, big water hunting up in Illinois last year, and the phone wasn’t out. It was just in my pocket where it belongs. And I just hunted with him and Doc, and we just had this great time, just duck hunting. Man, that’s almost rare in this day and age, just duck hunting, because it’s one thing if you’re posting to share with your friends in the world, but it’s something else if you’re made to feel, and I think some of us are, that you have to post, you have to turn out this content. You become a slave. You’re almost like a little worker ant in this system. So I’m asking, how do you reconcile that? How does a guy like yourself, with all these eyeballs on you, and with an income stream coming in, I should say, how do you balance that?

John Blake Riddle: So it’s become to the point now that, to me, it’s not a job. So if anybody gets bored this duck season, get on TikTok, and I go live every morning. You know, you get to watch my whole duck hunt. I finally got enough battery boosters to stay out there until lunch. But I think it’s just a conversation, just like what we’re having now, that I love answering the questions and taking people duck hunting that can’t go that day. I do the same thing with the fishing. It’s because I was a guide for years, and to me, actually going out there by myself is actually boring now. But I enjoy talking to everybody every day with the live feature. I mean, there’ll be 40,000 people every day during duck season watching me out there duck hunting. They ask a thousand questions, I answer a thousand questions, I tell a thousand jokes. They ask how many? I mean, it’s funny. There will be like a cult of 10,000 people every day. They’re going to show up and go duck hunting with me. So it’s a weird thing that I feel like I’m just taking the whole world duck hunting every day, you know, or crappie fishing.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What next for little Riddle? I mean, are you just kind of coasting along till you come to a fork in the road and take it again?

From Duck Hunting on TikTok to YouTube

So I finally have all the stuff ready to do it this duck season, I’m going to try to travel as much as I can and meet more people, and I think it’s going to be a fun year.

John Blake Riddle: No. So I’ve started, about five months ago, I started a YouTube channel to try to film, you know, just the same kind of content, just a more than a minute-long version of it. So I started YouTube about five months ago. I’ve got me about 70,000 followers, and I’m literally just waiting on dove season, early goose season, teal season. I’m going to try to film most everything I do because I’m self-filming it, and I figured out how to do it where it doesn’t bother me.

Ramsey Russell: Are you doing it all on your iPhone?

John Blake Riddle: Oh yeah. Besides, I’ve literally taken a GoPro and screwed it into an 1187 that I have the camera mounted straight down the gun. It’s the coolest because, you know, the shot cam doesn’t quite show where the gun is in relation to the bird. This goes back to me wanting to teach people how to shoot better. With the camera actually on the gun, it blocks the gun, so you have to be able to shoot from like the gun, not all the way to the face, which isn’t a problem for me. And I’m going to try to teach people, you know, correct leads and break the shots down, and you always find a way to keep it interesting. So I’m just going to do the YouTube content and try to get it really established and built a little bit more than it is. I finally got to their creator program, whatever, so I don’t know if anybody’s listening, but if you ever get in the YouTube creator program, get ready, because it’s going to be four months’ worth of paperwork, you know, just to get in. So I finally have all the stuff ready to do it this duck season, I’m going to try to travel as much as I can and meet more people, and I think it’s going to be a fun year. I really do.

Ramsey Russell: Well, we talked about that the other day. I’ve always got room in the front seat, almost always. That’s all I do from September till March is travel, so come on. Just don’t put the camera on me. I don’t like being on camera. Believe it or not, I don’t like it. I will hold it. We talked about that ShotKam. I was telling somebody the other day, you move it real forward so you don’t see the barrel. But I like to see the puff, I like to see that little spark of flame, and it’s made me forget everybody else. It’s made me a better shot. One of the primary ways ShotKam has made me a better shot is I can go back and look at it. Wow, and it blows you away. Now, I’m not cognizant of what that forward projection is, I’m not thinking about it really. It’s still instinctive. But at the same time, when you start looking at that little crosshair relative to a duck at 20, 30, 40, 50 yards and realize how many body lengths in front of that duck you are, it’s one thing. But also, there was a guy many years ago, back around or before the pandemic, a guy in California, the first person I saw posting ShotKam footage. He had a whole channel around it. I ended up having to block him because he kept wanting to tag me and was eating up my feed. I’m like, hey, just quit tagging me in this thing. But he kept doing it, and I soon figured out why he was doing it, but really and truly, he was just a public land hunter. Not that there’s anything wrong with public land hunting, plenty of it. I’m just saying he was going out on public land, and if you really watched his channel, within a week’s time, he might show the same snow goose getting sky-blasted 22 times, right. So it wasn’t just, like, endless amounts of content. I decided I wanted to get one just because it’d be fun, and I could document all these species and all these hunts and stuff I do. But I didn’t realize it was going to make me a better shot. How it made me a better shot is, really and truly, the best footage is when you swing through the bird. You can see it, it’s in slow motion, you see your lead, you pull the trigger, and you follow him to the ground. And what I learned is, just after doing that a bunch of times, it made my swing a whole lot better. I don’t just let it run on autopilot. You don’t get all your captures that way. When the birds set up, boom, I push it on. And you need about a three-second lead on this, but it’s gotta be a three-second lead before it’s guaranteed to start recording. But what I learned is it settled me down. I think the number one shooting advice I would give, there’s all kinds of techniques, we could talk for days about how to shoot a flying bird, but at the end of the day, the number one mistake I think your average duck hunter makes, or bird hunter, or dove hunter, or anybody, is they hurry the shot. Birds are coming in, and everybody’s trying to outshoot everybody, and everybody’s trying to get the jump. Everybody wants the closest bird and the farthest bird, and they’re hurrying. Instead of just taking a deep breath, give yourself a one-Mississippi count on every bird you shoot. Give yourself a one-Mississippi minimum count just to let your brain see that bird’s trajectory, just to see how that target is flying. And if you’ll do that, and if you skip that step, boom, you’re probably going to miss. You’re going to be above, behind, below, or in front. You’re going to miss that bird. If you just give yourself that much time to watch how that bird is flying through the sky and let your brain start doing its math, your brain knows, just let it run its math. Boom, you’ll kill the bird. Am I right? That’s how ShotKam has improved my shooting. That’s why I like to shoot a ShotKam. Besides that, I turn the crosshairs off a lot of times. I just like to see that beautiful slow-motion crunch and the way they tumble and fall. I’m sorry, it ain’t sick, I just love it.

How Far Do You Lead Birds?

The bird’s going to take a line, and you’re just putting a line up there to make it intersect.

John Blake Riddle: I’m the biggest fan of watching ShotKam stuff on the internet. I’ll watch it for hours. Just the shorts, I’ll be like, bam, bam, bam. I love watching people. Because I’m watching people’s gun movements, I’m like, yeah, he gets it. No, he doesn’t. You know? I love just watching triggers get pulled. I’ve got one for you, though, on shooting, so imagine this, when shooting, do we do that in two dimensions or in three dimensions?

Ramsey Russell: That’s a good question. I don’t know, I don’t know. People ask me all the time, how far do you lead birds? I’m like, I have no idea.

John Blake Riddle: So here’s the trick to it. This is the biggest thing, a lot of people, when they see a target, whether it be a duck or a bird or anything, they’re thinking that we’re living in a two-dimensional world. Like, I see it, I’m going to point at it. But what it actually is, is three dimensions, which means that you’re just intersecting angles, like making a triangle. See what I’m saying? Because things aren’t just going left and right, they can be going away. See what I mean? So you’re just—if you think of it just like what you’ve learned with that ShotKam, the slower your gun movements are, and the more steady they are, the more you connect. But the weird thing is, is that you’re moving in three dimensions, and you’re just letting two lines intersect themselves. The bird’s going to take a line, and you’re just putting a line up there to make it intersect.

Ramsey Russell: That’s it.

John Blake Riddle: It’s really strange. Yeah

Ramsey Russell: It is strange like that. How did you become an Orvis shooting instructor, John, and when?

John Blake Riddle: So when I worked at Prairie Wildlife, I got to be exposed to Orvis, all of Orvis’s programs like the Orvis endorsed lodges. There was the Orvis-endorsed wing-shooting guide, Orvis-endorsed shooting instructor, Orvis-endorsed dog training, that was at Wild Rose. But, you know, a lot of the shooting stuff I did was coaching women. I was really good at it because a lot of women don’t really like having their husbands teach them how to shoot because they’re going to be like, “Come here, I’m going to show you how to do it.” But I was just really patient with people and tried to explain shooting in a way that let their eyes do all the work instead of worrying about their hands. Because the only reason people miss is that they don’t trust their eyes and their hands. So I gave a lot of shooting lessons to a lot of women, plus a lot of younger shooters. And man, I’ll tell you what, it’s just one of my favorite things to do, is to watch somebody take that shot and it finally connects in their head. I’m like, well, we finally got out of her head long enough that it all connected. You quit worrying. You know, it’s training the mind to quit thinking so much.

Ramsey Russell: It really is. You know, I think people try to overthink a shot, and I think you gotta let your instinct kick in. I’ve told the story maybe before in a podcast, but my boys were twelve and fourteen. I took them to Argentina, down to visit Uncle Diego at Las Flores. And the ducks were flying. It was late winter, we were having a good time. Every twelve and fourteen-year-old kid that had no formal training. They were decent shots, better than I would at twelve and fourteen, I’ll tell you. And they just one day hit a slump, they couldn’t hit an eight-foot piece of sheetrock five feet away. And it bothered me as a daddy, right? Because we all think our crow is blackest. And we were driving out to a hunt about 20 minutes away, and the radio in the truck had its little thumb drive to put the music in. And man, those guys down there, they love Guns and Roses. They love Metallica. A lot of the same music we listen to here. And “Sandman” came on, and I put it on auto-repeat. And for 20 minutes, we listened to Metallica’s “Sandman” the entire way over. And I stepped out of the truck. We’re going around this little estate, a lot of trees, and a real grassland area, you know, like around North Dakota, where all these trees are up. And that’s where every dove and pigeon in the world comes to roost in the evening. So we’re shooting doves and pigeons that evening, and I can’t get “Sandman” out of my head. It’s stuck on autoplay in my head, and I’m just shooting away and everything else. And there directly, there goes one of the guys that’s been in the truck. He’s singing “Sandman” to himself, you know, coming by. And a little bit later, here comes another one. He’s singing “Sandman” to himself, said, “Whoa, Christianity! Where’s Duncan at?” He goes, and he pointed over to where there was just shooting going on. I go, “Hit?” And he goes, “Oh, sí. Muy bueno.” And I walk over to see what the kids doing, and he’s sitting in the middle of a doughnut hole just formed by shotgun shells. He’s singing “Sandman” at the top of his lungs. Not a care in the world, and there’s stuff dying everywhere, you know, just because he got out of his head, right. Worst thing you can do if you’re missing is think about it. It’s just like hitting a baseball. Just get up and hit the baseball. You can’t think about it. And at least for a purely intuitive amateur shooter like myself, that’s the way I think about it. You can’t think about it. You know something else about it? I’ve got a client that has, I don’t know what, one of those hologram sights on the back of his gun. Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. He swears by it, and he’s a pretty good shot with it, and he’s tried to convince me into getting one. I’m like, no, my favorite shotguns don’t even have a sight bead on them. The guns I grew up shooting didn’t even have a vent rib. If I’m looking at the sight or I’m looking at the barrel, I’m doing it wrong. I mount, I’m looking at the bird all the way through.

John Blake Riddle: Yeah, 100%.

Ramsey Russell: And I don’t. I’ve got this thing. I don’t want to go shoot clay targets either. I think they fly different, and it’s almost like there’s this expectation. This guy’s been duck hunting for ten weeks down in Argentina. I want him on my shooting team. I don’t want to be on the shooting team because I can miss with the best of them. So I try to avoid clay target shooting, especially if it’s a social set and I don’t want any part of it.

John Blake Riddle: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: So anyway, John, I appreciate you. Tell everybody how they can get in touch with you. How can they connect if they’ve not heard of you yet?

John Blake Riddle: So, yeah, you can go to any social media platform and type in Little Riddle or John Blake Riddle and you can find me. I’ve also got a website that is, what’s it called? It’s riddleoutdoors.net. We had to change the website to be compatible with TikTok’s shop feature, so I forgot my website name real quick. But yeah, if anybody’s got a question, you write me on any of these platforms, you’re getting the real person, and I will write you an answer back to whatever question you’ve got.

Ramsey Russell: So, Little Riddle. L-I-T-T-L-E R-I-D-D-L-E. Little Riddle. The Little Riddle. What is the Little Riddle? Where’d that come from?

John Blake Riddle: It was the name of a crappie jig. I was actually, when I was at Ole Miss is when I came up with the idea. I said, there was the Little George, that was a real famous bait back in the day.

Ramsey Russell: I remember that.

John Blake Riddle: So I said, Little Riddle? Doesn’t that sound good? I’m going to call the jig company and name the crappie jig the Little Riddle.

Ramsey Russell: The Little Riddle.

John Blake Riddle: Somehow that stuck and now they call me Little Riddle.

Ramsey Russell: And when folks reach out to you, you do comment. I’ve noticed a lot of real big personalities online, they don’t. And I do. I still do. Of course, I’m much smaller than yourself, but I still feel like I have to. If I get a message in an inbox, I’m going to acknowledge it. I may even write a long response, but I’m going to acknowledge it. I have to. I feel like I have to. I want to. The whole thing about this social media is engagement. And if somebody’s going to take time to say, “Hey, I listen to your podcast, I want to do this. What do you think about that?” Hey, thank you very much for this. Here’s an idea. Here’s somebody I know. That’s the whole point, is to engage. And now I’m not talking to them blindly out there in social media. Boom, I’m talking to them 1-on-1. I invite that kind of stuff. Is that the same? How big might you ever be before you can’t do that like some of these “superstars” that don’t even read their social media? There’s lots of them out there.

Stay True to Yourself While Embracing Opportunities

Kind of like what this girl, what the “Hawk Tuah” girl is going through right now. I swear, dude, as she’s telling her story now that she’s come out, I’m like, I remember when those people showed up. I remember when those people showed up. And my thing was, those people with those agencies and all this stuff, they were just in it to make a bunch of quick money. And they were right.

John Blake Riddle: I’ve had three different opportunities where I’ve been approached, actually, by agents, major record companies, all this kind of stuff. They wanted to handle all this and they said it’s millions and millions of dollars. Kind of like what this girl, what the “Hawk Tuah” girl is going through right now. I swear, dude, as she’s telling her story now that she’s come out, I’m like, I remember when those people showed up. I remember when those people showed up. And my thing was, those people with those agencies and all this stuff, they were just in it to make a bunch of quick money. And they were right. We probably could have made a lot of money really fast. But what was I going to do for the next 40 years of my life? And that’s what I thought was, if I let somebody else manage this and do it all, they’ll never be me. And that’s what got me here. So I turned down all the stuff so where I could still respond to everybody. Because I’m looking at it from a perspective of trying to help people. See what I’m saying? So I’m always going to be at a capacity, where I’ll be able to respond to people. The only times that I don’t respond is when the videos get up to like 6 to 10 million views. But just wait till the next video I post that doesn’t have as many, and that’s where your questions and comments are going to get answered. You get to a certain point when the video has ten or fifteen thousand comments, you can’t respond.

Ramsey Russell: You can’t handle it. You can’t even read it all in a day. Speaking of the Hawk Tool girl.

John Blake Riddle: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Is her fame going to last 15 minutes or beyond? I mean, how much more authentic can you be than having a blue tongue in front of God and everybody talking about spitting on that thing? What do you think about the “Hawk Tool” phenomenon? Because she seems to be calling them agents. I mean, she seems to be riding jets up to New York and everything else. Is this going to fade out or is it going to cruise on?

John Blake Riddle: There will have to be a way that she figures out how to come across as herself, because they’ll eventually run out of content. And that’s what I was scared of because they wanted me to do a boat racing series called Bass Cardinal. And we were going to travel around the whole country racing boats. And I was about to be on the, seriously, on the “Wolf of Wall Street’s” private jet, headed to his place to shoot content. All this crazy stuff that they promise you and everything. But that’s what I was afraid of, was not being sustainable for a long time. And my personality, I want to take people duck hunting and fishing, not just take all their money from the attention real quick and be done with it. So there’s eventually, unless they figure out how to make her a reality TV show, I think that it’ll fade in a year. Yeah, that’d be my guess.

Ramsey Russell: And she becomes a reality personality. I mean, what now? I haven’t seen anything. I mean, the funniest thing she said was the original video. I haven’t seen anything that makes me want to click in and watch her, like it, or do anything.

John Blake Riddle: Yeah. So it’s kind of weird. The world’s changed so much that it’s like, when something gets, like when I had that pontoon video and it was a pretty big video, the world reacts to that very differently now when you’ve got that many eyeballs on you. See what I’m saying? So the way social media works is, and these agencies and all that, they’re just going to try to capitalize on that moment as fast as they can, which is what they did with her.

Ramsey Russell: And then move on to the next sensation.

John Blake Riddle: I just didn’t want to get used, you know what I’m saying? And that’s what was going to happen because once I became whatever it is famous, I was literally signing Autographs.

Ramsey Russell: Or go ahead, say it, you’re a TikTok star.

John Blake Riddle: It’s so strange, dude. I was literally walking up to the gas station, and people are like, “Can I take pictures with you? Can I have your autograph?” And it’s like every time I leave my house now, which I love it, I mean, I’ll talk to anybody, you know what I’m saying? But it’s a real big reality shift, you know what I mean?

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, like when you go to Bill’s, do they lay out the red carpet and have a reserved table for their local TikTok star?

John Blake Riddle: I don’t tell them I’m coming. It’s funny. So I did, it didn’t make sense to me until I started, like I went to, what was the name of that place, Panama City Beach. I went down there and went fishing, right. I didn’t think that there’d be a bunch of people who knew who I was. Yeah, it was nuts. Like, just walking around in public. And that’s why, because I got this perspective, I know how big this reaches, and it’s strange.

Ramsey Russell: What do you do when somebody wants you to sign an autograph? Do you sign it?

John Blake Riddle: I sign it. I keep pens. I keep Sharpies on me every day.

Ramsey Russell: Are you serious?

John Blake Riddle: Yeah, I keep them in my car and in my pocket. No joke. Yeah, we sign all the barrel and stuff like that because they’re like, I went to this thing called Red Crest, which was a professional bass fishing, their biggest tournament of the year. It was in Birmingham. I was there promoting a company that, asked me to help them out, and I really liked the people. It’s called Thump Gel. They were really cool people. And I was in their booth, and I probably signed 200, 300 autographs because I was in a place with 10,000 people that knew me. It was a bunch of little kids, too. And when that first time that happens to you, it’s a little overwhelming when there’s a line for people who want autographs. That’s strange to me.

Ramsey Russell: What is the core demographic of TikTok? Is it kids? Is it grown men? Is it all across the board, like Facebook? What is it? I’m out of Facebook. There aren’t any kids on Facebook anymore. It’s a bunch of old geezers.

John Blake Riddle: Yeah, so it’s literally got to the point where it’s everybody now. I really think so.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

John Blake Riddle: Yeah, even, like, that’s no joke. It’s a lot of mixed people because it’s literally the best social media. It’s the most fun to use. It’s got the best engagement. They really give an opportunity for smaller creators like myself to be seen, finally, you see what I’m saying? The whole world wouldn’t probably know about me if it wasn’t for the opportunity that TikTok gave me. I just tried to make the absolute best out of it.

Ramsey Russell: Well, how is TikTok different than Facebook or Instagram?

John Blake Riddle: It works way more off of engagement. So if you look at Instagram and Facebook, their algorithm doesn’t push stuff as hard because the type of user that’s on Facebook or Instagram is there for something usually more than entertainment. TikTok is kind of like the social media app where everybody goes to have fun, if that makes sense.

Ramsey Russell: It’s almost like what you’re describing is TikTok is kind of crowdsourced and driven. The more the crowd engages, the more it’s going to drive, and TikTok just lets it go wherever it’s going to go. Whereas Meta, Facebook and Instagram might be a little more narrative, like, “Hey, this is the agenda we want to put out.” Is that what you’re saying?

John Blake Riddle: Exactly. You know, I make the joke that everybody says that TikTok’s the Chinese and it’s terrible. And I’m like, man, I’ve got more freedom of speech on TikTok than I have on those other programs, to be honest.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

John Blake Riddle: That’s no joke. But that’s what I’ve noticed is TikTok is like, let the people decide. It’s like the popular vote versus the electoral. I call TikTok the popular vote, and Meta is the electoral vote.

Ramsey Russell: Great, great way to end on last question. What’s the best time of year for me to jump in a duck boat with you and go crappie fishing?

John Blake Riddle: I like any day in February. Any day in February. February 1st all the way to the 28th, man, I catch a bunch of big giants. It’s usually still really cold, and the wind usually hasn’t started blowing real hard. You give me any day in February, and I will catch you a giant.

Ramsey Russell: Wade fishing?

John Blake Riddle: We’d be live-scoping them, at that time of year, but for the wade fishing, that’d be the third week of March to the first week of April. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, John, I appreciate you. Folks, you all been listening to my buddy John Blake Riddle, the original, the real Little Riddle. Go check him out on TikTok and everywhere else. John, I appreciate you, and I guess I’ll be seeing you soon. Come plan on jumping in the truck with me this year.

John Blake Riddle: I’ll bring the shotgun shells.

Ramsey Russell: Folks, see you next time.