Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 863: Building Landshark Outdoors and Turning Viral Fishing Content Into a Career, with Viktor Hluben.

From the Pier to the Beach

Tom Rowland: Viktor, what's going on, man? How are you?

Viktor Hluben: I'm doing great. I'm happy to be here.

Tom Rowland: I'm happy you're here too, man. I've been a fan. I like your stuff.

Viktor Hluben: Thank you. I as well as you.

Tom Rowland: So, Landshark Outdoors, tell me how that started.

Viktor Hluben: It started just like the name sounds. Just a couple of crazy kids back in the day, like 2010, 2011. I grew up fishing the pier and saw these guys, the older guys, catching sharks from the pier, which slowly escalated into trying to catch them off the beach. It just kind of turned into my first form of content creation. I picked up a GoPro, bought some lights, put them on a PVC rig, and I started filming what I thought was really cool: catching sharks from the beach. Growing up not having access to a boat, it was the biggest thing a land-based fisherman could attain, right, was a shark. Perspectives change a little bit when you start fishing offshore and your view of sharks changes. But back in the day it was the pinnacle for me. Catching hammerheads, bull sharks, tiger sharks off the beach, I didn't think there was anything greater. I still have a passion for it even though I don't do it anymore. I still think it's one of the coolest things any land-based fisherman can do.

Tom Rowland: So you grew up around where, Jupiter? Is that where you are?

Viktor Hluben: No, I grew up in the Deerfield, Pompano area. Deerfield Pier was my old stomping grounds.

Tom Rowland: Deerfield Pier. What else do they catch off of that, normally?

Viktor Hluben: Oh, you'd be surprised, a lot of stuff. Pompano, a lot of big kingfish. I would say that pier was really known for trolling rigging for kingfish and the Spanish mackerel run. We used to catch keeper muttons off the pier. After, in October and November, when you got a hard northeast wind, sometimes we would get muttons that push in. You catch a lot of keeper muttons, red grouper. I've seen some pretty incredible stuff that any offshore fisherman would be surprised to see. We've seen sixty-pound amberjacks come and chase the goggle-eyes in the wintertime. It's just a lot of crazy stuff.

Tom Rowland: Wow. And how old are you when you're first fishing this pier?

Viktor Hluben: My dad used to drop me off, or he'd come and sit there and read a book because he hates fishing, which is hilarious because I love it. He'd buy me a pack of squid, and I would go out there and sling my squid. I was like twelve, thirteen. Eventually he'd let me sit out there by myself, and that's where I met a lot of my friends that I'm still friends with today, just fishing the pier. So twelve to fifteen is where I went.

Tom Rowland: What was that like, convincing him that it was time for you to be able to sit out there by yourself?

Viktor Hluben: I had some very protective Eastern European parents. When he saw that the twelve-year-olds were out there by themselves sleeping on the pier, he was like, alright, it's time to let go.

Tom Rowland: Plus he might figure there's only so many books you can read sitting out there. But that seems like an interesting time when you just want to go so bad, and he's supporting you, going out there and sitting and reading the book and buying you the squid and dropping you off. But it's like, man, if you had your way you would've just stayed out there. I remember doing that as a kid, trying to convince my parents: it's okay, I promise, I'm gonna be fine out here. And then they let you eventually.

Viktor Hluben: And we stayed out there literally. There was a group of four guys, and our parents would rotate taking us to the pier. When we were like fourteen, fifteen, they would drop us off on a Friday night, and the pier used to be open twenty-four seven. We would sleep out there. We'd fish all afternoon, catch our bait at night, wake up the next morning so tired sleeping on a plank of wood, and then we'd fish all day until Saturday night. Then Sunday you're just beat. You don't want to do anything Sunday.

Tom Rowland: And then what would you do with all the fish? Bring a big cooler out there?

Viktor Hluben: We got creative. We used to sell it on the pier. I know you're not supposed to, but that's what we did back in the day, hoodlums on the pier. You basically just tried to make your money back so you could fish the next weekend. Your parents would give you twenty dollars, and you'd make it last at 7-Eleven, living off of taquitos and Arizona green teas. Pier admission was four dollars, and back in the day a six-ounce sinker was about a dollar, then it started to be two and three dollars, and it got really expensive. A lot of times we ate what we caught, but a lot of times we sold it, and of course we used it for shark bait.

Tom Rowland: And migrating from the pier to the beach, what is that like?

Viktor Hluben: Someone needs a car, so you've got to find that friend with a car. It was a very different experience. We needed to get a kayak. My buddy Mike Cashman got one at a garage sale for twenty dollars, and we just started going, exploring different beaches. It's all nighttime, because in South Florida the last thing you want to do is draw attention with how crowded our beaches are to catching a shark off the beach. It's not only controversial, but it's also a respect issue with people swimming, so we did it at night when there was no one around. It was one of the best times of my life, in terms of really being the pioneer of your own fishery. You were really discovering it.

Tom Rowland: And one of you would be the kayak person, I'm sure you'd rotate.

Viktor Hluben: I was usually the kayak guy. I didn't mind, but we'd rotate sometimes. If somebody didn't want to go out, like if it was too rough, I would go. I wasn't afraid of it.

The Viral Hammerhead and Good Morning America

Tom Rowland: Do you remember the first time you got something really big, like a hammerhead or a tiger, off the beach?

Viktor Hluben: Yeah, in 2013 I caught one that was around twelve to thirteen feet long. It was in Deerfield Beach, south of the pier, and it was like the third or fourth YouTube video I ever posted, just on a GoPro, a four-minute video. I posted it, and this was very early social media, when Facebook was huge and YouTube was still in its infancy, and it went viral. It went viral locally in the sense that seven or eight different news channels reached out to me by email. They found my phone number somehow. It's crazy even back then how people could find your contact info. I was valeting at the time while I was in college, at a location at the West Boca Bonefish Grill, and I got a call and they said, this is so-and-so from Good Morning America. I was like, no way. So the next day it was my not-yet-wife, my wife Brooke, and my buddy Ben, and we went to my apartment, and they set up this guy from Good Morning America. They did all the lights, and it was my first real fifteen seconds of fame, as they call it. There were lights in your face, and they interviewed us. It was supposed to only be a twenty-second segment airing the next morning, but our slot got pushed out because something else more exciting happened. I don't remember what it was, someone rock climbing got rescued or something, but they went through all that effort and never even aired it. That was the first hammerhead that kind of opened my eyes up to the idea that I could make a potential career out of this.

Tom Rowland: With that, did that first viral video and the attention it got you right away turn into money, or did it just show you that if you do this, money will follow?

Viktor Hluben: Both. I mean, anyone in the fishing community probably knows about BlacktipH. He was definitely the biggest player, and he was a big inspiration of mine. I didn't want to recreate what he was doing, but I saw, hey, this guy's from South Florida, he's creating fishing videos, I could probably do the same thing. He was way ahead, he has a big film background. But that video did produce a lot of money. I'm a pretty open book: I made about four thousand dollars in forty-eight hours from that video, which was insane, especially for a college kid posting a YouTube video. I knew that wasn't going to happen every single time, but I thought, there is a potential for this. That's when I started to take it a little more seriously.

Choosing Content Creation Over Medical School

Tom Rowland: That's interesting. Did your parents ever encourage you toward something else? What was your education, what were you going to college for?

Viktor Hluben: Biology, I was pre-med. I got into medical school in 2015 at a school in Georgia. My wife Brooke went up there with me, went through the whole medical school process, and came home. I was supposed to start medical school in 2016 because I graduated in 2015, and that entire year I was still part-time valeting, but I also wanted to see how far I could take YouTube before starting medical school. At the same time, my grandma was going through cancer treatment, so I was also taking care of her. It was a very crazy year leading up to medical school. It was a few months before I was supposed to start that YouTube just took off, and I was finally able to quit my part-time valet job. There was enough income coming in that I thought I could actually make a career out of this. But then you try to convince your Eastern European dad, who's like, you're going to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer, that you want to make videos on the internet for a living, let alone fishing videos, for someone who did not like fishing at all. There was a lot of pressure, but I actually sent the medical school a deferment letter and told them the truth. I said, listen, I have an incredible opportunity before I commit to a lifelong career in medicine, can I see where I can take this for one year? At the same time I was also my grandma's primary caregiver, because my dad worked a full-time job, so I was taking her from doctor's appointment to doctor's appointment. Anyone who's had a family member with cancer knows that is a full-time job. And they said yes. That year I just kept progressing, and it got progressively better, even though my dad kept saying, it's not going to last. I understood; he came from communism in Eastern Europe, and he wanted the best for his son. They came to America for me to have a better future, but ultimately you have to go with your gut, and my gut told me to pursue this. So here we are.

Tom Rowland: That's wild. When you're just messing around with it and then decide you could quit your part-time job right now and do this full time, what was that like? That's the whole reason we started this podcast, to get to those moments when someone decides they're going to be a fishing guy, they quit their job, they make the jump. So first deciding you're not going to medical school, at least for a year, and then that you're not even going to do the valet job anymore. If you quit the valet job, does that mean you can immediately turn out three times the content?

Viktor Hluben: Yeah, I think it's mostly the availability aspect. A lot of times when you get invited on a fishing trip, you have to make yourself available, and as a valet you're usually working when people have off: Friday, Saturday, Sunday. When I was valeting, I used to film a lot with my wife Brooke, going out on her family's boat, and it was always, you've got to be back in by three o'clock for your shift. So the availability aspect gives you a lot more time to focus on the content and plan out trips. It was still in its infancy; I was not full-time the way I am now. I was pursuing it full time, but I didn't have the same business mindset I have now.

Tom Rowland: A lot's changed since 2013. It's incredible how fast it's changed. Do you expect it to change even faster between now and, say, 2027?

Viktor Hluben: I think the social media environment has stabilized. In 2013 we were just setting up the foundation of what this could be. I don't think anyone realized how big YouTube or Instagram or Facebook was going to be, and it was an entire economy that never existed before. That snowball effect grew exponentially. Now I think the shifts are much slower and more gradual than overnight. Back then it was overnight changing. I think it'll continue to change, but just like with medicine, as a doctor you have to be a lifelong learner, and you know that as a businessman too. As long as you're willing to not be stuck in the past, you're going to make it. That's one thing I always told my dad: he'd say, well, what if it doesn't work? And I'd say, well, what if it does work? If you apply the same principles you'd carry as an engineer or a lawyer or a doctor, if you want to be the best in your field no matter what, you have to read up on your discipline, whatever platform you're on. If you're not constantly engaged and constantly learning about what you're doing, you're not going to be successful at anything you do.

The Hot Seat

Tom Rowland: That's a great segue into the questions. We have what we call the Hot Seat, a series of either-or questions and preference questions, and then at the end a couple of deeper questions similar to what we were just talking about. You ready to roll through it?

Viktor Hluben: I'm ready.

Tom Rowland: Fresh or salt?

Viktor Hluben: Salt, all day.

Tom Rowland: Cooking or catching?

Viktor Hluben: Catching.

Tom Rowland: That was a tight race. Drive or fly?

Viktor Hluben: Fly, all day.

Tom Rowland: Chocolate or vanilla?

Viktor Hluben: Chocolate.

Tom Rowland: Text or call?

Viktor Hluben: Call.

Tom Rowland: Favorite social media platform?

Viktor Hluben: YouTube.

Tom Rowland: Answer every comment, or never look at them?

Viktor Hluben: The first day, I try to answer as many as possible.

Tom Rowland: Would you rather have a million dollars now or ten million later?

Viktor Hluben: Depends on how I could turn that million into ten million, but ten million later.

Tom Rowland: One thing you've learned in the last year that has made you money?

Viktor Hluben: To listen to people, and to know your strengths but also know your weaknesses.

Tom Rowland: The most challenging thing about Landshark?

Viktor Hluben: Constantly evolving with the platform, trying to stay relevant and not getting burned out.

Tom Rowland: The easiest thing about Landshark?

Viktor Hluben: Being a full-time content creator, I'd say the flexibility of the work-life balance. You can work as much or as little as you want to.

Tom Rowland: A movie that makes you laugh?

Viktor Hluben: Forrest Gump.

Tom Rowland: Would you have a reptile as a pet? A non-fishing destination you'd like to visit?

Viktor Hluben: Iceland.

Tom Rowland: Me too, although it's pretty good fishing over there too. Top fishing destination on your bucket list?

Viktor Hluben: Probably Indonesia.

Tom Rowland: One species you'd like to catch?

Viktor Hluben: Napoleon wrasse.

Tom Rowland: That's big. One thing you've changed your mind on in the last two years?

Viktor Hluben: To not judge people with preconceived notions.

Tom Rowland: And one piece of advice you live by?

Viktor Hluben: Just to be friendly to people.

Tom Rowland: What about the preconceived notion one?

Viktor Hluben: I think that comes with age. I'm thirty-two, and I think that to have the best relationships, both business and personal, you really have to try to put yourself in someone else's shoes. That's what I've really been trying to focus on in the last year, because not everybody comes from the same background as you, not everyone had the same struggles as you. There's something to learn from everyone who is around your life, whether you like them or not, and you can turn it into a positive experience.

Family Fishing Roots and Slovakian Carp Traditions

Tom Rowland: When you were a kid, if your dad didn't fish, what started you fishing?

Viktor Hluben: Actually, my dad's sister, my aunt, used to take my cousin and me fishing. She was dating a man in Sarasota, so we would go over there a lot, fish the Anna Maria Pier, and he would also take us on charters. We used to fish Marco Island a lot, and the Keys a lot. I remember going to Bud N' Mary's, where the Stanczyk family is from, and we had one of the most amazing days of dolphin fishing, back when they used to put them in trash cans. You'd come home with sixty dolphin and not even know what to do with all the meat. I don't think I realized how special those days were at the time. I used to go on all these charters and go to the pier, go to the docks. My aunt also used to live on the intercoastal in Boca, and my cousin and I would get a pack of shrimp and premade steel leaders with beads and cast them out. I remember my dad took us to Sports Authority, back when that was still a thing, and got my cousin and me rods. We used to think conventional reels were called professional pulls; we didn't realize it was just a different application, we just wanted professional pulls. He got them for us, and we kept backlashing after backlash, not understanding what we were doing wrong.

Tom Rowland: Man, you must be good now to be a professional.

Viktor Hluben: It's funny, my mom is the most girly girl on earth, least fishy person, but her mom is a country woman who makes her own wine. My family is from Slovakia, and my mom's mom makes her own wine and her own bread. She's this big, burly Slovakian woman. For Christmas it's tradition to eat carp for dinner, and my mom would tell me that growing up they'd have a carp in their bathtub for Christmas dinner because they wanted to eat the fish as fresh as possible. My grandma would catch a carp, put it in the bathtub, and it'd be there for two days before they butchered it for Christmas dinner. She has the fishing genes, she loves to fish, she's a huge carp fisherman in Slovakia. But somehow it skipped past my mom, my dad, my grandma hated fishing. So it's just me and my aunt who really liked it.

Tom Rowland: Have you been back over there to check out the carp fishing in Slovakia?

Viktor Hluben: No, but I'm going for the first time. My dad and mom have both been a lot, but I'm taking my wife and I in May, for the first time ever.

European Carp Fishing Culture

Tom Rowland: Dude, have you checked into the carp fishing culture in Europe? It's a really big deal.

Viktor Hluben: Yeah, these guys have their secret recipes, from strawberries to flour ratio, to everything.

Tom Rowland: It's crazy. When I was a trout fishing guide, my sister, who lives in England, sent me some magazines, basically their version of Field and Stream, called Angling Times, and it's all about carp. I thought it was a joke. They had all these carp and were showing all the different ways to do it, and it's incredible. They're so technically savvy over there, and the carp must be really hard to catch, because with the recipes and the chumming and the way they do it, it's really, really hard. I've had a few people, including the guitarist for Iron Maiden, who is a huge fisherman and loves carp fishing, tell me all about it. I mean, you think your videos are doing well over here; when you start making carp videos, you're going to really do well. I really haven't seen that many carp videos on YouTube, maybe I'm just not getting served them up like I do the saltwater videos, but those people are crazy about it, and there's some really big fish over there, all over Europe. I don't know what Slovakia would be like, but I think it's difficult to find places to fish over there. We kind of take it for granted how great we have it in certain states here. You look at a state like Idaho, almost the entire state is green, you can go anywhere you want. In Florida you can fish so many places, and that's one of the things that's so great about America, having that access. Not everywhere has it like that.

Viktor Hluben: No, especially in Florida we're really blessed, because if you really want to catch a fish any time of day, cold front or not, three hundred sixty-five days a year, you have access to water in Florida.

Tom Rowland: Do you spend much time freshwater fishing?

Viktor Hluben: Not really, I'm not too passionate about it. Snakeheads, though. Bullseye snakehead, that's my jam, that's what I like.

Tom Rowland: What kind of tackle do you like to fish those with? Do you use a professional pole?

Viktor Hluben: Frog fishing for bullseye snakeheads. I use a baitcaster with a line winder, so it's a lot harder to backlash.

Baitcasters, Spinning Rods, and Regional Fishing Cultures

Tom Rowland: They've gotten a little better, more professional these days than they were, but still, I'd probably opt for a spinning rod. I'd see that all the time when we were doing the redfish tournaments, and when we got over to Texas those guys all fished with baitcasters, throwing a quarter-ounce jig really well. But I always thought, man, that's too risky, in a tournament, fishing for money, casting right into the wind. I just don't do it enough, but that's all they use over there. There was this dividing line, somewhere around Louisiana, where it was kind of half and half, baitcasters and spin, and then Florida is way more spin, but when you get over to Texas nobody uses spinning rods, or at least they certainly didn't a long time ago.

Viktor Hluben: It's interesting you bring that up. Have you fished much in California?

Tom Rowland: No, not really.

Viktor Hluben: Those guys are big anti-spin. All the offshore guys there are conventionals only. They prefer to cast the surface iron in applications that would make sense for a spinning reel, all conventional. Those guys are diehard Penn guys on the West Coast.

Tom Rowland: It's funny how that happens, I don't know exactly how, but I think it's kind of an evolution toward that.

Viktor Hluben: It's funny because it's the most progressive state, but they're the most backwards when it comes to their fishing practices.

Tom Rowland: Well, when you see what the offshore guys do with a spinning rod in Florida, it seems pretty good. You can put a lot of pressure on a fish with a spinning rod, and the applications are incredible. I prefer a spinning rod over a baitcaster.

Viktor Hluben: For me too, and as a content creator, I don't know if you ever think about this with TV as well: if I'm a viewer watching someone catch a fish on a spinning rod versus a conventional, hearing that drag is such an exciting sound and experience, and you don't get that with a conventional.

Foley Sound and the Craft of Video Content

Tom Rowland: Not as much, although you can have a clicker with an offshore reel, but also the braid going through the guides has a sound that mono didn't used to have. That's a whole new sound over the last ten, fifteen years as braid has become popular. All of those things you're talking about, we think about that in TV too. You even have Foley studios where they'll add extra sounds to video. If you're watching something and you hear sounds like someone walking across a gravel parking lot, they're not picking that up with a microphone; there's somebody in post-production with all these tools, coconuts, shoes, rocks and gravel and sand, and they'll watch the video and match the sound perfectly. It really adds to it. I see people doing it now with fish sounds even on YouTube, like when a fish bites a lure from way out and it sounds like the microphone was right next to it. That's an added sound. There are people who make their living just doing Foley for movies, and they probably make an incredible living at it. If you go to one of those studios it's amazing, because it's all audio, so all the walls are carpeted and it's all quiet in there. Do you do that with any of your videos, add sound?

Viktor Hluben: I've had my cameraman and editor, Dennis, do it on a couple of videos, like you're saying, where especially with birds, if you're flying the drone and you see a bunch of birds, we'll put in seagulls or waves crashing, or some dramatic sound when you're about to do a hookset. So we've used it a couple of times.

Content Creation Pace and Avoiding Burnout

Tom Rowland: How many videos are you doing a year?

Viktor Hluben: The goal is one a week, so fifty-two a year. That's the sweet spot where your demand stays high and your supply matches it. If you start to get too much out there, the quality will just suffer, because for me at least, I need to do things I'm passionate about, and the audience is going to tell if you're not passionate about something. I'll get excited going and catching barracuda and cleaning them and eating them. But the other day we tried to film a crappie video at Lake Okeechobee, and it was just so slow, nothing against crappie, it's a great, universal, relatable fish, but it was so slow that your attitude and emotions, which get evoked through the video, weren't there. If I'm not excited, I don't think someone else is going to be excited, so we just ended up not creating that video.

Tom Rowland: What about creating the video about how slow it is?

Viktor Hluben: We've done that before.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I did that last year. I think we fished for tarpon, fly fishing, and there were tons of fish, but they were really tough to bite. We fished for three days and hooked two fish, and that was the show, how hard it is, and people loved it. A lot of people told me, finally you showed it the way it actually is, instead of catching six tarpon on fly in twenty-two minutes, making it look like anybody can do it. It's pretty hard.

From Pier Kid to Chef: Viktor's Cooking Journey

Tom Rowland: So where did the cooking come from with you?

Viktor Hluben: I'd say my grandma. She's my biggest inspiration for cooking. She loved cooking for her family, sometimes too much, she'd cook a meal and everyone would have leftovers for days. She never learned to drive, or ride a bike, or swim, but she'd cook a meal, we'd have leftovers for three days, and she'd still want us to take her to Publix to go cook something else, because she always wanted to try new recipes. She didn't care if she threw food out, she just wanted to cook for her family. I think seeing how happy that made her made me want to take it up, and I've been cooking since I was about seventeen, progressively getting better. About three or four years ago, a subscriber named James, who's my good friend now, one of my best friends, reached out. He's a chef, and he said, hey, would you ever want to have me on your show, I think we could do something really cool, a recipe, an actual chef. I said yeah, so we went out, caught snakeheads, and he cooked for the family and me. My cooking from that moment forward has just progressively gotten that much better. Now I almost start with the end product and work my way backwards, especially with plating and the aesthetic of food. You asked earlier if I like catching or cooking more, it goes back and forth. I love cooking, I love seeing the look on people's faces when they're really enjoying something, and the endless possibilities of what you can create with a dish, especially with fish. I have a saying on my channel: no such thing as trash fish, just trash cooks. I've eaten almost every single fish you can imagine on the channel: stingrays, snakeheads, clown knife fish, chub.

No Such Thing as Trash Fish

Tom Rowland: I saw the clown knife fish video. Is chub good?

Viktor Hluben: Amazing. I can tell you right now, because I've done this before with friends: if I took a random group of ten people, blindfolded them, and served them chub and yellowtail snapper, I promise you almost every single person would choose chub over yellowtail snapper.

Tom Rowland: Really? Is it a fillet? Do you fillet it just like a yellowtail? So the presentation is very similar?

Viktor Hluben: Yes, a hundred percent. The only difference is that people have these preconceived notions based on the way the fish looks and smells, same thing with barracuda. Barracudas, for some reason, have a very foul-smelling slime to them, but when you actually fillet and skin them, they're amazing. You see all the Bahamians, you've been to the Bahamas.

Tom Rowland: Always. And not just there, but in Mexico, in Christmas Island, every island culture I've ever been to loves barracuda.

Viktor Hluben: Yep. And ciguatera isn't a myth, it's a real thing, but your chances of getting it, especially in the States, are so low. The people who get ciguatera in the States are usually the ones eating fish from the Bahamas or somewhere else where the supplier got it. I don't eat those giant reef fish from the Bahamas, but you have just as much likelihood of getting ciguatera from a big hogfish in the Bahamas as you do from a big barracuda.

Tom Rowland: So why do you think the Bahamas is any different than the United States? It's only ninety to two hundred fifty miles away.

Viktor Hluben: It was explained to me by several people that our water quality just isn't good enough to support the dinoflagellate that creates the ciguatera toxin. You need really, really clean, pristine water, and that's what you have in the Bahamas.

Tom Rowland: Isn't that funny, the higher the water quality, the more possibility of ciguatera. I've never heard that before. But the Bahamians eat barracuda all the time.

Viktor Hluben: Yeah.

Tom Rowland: When I went to Christmas Island, not only did they eat barracuda, but if you caught one they'd leave it out in the sunshine for a long time before they ate it, even with a refrigerator right there. I brought in a tuna and a wahoo we'd caught, cleaned them, took them into the kitchen, and asked where they wanted me to put them. She said, right here. We went and took a shower, and I thought, maybe I should go check on that fish, and it was just sitting there, one foot from the refrigerator. That's just not part of what they do, and they don't get sick.

Viktor Hluben: In Western culture it's very customary to only ice your fish. After I started traveling to Central America, about three years ago, my eyes were opened, because the first time I saw fish being processed over there, it didn't look like the fish here. In Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, not every operation runs the same, but those panga guys, the commercial fishermen, go out for two or three days and don't always ice their fish. You can tell the difference, but it's still fresh fish, not as good as fish you get in the States, but definitely edible. People have this idea that if your fish doesn't go on ice right away it's rotten or bad, but no, people all around the world eat fish that hasn't been iced.

Tom Rowland: For sure. I've seen that happen in a lot of different places, and they just don't have the same deal as we do, though I'll still ice mine if I have the choice. It's funny, a lot of the fish you get, even in places where you'd think they're buying right off the dock, is actually coming from Mexico or the Bahamas or somewhere else. Even in the Keys, a lot of restaurants buy fish that isn't local.

Viktor Hluben: I've heard it's not local.

Tom Rowland: Most aren't, and the locals know what is local, and those are the best restaurants. They're buying local, but I think it's been made difficult for fishermen to sell and for restaurants to buy the best fish right off the dock, which is a real shame.

Favorite Eating Fish

Viktor Hluben: Question for you: what is your favorite eating fish?

Tom Rowland: Easy, gray snapper, mangrove snapper. Love it. I like the entire snapper family, probably more than the grouper family, don't know why exactly, but I'd rather eat a snapper than a grouper. And I like all the offshore fish, wahoo and tuna. There's some other fish that are really good too, like cero mackerel, a fish not a lot of people think about, kind of the captain's choice, when a cero comes in a lot of times that one goes in the special cooler on the side, because it's going home with the captain.

Viktor Hluben: That's a good one. I like African pompano.

Tom Rowland: Yes, for sure, African pompano is outstanding, a lot of people are getting them right now, good time of year for them. Permit's good too, people might be surprised, but sometimes they get bitten in half by a shark and we're taking the end that still has meat on it and we'll eat that permit. Pompano, permit, those thick, dense fish, are good. Yellowjack, really good. What about you, is there a fish you've learned how to eat that people aren't really eating? I saw you doing the clown knife fish and saying it's so mushy you have to get it off with a spoon, and then you made a fish cake out of it. What other fish have you learned to eat that people aren't really eating?

Viktor Hluben: Ladyfish is the exact same way, clown knife fish, those are the two that come to mind, fish always labeled as trash fish, not because of the flavor of the flesh, but because of the preparation you have to do to get your final product. Ladyfish are so mushy that if you were to filet it and cook it, there's no texture, no bite, no flake, but that doesn't necessarily mean the fish is bad. It's just that you, as a chef or someone who prepares the fish, need to know how to prepare it. If I told you the best way to cook a ribeye is to mince it into a thousand pieces and make it into ground beef, that's doing an injustice to that ribeye. Or if I told you to eat this chicken raw, no, but you should eat wahoo raw, you should eat tuna raw. Every protein source has a right and wrong way to cook it. With the ladyfish, you scrape the meat off, leave all the bones on the skeleton, same thing with the clown knife fish. If you smell that fish, there's nothing wrong with it, it doesn't taste bad, you just have to form it into something presentable. That's where the fish cake comes in, but I've made it into many different things, like fish balls, mincing it with ginger, garlic, cilantro, putting it into boiling water, kind of like a pho or ramen-type dish. The number one thing that frustrates me when I do these trash-fish catch-and-cook videos is people say, well, you had to do so much to dress it up. And I say, well, yeah, every protein has to be treated differently. If I gave you a spoiled piece of chicken and mixed it with ginger, garlic, and cilantro and cooked it, it's not going to taste good, because once something is bad or inherently doesn't have good flavor, you're going to see it no matter what you do to it. If you eat beef liver and don't like beef liver, I don't care what you do to it, you're not going to like beef liver. But if you cook a fish and make it into a beautiful dish and like it, that doesn't mean the fish is bad, it just needed some doctoring up.

Turning "Trash Fish" into Delicacies

Tom Rowland: One of my friends, Tom Pierce, used to fish these tournaments in the Bahamas where they'd catch bluefin, and at the end of the tournament they'd tie the bluefin together by the tail and drag them out to the end of the bar and sink them. People used to think that way about bluefin tuna, and now that's a twenty-five-thousand-dollar fish.

Viktor Hluben: Same thing with lobster, same thing with ribs. Ribs used to be a poor man's protein source. It's funny, my family's from Slovakia, and when they came over here they were astounded that things like chicken hearts and beef liver were so cheap. Now it's becoming trendy to eat these things, and the price is going up because the demand is there. It's funny how artificially we perceive things and give them value.

Tom Rowland: What does it take to turn a fish from something you wouldn't necessarily deem a delicacy into something that is? The greatest example is probably the lionfish, something no one ate before, and now you actually see it on menus in some places.

Viktor Hluben: I think just content creation. You tell one neighbor about it, that neighbor tells a neighbor, but you can do it through the masses with video. You get certain chefs or restaurants to prepare these fish, someone tries it, and it's about getting someone over that preconceived notion, and once they get over it, they might like it.

Tom Rowland: I once went to an event with the chef Alton Brown, do you know who he is? He does a lot of that kind of thing, taking something not known as a good fish or dish and making it into something beautiful. He had this idea around the invasive carp in the Illinois River, the ones you see jumping in the boats, jumping everywhere, so many that it's a big problem, pushing other fish out. His idea was that if they were considered a food source, that would take care of itself, since you could easily catch tons of them. He had an event where he took those fish and created several different dishes, served like a three-course meal, all different variations of that fish, a fish ball, a filet, and it was really good, honestly. That's the way to do it, and that's what people are hoping with lionfish, that if people think they're really good to eat, and go out there spearing them all the time, that decreases the population. Though that's yet to be seen. People go out there and spear hundreds of those things, and the ocean's got no fences.

Viktor Hluben: The ocean's got no fences.

Tom Rowland: Right, no fences, and they don't have that many predators. I know some people have been trying to teach mud snapper to eat them off a spear, but there's not a lot of video of one just chasing down a lionfish and eating it on its own.

Viktor Hluben: No, never. I've speared them myself and fed them to nurse sharks, but on their own they look like the most helpless little fish, slow moving, like they know nothing's going to mess with them.

Tom Rowland: I wonder how they ended up in the state they're in now. I think everybody's heard the rumors that maybe it was an aquarium release, Atlantis or something.

Viktor Hluben: It's tough to imagine, because even if they released three, what are the chances those three lionfish make it to the same rock and then breed and find each other? It's crazy to think that in an ocean that big.

Tom Rowland: I know. And how do they get all the way over here? But I guess, like you said, the ocean has no fences, and it has lots of currents. We were just doing a podcast the other day about bonefish, and the way the ocean currents move, fish will move to an area that, by instinct, they know is their spawning area. That may also be an area where the currents will disperse those fertilized eggs to a place where they can grow up right. We've tried to figure out what it is and why they're doing what they're doing, but there's still things we don't know.

Viktor Hluben: It amazes me too. We went shrimping the other night, this time of year is when the shrimp run, and I was just thinking, a shrimp is this small, it has to have the tiniest brain, yet it knows when there's a full moon and a southeast wind and the right tide, which happens all summer long. Why don't they run in the summertime? They know that between December and April they're going to flush out of Biscayne Bay and work their way up the coast. An animal that small.

Tom Rowland: It's like a palolo worm, they do that once or twice, maybe three times a year at most that we know of, but it could be they only do it where we can see them, that one time of year. It could be happening in a hundred and fifty feet of water and nobody would ever know. We had a podcast with my friend Mike Larkin, a very good and experienced fisheries biologist who's done a tremendous amount of work on bonefish. He was talking about a bonefish that was tagged in Key Biscayne by Joe Gonzalez, a very famous fishing guide, rest in peace, so a reputable person tagged it, and it swam over to the Bahamas, where someone I'd fished with a bunch of times, Brian Harris, a dermatologist, caught it. He took a picture of the tag and reported it, and these scientists were like, no way, that's impossible. But it happened, and it's happened probably a lot of other times. I wonder why there's that closed-mindedness about something like a fish that just has to swim a hundred miles. We know of tons of fish that swim hundreds of miles, so we don't know for sure that bonefish do that, but it seems like they would. That's what a tag is for, you tag it here, it gets caught there, doesn't that prove it went to a different place? But he was met with real disagreement, and he couldn't figure it out either. This dermatologist in Tampa, who has zero to gain from it, has no reason to lie about tagging a bonefish, it could only discredit him. Anyway, it's kind of funny how that stuff happens.

The Future of Content Creation

Tom Rowland: So if you were to predict the future here, what do you think the next few years look like for you?

Viktor Hluben: Definitely kids, on the personal side. I would love to have kids. And on the work side, I don't want it to sound mundane, but I'd love to just keep doing what I'm doing, every year exploring a different fishery, filming videos, keep doing the catch-clean-cook thing. I really like it when we meet fans in public, whether at Publix or the beach, and they say, we've learned so much from you. I think especially the local aspect, because we film a lot of videos out of Hillsborough Inlet, and there's a lot of people, especially since COVID, who moved down here and it's their first time getting their feet wet. If you could just give them one tip. I remember when I started out, I was so excited to catch a blue runner or my first mackerel, and I can only imagine the satisfaction these people get catching their first kingfish or dolphin, knowing you gave them the help to catch it, and then they watch a filet video and think, okay, I know how to filet this thing, and then they get a recipe, and it just makes their day. I love putting myself back in their shoes from when I first started. You've been doing this a lot longer than me, and I'm sure you still have the same passion, but you've become a little desensitized, catching your seven-thousandth blue runner isn't as exciting as the first. Seeing people react to your videos and the impact you have on their lives is what I like most about our job. I was in Publix yesterday and got recognized. No matter where you are, I recently took up surfing, and there's a huge overlap between surfers and fishermen I never realized. Now I'll be out in the lineup surfing and someone says, are you a Landshark? And I say yeah, and we start talking about the videos, and they say, we didn't know you surfed, and I say, I didn't either, I just started. The impact you have on people's lives is really special. There's a lot of personal satisfaction I get from making a good video or catching a new fish or going to a different fishery, but at the end of the day I realize I'm not doing it for myself, I'm doing it so people can be entertained or get some value out of it, or learning. We always try to keep family at the center of what we do, so at the end of almost every video I'm cooking for my family or Brooke's family, and I like showing people that even in this day and age, a thirty-two-year-old guy with his wife is cooking for their family on a Friday night, not going out. I like that. Just continuing to expand, and I'd like to come out with products eventually, apparel or fishing tackle, it's just something I've dragged my feet on because when I do it I want to do it the right way, finding the balance between content creation and approaching that side of the business, because that's going to take full-time effort.

Tom Rowland: Well, you're doing a great job with what you're doing, the videos are awesome. Is it Landshark everywhere?

Viktor Hluben: Landshark Outdoors on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook.

Tom Rowland: How's TikTok for you?

Viktor Hluben: Oh, it's funny you bring that up, I just spent all morning deleting like a hundred videos.

Tom Rowland: Why would you delete them?

Viktor Hluben: I've heard mixed things. TikTok, like we talked about the platform changing, I used to be a lot more consistent, and then I stopped posting on it, and I think the algorithm recognizes when you don't post. People call it shadow banning, but it's not really that, it's just the algorithm realizing you weren't doing as well as you once were, so it's not going to give you the same love. I was deleting videos that don't match up with the style of content I'm posting now, which is much more storytelling rather than quick five- to ten-second viral clips. It's a constant learning process. I think if people could realize one thing, it's that this is a full-time job. It's not, I wake up, film a video, and have the rest of the week off. My brain is thinking twenty-four seven about the next thing I can do, making sure to stay relevant, walking a fine line of not boring people but still entertaining them, while also doing things you enjoy.

Tom Rowland: Right, that's the real trick, because all of a sudden it becomes something you don't like doing. I've seen that with a lot of people who make content for YouTube, where this video has to be better than the one before, and it has to keep getting better, and you get into this constant state of one-upping yourself.

Viktor Hluben: The MrBeast effect.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's tough. We've never felt that way on TV, even though we've got two hundred fifty episodes I think, they're all different, this one doesn't have to be better than the last one, it just needs to be different than the last one. But there's a lot of people out there where it has to be better and crazier, with a bigger superstar or something bigger, and I could imagine that's incredibly fatiguing for some people.

Viktor Hluben: Yeah.

Tom Rowland: But other people just thrive on it, that's what they're doing. Your stuff seems really good, so if you're not following Landshark Outdoors, you should. Whatever your favorite platform is, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, anything else?

Viktor Hluben: No, that's it, that's a plate full right there.

Tom Rowland: Do you think there'll be a new platform? We've been kind of stale on the creation of new platforms. For a while it was Facebook was everything, then YouTube, then Instagram pops up, then TikTok pops up, then some go away, but it seems like for the last couple of years it's been pretty much the same players, and I haven't noticed a lot of other platforms coming along. Snapchat was huge with my kids for a while, but that didn't seem like something you could create for necessarily.

Viktor Hluben: I think it would be ignorant of us to say nothing else will come along, but like you said, these companies, Google, Meta, have so much capital that they're not going away. Even if something does come along, I think the only reason TikTok hasn't been acquired is because it's not a US-based company, otherwise Meta or Google would have acquired it a long time ago just to squash it.

Tom Rowland: I liked Vine, and then that got bought and squashed.

Viktor Hluben: I think the players that are here are here to stay. They might have to share some of the market with a newer company, but I don't really know. I think the next step would be something like virtual reality, which is basically live. I mean, all these platforms support live already, but I think people are going to be much more interested in the live aspect of people's lives, so instead of posting and creating content, it's, come and spend the day with me in real time.

Fitness, Aging, and the Fishing Guide Lifestyle

Tom Rowland: I see that happening, but I think until we get away from these headsets, it's got to be something more seamless. I saw the other day this omnidirectional mat you can wear with a virtual headset, and if you were to walk, you'd just start walking but not actually go anywhere, it just feels like you're walking. You could be walking this way and I could be walking that way, standing right next to each other, but you're in your virtual reality world, and it feels like the ground is moving under your feet, pretty realistic. But until you get away from the mats and the headsets, it seems too early.

Viktor Hluben: Have you used one of those headsets?

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I've used one. I don't like it either. I don't even like wearing two headphones at the same time, if I'm running or working out I like only one, so I can hear cars or whatever. I'm sitting here with two headsets on right now, but unless I'm doing something like this where there's no external thing to worry about, I use one. That's what I feel with the VR headset, I feel completely exposed to anything in the real world, like I could walk off a stair or a cliff and not know it. You're so immersed in that virtual world that you're not aware of what's actually going on. You're not going to hurt yourself in the virtual world, but you could break your ankle falling down actual stairs. I'm not crazy about them, and I don't think we're alone in that. I think that's what's really holding it back. If you had something like a contact lens, or some sort of wearable that could do everything Google Glass tried to do, or even just glasses that are much more low-profile than these headsets, or it turns into something like Iron Man where a hologram just pops up, that would be cool. Once that kind of stuff happens, I think it really takes off, but until then most people aren't going to fully buy in.

Viktor Hluben: Yeah, agreed.

Tom Rowland: But when they do, we can take them fishing all day long, and although it might not be as much fun as they thought, because they caught way more fish in a twenty-minute video than in a nineteen-hour fishing trip, sometimes you've got to show them what that's really about too.

Viktor Hluben: We're going to start with the morning of getting all the stuff ready, getting the boat ready, so they can have the full experience, and then cleaning the boat.

Tom Rowland: And if you could insert the feeling of very little sleep the night before because you're too excited, then waking up at three-thirty so you can get everything ready, catch the bait, so you can actually go fishing at eleven o'clock, that's more along the lines of reality.

Viktor Hluben: I'd say that's my least favorite thing about fishing. I know you're big into fitness and strength training, and I am too, and fishing and lifting are so not conducive to one another. Fishing ruins your sleep schedule.

Tom Rowland: It does. What do you do for fitness?

Viktor Hluben: I do a push-pull-legs routine, three days a week, and I've been trying to do yoga lately for the surfing. My mindset's shifted a lot, the older you get, I mean I'm only thirty-two, but I can already feel it in my joints, just trying to be nimble and agile rather than as big as possible.

Tom Rowland: Agile and fast translates to agile and old, and that's what you really want, to be able to move when you're older. At thirty-two you don't even notice it, but at forty-two you start noticing, and at fifty-two it's definitely there. For some people it's debilitating, and for others they feel like they did when they were twenty-two.

Viktor Hluben: For me, you're a big inspiration in terms of that, because nobody in the fishing community is really doing what you're doing with the lifestyle. I think it's important, because if you look at the average fisherman, they're generally out of shape, there's a lot of beer drinking going on, and I hate to see it. I want to see people thrive when they're older. I don't think people realize that what you're doing in your thirties is shaping up your entire foundation for when you save up all this money to retire.

Tom Rowland: And then you can't do what you'd hoped your entire life you'd be able to do once you finally have enough money to buy the thirty-six-footer, because your knees hurt so bad you can't go. I started sharing what I was doing on the physical side mostly for guides, professional guides, because so many guides have bad backs, they've hurt themselves in some way, their knees hurt, and if you just did some basic things you could extend your career by twenty years, be so much more comfortable doing what you're doing, and be so much better at it than you currently are. So many guides get into too much drinking, too much sun, not enough sleep, and not enough activity, even though it's a very active job in some ways and not in others. You take somebody fishing for the first time who doesn't go often, they're exhausted at the end of the day, wiped out, but somebody who does it every single day can do that same thing for a hundred and fifty days in a row. There's a certain type of fitness and conditioning they've gotten good at, like sea legs. It's like wrestling for the first time, if you're all tight and intense you burn up and can't last twenty-five seconds, but somebody more experienced is more relaxed and can go a lot longer. Same thing being on a boat, the first time somebody gets on a boat every step is unsteady, they look like a scared cat, and then you see somebody who's got their sea legs, moving with the boat without even thinking about it. A lot of guides get into this thing where they put on extra weight and then they're lifting heavy coolers and heavy stuff all day, the boat off the trailer, and they hurt their back. That's a bad deal, because being a fishing guide is like being a professional athlete, if you're hurt you've still got to go or you don't make any money, so it's all about your body. I started sharing all that stuff mostly for guides, but some other people liked it too. It's pretty much an uphill battle to introduce fitness to the fishing community, because not that many people are into it.

Viktor Hluben: Nope. I don't think I've ever met a less fit group of individuals than fishermen, as a niche.

Tom Rowland: You think so? There's a lot of different types of fishing, and some fishing is certainly more athletic than others.

Viktor Hluben: The fly fishing guides who are poling people around, those guys are fit, you've got to be in shape for that.

Tom Rowland: Well, you do, but even then, you can be in shape to pole somebody around for eight to ten hours a day, but could you run a mile? A lot of them, definitely not. But that's kind of the guide body, big shoulders, big gut, able to pole for days and days, also big strong forearms and grip from holding the pole. There are a lot of guys in really good shape, but a lot who just aren't, and it's not that important to them, I guess, or they haven't made the correlation between being in better shape and catching more fish.

Viktor Hluben: I think you definitely had an impact, I see your stuff on social media all the time. I think the best thing you can do to better someone's life in terms of fitness is just your local community. In the last two years we really got Brooke's parents into taking their health seriously, they started going to the gym with us, they changed the way they eat, and they lost a lot of weight, and it's just your local community, and then they tell someone about it, people see results. You can't change the world, but you can change the little world around you.

Tom Rowland: You definitely can. I'm going to become a better cook by watching some of your videos. I'd love it if you would do one about sauces, that seems to be where I'm not good, the sauces on the fish. When I go to a restaurant with an excellent chef, that's the difference, it seems like I've got the fish preparation down, but they'll put this little sauce on it and it makes it so much better. I've always kind of struggled with sauces. How do you feel about them, is that something you use?

Cooking Basics: How to Build a Sauce

Viktor Hluben: I'll try to give you three little pointers. You start with your aromatics, things that smell good, garlic, shallot, ginger, onion. You start sauteing those in butter or some type of fat, get those going, then you decide if you want to do a wine base or some type of cream base, or you can use chicken stock for the actual liquid. Once your vegetables are sauteed, if you want to thicken it up you put in a little flour to make a roux, then put in your liquid, whether it's cream, stock, clam juice, whatever direction you want to go. Let that reduce a little bit, and then finish it off; if you want to go an Asian route you can do cilantro, if you want an Italian route you do parsley, you could do a parsley cream sauce. If you break it down into those three individual components you can take it a long way, or add in some fruit, mango or peach. But the biggest thing with cooking is you can't just learn the recipe, you've got to learn why you're doing the recipe. It's the same thing with fishing, people can watch fishing videos until they're blue in the face, but you're never going to be able to recreate the exact same day someone else had success with. It's why you troll that planer at this time of day, this time of year, because there's a possibility related to the full moon. It's the same thing with cooking, learn the foundation and the basics. I tell people cooking is way easier than you think once you learn ten basic principles.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I can certainly see that. Just what you're saying about the sauces makes a lot of sense, you could create different sauces for three different types of food in different directions, and make almost the exact same sauce with slight variations and it'll taste completely different for something else. That's really good, alright, I want to try that, I'll try one of your sauces and see if it makes our fish better.

Viktor Hluben: Go for it.

Tom Rowland: Alright, man, well, I really appreciate you coming on. If you're not following Landshark Outdoors, you should definitely do that, find him on every platform, and we'll be back with another awesome guest like Viktor next week. Alright, see you.