Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 306 is my conversation with Jimmy Houston, one of the true legends of bass fishing and fishing television. Jimmy has hosted his show for more than 43 years, an almost unheard-of run in any kind of broadcasting. We talk about how he built and sustained that career, the changes he has seen in the sport and the industry, and the wisdom that comes from spending a lifetime on the water and in front of the camera.
Listen now: Megaphone · Spotify · YouTube.
Jimmy Houston is a bass fishing legend and television icon who has hosted his own fishing show for more than 43 years. A celebrated tournament angler and one of the most recognizable figures in the sport, he helped shape fishing television and bring bass fishing to a national audience.
Jimmy Houston has hosted his fishing television show for more than 43 years, one of the longest runs in the genre. That longevity makes him one of the most enduring and influential figures in fishing media.
Jimmy attributes the longevity to authenticity, consistency, and a genuine love of the sport that connected with audiences. In the episode he reflects on what it took to keep a fishing show fresh and relevant across so many years.
Across more than four decades, Jimmy has witnessed enormous changes in tackle, technology, tournaments, and fishing media. He shares his perspective on how the sport and the industry have evolved and what has stayed the same.
Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 306 with Jimmy Houston is available on Megaphone, Spotify, YouTube, and the Tom Rowland Podcast feed. The video version is embedded at the top of this page.
I wanted Jimmy on because he is a genuine legend. More than 43 years hosting a fishing show is a staggering run, and very few people in any field sustain anything that long. Jimmy helped bring bass fishing to a national audience and became one of the most recognizable faces in the sport. I wanted to hear how he built that career, what kept it going, and the lessons of a lifetime on the water from someone who has truly seen it all.
Press play in the player above to hear it.
Sustaining any show for four decades is almost unheard of. Jimmy reflects on what kept his on the air for so long. Hear it in the episode.
Jimmy has seen the sport transform over his career. He talks about the changes in tackle, technology, and how fishing is broadcast. Listen to that section of the conversation.
Becoming a household name in fishing is rare. Jimmy shares the work and the breaks behind his rise. Press play in the YouTube player above.
Decades of fishing and broadcasting leave you with hard-won lessons. Jimmy passes along what matters most. Worth hearing in full.
Listen to the full conversation: Megaphone · Spotify · YouTube.
What stands out about Jimmy is the longevity and the love of the sport that fueled it. You do not last 43 years on television by faking it.
If you care about the history of fishing and the people who built it, this conversation is a treasure. Press play in the player above, or grab Episode 306 on Megaphone or Spotify.
Jimmy Houston · Tom Rowland (host)
The Tom Rowland Podcast brings you long-form conversations with the most accomplished anglers, hunters, conservationists, and outdoor professionals in the game. Listen to every full-length Tom Rowland Podcast interview.
Jimmy Houston is a bass fishing legend and television icon who has hosted his own fishing show for more than 43 years, one of the longest runs in fishing media. A celebrated tournament angler and one of the most recognizable figures in the sport, he helped bring bass fishing to a national audience and remains an enduring ambassador for fishing built on authenticity and a lifelong love of the water.
Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 306 with Jimmy Houston.
Tom Rowland: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. I tracked down one of my heroes. I've been watching this guy on TV since I was a little boy. On Saturday mornings, I would sit with my dad, and we would watch fishing TV when we weren't actually fishing. And one of my favorites was always Jimmy Houston. There were three guys, really four guys, that I really liked watching. Bill Dance, of course, he's been on the podcast. Roland Martin, of course, he's been on the podcast too. And Jimmy Houston, as well as Hank Parker. I always liked all of those shows.
Tom Rowland: When I was growing up, I grew up in Tennessee. I thought I was gonna be a bass fisherman. That was the most natural thing. I happened to make it in the saltwater world through a lot of different ways and paths and things, but I always had a fondness in my heart for bass fishermen. That's why I like to get a lot of the bass fishermen on. But particularly why I wanted to get Roland Martin, Bill Dance, and Jimmy Houston on is because they are true icons, not only in the fishing world, but they're icons in the television world. There are not many shows that have been on the air for forty-seven years, forty-five years, forty-two years. Jimmy talks about that in this podcast.
Tom Rowland: There are not many television shows that have been on that long. Name one. I don't know one. Seinfeld or something like that is on the air for ten years, and that's like a milestone. It's a huge show, and that's incredible. But these guys have been on the air for forty-seven years, forty-five years, forty years. That's a long time. In that time, they've had lots of ups and downs. They've had lots of sideways moves, but they've stayed true to the path, and they've been providing great fishing entertainment for the world, and that's why they are icons.
Tom Rowland: So today, I tracked Jimmy down. He had time. He said, yeah, I'd love to do it. He said, but the Wi-Fi is not that good at the ranch where he is. And as you know, we're under quarantine right now, so he isn't going anywhere. So the Wi-Fi is not getting any better. As you'll see, the quality on this one is quite subpar compared to any of the other podcasts that I've done. I'm gonna stick with it on this one because it's Jimmy Houston. He's a legend. He's an icon. I wanna hear what he has to say, and I know you're gonna wanna hear what he has to say, but I gotta warn you: the quality is not good. The quality is very poor. But if you stick it out, it's a very interesting conversation with Jimmy Houston. So sorry once again about the quality, but you're gonna like the content. Alright, here we go.
Tom Rowland: I tell you what, it's an honor to talk to you. I've been a fan of yours for a long time. You were probably a big reason why I entered into the television world myself. You and Roland Martin, Bill Dance, all the great TV shows. So I've been following your career for a long time.
Jimmy Houston: We haven't been doing it quite as long as Bill and Roland, but we've been around for a long time.
Tom Rowland: How long has it been for you?
Jimmy Houston: Well, we've fished national tournaments for fifty-four years. This is the first year since I was a senior in college that we haven't been fishing national tournaments. I just haven't made a decision. I waited clear up till December before I decided not to fish them. Basically, I'm not fishing the tournaments because they won't let Chris practice with me. They changed the rules around this year where you have to practice by yourself. And to be honest with you, that's not much fun. You practice daylight till dark for three straight days getting ready for a tournament, and to do that out there by yourself is just kind of a crazy, silly thing. Fishing was not designed to be that way.
Jimmy Houston: We had a great year last year and won a lot of money, and the tournaments have been good to us. But we've fished those for fifty-four years. We've done the television show for forty-three years, and we just keep on keeping on.
Tom Rowland: So how did this get started for you? Was there a moment where you kind of saw fishing as something you wanted to do?
Jimmy Houston: Not really, Tom. We were fishing and doing things for a long time. And at some point, somebody started calling us professional fishermen. We didn't even know there was any such thing as a professional fisherman. The guys now that fish tournaments, most of them say, well, I've been professional fishing for eight years or six years or twelve years or whatever, and we had no idea. I started fishing tournaments when I was a senior in college. We started the television show about ten or fifteen years after I got out of college. We've done that television show for forty-three years, and we've just been involved in this business for a long time.
Jimmy Houston: We didn't really ever plan anything that way. I've fished all my life and hunted all my life, and we never really planned to do this. It just kept going, one thing led to another and another. It's kind of like the other businesses we're all involved in. We didn't really plan any of those out either necessarily. But once we got an idea to do something, we researched it and did it. And we turned out having a lot of fun at it. We've had a great time, made a living at it, and we're still doing it. I don't know that we'll ever quit, to be honest with you. We'll probably continue fishing until we die. As long as I can get after it and fish, I'm gonna fish. I'm gonna fish today, as a matter of fact.
Tom Rowland: Well, you got a beautiful lake behind you there. In everything that you're talking about, you're using "we." So who do you consider your team in fishing?
Jimmy Houston: Well, our whole family is involved in our company businesses. Chris and I have always done everything together. And like I said, that's the thing that caused me to quit tournament fishing. I've never known anything but tournament fishing since we were in college, so it's kind of difficult to quit the game. They didn't force me out. The rule wasn't against me, obviously. I don't really know what the rule was for. It's kind of a silly rule. Fishing has always been a family sport, and to not allow your wife or your son or daughter, your brother or whatever, to go fishing with you is kind of crazy. But that's just the way it is, and I'm not cool with that.
Jimmy Houston: Our whole family is involved. My son runs our boat dealership. My daughter runs our travel agency, handles all my personal schedule, and runs our Subway store. We've got a lot of businesses that those kids have been involved in forever. The kids have never done anything their entire life except work in the company. So everybody is a big part of it. We started our kids working, which you can't do nowadays. Bill Clinton came along, or Obama or somebody, and made it where kids couldn't work, like it was child endangerment or something to let kids work. But our kids started working in the business when they were ten or eleven years old, and I think that's very, very important.
Jimmy Houston: Because of the rules where kids can't work, they've kind of raised a lot of adult snowflakes nowadays. But our kids understand, and they know what business is all about. It's really made a difference in their lives, and they're very successful themselves.
Tom Rowland: So the television show, how did it get started for you? I mean, you were probably doing just fine in tournament fishing. What made you get interested in TV?
Jimmy Houston: Well, the television show came about because of really being a guest on a lot of other television shows. We had good success tournament fishing, and because of that we were on quite a few other television shows, John Fox's American Sportsman show, the local shows here in Oklahoma, Joe Krieger and Don Wallace. Because of being guests on those shows, I had people start talking to me about doing a television show of our own. We really had no desire to do that. We were making a good living. But I started investigating it. I thought if people were talking to me about it, it might be something we ought to be thinking about.
Jimmy Houston: I looked at it just in kind of a crass way, but I'm a businessman, and that's what we look at everything from, the standpoint of a business. So I looked at it and thought, well, I wonder if that's something we could make money at. We started the television show simply as a business. I had no desire to do a television show so I could spend more time fishing or be in the outdoors. I was already doing that a lot. I looked at it just as a business and a money-making deal, and I did a lot of research and a lot of study. One of my degrees in college is in economics. I felt like we could make money.
Jimmy Houston: I got hold of a lot of Bill Dance shows and a lot of Roland's shows. Roland had been doing a television show for two years when I started. Bill had been doing one for four, and both are very good, close, dear friends of mine. I fish and hunt with both of them a lot. I studied their shows and tried to see what they were doing right that I wanted to emulate and what they were doing wrong that I wanted to avoid. We decided to try and see if we could make money doing an outdoor fishing show on television.
Jimmy Houston: I set a goal the first year in my business plan: if I lost fifty thousand dollars or less, we would continue doing that show for a second year. This was forty-three years ago, so that was a tremendous amount of money. The reason I set it that way is that in visiting with Bill and Roland and quite a few other guys in the outdoor business, they all lost money their first few years. Bill and Roland were still losing money when I talked to them, so I felt like that was probably the norm. I set aside money to lose. As it turned out, we made thirty thousand dollars that first year, which I thought was enormous. We made money all the years ever since, clear up to 2008.
Jimmy Houston: In 2008, during that downturn in the economy, we lost money in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011, actually four years. It was just horrendous in the business world for pretty much everybody. It wasn't just me. We were very fortunate that we'd been successful. We also owned a lot of boat dealerships at that time. We had six boat dealerships, and that was another very difficult business to be in. All businesses were difficult to be in at that time. During those four years, during that crisis, we lost seven-figure amounts of money.
Jimmy Houston: But we were fortunate that we'd been successful for a lot of years. Those successful years allowed us to lose and keep businesses open and keep people employed. We basically went broke during that situation. And now we're fighting the deal right now with this coronavirus and everything that's going on. So we're going through the situation again. But we've been there, done that. We think we can get through this situation just like we did the last.
Tom Rowland: How do you see this situation being different than the last one you just described?
Jimmy Houston: Well, it's totally different. That was an economic downturn. This has been a downturn because of the virus and the state governments and federal government shutting down the economy. The economy was just great. Everything was pretty good in this country. Once we get this economy open back up, it's gonna thrive again. It'll thrive very quickly. But I am concerned about all the money that governments have printed. It's been a long time since I got that economics degree, and economics has changed a lot in the last fifty, sixty years.
Jimmy Houston: Basically, what the United States of America is doing is printing money. We will probably have a situation where the ten-dollar hamburgers we buy now become twenty-dollar hamburgers. We'll probably have a lot of inflation come into this economy over the next several months. Hopefully business will be good enough that they can start paring that inflation back down over a period of time. But a lot of it depends on who runs the country. If the wrong party gets in power, we will obviously have enormous taxes on just about everybody, and it will be a long time before the economy recovers.
Jimmy Houston: For the first time in my life, they're paying money to work as opposed to giving people money to not work, and I think that's great. All of the business loans for small businesses to bring their employees back and pay them to keep employees is fantastic. We've got businesses that have applied for those loans. We haven't gotten any of those loans yet, and I don't know that we will. I understand that program is gonna run out of money today, and the president asked for another two hundred fifty billion dollars be put into that fund for small businesses. Right now it's being held up by our Speaker of the House, who's out in California somewhere. So we've probably been left out of that. But that's okay. If we're left out, we're left out. We kept all of our people working, and we'll continue to.
Jimmy Houston: We own a big place on the lake there, and we are an essential business because we sell groceries. We've got a big tackle store within there too, but we sell groceries and gas. Our boat dealership is an essential business because we take care of all the marine stuff for the local governments as well as the public. So we've kept them open. The business is not good because of all the shutdown and people staying at home, but we kept all of our people employed. They've all got a check. Obviously, a television show is not an essential business, though I think it's essential, but the government doesn't. We kept all of our people employed in the television show also. Everybody's got a paycheck, except Chris and I, and we don't get one anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
Jimmy Houston: I think this economy is gonna roar back. It can do it very quickly if we get it opened back up. I'm on a stay-at-home order just like everybody else in the state of Oklahoma. We've not been hit hard with the coronavirus, only one case actually in the county we live in. We live on a big ranch. The governor is lifting the stay-at-home orders toward the end of the month here in Oklahoma, unless you're sixty-five years old, and then it runs until May 6. I had a turkey hunt planned, and I'm gonna miss that, I guess. But it's just the way it is.
Tom Rowland: So you have quite an education. What do you think you would have done if you hadn't started fishing?
Jimmy Houston: Well, this is crazy, but one of my degrees is in political science, and I had planned on going on to the University of Oklahoma Law School when I graduated. Quite honestly, the only reason I didn't was that it was another three years of college, and I was married and had a baby girl and I was just tired of being broke. I told my wife, and it was pretty much a big shock to her, because that's what we had always planned on. I got the economics degree in case we didn't go to OU's law school, and the political science degree was basically because of that. So we'd kind of had things planned both ways. We could have gone on to OU Law School. We had really high grades, so that would not have been a problem.
Jimmy Houston: But I told her when I graduated, I said, I can't go to school another three years. I can't stay broke for another three years. I needed to get out and make a living. Chris has never really worried about money one way or the other. During that 2008 to 2011 time when we lost basically everything we had and all of our stock portfolio, it didn't bother her a bit. She said, well, whatever we're gonna do, we'll do. I tell my friends and buddies that God saved me from being a lawyer. And they tell me that God saved them from me being a lawyer. So it's worked out a lot better than it would have.
Jimmy Houston: Most likely, had I gone on to law school, as you could probably tell, I'm pretty interested in and pretty heavily invested in politics, and I might have ended up being a politician. One of my running buddies in college was the attorney general here in the state of Oklahoma for many years and actually ran for governor this last time around. He didn't become governor, but he ran. I don't know, but I know one thing: I certainly had a lot more fun being a fisherman.
Tom Rowland: Well, I'm a hundred percent certain that being a fisherman is more fun than being a politician. And I'm no politician, but they all wanna go fishing.
Jimmy Houston: It really is. It worked out pretty well.
Tom Rowland: One thing I noticed that's kind of interesting is that I'm in the television world just like you are. It sounds like our careers started kind of very similarly. I had a guide business going, and I was fishing tournaments and doing just fine. And all of a sudden, I found myself being a guest on a lot of other people's shows just like you did, looked at it and thought, well, that doesn't seem that hard, really. I was very naive at the time, because it is a hard business to be in. Actually, in my opinion, going out and catching fish is the easiest part of the whole business. I'd be interested in knowing what you think about that. What do you think is the most difficult part about being on television, and what's the easiest part about operating the television business?
Jimmy Houston: Well, the most difficult part, same as any business, is paying the bills. It's a real simple business. We go to school and take all these classes and learn all these business things, and we continue learning our entire life. But the hardest thing is the simplest thing. Business is very simple. You have to take in more than you spend, and what you have left, called profit, that's what you get by on. And that's the most difficult part, no doubt about it.
Jimmy Houston: Everybody looks at the outdoor television show business. When we started, there weren't hundreds of shows like there are nowadays, but there weren't very many places to put those shows either. We were pretty much running network television, ABC, CBS, and then the independents came along. We've been doing it forty-three years, and we go way back before cable or satellite television. Now we air our show on eleven different networks, including the Discovery Channel and Pursuit, WGN, CBS Sports, a lot of really large networks. If you add them all up, it's a couple hundred million homes. So there's a lot of availability out there. There are lots and lots of outdoor shows out there. But the problem is the same now as it was when we started: you simply have to take in more money than you spend. That is the most complicated thing in the outdoor show business, and it's the thing that causes a show to either be successful or not. Everybody tries to come up with little things that make their show different or unique. Really, it doesn't make any difference, because you determine whether you're gonna have enough money at the end of the month to pay all the bills. If you can't pay the bills, you're not gonna be successful in the television show business.
Jimmy Houston: The good thing is, again we go right back to Bill and Roland. Bill Dance and Roland Martin and I at forty-three, forty-five, and forty-seven years have three of the longest-running television shows in the history of television, of any kind. We get a lot of accolades because we've been around forever. But when you really think about it, you're talking about guys that have been able to keep a business going for that period of time and become icons in this industry. They are iconic television guys, and both are very good businessmen. They're both very intelligent. Roland's got a degree from the University of Maryland. Roland is a very smart individual. From a business standpoint, we probably have a little advantage over quite a few of the guys out there.
Jimmy Houston: I've always felt like successful people can be successful in whatever they set out to be. The traits of being successful really have nothing to do with your occupation. What I like to say is, take somebody like Billy Graham. If Billy Graham had decided to be in the automobile business or the fishing business, if he'd decided to do an outdoor television show and had grown up with the abilities to catch fish, he would have been very successful doing an outdoor television show. You look at all the successful people around now. Some of the tech people are a little bit different; a lot of those could probably not make a living doing anything else that made hundreds of millions of dollars. But with the real businesses that you really run, those guys would have been successful.
Jimmy Houston: We fish and hunt with a lot of CEOs from really big companies, companies like Shell Oil Company and O'Reilly, the guys high up in those companies. They could have been successful at anything. The head guys in O'Reilly, the two co-presidents, both love to fish and hunt. They're very good fishermen and hunters, but they could have been successful in anything they went into. You can go on and on. A lot of the guys in our industry, iconic names like Cotton Cordell, Bill Norman, Charlie Spence, and Berkley Bedell. Berkley Bedell not only started a fishing line company that became one of the premier companies in the outdoor industry, he got into politics. He was a very successful congressman. So those individuals who are successful, it doesn't matter. Hank Parker is another great example. Hank's been around a long time. We helped Hank get his show started. We shot that show for him and helped him a lot. He's a very good friend and another intelligent individual who's gonna make a good living at whatever he decides to do.
Tom Rowland: I had both Bill and Roland on this podcast and learned their stories. One thing that was consistent with both of them and with yourself is that theme, that they probably would have been successful at whatever. But one of the reasons that struck me was not just because they were smart or had better business skills, but mostly because of the work ethic. Bill Dance telling me how he got his show started and how he was editing 208 shows a year. It's a lot of work. What do you think about the work ethic when you apply it to all those individuals you just mentioned? Is that consistent throughout their personalities as well?
Jimmy Houston: Oh, without a doubt. You can take any profession. Just take the tournaments. Roland Martin, the best tournament fisherman of all time without a doubt, won nine B.A.S.S. Angler of the Year titles, and nobody's ever done that. Probably nobody ever will win nine end-of-the-year titles. My wife, Chris, won seven, and if that organization could have stayed around another twenty-one years, she might have caught up with it. The work ethic caused him to win those nine Angler of the Year titles in B.A.S.S. It's the same work ethic that caused him to be successful in his television show. That's really a big part of it.
Jimmy Houston: I'm seventy-five years old now, and it's hard to really think about it. Our stay-at-home order here in Oklahoma is being lifted in a couple weeks. I had a turkey hunt planned to film some turkey shows, beginning next Monday. But now, if you're over sixty-five, they moved that stay-at-home order to May 6. So it cost me a week of turkey hunting. It's crazy. But we try to do things right. I'm not too concerned about the coronavirus. I'm not too much afraid of anything. I'm a redneck. But the work ethic is the deal. We still do thirty-nine television shows a year. I do right in the neighborhood of a hundred personal appearances every year. Up until this year, we were fishing six or seven national tournaments a year. We're not doing the national tournaments this year, but nobody's doing them now anyway. And running the companies we run takes a lot of time also. All of our businesses require time. So we're working as hard now as we ever did. We've probably done more personal appearances every year than anybody in the fishing game. We had a lot of years when we were really bearing down, doing 130 personal appearances a year.
Tom Rowland: So when you're doing those personal appearances, what does that look like? Is that like Bass Pro Shops? Is that speaking engagements, seminars? What is a personal appearance for you?
Jimmy Houston: Yes, all of the above. Anything you said. We do a lot of appearances, a lot of speaking engagements. I do fifteen to twenty-five churches a year. We do a lot of speaking in churches. I do motivational talks for a lot of different companies, not just fishing deals. We do a lot of work with Bass Pro Shops. We've done the openings for pretty much every Bass Pro Shop in the nation, basically, except for two or three that had scheduling conflicts. We do a lot of appearances at Bass Pro Shops stores. We do a lot at boat dealerships, like Ranger boat dealerships. We do a lot for Shell Oil Company, a lot for O'Reilly Auto Parts, for Bass Pro Shops, Ranger boat company, the churches. We're kind of like a hired gun. We're like paladin, have gun, will travel.
Jimmy Houston: One thing about the coronavirus and how it's hurting this economy: I've lost thirty-five thousand dollars in personal appearances. I don't know of any government help on any of that, and very little of it is coming back. There's a possibility that maybe ten thousand dollars of that might be rescheduled a bit later this year. We've done twenty-seven personal appearances this year already. We did the last ones on, I think, March 14 or 15. But from then to now, we've lost thirty-five thousand dollars in personal appearance money.
Jimmy Houston: We handle our personal appearance money a little differently than most fishermen. Our personal appearance money goes into the company. Back in 2008 when that bad situation hit, we were losing money, bleeding money in the television show business and in the boat store business. The only way I could really make very much money was in personal appearances. We changed at that time from our personal appearance money going into our pocket to going into the company. We'd go out and do personal appearances to pay people's salaries and keep the company afloat, to make sure our people got their paycheck on the first and the fifteenth of the month. We started making money again in 2012, thankfully. But we kept it that way. That money we would have made since March 15, that would have gone into the company to help pay salaries, is not there.
Jimmy Houston: The federal government is printing money, pure and simple. Not borrowing money, not making sure you have gold to back it up. They're simply spending money. That's not a good situation for a country, but it probably is the best thing to do right now. I agree with what they're doing. But there are a lot of parts of this economy that are not gonna be helped. I don't know that the tournament fishermen can get any help. The guys making a living tournament fishing, some of them might have lost sponsors during this time. We've had situations with sponsors where a couple suspended payments for a couple of months just to get through. A lot of guys out there tournament fishing need to be out there winning those ten-thousand-dollar checks to pay the bills. I know of nothing in any government stimulus program that will help them.
Jimmy Houston: Think about an evangelist as an example, someone who speaks to churches. They don't receive a paycheck from a church. They're not a pastor. They count on going out and preaching at churches to pay their bills, and they've got bills just like everyone else. That's what they do for a living, and they're getting paid for the days they're speaking in churches. Now they can't do that because all of those events have been canceled. So there are a lot of people and a lot of businesses in this economy that are gonna be left out. I think the government money for small businesses runs out today. Unless we get a call from our two banks, we missed that one.
Tom Rowland: Oh, man. We did get in just under the wire, I think, on ours, and got a notification that we might get something, that the application was accepted. My banker friend, I went to high school with this guy so he takes care of me, gave me a call right away. It's good to have people you trust in your inner circle. He said, listen, man, you need to get this application done immediately because they're gonna run out of money. So we did get it done as fast as we could. I don't know what we're gonna get, but it will help to keep our people employed too. It's kind of the same deal. Fishing guides, tournament guys, the tournaments themselves, all of those things are total unknowns.
Tom Rowland: Your personal appearances, that's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, just what you thought the future of that was. One of the things I've noticed about you and Roland in the last couple years is that you've embraced this new world of digital entertainment. You both have YouTube channels. Yours is doing well. Roland's is doing well. You're coming on podcasts like this. Do you think there's any potential of doing some of those personal appearances virtually, like through Skype? I do see that one of the things that's gonna happen in the next year, as we continue this quarantine, is there's probably gonna be some incredible technology that goes into virtual meetings, stuff like what we're doing right now. I think the quality is gonna improve incredibly. Do you see that you might be able to do some of the things you're doing now virtually?
Jimmy Houston: Well, that's definitely a possibility. We have embraced the social media stuff. When all of this started, all of our sponsors were hollering Facebook, Facebook. So we worked very hard to build our Facebook. We have 303,000 on our Facebook, and it's been good. We actually monetize Facebook as well. Facebook is not nearly as good at selling advertising as YouTube is, but we used it for something. We just really did not get involved with YouTube until, you mentioned Roland, and Roland's got a good YouTube channel going. Roland told me last February, we fished together, he said, man, you need to do YouTube. He said, you gotta do YouTube.
Jimmy Houston: So I had Pat Turner, who runs our production, he's been with me for over twenty years. I told Pat, well, Roland says we need to start a YouTube channel. And he said, Jimmy, you have a YouTube channel. And I said, really? I had no idea I had a YouTube channel. I said, well, how many people do we have on there? And he said, oh, you've got less than 2,000. I said, how could we have less than 2,000? He said, well, because you haven't posted anything on there in seven or eight years. He said, you gotta post videos on YouTube. I didn't really understand. We had one, and I don't know how it started or how it happened, but it did.
Jimmy Houston: So we took that YouTube channel last February that we had less than 2,000 on, and we've got over 40,000 on it now. We grew that in about thirteen months, which is pretty slow, I think. I think we should have built it to a million by now, but we haven't. We're working hard on it. We do 500 YouTube videos a year. That's a lot. We actually broke off a part of our YouTube channel and started a new one on April 3, about ten days ago. It's got about 1,700 or 1,800 new subscribers in about ten days. For our Catch of the Day, we do a daily devotional every day that we put up at 5:00 in the morning. So we've got a Catch of the Day YouTube channel in addition to our Jimmy Houston Outdoors YouTube channel. We post four times a week now on the Jimmy Houston Outdoors channel. We were supposed to be posting eleven times a week; we put the other seven over on that other channel.
Jimmy Houston: I think it's gonna be a big deal in the future. I don't know too much about doing virtual appearances, so I don't really know about the comparisons. That might be something big. We've had a lot of people come to us about doing things like a Patreon, a subscription channel. I've thought about that forever in the television show business. I felt like probably the easiest thing to do in television was just to get a million people out there to pay you a dollar a month to watch your TV show, buy television time, put it on there, and you can make a lot more money doing that. Obviously, Christian television has worked very well that way. I have many friends in Christian television who have made very good livings preaching on television. Some of them have big churches that don't even take a penny from their church because they make so much off books and other things they do. They give their service to that church 100%. They make their money outside doing other things.
Jimmy Houston: Like I said, we work really hard. We spend a lot of time doing a lot of things: thirty-nine television shows, 500 videos for YouTube, fishing six or seven tournaments a year, doing around a hundred personal appearances. We don't do 130 anymore. Last year, I did ninety-eight personal appearances, but that's still a lot. That's almost one every three days. We work hard at this game.
Tom Rowland: So the start of the YouTube channel, one of the reasons we start to branch out and the reason you're on eleven networks, I imagine, is the same reason we're on six networks: the ratings on television have just gone down. We have guarantees that we made ten years ago, and the sponsors are expecting those kinds of numbers. So now you add another network and another network, and you get back to kind of the original viewing you once had on ESPN. Is that why you're on so many networks, to make up for the loss?
Jimmy Houston: That's exactly right. We ran twenty-one years on ESPN, and that was the only network we ran. We didn't run any others. But yes, you're right. There's just so much availability for people to watch something on a device now. They can watch everything. You watch YouTube, but I've got an eighty-six-inch television right there, and you can watch YouTube on that eighty-six-inch television, no problem. As a matter of fact, we do. We pop our stuff up there. My wife would say we probably watch way more on the phone or the iPad than we do on that television. A lot of people have no network television anymore, and a lot of people have no cable anymore. So these handheld devices and televisions hooked up to the internet, that is the way of the future. The technology will get better, and it will be more amazing as time goes on.
Tom Rowland: Well, Jimmy, you've had an amazing career. You're a hall of famer. You've won all these different tournaments. You've got all these businesses going. You obviously are a good family man that spends a lot of time with your family. If you had to think about how you'd like to be remembered in this industry or for this world, how would you like to be remembered?
Jimmy Houston: Oh, I don't know. That's really kind of unimportant. But the one thing that we've tried to exemplify more than anything else is, we're trying to be people of integrity. We have a strong Christian faith. We wear that on our sleeve and always have, and we'll continue to. We wanna be remembered as being the right kind of people. If they need to remember us for something, that's what it would be. That's really what will last.
Jimmy Houston: When you look at bass fishing, obviously Roland has the credentials that no one else has or ever will have. Without a doubt, the greatest tournament fisherman of all time so far, and I doubt anyone will ever match what Roland has done. My wife, Chris, won seven Bass'n Gal Angler of the Year titles and four Bass'n Gal classics, and no one will ever match that in women's fishing. It hasn't been all that many years since Bass'n Gal went away, but most people now, even folks on our television show and involved in our social media, are surprised to find that she's such a great fisherman. They see her fishing with me and say, wow, that girl could really catch fish. So the tournament accolades and that stuff will disappear.
Jimmy Houston: She's very humble and doesn't talk about any of that stuff. People come into our home and see, well, you're in the Bass Fishing Hall of Fame, and they say, I didn't even know there were women in the Bass Hall of Fame. She was the only woman in the Bass Hall of Fame for many years, and now there are two in there, her and Sugar Ferris. People start looking and say, man, you won all these titles, and they can't believe it. That just tells you how quickly accomplishments like winning tournaments go away. And you talk about being remembered after your lifetime; this is during her lifetime. She was without a doubt the most decorated, most celebrated woman fisherman of all time, and yet most people now don't even know she did all that. So what you need to be remembered for is the kind of individual you are and what you do with everyone you come in contact with, not what you accomplished from the standpoint of beating somebody in a fishing tournament or hitting a lot of home runs or scoring a lot of points in the NBA. That's what you really have to be remembered for.
Tom Rowland: Man, I love it. Now, I don't mean to say that you are by any means finished and that it's time to remember you. I don't think you're anywhere close to being finished. I think you're just like Roland Martin and Bill Dance. When I talk to those guys, there is no finish line in sight. They're gonna keep going forever, and I think you are too. So what kind of goals do you have for the future? Are you moving more into the digital side? Are you gonna keep doing the TV? What are you thinking these days?
Jimmy Houston: Well, we definitely are gonna keep doing television. I've said for years, we'll do it as long as they let us. There's absolutely no doubt about it. Our television show has been one of the most successful, and it continues to be. We're in more homes than anybody by far, and we'll continue to do that. But yes, we're working hard in social media. We do have desires to build our YouTube channel up to a million. I've got a buddy of mine, Chris Fix, in New Jersey, who has over six million subscribers on his YouTube channel. I'm helping him. He's about to start a fishing channel. He's got an auto channel, and he's a really sharp guy, a good friend. He lives in New Jersey, so you know what they've gone through during this coronavirus. Chris is dramatically successful, one of the more successful YouTube channels in the nation, even in the world. He fixes cars, and he's got a great story, and he loves to fish. He's a good fisherman.
Jimmy Houston: When you think about what he's done on YouTube, six million subscribers, and I look at some of the guys who have been very successful in fishing on YouTube who are obviously not household names. They're not Hank Parker or Bill Dance, and yet they have two million people. So my goal is at least a million. I felt like for twenty or thirty years in the television show business, we've been doing it forty-three years, that you could have a subscription to outdoor television. That's something you and I both should be looking at. I've thought about it forever, and I think it would be pretty easy to have enough people out there. We have the capabilities of doing that now through all the digital media we have. People are watching a lot of digital media on big-screen TVs right in their living rooms. Our Facebook is 300,000, that's not a small amount. There are a lot of people who would pay a couple of dollars a month, three dollars a month, or five dollars a month to exclusively watch Jimmy Houston Outdoors on television, or any of the other shows they really enjoy. Everybody's got their favorite outdoor shows. The big names have been the favorites all along for years. It was very difficult to get started in the television show business forty-three years ago, and it's just as difficult to keep it going today.
Tom Rowland: Yeah, it's almost flip-flopped. It's a little easier to get started, and maybe a little more difficult to keep it going. Back forty-three years ago, it was probably a little harder to get started.
Jimmy Houston: You're right.
Tom Rowland: It's flip-flopped a little bit. There are no more gatekeepers like there were at the networks, making sure the show was just right. You can put anything you want on YouTube, and then the customer decides what's good and what's not.
Jimmy Houston: That's right.
Tom Rowland: Well, man, it's been a great opportunity to talk to you. I wanna do this again with you when we can sit down in person and have some good quality. I've been doing a lot of these Skype interviews during this coronavirus outbreak, and some are really good quality. Some have some internet issues, and we did with yours a little bit. But the content of everything you were saying was just spectacular. I love talking with you, and it's been an honor. I just wanna tell you one more time, you've had a really big impact on a lot of people, a lot of people in the business now. People ask me about being in the television business, and I say the television business is easy because of guys like Bill Dance, Roland Martin, Jimmy Houston, Flip Pallot. Those guys carved a path, and guys like me just follow right along. You guys were hacking your way through the jungle with a machete, really creating this business. That allows people like me to do something similar and make a living doing what I love. So thank you for that, and thank you for your time today. I really appreciate it, and I hope you catch some fish this afternoon.
Jimmy Houston: No doubt about us catching fish this afternoon. That will happen. I can guarantee that will happen. Alright, Tom, I appreciate it, buddy.
Tom Rowland: Okay. Thank you so much.
Jimmy Houston: Bye bye.
Tom Rowland: Wow. That was Jimmy Houston. For the young viewers, I'm sure you've seen Jimmy Houston on television. I probably would have stopped that interview had it been someone else, but he's somebody I've wanted to have on the podcast for a long time, and he is at his ranch in Oklahoma. The internet's not that great, so we just kind of endured it. I wouldn't endure that quality for many people, but for somebody like him, I knew what he was gonna say was gonna be really impactful and meaningful. I wanna thank Jimmy for his time and for what he's given to the fishing industry and the fishing world. He and others like him carved the path and paved the way, so that shows like mine and every show today are just following along with what those guys did. Go check out Jimmy's YouTube page. Check out his Facebook. Check him out on Instagram. Check out Jimmy Houston Outdoors. You'll see him kiss a fish.
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