The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 262: The Jake Brake

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Jason Phelps, Dirk Dirham, Seth Morris, Phil Taylor, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: Chester The Investor makes a solid plan on a walleye boat; how skepticism is the chastity of the intellect; reconsidering the use of a sous vide wand to warm up your bathtub; Steve's FOMO were he to die while other humans got to keep living; Texas' record low temperatures wiping out piles of exotic big game; yet another nipple ripping tale; taxidermying an albino porcupine and getting a $70,000 offer for it; how The MeatEater Podcast solves tombstone mysteries; when turkeys are bad turkey callers; how turkey testosterone levels change daily, like Steve's; the reason God made naps; the incredible way turkeys hear and how they're basically GPS devices; how you get Jason Phelp's personal phone when you call Phelps' Game Calls customer service number; breaking down turkey calls; the otherwordly odor of a turkey buzzard; tuning game calls; MeateaterXPhelps calls: the Jake Brake, the Latvian Eagle, and the Easy Clucker; Dirk, the saxophone player; a single production of a black walnut tree; pink vs. red; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by OnX Hunt, creators of the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters.

Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with Onyx. In addition to a bunch of normal people that are sitting around here, we have from Phelps Game Calls Jason Phelps and Dirk Durham are here to join us. And we have like a we're making all kinds of sighting. Exciting, not sighting.

Exciting announcements in a little bit here. So stay tuned for that part. First we got to take care of the other stuff. Then we're going to get into these two. But how's it going, guys? Good. Fantastic. All right.

Don't go anywhere. And if we talk about something that you feel like you're qualified to speak about or not, jump in. We're going to cover off on a bunch of junk. Then we'll get to you. This is the first installment of a recurring segment, and the segment's called, we need a jingle for it. It's called Chester Gets Rich Off Bitcoin. Now, Chester, this is really a story about walleye fishing.

I'm going to put in like a slot machine sound there. Yeah. Cashing out coins. Can you build a little something? Yeah. I think like a slot machine, and then something to signify a walleye boat. Okay.

So if you could hear an engine, you know, like an outboard? Yep. And you kind of got the coolant pissing out. Passing by through the headphones, like left to right. Yeah, him hauling ass by. And then a sound of like cascading money out of a slot machine. And they'll introduce Chester Gets Rich Off Bitcoin. The continuing adventures of Chester the Investor. Come to Papa Moon. money out of slot machine they'll introduce uh chester gets rich off bitcoin the continuing

adventures of chester the investor come to papa moon that's it come on chester uh wants a walleye boat real bad and so he sent how much money off to bitcoin right now about four grand no initially initially like a hundred bucks yeah and i was with him one weekend and what shot up to like five hundred dollars and i called you a liar it was like no i called you 400 something i think yeah your hundred bucks turned into 400 bucks this is i'm not giving investment advice here i still think he's i still think he's gonna get screwed in the end but no way and over the weekend he made like a lot of money yeah i mean um over over this week this last weekend no no i'm going back you're going back still um to when yeah when we all

caught covid yep over you'd already had it but yeah over the weekend i probably made i don't know like over 300 bucks and you didn't believe me no i believed you but i didn't i i was still ignorant about i'm still way ignorant i was even more ignorant then about cryptocurrencies and i said i bet you can't get it back i don't know why i said that. Yeah, and I... You know that my favorite quote? Tell me, honey. The skepticism is the chastity of the intellect. So I was skeptical. And Chester's raking all this money in. I was super jealous.

And I said, I want to see that money bounce back into your bank account. And then what happened? I took it out, and it went in my bank account. And while it was sitting in your bank account and then what happened I took it out and it went in my bank account and while it was sitting I think I lost 10 bucks on a bet to didn't yeah you said you give me 10 bucks to put it back let's see if I got it right here while I was sitting in my bank account I definitely lost some money by sitting dormant my sitting door even though they give you like point oh oh oh one percent interest on that stuff in your bank account. But I got it back in there and want me to, Bitcoin right now is in a pretty new stage. Would you rather, you can do it one of two ways.

I give you 20 and you owe me 10 or I give you seven and I owe you three. Give me seven. Okay, there's our setup. I might have two tens. And then when I get that walleye boat, you just owe you three. Give me seven. Okay, there's our settlement. I might have two tens. And then when I get that walleye boat, you just pay for gas. Okay, so you took it out in order to prove that it wasn't, that you hadn't. I thought you got scammed on a weird website. No.

I thought it was like, oh, we just heard of a guy selling ammo. He set up, you know how no one can find ammo? We heard from an individual about him going to some website. This wasn't the name of the website, but the website's like, Bullets are us, you know? And lo and behold, he has all the ammo that no one can find. So he places a big order and his credit card gets processed and no ammo shows up. Got to look out for that kind of stuff.

So I thought you fell prey to that by this walleye boat scam. No, no, I did not. I just listened to my brother, who is very smart, smarter than me. And he said, you should start dabbling in Bitcoin. And he said, if you put some money into it that you can still feel comfortable you can still sleep if you lose it you know yeah but your wife gets mad when you sleep when i have covid and i slept too much yes that is true um but so i'm dabbling in it and uh every day steve it's getting a little bit closer to that walleye boat.

So now at this point, but then you went and put more money in. I don't want to get too deep into your personal finances, but you're in deep now. I had some cash sitting in a drawer. Literally? Yeah. What's your address, Jeff? And I took it out of there and I put that in Bitcoin. And I've been just slowly putting, you know, a hundred bucks in here and there.

And Bitcoin right now is pretty level. I think a lot of people are new to it. So people are getting in Bitcoin. They're making some quick cash and they're selling. But just as of recent, a lot of people have been putting it into cold storage. Big companies, like even like fortune 500 companies are starting to dabble in Bitcoin. Yeah.

Tesla bought 1.5 billion. Yup. And, uh. And did they make, did they make like another 1.5 billion off of that already? Well, he turned around and then he turned around, Elon Musk turned around and suggested that it does seem a little high, so that kind of sabotaged his own deal, apparently, and said that the decision to do that, I think he said the decision to do that wasn't really reflective of his... He said something to the effect of, to suggest that it was other other individuals were pushing for that move more aggressively than he was gotcha yeah i'd heard like he like they make i think last year they

made like 700 million off of car sales and just in the short time that he's had that that money in bitcoin he's made over a billion dollars it's kind of scary dude man imagine how many freaking walleye boats that is. It's a lot. Someone should divide that out. What's a walleye boat cost? I mean, I'm not- Depending on what boat you want.

Yeah, so you're saying- You're buying your own walleye lake. Yeah. Yeah. I am trying to get like a nice, simple 18 foot Lund with a motor on it. And that's all I need. So then you're going to quit your investment. That would be hard to do.

Ike thinks I'm crazy for wanting to buy a walleye boat off of it. So when the time comes, I'll consult with different people and go from there. Will I be included on who you consult with? Sure. I think you should include me too. All right.

Well, Seth just bought a walleye boat. I know, I need a walleye boat partner. He think you should include me too. All right. Well, Seth just bought a walleye boat. I know. I need a walleye boat partner. He did it the old fashioned way. He just went down and bought a damn boat. Yeah, that's true. He didn't get tangled up in cryptocurrencies. All right, Chester, you can go back to whatever

you're doing. All right. Oh, I'm sorry. How much more? It might blow up so much that you can just peel off what you need. It could. I don't know how much money it might blow up so much that you can just peel off, peel off what you need. It could.

I've only made like a little over a thousand bucks is all, um, total, but it's. Well, you haven't made it yet. Well, I haven't put it in my bank account, but it's. Cause you could wake up and it could be gone. It could, but it's just going up and down right now. And I'm trying not to like look at it very much because i know in the long run i think i think it's going to pay off and i'm dabbling i'm not like invested just just a dabbler all right thank you chester you bet you

should go visit that crypto mine in uh butte montana you know why bill that's what you know bill gates is down on it because of the amount of electricity it takes to do the computations. Yeah, it's a lot. And the fact that he's not into these anonymous,

these anonymous, untraceable, unretractable, terrorist-style exchanges of money. Yeah, I agree. That's kind of sketchy. But I'm just trying to buy a walleye boat. Okay. Yeah, Steve, isn't your mantra,

don't hate the player, hate the game? That's correct. Okay. I think that applies here. I stole that from Clay. Not that Clay Newcomb made it up, but I stole it from him when he revealed to me that he was lined up to get the vaccination in Arkansas on what I felt was pretty dubious grounds.

Which it didn't work out for him in the end anyways, but he was getting it as a public, as a basketball coach for a school. It is now. Which maybe that's fair. Yeah, sure. I told you. It's what? He. It is now. Which maybe that's fair. I told you. It's what? He's getting it now. Well, he was supposed to get it quite a while ago.

Oh. And it initially fell through. All right. Yanni, do your correction. Corrections. While back, I don't know what episode it was, but we read an email from a fella that had found a new use for the sous vide kitchen appliance. Why is that funny?

It didn't even occur to me until you brought it up, like how, I thought it was genius. Right. But then when you brought it up to me, it occurred to me like how not a good idea it is oh yeah no yeah i think all of us in the room are guilty because i was like that's genius nobody called it out everybody's like oh yeah a great idea like you know next time the kids have a cold pool i'm gonna just drop my suv machine in there. Or hell of. This fella had a birthing pool set up in his house and just was struggling with keeping it warm.

And he had the bright idea to stick a sous vide wand in there and it kept the water nice. My father heard this. He was a building inspector. Yeah, who heard this? So he's up on safety. And he said, there's a lot of reasons, a lot of failures that could happen.

That you don't plug stuff in and stick it in the tub with you. Exactly. And he said, by no means is that appliance meant for that application, and thus we should not talk about it or promote it. Da-da-da-da-da. So there you go. Don't use a sous vide wand to warm up your bathtub water. Or a clothes iron.

That would not work either. Yeah. Don't drop plugged in stuff into your tub with you. When Yanni brought this up, I initially was eye-rolly. I was eye-rolly about the need to clarify. Because I don't know how it really goes. Can you imagine? Let's just say, heaven forbid.

What winds up happening? Does the judge wind up being home? So you're saying that you listen to some knuckleheads on a podcast who are not baby experts or bath experts. Or electricians. And it's called, the slogan is like, Hunt Fish Listen. But you took birthing advice from them, and now you want to hold them liable. Dismissed. Yeah. Or would he be like, by God, the buck stops here. want to hold them liable? Dismissed.

Yeah. Or would he be like, by God, the buck stops here. Make an example. They'll be held accountable for this transgression. By the way, Yanni pointed out, do you really want it to go that far? Yeah, you just have to worry about your own conscience. That's what Yanni brought up. He doesn't want it on his, doesn't want it on him yeah well it's off you now yanni uh oh corinne real quick what was the general um speaking of feedback so we got another feedback thing here

after the renewable what was that episode called there's no free lunch with with renewable energy you said there's a lot of people writing in yeah was it um generally was it all over the place or was there like a was there like a consensus um there were it was kind of all over the place People just riled up about this and riled up about that. Yeah, Corey, Corey forwarded me, Corey's our, our community manager. He forwarded me kind of the most, I don't know, salient of both sides. That's a good word, man. I never use that word.

It was a bit all over the place. Yeah, there were folks who were really glad that we were just even engaging the topic to begin with. There were folks who just kind of railed on us not asking hard enough or pressing enough questions or folks disagreeing with Nels, folks spouting off, folks thinking. I mean, it just kind of ran the gamut but there was a lot of response to that so it it hit it hit somewhere yeah they paid attention contentious topic yeah i think we can you know come back to it at some point they weren't being mean to the guest right i thought the guest brought it i thought he did a great job i don't think he was pushing he was not trying to remember i brought the obvious i'm not finishing any of my sentences right now but asking tough

questions i think we asked the toughest of all question even ask the question like do you feel that the renewable energy industry as it is obfuscates some of the realities about what this would really take. That's like, that's like watching 60 minutes, dude. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean,

I should get like a, like a, a prize for that. I think hard hitting interview. I think his, his kind of refrain and why that was the name of the podcast is that it's true. Like he's,

it's just, there's no, there, there's always going to be a compromise there are going to be a lot of things that are shitty if we as a society continue to live the way that we do you know like you guys are listening to this podcast right now on your phone or on your computer and that's battery and that's like it's i mean it's the way that we are living right now so if we're gonna make not make those changes we you know we got to do something so elon musk thinks we're going to go and populate other planets if we want to keep this human race going it's kind of i don't even care about the human race as long as we all blink

out at the same time i just just don't want to have to go and then everybody else gets to stick around. I don't think it's going to happen in our lifetimes, buddy. Because I'd get some bad FOMO if that happened, man. If I knew it was just going to be like, remember that movie Melancholia?

No. With that asteroid. You watch half the movie and you don't know what's going to happen. You just know that everybody's acting extremely weird. And then eventually you realize that they know at some specific second the Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid. And everybody gets to go at the exact same moment.

That's the way to do it. Scrap metal. A guy wrote in how they're making it way harder for drug addicts and derelicts to turn in scrap metal. It's hard on crackheads now. So when you go in now to a scrap yard, you got to provide an address. They don't pay cash for, weirdly, they don't pay cash for anything but steel. It cuts down on construction theft because you got a place to send the check of course you to have an address thus eliminating i think it's i think it's prejudicial but

eliminating vagrants who might just be wanting to make some drug stealing and he says that a lot of scrapyards have repeat customers and he once watched he's from a scrapyard, he watched a minivan come rolling in with a 36-inch diameter piece of cast iron sewage pipe stamped city property. He said that the

cops were there before they could even unload it. Scrap is high right now. Three bucks a pound for number one copper. Steel is 150 a ton for low grade. This guy that rode in was getting big into scrap himself,

but his mom doesn't like him leaving it all over the yard, so he's got to get his own place and he'll get back into the business. The super cold weather in Texas killed tons of stuff. Tons of animals. All those exotics that are from like Africa, Asia. Wiped them out. In fact, if you watch the episode we did on Netflix, we have an episode where we go neoguy hunting. I go with Jesse Griffiths.

And we're on a big ranch. We were hunting with a guy. Do you remember that guy's name that went out with us to accompany us, help us out? It was with an A, I believe. Amon? Amondo? Was it Amondo?

Amondo. Amondo. Yeah, but I think they called him Mondo for short. Maybe. Well, I heard. There might have been an R in there, too. Armando. But Mondo? Yeah. I think they called him Mondo. That ranch, I There might have been an R in there too. Armando. But Mondo?

Yeah. I think it's called Mondo. That ranch, I was talking to the guy there, the family that owns it. So far they've found, this is days ago. So far they just randomly counted up 86 dead neoguy that froze to death. And weirdly, some of them kind of came up and like died against a house on the tile like they there's like some solar radiant heat or something coming off that thing how they found it i have no idea like why they would what about the uh orcs and stuff some dead ones but they can handle it better just far fewer and he said he hasn't done like an exhaustive survey. It's just

they're just laying all over the place. Yeah. God, it's crazy. Yeah. This article here points out that they've died on both high and low fence, which makes sense because why does... What's in this picture of all these dead critters they got?

Like what critter? What kind of animal? Looks like axis animal looks like axis deer i think it's that's what another buddy of mine uh was telling me yeah he said his buddy's place all i believe he used the word all of the axis deer died is that right jeez that's the place that whit knows about i don't know about oh no i no, I was talking with Matt. Yeah, same place. All the Axis deer died? Wow.

There's a zoo down there. They had to bring the flamingos inside. That was interesting. They're like inside a restaurant. Yeah, crazy. Inside a restaurant. Yeah. Crazy. You got to wonder, like, what you do with all that rot. Who was pointing out that they wanted to go down and get all the backstraps?

Yeah. No, we were saying that. Yeah. Just go down. Like, if you woke up one day and there's 86 dead Neil guy, man, what's that times two? 172 freaking back straps you'd have if you went out and got them all. Yeah, that'd be. Imagine a full freezer with nothing but Neil guy back straps.

Yeah. God. But what's that going to do to the industry down there i mean it's got to be i mean in in terms of whatever industry there is around in terms of whatever industry there is around uh those hunts i mean it's got to kick its teeth in you know jesse griffith's restaurant and um he sells a lot of stuff so i imagine that's going to complicate his world and then he only bought i don't know what he's doing right now but he only buys produce from texas stuff's all frozen man yeah and then all

those people without like access like their fridges and can't cook he was running he turned his he turned um his restaurant basically into like he had like a social media feed going about what they have, what key people can come get, what they have in, what they're out of. Just trying to like feed people. Jeez. And use up stuff. So it was almost like this, like ticker tape of information about what you can come down and get and who's got what. God, we're vulnerable animals, aren't we? Not as bad as Neil guy.

This is the weirdest thing. A guy wrote in, Cal, who's not here right now, is the singer from Ram Jam. If you go to YouTube and look up the Black Betty, remember that song? Whoa, Black Betty. Have you ever read the lyrics to that song? No.

My God, does that guy look like Cal? Really? Someone wrote in pointing out the bass player, but he was wrong. It's the singer. Is Cal. I am. It's the way.

I don't see it. Oh, dude. It's Rick and Cal, man. Do you see it, Seth? There it is. There it is. Hold on. Hold on.

It's Cal. There's a screenshot. You see it, Jason? No, that's not him. That's not it. That's not the right guy. Oh, that's not the right guy. Oh.

Oh, my God. It is. Is it the bass player? Is it the bass player? I couldn't tell what instrument he had. Pass it around. Oh, so it is the bass guy. Hold on a minute.

Oh, my God. It is Cal. I was looking at it trying to figure out what he was playing, but let me see. It's kind of like a mix between Cal and Corey, Brittany's husband. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, it is a bass. Man, I'm bad at music, man.

I can't even tell what instrument I'm looking at. Looks just like him. But that song's a weird song. Oh, my God. It's a dead ringer. Yeah. Everyone go to a minute or second 25 on the Ram Jam Black Betty? The song's weird because he's talking about

a woman named Black Betty. And he likes her a lot and she really does it for him. But then she has a child who goes blind? I thought it was goes wild. And blind. And blind. Dude, it's a horrible song. Wow.

But it is Cal. And blind. Dude, it's a horrible song. Wow. But it is Cal. Big hit. This is a good one a dude wrote in about. He's a tree surgeon. He wrote this thing because he knew I used to be a tree surgeon, so he thought it would appeal to me. But a fellow tree surgeon guy had a nipple ring, and the guy slid down a tree a little bit one time,

and a chunk of bark grabbed that nipple ring, tore his nipple right off. Another guy wrote in. I don't know if this is true or not. I have a hard time with this. We were talking a long time ago about how you can sell. I know for a fact that Buck Bowden sold a, how big was that moose? It was like a 70-some inch moose. Yeah, it was giant.

Sold it for like tens of thousands of dollars to Cabela's for their collection. And he even knows where it sits now. He would carry this big giant moose head around, the rack. He'd carry it around when he's at a show. So if you go to a show like, what's that thing in Harrisburg called, the famous one? Great American Outdoor Show. Yeah, that's where I met Buck Bowden. So there's these outdoor shows, right? And outfitters will have booths, and they always have a little photo album.

A lot of them have all kinds of taxidermy mouths. You go to Buck's, there's just Buck sitting there on a folding chair with a photo album laid in front of them. Like nothing, like just does it, like not a marketer, not a marketer. And so I was like, I feel like talking to that guy. So I went and talked to him a long time. He said he used to have this big moose he'd carry around, but he brought it to Harrisburg. And some guys came up, asked a bunch of brought it to harrisburg and some guys came up asked a bunch of questions about it they left and another guy came up and made the purchase

because he wanted to put it in a sporting goods store is it in the harrisburg i don't know he could tell where it is i can't remember where he said it wound up bass pro whatever's there this guy's saying he found a porcupine albino he says cabela's offered him 70 grand and his grandpa what the hell was it his dad says his dad turned it down that's where i get incredulous he says he mounted it on a pile of sticks and pine cones instead. Yeah, I mean, I feel like his dad should call in just so I could say, really? 70K, huh? Let's see.

I want to see a picture of this albino. I'm sure if he's listening, I'm sure he'll send it in. Porcupine. Corinne, if he writes in, maybe his papi will talk to us on the phone. We can grill him. We can grill him. I'm actually looking at pictures of albino. Maybe there's a story that goes along with it that's worth $70,000.

I don't know. Well, maybe it's Elon Musk. No, but he's saying that it's his retirement plan. Oh. Oh, huh. There's Chester's walleye boat. Chester could get like a freaking full electronics package and everything, man. Yeah, he probably put two engines on that sucker.

That's pretty cool. This show, I got to report this because this makes us look good. This show solved a mystery. Not only have we saved a ton of lives. A ton. Well, two. Through, and not us, Dr. Adam Lazara has saved two lives so far about tourniquets. This guy was up along the Muscle Shell River in Montana and finds, like it had burned. There was a prairie fire.

And the prairie fire had stripped away all the grass and sage and whatnot from this little patch, and lo and behold, there sits a little tombstone. No explanation about the tombstone. He was super curious about it and took a picture of the tombstone. Then, he even called the office of the land and the administration, the administrative office of the land management agency. They didn't know. Then we got talking about my new favorite book,

life and death at the mouth of the muscle shell. He goes and gets the book, reads it and finds a very thorough explanation of what happened to this dude. But that was unsolved for 15 years. This was 15 years ago that he came upon. Keeping him up at night. Keeping him up at night for 15 years.

Who wants to sum up what happened to the guy's body? In that book, the amount of people shooting each other, fiddling with guns. It's crazy. Oh, fiddling with guns. Yeah. It's crazy.

Oh, all the time. Yep. It must be three or four times or someone's fiddling around with a gun and like shoots himself or shoots his buddy or whatever. Yeah, well, we didn't have hunter safety courses yet. So this fella, whose was Constant Kessneel Kessnell It's spelled Q-U-E-S-N-E-L-L Chester

How tall is Chester? I don't know This guy was 5'6 Yeah No it's one of the interesting things about Constant is that he was a short fella. He was a tinsmith from Montreal and enlisted in Boston.

But anyway, it sounds like there was a raid. Some Sioux raided their stock and had their stock run around everywhere. And this fellow and another fellow must have been right there. I don't know if they were shepherding the stock or what. But somehow they were part of this being raided upon. And they found his body with a whole bunch of arrows sticking in it back and arm and it looked as though if i don't really know how he's extrapolating this information from what he could see but he's saying that the some of the arrows in the hands and uh were evidently shot while he had his gun to his face

in the act of firing at them, disabling him so he could not use his gun, a breech loader, causing him to turn and run. Yeah, he's like this. And so they're saying that like, just the angle of the arrow was as though he was holding a rifle, aiming and shooting.

I think that's what he's suggesting. Yeah. Well, he might not be keen to is the, um, elaborate ways in which bodies would be sort of mutilated in symbolic ways. And like things done to bodies to like send messages or to impact one's experience in the afterlife.

So who knows? Well, I also just feel that like, sure, they might've hit him as he was in the motion of, of shooting that rifle. But to say that someone's like taking a stick bow, I don't know what range.

And they're like actively trying to shoot a guy's forearm or hand to disable him, like, that's some pretty accurate stuff. Yeah. You know, and, like, it's not like you're at the range, you know, shooting at a target that's not moving. You're, like, in part of a raid, and you're like, oh, I'm going to hit him in the wrist. So you can't shoot at me anymore. Yeah, I got you. Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, Yanni. Mm-hmm.

Maybe they're really bad shots and that's as good as it, I mean, they got him in the hand and the arms. They were going for the heart. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Aiming for the guy. They were firing arrows, yeah, and they happened to hit him in the arms.

Or he was hiding behind a stump. Mm-hmm. And that's all that was sticking up. That could be too. But I wouldn't underestimate those bows because we're going to have, we're working on having Michael Punk back on about his new book that's coming out. About the Fetterman fight. Mm-hmm. And they killed, I think the Sioux called it like the battle of 100 in the hand, but they killed something like 84 US soldiers with bows.

I mean, granted they had, it was 2000 against 84, but killed them with bows, man. Like mostly, I guess there was some firearms, they mostly did it with that. So, but you'd also read about bodies being left with a hundred arrows in them, which I think is like, you're basically saying to someone. Yeah. You're super dead. You're saying to someone like, man, this is like, kind of like where we live.

Appreciate you not coming round. Mm-hmm. Go on. That's all I had. About constant. That's pretty damn cool, though. What is? Getting shot up full of arrows? No, no.

Finding that tombstone. Yeah, no, it's super cool. And then learning about it just by reading a book. Because you know what's especially interesting about it is that everything that happens, not everything, about it is that everything that happens, not everything, the vast majority of everything that happens

in that book is underwater. Yeah. It's under Fort Peck Reservoir. Fort Peck, yeah. An enterprising fella would get himself a scuba tank and go down there and look around and find cool stuff.

Yeah. Dig around down there. Okay, moving on cool stuff. Yeah. Dig around down there. Okay, moving on. We're going to talk about turkeys. But as a segue to turkey talk, and it's almost like I almost hesitate to bring this up because it – let me put this question to Jason. Do you know what I want – do you know what Seth is going to present for us? Yeah. Yep. us yeah yep do what do you feel um are you like just do you love turkeys and you're just interested

in all things turkeys or do you feel like this negates something or do you feel that it like does this diminish the work of a turkey caller or is this just why not know about everything that's true no i think i think it's something we strive for like some of what we're going to listen to like man you know i hate the sound of a box sometimes but like man that's true. No, I think, I think it's something we strive for. Like some of what we're going to listen to, like, man, you know, I, I hate the sound of a box sometimes, but like, man, that's really boxy sound. And so it's just, it makes me think like, how do we sound more like that?

Even though we all know what we've been doing works and we had a little pre-conversation before you got here, like, you know, cadence is important. You know, some of the other stuff that doesn't matter as much as the sound, um, you know, and then I don't want to necessarily get ahead of ourselves, but like the 77 Yelper

hen coming up, like, you know, we've always been, oh, seven to nine note Yelp. You know, one lesson, you're not going to call the bird 10 Yelps. You're not going to call the bird in like seven to nine. And then you hear this real hen out there just going downtown.

So it's like, it always makes you think, but I think is, is a, you know, a guy that tries to sound as much like the real thing. Like you always strive to like, Hey, yeah, she she might sound off but i think a lot of real hens aren't great turkey callers that what got me interested in finding out about like looking this stuff up is i found that it was more helpful to me to go on YouTube like in learning about learning turkey calling right it was almost more helpful for me to go on YouTube and just find hens yep find video of hens making noise because oftentimes like so often when you're out in the woods and you hear turkeys they're not doing the playbook they're not always doing the playbook

that you're doing like you have an idea of the playbook but then you're like you'll be sitting there in the dark sometime and just hear some hand just like up in a tree going nuts and you would feel funny doing that yep yep like and this this hen on youtube that yeah if you heard a person out in the woods did the raunchiest loudest 77 yelp in a row sequence you'd be like what is that dude doing yep yeah that's that's a guy yeah or you'd say you know after 34 you'd be like that's not a dude yeah that guy either be to passed out by now it's really interesting man it's really interesting you know to go watch stuff they do but then I it's worth bringing this up to

you know the the 10th Legion that that kind of of like this famous turkey hunt book by this guy, Colonel Tom Kelly. Phil's subject matter expert. You're a Tom Kelly expert? No, Ben's just been shoving it down my throat for the last few months. It's hard to avoid. It's a good book about turkeys. But in it, he tells this story where he's out in the woods one day and he's watching a group of,

I can't remember how, if he's watching, he's watching either a group of hens or a group of toms going about their business. And a hen shows up near him and sets to just yelping her ass off. Okay. It's like spring. And he said,

the gobblers didn't even pick up their head. So in terms of, you know, there's a big thing about like, what mood are they in? Yeah. Like what do they got going on? So if you do something and it doesn't respond,

you're in your head's like, he doesn't think I'm a hen. Right. Yeah. But then that, I didn't trick them. Well, but then here's a hen standing there.

And they're like, didn't pick their head up. Uh, Mike Chamberlain was saying that their testosterone levels change daily up and down. And one day I have that problem. One day, one day their testosterone might be

low and you call to them and they don't give a shit. But the next day you're on that same bird and his testosterone levels have risen and he's like all of a sudden interested. Yeah. Sounds like a bull elk. Man, I got a, I got a little idea.

I'm hatching right now. Testosterone injections for turkeys? Putting corn out with testosterone. You'd be breaking two laws. Yeah. See, I've always been like, I've always subscribed to the idea like, you know, they're henned up. And if they got there for sure thing, like they're not interested. But I'd be curious in that example you shared, like when the real hen was next to him, like, was it truly just a flock of toms or were they locked down on a hen?

Because if they, I would. You got to read the 10th Legion. I would throw a fit. I would pack my calls up and go home. If it was nothing but toms over there, no hens locked down and they didn't even look at me. I'm like, all right, I'm out of here. You haven't changed. I had a big fight with Clay Newcomb down in Texas where we went out one day bright early in the morning to rattle bucks in. And we had reason to believe, based on Yanni rattling a couple basically into the truck with him, we had a reason to believe that on this property rattling worked very well.

We go out in the morning and nothing. And I'm like, damn damn what's going on you know then we go out in the middle of the day and one after the other and i don't think it's at their testosterone level spike i argued to clay that i'm like for lack of a better word i think bucks are bored at two o'clock and i think in the morning they're kind of like oh the dolls are doing this they're moving around stuff's going on and then everybody's just laying around bored off their asses and they hear a rattle and he's in the does are bedded and he's like i run over there real quick i'm not

gonna miss out on something exciting yeah i'm thinking which clay thought that was a stupid idea i'm thinking he's already checked the bedding area He knows all those does are not in heat He's like whoa Somebody's fighting over a hot doe over here Boom I gotta go So maybe not bored but you know what I'm saying His mood changed

His circumstances changed In some kind of predictable fashion At a certain time of day Maybe their testosterone rises with the temperature. Mine doesn't. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right.

We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products

and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Okay, Seth. I don't know how you want to do this.

So this is like, you got some good ones. I have a couple. Here, let's do this first. Which one of you boys, Dirk or Jason, which one of you boys wants to give us like a conservative hunter

sits in the woods and goes, yep, yep, yep, yep. Am I going to use your call or Yoni's? It doesn't matter to me, man. Whatever one you think is going to be the most conservative

for you sitting in the woods i'm not using either of yours i'm gonna use the meat eater call okay this is a conservative turkey hunter who's like man i gotta play it cool i don't want to give these turkeys the wrong idea. Okay. Now is that like, that was probably still like, they're just out of the tree or still in the tree, like real quick. Yeah, I call that conservative.

All right. Now Seth's going to share with us like some, some turkey noises. Yeah. I love these things. This first one just totally debunks the, the like, don't call too much, seven to nine Yelp cadence.

Just non-stop. It's like having a kazoo out in the woods. That's the hunter. That's the hunter. That's the hunter. I love it. So after hearing that, you know, maybe you could call a little bit more. I don't know. Yeah, because if they don't come in, you're always like, I'm going to give them the silent treatment. Yeah.

I don't know. Maybe some people are. Maybe some people are like, dude, I'm going to pour the coals to it. There is. There are. Man, I can't remember the guy's name. Someone that Jay Scott hunted with, Yargus maybe. You guys know that name?

He was like, there's so many guys that have been like national turkey calling championships, but I believe the guy's name is Billy Yargus. that name he was like there's so many guys that have been like national turkey calling championships but i believe the guy's name is billy argus and that was the first guy that jay i think had heard and that i had heard where like even in the dark on the tree setup his attitude is pour the coals to him just talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk and be like no i am the only hand you need to be focused on right here me and just hammer adam and he had great success i like that guy that's your style yeah i don't the whole like be quiet be patient that's that's no good i want to be like that hen i just want to run that call as much as possible

hit us with another one seth oh okay so this one is a hand that if I heard this hand, let's say I'm in Pennsylvania and I'm walking through the woods and I hear this, I'm like, that is a dude on a box call and he sounds terrible. This turkey's clocks are more like squeaks. Like some sound good, but you'll hear a couple that are just like squeaks. hmm like every once in a while there's one in there just like a squeak and you know i'd be like that's dude just like messed up a little bit he's got

like there's a problem with his box call yeah yeah so yeah real turkey you got another good one here's one more good one you'll be able to clean this all up right phil this one this one's just a hen that gobbled that's gobbling oh which is interesting clean this all up, right, Phil? This one is just a hen that's gobbling. Oh. Which is interesting. That's the hunter.

No, this is the turkey. That's the turkey. That's a hen? That's a hen that's a hen yeah and if i heard that in the turkey woods with the you know a bunch of pressure around me like that's a dude on one of those gobble yeah thanks the gobble shakers yeah so that's a real turkey this this is right here. It's almost like a Jake gobble, too. Yeah. Kind of half-hearted.

Okay, one of the things we wanted to do in heading into this is, in heading into talking about some of this is um we're trying to get our favorite turkey biologist mike chamberlain what's his what's his instagram thing called super interesting man oh i love his posts wild turkey doc dude they should have it be that he's the only person that can be on instagram like instagram should just be his thing and everybody has to follow it yeah cuz it's like it's just like information useful applicable information I like how he apologizes to for like being too long like he knows he knows like how much people can tolerate and how much they want to read.

He'll a lot of times be like, all right, it's a little bit longer this Tuesday. He only gives you one a week. Yeah. What's this thing called? His handle is wildturkeydoc. Yeah. Just one word. And yeah, I highly recommend checking him out.

Instagram should be called wildturkeydoc. And when you go, it's just his stuff. You can't start an account and start putting your own stupid stuff up there it's just his stuff so corinne asked him a question we were curious because we i don't think we asked him this before uh corinne wanted we wanted to ask him mainly um what is going through a turkey's mind when it's being called at right we do all the talking about like mimicking the sounds but what might be on the turkey like the one receiving the noise what is it really capable is it really sitting there being like hmm hmm is that a person or what yeah or is it like is it telling me to come is it

telling me to go is it telling me that there's good food over there right yeah does it sound like sex sex sex sex sex or food food food that's old betty lou there. I remember her from last year. Steve was dying to know what on earth is going through a turkey's mind when it's called at. Well, that is a good question. Unfortunately, we can't interview turkeys, so it's hard to know with certainty what they think or perceive when we call to them. But what we do know is that turkeys at least partially recognize each other based on their calls. We also know that because of the way hearing works in birds, that they perceive calls differently than we do. So you kind of need to think about, so how does a turkey hear? If you understand how they hear, then I think it helps kind of navigate, well, what are they perceiving? So turkeys, they don't have an

external ear like we do. So they don't have flaps on the outside of their ears that help funnel sound into their inner ear canals you can see the ear canal on the side of their head it's kind of just below and behind their eyes but without an external ear flap they have to come up or they have to use different ways of determining direction and distance to sounds. So what turkeys do is a sound comes into one ear and the ear registers the volume of the sound and the other ear acts independently to register a different volume to that sound. And if you watch turkeys, you'll see them do this. They constantly are turning their heads. That allows them to determine, because they can figure out through that volume

adjustment, where is the sound coming from, left, right, up, down. And as they turn their head, it helps them kind of refine where exactly is that sound coming from? And turkey hunters will tell you, you know, they have this uncanny ability to just pinpoint the exact distance to a sound. And the way they do that is because those sounds are coming in their ears and being registered by the brain differently than we hear sound. And because we also know that birds in general hear different frequencies in calls than we do, we call to a bird and there's a very simple yelp, yelp, yelp, yelp, or whatever sound we make, and they hear that differently because they can perceive different frequencies than we can. So you kind of factor that into the equation combined with

the way that they hear sounds in their ears and that allows them to perceive much more complex messages in calls than us humans are capable of perceiving. So we don't really know, again I've never been able to interview a tom to ask him, but we do know that birds in general, and turkeys obviously, hear their world differently than we do. So we know because of how acute their hearing is and because of the way their hearing works, they can pinpoint direction of sound with precision.

And a person once told me, he was a famous turkey researcher that imprinted birds and watched their behavior. He told me that turkeys have an incredible sense of place. And what he meant by that was they hear a sound and they know exactly not only the direction from which that sound came, but where that sound originated from on the landscape. They essentially have a GPS and they can pinpoint that call or that sound came from that spot and they can go to that spot. And we see this really commonly in some of our research where we are tracking hunters and turkeys simultaneously. So we have toms that are running around with GPS units on, and we have hunters that are carrying a GPS in

their jacket. It's bizarre, but turkey hunters have, we know this occurs, but we've had numerous situations where a person ends up calling to a bird from a spot leaves because the turkey doesn't show up and three or four hours later the bird ends up at the exact same spot the hunter was incredible incredible and and that just tells you that the bird knew exactly where that call was coming from yeah it just wasn't in his routine that morning to walk over to that sound. He said, you know what, I'll go check that out a few hours from now because my morning routine is I'm going over here and do this and then I'll get back to that sound. Take a little detour. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've actually put some maps out on social media showing what that looks like.

It's really crazy. They'll end up hours down the road right where you were sitting. Wow. Yeah, that's why God made naps. 100%. Like, I'll often make the mistake of having my nap somewhere else. Like, you go off to a good nap spot. But what you should do is your last call session at nap time,

you should pick a good spot. I'll sometimes do this, like a good little hidey spot where you can call, nothing comes, and then take your nap right there. I'm going to write a book about that. I'll tell you a story of choosing a bad nap spot.

Please. Yanni was there. This was two seasons ago when we took Maggie and Tracy hunting, turkey hunting for the show. The turkey that Maggie and Yanni were after, we called to and then he ended up drifting away and we laid down and took a nap and i woke up to a turkey putting and opened my eyes and the turkey's standing two feet from maggie oh he had come he had come and was

standing like she could have reached over and smacked the bird just like dr chamberlain was saying yeah no kidding man just walked right into us there's a bunch of people sleeping there you know uh what else i'm thinking about as he's answering this question is this idea that you know when we look at deer what deer see right like when you look at your setup camo and all that like you're looking at you have like an idea of what it looks like but then you get into how deer's eyes are or duck's eyes are whatever their experience is probably totally different like you can't even you you'll never maybe not ever i can't foresee where you would look through a thing that shows you what it sees

but from all indications are it is not seeing what you see and so you you're sort of like extrapolating you know i think that's why trial and error is so expensive you can't just look and be think that's why trial and error is so expensive. You can't just look and be like, that's hidden. It has to be more like, I've done this thing, and here's how the animals respond. I've done this thing, and here's how the animals respond. I don't know what it is. I can't replicate it, but I'm learning that this type of thing really gets their attention.

Yeah. You know, this type of thing, they just look right through. Abernathy, who's a biologist, was saying one time, he would talk about iridescence on birds. And I know he's talking about what they hear, but he's talking about bird vision. And he thinks that when a turkey looks at a turkey,

it just is not seeing what you see in terms of the iridescence on those feathers. So when they're looking at like a foam decoy versus a real bird, it might not even look close. Even though to our eye, it looks like another turkey. It's just not what he's seeing. He thinks that fan is just screaming at that turkey. I agree. I think. It's like I would, I think. It's like fireworks going on. Yeah.

And like now back at home, like the big things like real turkey, like stuffer decoys, you carry like a full mounted bird around with you. And then that way you get the full, you know, you got a real bird sitting there, but I wonder if, like you said, it comes back to testing. Like you have to test that over and over and

over out in the field to see if it works any better. He, he was very early long time ago this abernath he started messing around with real turkey feather decoys and he just took a decoy and got a hot glue gun and glued the feathers onto the thing and he had one with him when i was hunting with him in florida and i can't remember what he said he said something like 32 turkeys have seen this decoy and they're all dead. That's a good result. That works. What constitutes a quote unquote good call versus a bad call? We have, well, let's say we. As a human being, I can listen to a call and think, oh, that sounded pretty good.

But we have absolutely no idea what a turkey thinks is a good call or a bad call. And any turkey hunter can tell you this if they've hunted enough that you'll use one call and get no response whatsoever. And you take a different call out of your vest and all of a sudden there's a bird that's gobbling and he's right there. Why didn't he call to the first call and he did to the second or you know another experience we've all had is you start calling and suddenly there's a bird a hen that's nearby and she's mad as hell and she approaches you and starts cutting at you and yelping at you and we don't know what she's thinking, but presumably because we know they recognize each other based on their calls, she either doesn't recognize you and wonders why you're there, or she thinks she recognizes you and she doesn't want you there. I mean, that's the two logical assumptions I have. Either way,

for whatever reason, that call caused her to get upset and she comes and tries to find you so that she can tell you that she's upset. So we don't really know. I mean, I can call okay now, but I killed turkeys years ago when my calling sucked. I thought it sucked, but there was a bird out there that didn't agree with me and thought, hey, that sounds pretty good. And I think a lot of it goes back to the ecology of the bird because a hen, she's thinking in her mind, she's geared to reproduce and lay a nest and hatch in the spring. She has grown up around other turkeys and she recognizes their calls and she recognizes what they look like. That's the other way that we think turkeys recognize each other is based on their heads,

which is one reason why you'll often see turkeys when they're fighting, they're pecking at each other's heads because that's their form of recognition. So you have a hen who's geared towards reproduction and she is going to be by herself and spend part of the spring alone. She's been gregarious prior to that, meaning she's been in a group prior to that, and she recognizes everybody in her group. But toms, on the other hand, they're geared towards reproduction solely, and their fitness improves by breeding more hens. So the more hens I can breed, the more fit I am. So in his mind, he may not care whether he's hearing Sally or Janet or Susan or whoever. He's just thinking I can reproduce with that sound and that's a good thing.

So it makes sense that toms would be more responsive to a wider variety of calls, a crappy call or a world champion, grand champion caller, because they're thinking with reproduction on the mind. That's the way I kind of look at it. Given how acute turkey hearing is, do we need to screech at them at the figuratively the top of our lungs when we call to them? Do we really need to be like that loud and obnoxious? Well, there are going to be some people that disagree with this but no no we don't there are situations where using a really loud call when you're trying to locate a bird maybe the wind's blowing or you're trying to project sound in the environment at distance to hope that he can hear

you yes that's grounds for squawking away. But if you're fairly close to a bird, and when I say fairly close, several hundred yards, you don't need to call loudly. This bird can hear very, very subtle sounds. And we've all probably been in this situation where you're scratching the leaves or you reach over to pick up your call and you make a noise and a bird gobbles. I tend to call louder than I think I probably need to. And the reason I say that is one of the best turkey hunters that I've ever been around. He calls so soft that I can barely hear him when I'm sitting with him. And that's, that's the truth. It's crazy.

And before I started hunting with this guy, I tended to call much louder than he, he does. And I was successful. It worked, but sometimes it didn't. And when this guy calls, he calls so softly and so subtly that I'm serious. I'm sitting 10 yards from him. It's so soft that I can barely hear the notes, and yet birds come right to us. In fact, I don't even call when I hunt with this guy anymore. I just let him call because what few times we hunted together last year, we had birds in front of us almost every single time. So it was like, well well you do the calling I've also been in situations where I made calls and just scratched in the leaves or did something really subtle really quiet and birds are responding from hundreds of yards away

and then kind of back to some of the other things we've talked about that allows a bird because they can hear so well that allows them that gps an internal gps to figure out that's where that scratching in the leaves came from i'm going over there and i'll check that out i do think in general we tend to call too much because the bird once they hear you they know where you're at they know Well, that call came from right over there. So once the bird realizes you're there, in my opinion, you're better off to call quietly, if at all, once they've responded, because they know you're there. And they know exactly how to get to you on their own terms, which unfortunately often ends up with them winning and us losing, but they know how to get to where you are with precision. Man, I'll tell you all this talk about the randomness of it or the crazy noises.

There is, because I've just seen it so many times, people that are just so good. Like, Jason, you know, you've talked to Guy Zuck, right? Yep. Like, I've gone out hunting with Guy Zuck where I've gone out and hunted all morning on the place. Okay. With whatever results.

Sometimes good, sometimes not. But then Guy will be in the afternoon like, oh, let's go take a walk. And he just go out and like starts calling, you know, to get a gobble. And it's like someone putting like a ton of pressure, squeezing a zit, man. Cause he'll just keep like very quietly, just like going, going, going, going, going, going, going, going. And all of a sudden, like, it's like the thing just like, can't like, he lays it out in the way that the bird just cannot help itself.

Like when that dude goes out, he's going to call in a in a turkey morning or afternoon is he tricking you with timing so like the old time no no the old time is like the old timers like we were always the young bucks like get up you want to hear all the birds on the roost just get that you know that fun in and then the old timer he's like back at camp eating breakfast drinking his coffee he's gonna let all of us come back take our nap he's gonna go at noon and kill the bird. No, this isn't the old noon trick. Okay. This is like the 4 or 5 o'clock not noon trick.

He's just going to get him. He's just like, I don't know. He's a good caller. Talks turkey. Experience. That's what it comes down to. Does he do anything different? I don't know.

You don't know. Just the mood. I think there's like a lot of mood reading. Also the dude lives on the property, right? Yeah. So he kind of knows like where people are, people meeting in Turkey. He probably had some of the GPS trackers on

that sucker and you didn't know it. So he's like, we're just going to keep, but no, I, you know, kind of going back to what he said, like, you know, even like scratching the leaves, like, is there something that like a Jake, you know, like do the different birds, as they mature, do they start to hear different? Can they differentiate between like sounds? Like that's one of the things I've always, I'm just kind of the nerd out there under the tree. Like, why can't I get this three-year-old bird to break away?

But yet these Jakes come running in, you know, of course they're, they're henned up or whatnot, but you always wonder, like, as a mature, do they become smarter or do their ears become better? Or is it just truly a, you know, uh, I'm an, I need to breed all these hens. So I'm not worried about that hen that's over there in the brush. Yeah. Um, you know, like how do you break that code? Um, but that's why, you know, I kind of mentioned

timing cause you know, turkey hunting timing is huge. Like go let all those hens go lay. Now you have a bored ass tom sitting out in the field or, you know, I don't got anything to do. So now you strike them up at midday and that tom, more so than elk, more so than any other animal, just because the way that they have to lay on that clutch of eggs, you know, it's like, man, you can get that tom that you fought with all morning for the last week straight,

but you go hit them at noon and that thing's going to come in just like that. Yeah, I feel like it's, we've talked about this before, but it's like to not go out at daybreak feels dishonorable. I don't like it. Yeah. But then there's a lot said, just like lay around, go out there at 10. But you feel like you're coming in in the middle of a conversation. I agree. Yeah.

So tell people what's going on with Phelps Game Calls, man. Oh, so we announced what? It was almost two weeks ago now that, yeah, you're my new boss. Can I call you boss? Mm-mm. No. I would prefer to say that we're colleagues. Okay, colleagues.

We're coworkers. We're coworkers. We're colleagues now. So we're going to be able to talk about turkey calls, right? This will be the first time I can finally like talk about the turkey call line. Let it rip, man. So August 17th, I, me and Dirk drove over last

year or no, it was just me this time. Just you. August 17th, talk about this turkey call line that we had tried to launch, I think two years ago and never really got feet off the ground. And I was here and I think Garrett at that time went, took me out to breakfast. Hey, would you ever be interested in, you know, talking about some folks game calls?

And I remember that distinctly. No, I'm not interested. You did? Yeah. I never heard that. Yeah. So I told Garrett, no. Dirk, Durham, were you there for that conversation?

I wasn't. We're sitting out there at the, at the Western on the sidewalk, eating breakfast. And I didn't know we approached you and you were like, uh-uh. No. So wait, wait, we to wait like four more hours. So then me. So you're not a man of convictions. No, no, no.

Well, you know, it's like it is maybe playing your cards right. Like you don't want to just come out like, heck, yeah, I'm looking to maybe move on or do something. We thought maybe you sent the guys out to like go feel out film. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Test the waters a little bit. Yeah. So I'm like, no, not really. I'm kind of happy where

we're at i'd love to you know get this project going with you guys though and then fast forward like four hours later we go to lunch with josh and garrett and josh brings the question up i'm like yeah i mean i'd be willing to entertain it like what's it look like and so just uh and then it got some legs from there and um i can remember like on the mountain all september uh like i i was with yanni in Colorado and they're like, yeah, Josh is like, yeah, Yanni, I don't know if he knows yet. Like, you know, we don't need to talk about it. So like, we're sitting here hunting, like, I don't know if Yannis knows at this time

I'm supposed to say anything. And then by the time we get like to New Mexico, um, like I'm sending, like trying to sign PDF so that we can open the books up. And so it was throughout the fall, I've spent pretty much the last four or five months of my life, like getting this deal kind of straight with everybody. And, uh, yeah. And now we're here with kind of what launches whole thing and, uh, releasing the meat eater X Phelps, um, turkey call line. Yeah. And you're going to, um, you're staying on board. That was a stipulation. Oh yeah. Yeah. No. And that's, I remember you saying you'd sign a 20-year contract. I wanted to.

I'm worried. They said five years, and I think once they got everything from me, they're going to kick me to the curtain. No, I'm just joking. But, no, it's good. You know, I'm one of those guys, I described the situation, like, you know, back when Howie Mandel ran, like, let's make a deal. Like, I'm the guy, as soon as I got, like, six figures on the board,

I was running. You know, and so it's like I put a lot of work in, and with the kids kind of growing up and stuff, it's like, man, I would, you know, what the help that the meat eater team can give me. And it's still like, you know, whether we want to dive deep into it, like the financial side, like every year, like no matter how successful we were, it's like, man, here we are again, like getting ready for next year. And like the bank accounts draw, you know, to produce that next year. And it was a little bit of like, man, we're doing a great job. We have, we're turning big numbers every year, but it's just like the financial stress. And so like talking with, you know, the team

getting through there, I'm like, man, I think this is where I want to go. I want to have a little bit more of my life back. Um, all my kids know is this business as we, me and my wife have, you know, with, with friends and family have built this thing. And it's just basically, I want to, you know, enjoy this, this little bit and still do a lot of the cool stuff. And, um, you know, I had two diabetics, my wife and my son are both type one, like juvenile onset. And so like, I couldn't leave my state job. Like there were all these things and, and like, it couldn't have been more perfect. Like when we started talking to the meat eater team, like, man, you know, the benefits are good. This is good. This is good. And it's just going to work out as we've've mentioned in some of the other things like it's the right team i think to grow this

thing and do some cool stuff so when i would tell people about what we're leading up to and i would talk about how you know how you guys are such renowned callers and in some ways kind of revolutionized elk calling in a way and also grew up hunting like the hard elk. Yep. Like hunting the shittiest elk in the world. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

And like learned how to do that. Are they really known to be the really, really tough elk? So, and I don't want to. Like the, well, go ahead. I don't want to throw any of the big hunters under the bus, you know, but you see the, back when we were growing up, the, the, you know, the sportsman's channel, the outdoor channel hunters, the big elk hunters we all looked up to, you know, can you see the, back when we were growing up, the, the, you know, the sportsman's channel, the, the outdoor channel hunters, the big elk hunters we all looked up to, you know, can I mention names? You'd see like the Will Primos. Yeah. Well, they would go and film it

at these famous ranches. Now there's anything wrong with going to the famous ranches, but. Yeah. So they, you know, they were the elk hunters. Like I looked up to Will, like I watched, as soon as the truth came out, like I was driving to my local Sunbirds, I was buying the DVD. So I go pop it in and watch it. And then as I grew up, like spots where we were successful, you know, Dirk isn't in the same stuff I'm in, but he probably some of the other hardest elk in the world to hunt aside from the coastal jungle. But you would watch these, you know, proclaimed elk hunters come and just get their butts kicked on the coast. You know, everything there wants to bite you, eat you, it's wet. It's, and you know, people have just struggled on the coast to kill these, you know, tiniest Roosevelt's in the world.

You know, their bodies are huge, but we've got these little, you know, I've killed mule deer that are bigger than most of my bulls. I killed my backyard, but they are hard, hard elk to hunt. And so. And the, I mean, the, the, the densities are so much lower, like everything about it. You can't see. It's not like, oh, here comes the 300 of them out into the alfalfa field you know it's just like a different kind of yeah and and i grew up you know hunting industrial timberland so it wasn't any of the you know hunting down on the hayfield or down the alfalfa field it was you

know beaten brush you know down on the bottom of big canyons you know devil's club anything that would bite you poke you stab you um you know fern up to your chin. It was just, that's how we grew up elk hunting. And, and, you know, it's like, I, I loved it, but, um, it was definitely tough, especially, you know, getting to, to, to start hunting elk all over the West. Now I'm like, man, that was, that was tough compared to some of this other stuff. You might as well just leave your binoculars in your truck. Um, it was just that kind of hunt. Do you still hunt Washington every year? I haven't, I've got a lot of pressure to come back though. It's, oh yeah, you got to go to all these other

states and draw these tags and do this. And there's a lot of pressure on me, I think, to eventually come back. When was the last time you hunted Washington? 2013. You don't have this little local, you don't have little local honey holes? So I take that back.

Like for myself, the last time, 2013, when some hunting partners or stuff will get like a muzzle loader tag and I've got time, we'll go out and hunt. Oh, I got you. So, um, you know, my wife drew a good tag in 17, so I hunted there, but you know, it's only had so much time up until now with vacation, you know, and trying to squeeze the hunts in.

So, um, yeah, I'll eventually come back and, and hunt, you know, home. I haven't hunted with my dad, um, and my uncles, um, for a long time. Um, you know, aside from like a weekend trip, maybe just to go out with them. So I want to get back and do that once before they get too old. When I would talk to people about it too, I would say like, man, he built the business in his backyard, you know? Literally.

And I mean, and by that, I mean, he built the business in his backyard. Yeah. No, it was, I shouldn't even tell on myself because it's a little embarrassing, but it was just that it was the way we had to do it. Like we'd go to package calls and, you know, my mom or my wife, they were doing the majority of the packaging. And like, they would go into my closet. Like I had, I had, you know, like my racks of finished calls were like sitting in my closet. Like here's the, here's the clothes that I wear to work. And then here's like the calls that we need to send out, like, as it grew. And that was

just kind of what we had to do. We, we started it all in a 36 by 30. It was literally my garage. We kicked all the vehicles out, kicked everything out, all the four wheelers, everything. And like, no, this is, if we're going to do this, we're going to do it this way. And we, we made it work. Someone pointed out to me, I didn't even realize this, but someone pointed out to me too, that the customer service number was your cell phone. It still is. No, no. We're in the process of getting that transferred over. But if you call the number on the back of the packaging, and that's why I would always pretend like we were bigger than we were, right?

Did you use an accent when you'd answer? Yeah, yeah. Oh, let me transfer that jason if you need to talk to him um you know like people are always surprised like oh i didn't expect to get you on the line i'm like yeah the customer service must have forwarded it like have the calls forwarded to me right now or something because he didn't want to look that podunk that your cell phone number but my cell phone number we're working on getting that changed because it lives on all of our packaging. So it was easier just to get me a new phone number. Dude, that's hilarious. Yeah, he's not lying.

A buddy of mine, I told him to go get some fellas game calls. He had, I don't know what it was, but he had something. I said, he had a problem. I said, you should just call the customer service. I'm sure they'll take care of you. And then he got back to me. He's like, you know, I think I talked to Jason himself. I'm going to just auto forward everything to Dirk.

I get quite a few of those too. Yeah. Dirk started to handle most of the email customer service stuff though. My number's on there for some of that stuff for dealers. But some people, I think they just call numbers until they get somebody. And they're like, who? Hey man. So I saw you on the internet. Yeah. But you know, it was just cool. It's cool to be part of the family. Um, we were able to bring everybody along. Um, and a lot of people, I think, and maybe I can clear up from our side, maybe you guys don't care,

but like a lot of our followers may be different than, than the meat eater followers. And, and I think the most asked question is, oh, you guys are going to change. We're going to become, you know, meat eater ish. And I've, I've told everybody, like, it's been more important to you guys than it has to me. Cause I want to be able to like, do some of the cool stuff you do or like, why do you guys, you know, this post is cool. And like, it's been more important to the people I've dealt with that we stay Phelps game calls. We, we use our quick wit, we use our, know like your guys's marketing they don't think we have quick wit no no I think you do but like they want us to yeah I want to know what becoming meteorish means I don't know what that I don't know what they expect from that but like it's been told to us multiple times like

we want you guys to make a post and maybe have a misspelled word or, you know, like we want you to, you know, like. Oh, we spell it too good. The polished, you guys know how to spell. Me and Dirk are from the sticks. Our vocabulary is too good. Yeah. There's probably some software you can do to just make sure that all the words get

misspelled, man. No. So it's. You're going to start throwing around salient. I don't. I see. So you guys in all your big words are like super intimidating for,

for a guy from PO, uh, so no, no. Uh, so you always been into elk. How long have you been into turkey hunting? I, I was talking to somebody this morning. I probably, my passion was probably higher for turkeys early on than it was for elk. Um, it was more, it was more attainable. Um, you know, I would grew up a rifle elk hunter. Um, so as a kid, like calling the turkeys was the thing. And so I can remember in junior high, like I was a nerd that would sit and print off like a hundred page report on like calling turkeys and like read through it and then try to mimic, you know, what was out there. And so, you know, my first passion may have been turkeys before I got crazy into elk calling. Um, you know, my, my turkey call collection, like I still have a big ammo case full of just all the turkey calls. I would buy way more than I needed. And, and, um,

around home, it was tough though, because we have probably the hardest turkey in the world to hunt. And I'm, I'm saying that without doing a bunch of research, but in Washington state, they have three species. We have the Easterns, the Rio and the Merriam. They've decided to put the Easterns on the West side of the state where I live, where it's wet and very, very poor like reproduction rate. So a lot of what's left is there. But I mean, we would spend our entire March, April just trying to find one or two birds to hunt.

And so just finding them was the tough part. Calling them in and killing them was actually way easier than finding them because the hen numbers were so low. Oh, I got you. You just start cranking on a Yelp and that bird was at your feet. And so we kind of, you know, cut our teeth on some of those, those birds that were extremely

tough to hunt. And then as I got older, got a car, got to drive over to Eastern Washington, the place is pretty dang good. And like, all right, this is what real turkey hunting is supposed to be. You know, you could get on a bird, switch birds, you know, four or five times in the morning and get a ton of experience real quick. It's, it's interesting how turkeys went for so many people in the country particularly in the west and in the far north where you didn't have like our dads weren't didn't hunt turkeys

you know so in michigan i remember early on i remember when i still lived there that there'd be draw tags, right? Now you can hunt the whole, you know, pretty much no matter where you live, you can get a turkey tag and hunt. But being like a big deal, like so-and-so got a turkey tag and they're driving up north to hunt a turkey. And I left around that time. So I never hunted turkeys as a kid. Yep. And then even when I moved to Western Montana, I remember when the units out there, I put in one year and drew a tag when it was like they were giving out like 20 tags up in region one or two or something, portions of it.

Right. And no one knew about it and drawn the thing. And no, like no being raised in the North and living out West, sort of like no institutional knowledge about it. Right. Like wasn't raised by a turkey hunter. And so many guys in the Southeast and areas of the South, it just has always been a thing. They never missed the seasons, but in these places where turkeys had to be reintroduced or flat out introduced. It was as much. So I feel like I've kind of almost discovered it and studied it in a way where even though I've been doing it for a long time now, it still feels kind of new. There's still an excitement about it.

I think I didn't kill my first turkey. I mean, I'm 47 now, so I've been hunting turkeys every year, very avidly for 20 years, which sounds like, oh, that's a long career of turkey hunting. But to me, it still feels new. Yeah. Because I just like grow up with it, you know? Yeah. I've, I've been so busy on the big game side. Like I haven't turkey hunted for like the last six years. Um, you know, and so I'm excited to get a chance to get back out there and spend a couple of weeks chasing birds again. But yeah, it's, it's the same way.

Like more, even more so than elk, like nobody being an archery elk hunter and knowing how to call them, like turkey was completely foreign. We had nobody local that hunted them. Nobody knew how to give us any tips. And so it's like, you just went to the internet like, Hey, how do you, what do you do? How do you make sounds?

Once again, old Will Primos in the truth was truth was like all right i can learn something from these guys and and try to employ some of this and and came up with our own strategies but heck i don't even know i mean we've killed a lot of birds and we're really successful but i don't even know if i'm if we're doing it right or whatever right is um you know we're just super aggressive like elk hunters we get close we scare a bird we get closer we try it and who knows if it's ripe hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. I'm going to get yelled at for this. Dirk's probably going to slap me, but like, to me, it's, it's like elk hunting in, in the spring.

Like we use the same exact strategies. We locate them. We go get close. Um, aside from not having to, you know, fluff the wind checker. Um,

it's pretty much the same game, um, for a lot of parts. And so I love that that being able to talk kind of control the bird and then be able to be aggressive yeah remy warren's blood pressure is rising right he doesn't like that but he doesn't but i get it yeah because it's a it's an audio experience yeah um not grow when we first started hunting turkeys in the, I guess the mid nineties, uh, we did like,

I guess anybody would, you know, we'd go out and get a box call. I remember going out. We were so naive about it back then, getting a box call and going out and not having chalk and pulverize. I'm not kidding you, man.

Sitting there with my brother, pulverizing sandstone with rocks into a dust that we could then rub on there to try to get some more notes out of it. I'm not joking, man. And then typically just losing patience and then doing belly crawls. Oh, yeah. And it was fun over time because at first we would go out and we would glass them up and just kind of hang,

almost like if you're, again, to go to the elk thing, it'd be like the strategy of kind of finding their herd, seeing what they're doing, and trying to just make something happen by nudging out in front of them. We would go out and just try to do stuff. Ditch crawl, ambush ambush them bushwhack them and then gradually being like holy shit you can call these things in

and how much and just how much fun it became and to be where now um i just don't i don't bushwhack them yep like i don't bushwhack them is there any now that don't bushwhack them. Is there any part? Not that I won't, but it's not, maybe I kind of won't. I killed a crippled one the other year that I jumped up, but that was crippled. See, even as a call maker, like as much as I want to show the calls off, there's something that I absolutely love about being able to sneak in on a flock of turkeys. You know, and I'm going to put the disclaimer out there.

It's not necessarily the safest way because who knows if somebody's calling to them, but if you know, you're in a patch of timber or a wooded area, you know, or an area that there's not a bunch of other turkey hunters. Um, I love to like do that call and, you know, sneak, call and sneak and call and sneak. And then, you know, eventually, you know, kind of fool their eyes and ears as well. Um, aside from calling. So I still, as much as I do, like you said, love to call them in. I, there's still something about like tracking a turkey down and like beating his, maybe his best defense. Yeah.

You're pretty sneaky, sneaky hunter. If you can sneak up to within shotgun range of a turkey. I'm built for being sneaky. I have the right size and stature. No, it's, it's fun.

I love calling them, but, um, you know, it's like, there's, there's part of me. It's still sometimes like, especially once they get me a couple of times, I's fun. I love calling them, but there's part of me that still sometimes, especially once they get me a couple times and I'm frustrated, I'm like, all right, I'm just going to go track you down and kill you. When we were working on it, so we set to a project a while ago of doing, because we're all huge here, us folks that spell real good and are slow-witted are oh boy

very interested in turkey hunting and so we had an idea to try to start trying to like work up that we would have like a line of turkey calls that and the thing we talked about would be that um i like to think about, and in doing it, stuff that gets people up and running. For me, because earlier I was telling the story of just trying to figure it out and learn how to be basically proficient. Because you could be a phenomenal caller. I was talking about guys being a phenomenal caller.

But I'm almost kind of surprised by the fact that every spring i like dumb ass me like every spring i'm able to kill a handful of turkeys by a combination of um understanding the birds working the habitat right taking their mood, but also just being able to do the, like at the right time, the right amount of calling, you know? And that's been hard to learn, man. Yeah. And I think to, and, and learning how to like, just get like basically proficient at calls can be a challenging process.

For sure. I like try to be pretty open about the fact that like, it's not like I just pick them up and kick ass, but I've gotten to the point where with the right stuff, I can make the right noise and kill turkeys. Yep. Yeah. And I think that's,

that's important to know is everybody picks one up and if they need to be the best, it's like, is, you know, as the interview earlier, you just need to, I think cadence is important. And as you mentioned, you know, being in the right spot at the right time, making the right decisions, um, being, you know, extremely patient, like I'm not very patient. And so it's, it's ruined a lot of turkey hunts for me or where

I would have been successful quicker, but yeah, I don't think you need to be able to pick these up and be the best caller out there. You don't need you need to be able to pick these up and be the best caller out there. You don't need to be willing or able to go take first or second on the stage or whatever it may be. You just need to be able to make the sounds and be more confident in making the sounds. That was the point I wanted to make, man, is getting to that level of confidence where when you're in a good situation, having the confidence to then do what you need to do. Yep. Because you just don't want to do it

and have some crazy sound that's just so far off it's not going to work. But getting to where you're comfortable, at the right moment, I'll be able to do it. Yep. There's a lot of turkey hunters. And feel cocky. Yeah.

I think a lot of guys will get set up and they're so scared to make a sound. They're like, well, we'll just take our chances. Like if that bird decides to walk by, we'll kill them. If not, we're just not going to make a sound, you know? And they'll just be silent.

And I'm like, well, you at least need to get to the point on whether it's a box, a pot, like, you know, something, you need to be able to at least make a sound. So that bird knows you're there and draws their attention to that spot. Otherwise just sitting there, you know, your chances are, are really low. I think I'll, you you know i'm actually wearing my meat eater t-shirt right

now that shows the probability of a turkey just walking by you if you do nothing what's that what's the percentage it just depends but it winds up being this scenario i think you have like a nine percent chance that he'll just walk by you within shooting range. It's like all the computations to figure out its distance from you. You just sit there and its distance from you and then if you factor in just all these kind of things, what are the odds it'll pass

within shotgun range at various distances as it goes about its day. Coming out of his roost. That's from the roost setup. Coming from a fixed point. You crawl into 70 yards. This is the quiet. You can see that we have a lot of different.

That's this computated. Yeah, that's the turkey one up there. That's a computation of the same thing. It'd be that you crawl within 70 yards of a turkey on its roost and do nothing. What are the odds that it'll pass within shotgun range? So 30 yards on either side of you yeah i think it was like nine or twelve percent i had a guy i was cleaning fish one day in michigan

and there's a guy looking at this shirt and he says you know that's wrong and he's the one that sent i can't remember one of these around here's the one he sent oh i didn't know that those aren't from the same person he's like i don't he goes i see what they're doing but i wouldn't do it that way and he sent us a new formula it's somewhere around here either way it's it's better to try to do something it's better to try something do something. Yeah, I agree. You up your odds. It's better to try something. Exactly.

And in order to try something, you got to have the confidence to do it. Yep. So when you're going to talk about making calls a little bit, like how you make them, what the hell is a turkey call? So specifics? Walk through the whole arsenal, man. So there's multiple ways to get to what sounds like a turkey.

And I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to say that I developed any of this. It's trying to perfect it and make it sound right. And most of all, easy to use. But in this lineup, we've got a box call, which is maybe the oldest form of calling turkeys out there, you know, two pieces of wood, um, the friction between them, um them making a turkey sound,

a yelp sound, cluck purr. We've got diaphragms, which I think are probably the most popular out there. You think so? I think. Well, I think they're the most used. Maybe they're not the most popular, but they're the most used.

Yeah. I think they're the one that everybody aspires to because it's hands free. Hands free. That's where I was going to get. I mean, when we're calling a bird in, like I've only ever called one bird into the gun with a box call and I was scared to death, but it would

only answer that one call because there's so much movement. Like you can't like sit there and not make movement. Same with a pot call. Like it works great, but you got to have set somebody up on the other side of the tree or away from you or some deflection so that they're

not looking at where the gun's at. But you got the have set somebody up on the other side of the tree or away from you or some deflection so that they're not looking at where the gun's at. Um, but you got the, the, the diaphragms and we've got the pot calls. So it's kind of, when you look at the three, if you just stick to the, I mean, there's other things too, like wing bone calls and all this like little spring loaded boxes.

But if you take those, the standards, it's kind of amazing. If you look at them, the wildly different technological approaches to produce those similar sounds. I agree. I think that they would all look a lot like each other. Yep. But they're real different. They might look different, but I think that the, you might have to help me here, Jason, but like the components are friction and then a chamber.

Yep. A sound chamber friction aside from the diaphragm, like there were just, but all the other ones technically could fall into that group of, like the slot calls, the push pins, you know, all of that. Um, you know, wing bone, I, back in the day, I tried to make some, you know, wing bone calls. And I mean, that's, that's just like air, um, you know, going through the three different leg sections. A guy sent me some beautiful wing bone calls. Oh, they're pretty. Yeah.

It's fun to mess with. Do they sound good? I haven't given it the amount of time, but he sent me a video of him doing it. Yeah. He does nice little clucks on it. Gotcha. Yeah. I've always wondered, like, if there's a, uh, um, you know, correlation between like

how good they look and how good they sound. Because they make them beautiful, but I'm like, does that thing act? It's like an artisan thing, man. He makes artisan calls, but then he has gone out and killed turkeys with them. But it's very much a, yeah, it's more about craft, I think, than functionality. But it is interesting. You take a turkey's wing bone, chop it all up, reassemble it, and suck on it and make a turkey craft. Yeah. Yeah. I think than functionality. But it is interesting. You take a turkey's wing bone, chop it all up, reassemble it and suck on it and make like a

turkey sound. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. I mean, you could also do that with a hollow stick probably too. Yeah. They've manufactured wing bone calls too.

Yeah. What you're doing on wing bone calls, you're basically like you're, everything else is, you know, other mouth calls, you're blowing. Yeah. On a wing bone call, you're basically puckering and sucking. Yeah. Yeah, it's like a reverse kiss almost.

Yeah, it's like you put your mouth on this little tube and go. Yeah, I had set some wingbone inside one time to do it, and I'm like, it was just too deep. And I'm like, man, you can only make certain sounds, and I'm just going to stick with these ones. It'd be interesting if you could go back in time to 1750, right? And I know, you know, you know like the Frontiersmen and Boone's era, like they ate a lot of turkeys.

I know they did a lot of roost shooting and whatnot. But were those guys sitting out there sucking on wing bone calls? Or would they have been, shoot them out of the tree, man, in the dark?

I think back then when it's, I think they were shooting them out of the tree. They just want to eat them. Yeah. And mess around with them that's calling., man, in the dark. I think back then when it's just, I think they were shooting them out of the tree. They just want to eat them. Yeah. And mess around with them, that's the call. Now it's frowned upon. Illegal in most states.

I think it was Abernathy was telling me a story about an area where there was historically like very few turkeys. And he was saying that someone he knew or some relative of his has a story where they saw a turkey in a tree and came home all excited and went back and shot the turkey down out of the tree and brought it home and it was a buzzard oh my gosh he's like that's how rare turkeys were man oh i'm i don't as

much as you guys just laughed i don't want to know if I want to tell this next story. Oh, please. I'm a buzzard shooter. When I was young, one of the areas we've had lots of turkeys, I was probably high school senior, junior in high school. Me and my wife were going on a bike ride or something,

kind of just to go check on the turkeys, and sure enough, something flushed up into a tree and, oh, there's birds here like you back out i'm gonna run home get the shotgun and i'll come back out and that bird had dropped back down in the field and i kind of snuck through the field and pow push whacked him that was a stinky old buzzard yeah oh man but that was you know it was season it was everything was and yep ended up shooting my first buzzard i don't want to go into detail but i've had occasion to smell a buzzard and it's a otherworldly odor oh they're disgusting yeah it's not good anyhow turkeys so yeah back to the call so yeah we've got the three different

calls um you know when you go into a box call you're trying to pair up two woods that work well together you know you could have put walnut on walnut you could put you know cherry walnut um are kind of the standards you can get into the exotics but um like man i think when we sat out when we set out to make this call we wanted to be good looking but then also more importantly for me and us is it for it to sound good and so yeah there's a there's a nostalgia to box calls where they bring out there's an ornateness to them like oftentimes people touch a box call and the first thing they comment on is that it's beautiful yep yeah and i mean well the listeners can't see this thing right now but i mean this is i keep my ear turned to the turkey

world and like pay attention to box like this thing is is a piece of art the one that we put together in it and it more importantly it just sounds good. And so, um, as Steve had mentioned earlier, like one of the things you have to do to get this call to operate is you need to get the lid to grab to the sidewall of the box. Um, and so we use chalk to do so. And then, um, as you swipe, I'm looking at a call as a right-handed caller, I'm going to swipe the paddle right to left. It will make contact higher up the box. So you need that to be a little bit thicker because we need to get less vibration out of this sidewall. And then as it gets down towards the bottom, we will hear that call start to break over. And that's where it gets thinner.

People at home, imagine if somehow you don't know what this is. Imagine you have a rectangular box with a wooden lid. Yep. But then the lid is fixed at one point. So the lid can just kind of slide back and forth. Yep. Yep. So we're literally.

He's sliding the lid across the lip of the box. Oh man. And so yeah. Gets me downright excited yeah sure and then not to pat myself on the back but these things come out of of some you know some routers some 3d routers as close as possible but there's no when you're building a call out of wood it's not like this latex which i can take every piece of latex spec it out oh yeah it's 0.003 inches exact it's uniform wood is wood.

And so here's the big crux of building a wood call that sounds good is that this thing might have grains that goes perfectly straight down the sidewall. It might have some sapwood in it. It might have some figure in it. It might have a burl on one side. And so here I am after they all come off of the machine, you have to literally tune one of these hand by hand, you know, one after another, each side by hand to get both sides to run like a turkey. What does that process look like when you're doing that? So I get, it's kind of like, if you can imagine me being very angry at first,

because I'm going to, I'm running the box way harder than I should. I'm really just trying to get that chalk to like bite into the grain and really just like fill the call up with chalk. And then you're listening, like, as you do it over time, you, you get a pretty good ear for it. Like if it sounds like it's scratchy, like the box call I have is not tuned on the left side. So if I start to hear like wood versus wood, like a scratchy, it's typically in the paddle.

So I'll take the paddle off or I'll sand the paddle and try to get it to smooth out. Or the, maybe there's like a little bit of a, a chunk out of the paddle. Um, if it's not like, if the timing's not right, like high to low and like in cadence, it's typically on the sidewall. So I'll go mess with the sidewall and thin out a section. And, and it's kind of, it's, it's really an art to kind of hand tune these things. Now we could set up the machine to just do all this perfectly, but once again, it's wood. Um, and so for me, rather than throwing half of these boxes in the

garbage, because I don't want to put your name, the meat eater name or the Phelps name on them. I don't want to toss these all. What we do is we do kind of a conservative build on a box call, give me a lot of meat in that wall and I'll slowly sand my way into a call that sounds good. How long does it take you to tune one? Um, it really depends. Some of them will give me like a five to 10 minute fit, like need a lot of work. Sometimes it's just a real quick, you know, 30 swipes, 10 swipes to get the angle right. And we're, we will swipe, swipe, check, and we're out in a minute.

And you always tune one wall. No. So on my personal call I brought here, I just tuned the right side. Cause I'm a right-handed caller. That's the side I play most. Whether I'm, I'm kind of the, I don't know what you call this, the Tomahawk chop, like running it this way, or if I'm running it kind of flat style. Yeah. Um, so the right side is what I play typically, but on every call we send out, we try to tune them to two different turkeys left and right and make sure that both sides play. Um, and, and everybody's a little bit different.

I kind of have a group of pre-tuners that get me close. Oh, no kidding. So that I'm not doing the entire legwork myself because 500 seems like a big number, maybe a small number, but it seems like it's a million when it comes to like 500 box calls needing tuned. That number becomes exponentially bigger than it really is when you're counting box calls. Yeah. So if you want to touch something touched by the actual Jason Phelps, pull a fingerprint

off it. Oh, no. All the mouth calls have been in his mouth. Oh, yeah. We pre-tune all those too. That's a little call humor there, ladies and gentlemen. That's an old call joke.

The mouth calls have not been in Phelps's mouth. And then one of the things I, why we've got the time is, is like tuning a box call, like showing up here to Montana and what, 10% relative humidity. Yeah. Going to Washington to 90% relative humidity. There's a spring under the screw, which the box

call pivots on. That can rattle around and rotate even in shipping or from, you may need to adjust that. And so while I don't recommend you take your box call and get your Phillips head screwdriver out before you start to play it, there is always some minor tweaking on that screw. If the call seems to be too high pitch and it

doesn't break over, if you run the screw clockwise and actually tighten it, you will start to get your back end earlier. So you'll get the tune, you know, the second part of the note before you're all the way parallel. Huh. If your call is too tight, then you can loosen

it and it'll actually make the call higher pitch. So there's, it's kind of, as I mentioned earlier, so the tuning is me sanding it and then really adjusting the screw. For the box call that we designed, a good starting place is the screw, the brass screw all the way down and then come out three quarters

of a turn. It's kind of going to get you in that ballpark and we start adjusting from there. So like I always cringe it's people like getting out and tuning their calls yeah right off the bat but that's if things are just out of whack um that's that's a good place to get back to because just a slight turn not even a whole quarter turn on a box call huge huge yeah i mean an eighth of a turn would would change a call when i was tuning them from not working to speaking like pure turkey. Really?

It's crazy. That little bit of just changing the angle that that lid's hitting, hitting the boxes is what matters. I had no idea. It was that, like, I would have, you know, my tendency is to get in there, I don't know, quarter, half crank. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like, I'll get to the bottom of this. Yeah.

No, and that's where it's, you know, you can nerd out on these things because that eighth of a turn matters or, you know, the difference in the wood matters or, you know, I got to the point where, oh, we got sapwood on one side. We need to come out a little bit more because it's a little bit tighter grain or whatever it needs to be. Like you just start to learn. But, um, yeah, the, those things were meant to be, you know, tweaked a little bit by the end user based on location, humidity. Um, and then we also want to note, um, the box call is tough to run. At least ours being, you know, pure wood doesn't have the waterproof chalk or anything. They're, they're kind of the first call that gets put away in a, in a plastic bag, you know, when the rain hits. So that call kind of just, it's a, it's a fair weather call. Yeah. Um, but it does have, it's got that distance and I just love the sound of a, sound of a well-tuned box call.

I know a lot of guys like to use them just for trying to – when you can't get nothing going on, just trying to get a gobble too because you just get a loud piercing. Yep. High pitch. When you're just trying something, man, they'll pull that one out just to try to make something happen. Yep.

Talk about the – I'd like to point out before we leave the box call that one thing that we wanted in the design of it was uh compact yep yep box calls can sometimes be unruly how big they are like they don't even make pockets in your vest that'll fit some of the ones that are out there uh but this one's nice where you could just you know put in your pant pocket if you wanted to. Yep, yep, 9 inches long and about 1.7 inches wide. So it's a nice compact side that still gets a good high note. You know, like you had mentioned, you got those old 15-inch, like,

boat paddles that are just, you know, you're out there, just big old swipes, and they're just tough to hunt with. How many of those are we going to have? The sky's the limit. Like, we just, we kind of hit with this first one. I'm just, like, curious how many you many of those are we gonna have the sky's the limit like we just we we kind of hit with this i just like curious how many you want to pick up and tune oh we can we'll just we'll have to figure out a better system but we can or i'm gonna have to hire somebody that's like a box called tuner but we know the first 500 have been tuned by jason phelps himself i love it yep um yeah and so then we've got the pot calls um i, and I think, I don't know if Giannis was a

bigger, um, cheerleader for the smaller pots, if it was Steve, but I know we didn't go with a full size pot. No, no, I, we're in, we're in alignment. Together. Okay. So, you know, most of your pots are like four inch pots.

Cause my turkey vest has a small little pot. The pot pocket's smaller than a turkey vest. So there you heard it, why we have a slightly smaller pot call just so Steve can fit these in his vest. They're a little bit smaller. I like the way it feels in your hand. Yeah, they're easier to hold. There's a lot of good reasons for it.

And then we kind of went back and forth. Do we bring out a slate? Do we bring out a glass, a crystal? And we ultimately ended up on a slate over glass and then a crystal over slate inside of a walnut pot. Yeah, man, that's the thing. Explain it to people how it's got, how they're not laminated. What do you describe? Like how there's multiple surfaces that live inside there.

So what you need is, is it's kind of that sound chamber. And as, as you guys, nobody can see this, but these both all have like dimensions that we were, as we were prototyping these, the distance you set that soundboard underneath the playing surface affects your breakover. It affects your notes. It affects everything that this call produces. And so the height you, there's a pedestal that's actually like on this call that the sounding board is glued to. And we change the height of that pedestal. The higher it is, the higher pitch, the lower it is, the, the deader the call gets.

Um, and so we, we need to set that, um, so that we can, I don't know what, how you, everybody's kind of got their own place. They play on these, but. I play on the edges. Yeah. So the edges, I would say on most calls, you probably come in like a half inch off the edge, you know, kind of as a, and so that's where I played and kind of tuned all these calls to where most people will play on that perimeter, but you know, a little bit off the edge. Um, and so you're just kind of trying to find two

surfaces that compliment each other. You know, there's aluminum, there's, there's, uh, you know, people use real wood soundboards. Um, there's all kinds of, of soundboards and, and tops that you can play with but crystals really consistent it gives that sharper high note and then it kind of comes down and hits that slate which kind of gives it a more mellow back end versus the slate it's got that mellow front end but then you use the glass to kind of give it a little bit of a pep and so it's we tested a bunch of these glass crystal slate and i think we just wanted to kind of stay with the typical, at least in the start, a good glass slash crystal call

and a good slate call. I always carry two. And that's that same configuration. Because, one, I leave stuff laying out in the woods. Yep. And I got to go back and try to find that tree where I was sitting. And that keeps me busy while I still have something in my arsenal when I leave one laying out in the woods.

And two, the rain issue is different because when you get traditional, like, you know, slate, like traditional, it's like slate, like out of the earth, right? Yep. When it gets wet, it's hard to monkey with. Yep. Glasses or, you know, the crystal surface,

you can just like dry that thing off. Yep. Or if you have a waterproof striker or an all-weather striker, you can just dry that thing off. Or if you have a waterproof striker or an all-weather striker, you can just keep playing that thing right through. It's a little bit bulletproof. If the crystal's wet, as long as your striker's a waterproof striker, it'll still play. You ever see crystal with an aluminum striker? It doesn't matter.

It's so easy to dry, it's not an issue. I mentioned this too. I've even held mine up, just taking a lighter and just flick the lighter and everything's back to brand new, man. Yep. Yep. So you can, you know, play that. And then, you know, prep's a big thing.

Like we're sending these calls out non-prepped. It's like, well, that's a huge part of, you know, whatever way you scratch or prep the call, you want to run the striker in the opposite direction, you know, not with the scratches. And so inside these calls, it was very important. I think you called me up and said, Hey, we need some sort of instructions in here. And so now when we ship the calls, like we will give very detailed instructions about the approximate location. You know, if it's a crystal, you should take the, you know, provided a conditioning stone. If it's a slate, you know, use the, you know, provided scouring pad. Um. And we give exact locations on where to scratch the call up to get that good sound.

Yeah. Like meaning if you open, like if you open up one of these crystal calls and you take your striker and you're like, it doesn't work. Like it won't work. You have to create an abraded like sanded spot and people will kind of hunt around on there and it's it's never gonna be the same for two people right like because just everything about sort of how you hold your hands your configuration how you work the striker it's never going to be the same for two people so you're going to you might explore around and find a couple little different spots that you like um to get the sounds you want and then on top of that you'll sort of learn what you can get away with in terms of how frequently you need to refresh

it but things you got to figure out too is if you even if you have like if your hands are sweaty if you got you know just your natural oil skin oils on your fingers, you get that stuff on slate, man. It's like. Tough. Yeah. And so you kind of learn how to, it's good just to learn how to do it because it's not like you prep it once and then that's it. Even if you, even if you got this call and you open it, it's like, oh, it's pre-prepped. There's still maintenance.

Yep. When I sit down in the woods in the morning, man, man before i do anything i'll be sitting in the dark before i do anything i'd go through my little conditioning ritual yep to make sure that thing's ready to start cranking some noise on yeah and like before you make a sound like you know the striker tip it'll eventually gall up just from running through some of that you know you try to clean it off but it's like you know you scratch it in your scour scour pad just to make sure that thing's ready to go so you don't, you know, slide a, as you mentioned earlier, when the call is not conditioned, if that, once that striker doesn't have any bite anymore either, you'll just kind of slide across the call and it won't produce sound. So there's, we provide all of that with these calls so that they can be

conditioned instructions and make sure that, you know, the call will run right. Yeah. You get like slimy grease on the end of that striker. It's done. Yeah. I don't understand. When my kids take one and run around the house with it for an hour, it never works. I think it's just their greasy little hands. They're done for life. But yeah, you got to take like a mil off the end of that striker to get it back to life. I think they got it up their nose and stuff. I don't know what they do to them, and they make them not work.

So yeah, the conditioning thing. And like the crystal call, man, it's beautiful. It's got like the soundboard has a design. Yep. So yeah, the conditioning thing, and the crystal call, man, it's beautiful. It's got like the soundboard has a design. Yep. It's collateral damage. I mean, you're going to obscure the crystal and obscure the thing when you start monkeying with getting your thing. The slate is way different in that the same thing you use to wash your dishes, but you still got to take care of the surface. Yep.

Yeah. But one thing, I mean, these specific calls, like we laser etched the slate, like they're going to get damaged in the prep of this call, no matter what you do. So don't, you know, just scratch over top of the meat eater Phelps name or across the bird to get that prepped. You know, it's not meant to last forever. For me personally, um, in my kind of calling, you know, wanting to learn how to like kill turkeys good. I wound up having, I think in terms of labor versus output practice versus output, I had the greatest advances learning how on pot calls where,

um, you know, a box call. They're great. There's like very good Turkey hunters just use box calls. Right. But they're, they're,

they're loud, which is one of their big selling points. Like blue, you know, they have a high volume. Um, and some people they have a high volume. And some people can get a lot of, some people can get, develop quite a vocabulary with it.

But anyone could pick one up and start making like a loud yelp. Not anyone, most people. Learning the rest of the vocabulary is a little harder and learning how to do just subtle sounds. Like, you know, you got a bird hung up at 50 yards and you can't see them good. And you're sort of trying to make something happen before something goes wrong. It might not be the best bet just to be like, you know, you're just kind of telling it you're here. Right. And trying to keep it around. Um,

I think that in the time I spent messing with it, I was more quickly, I was more able to learn how to do the basic calls. Like here's a Yelp, here's a clock, right? Here's a per on that, on that medium over other things. And then I, in my mind, for me, like the, the real master, like the thing that's like the most alluring is you learn how to mouth call. Yep. Yep. And that's kind of. Then you could do the entire vocabulary and

never move your hand. Yep. Yep. But that's like the kind of thing you got to dedicate yourself to. Yeah. You know, where the pot call, as you mentioned, you can pick that up and I think anybody can run

it within about five minutes of instructions or at least start to sound like a turkey. Like the mouth call takes some, some dedication. No, you gotta be like, you know what man i'm gonna spend years like i don't mind i'm gonna drive around in my car drive around in my truck and i'm gonna learn how to do this and then when you get there like you're there yep you know but it's a journey yeah to learn how i mean and and you know the crazy thing is us being elk guys and turkey call guys like i don't know what it is and i wish i could figure out what it is but we get, hey, I can run this elk call, but I can't run a turkey call.

Or, hey, I can run the turkey calls, but I can't run your elk calls. And it's like, you know, but ultimately, as you alluded to a little bit earlier, is, you know, these calls, we want to design calls that were easy to use, but then also calls that the very experienced caller would be, you know, happy to use. And so it's, it's tough to kind of strike that. And we develop it through materials, through the cuts, all of that. And so ultimately we brought out four turkey calls. They come in a three-pack, which is yours, which is a Jake Brake, Steve Rinella Jake Brake. Love that term, Jake Brake. Yep.

Love them Jakes. We've got Giannis's, which is. Hey, jakes have saved a lot of turkey hunts, man. They eat the same too, don't they? Yeah. And my kid this year, like he's, you know, he had his first turkey season last year. And, um, I, he'll be, this'll be the second turkey season. If, depending on where I go, my daughter will have her first turkey season this year.

And, uh, you know, I know that the Jake's out there will hopefully help them get over that initial hump. Yeah. No, Jake's are fun. I haven't introduced to them the idea that it's not the perfect turkey. No, no, they'll be, they'll be happy with the Jake. Um, and then, so, uh, Giannis' Latvia Nego, it's the heaviest call in the group. Um, he's a little thicker latex.

Yeah, explain that. So what you get with the heavier latex is a little more volume, a little more long distance calling, a little heavier cutting. And then just by adding, um, heavier latex, you also get a little bit deeper turkey, you know, an older boss hand, um, sound. It's a little deeper.

But you need more air. A little more air. It's not going to light up, you know, as you had mentioned earlier, like if you want to do a little soft purr, it might, you know, that purr might be mid to loud volume by the time you get it to fire off where, you know, like with your call or the meat eater's choice or the easy

clucker, you could do really subtle light clucks. You can still do it. A good caller can still do it on Jonas' call. It's just going to be, it's almost that box. Like if you want to reach the Turkey three canyons over, like you can Yelp on that thing and get that volume out of it. But you find that people can generally learn easier on the lighter latex. Typically.

Um, it's just, they get sound. And so they, they, they're, they're maybe not frustrated. Now that doesn't necessarily mean learning. Like you might have just a heavy mouth guy that just wants to put all the air in his lungs to the call. And so even though he's not an experienced caller, he may prefer Giannis' over. And that's where it's like, it's all over the

board. Like trying to find, you know, we get the email, Hey, I'm a new hunter. What should I use? And it's like, I'd like to put you in this for 80, but you might be the complete opposite and want something else. Yeah.

That's why I think it's good to have, you know, to get a handful of them at once and just start messing with them. Yep. Yep. So yeah, his has got a cutter's cut on it. Really, really raspy. I like that call a lot. And then-

The latex should also withstand that heavier calling a little bit longer before it kind of plays out. It's a little more durable. Steve's call has a lighter piece of latex on top with what we consider a combo cut with some Proph as your playing read. So it's a little lighter, but it achieves that higher pitch easier without putting a bunch of air to it.

And then the meat eater's choice, once again, we're using Proph as the backing read, the playing read, and then we've got, it's kind of a modified bat wing is what we're calling it. What the hell is that? Something. So really easy to, and then we still get that rasp out of it.

And then the single call by itself is, is easy clucker where we put a ghost cut in it and really, really easy to use, easy to get your kiki runs out of and stuff, your immature turkeys. But it's typically the most easy for a new caller to run. Dirk, I didn't know, like, you don't even strike me as this, but Corinne had it down that you were a saxophone player. Not a lot of people know that about me.

It's like you, Chevy Chase, and Bill Clinton, man. Yeah, Bill Clinton. Hand me my saxophone. Let's like you, Chevy Chase, and Bill Clinton, man. Bill Clinton. Hand me my saxophone. Let me show you something. Yeah, growing up in a little town of Weeipe, I was in the band from junior high school

through my sophomore year and I sold my sax and bought a 338 Win Mag. Does that being a reed instrument and a diaphragm call being like a reed, right? Yeah.

Were you like, oh, this is easy. I used to play saxophone. It's different, yeah. But there's some weird nuances between diaphragms and saxophone reeds. Quality, construction, like if you buy the cheap sax reeds, they don't seem to work as good. You just can't get those sweet, sweet tones and melodies. And, you know, brand X, brand whatever, a lot of guys will kind of pick up a diaphragm and be like, oh, first time in their mouth. No, it doesn't sound good. I can't do it.

But experimenting a little bit, you find that not all diaphragms are built the same. Same with saxophone reeds. One of my buddies would lend me a reed here, try one of these. He'd have a really nice Rico reed or something. And I'd throw that baby in and I was like, wow. All of a sudden, it just got way better. Oh, is that right? Yeah.

So I kind of feel the same thing about diaphragms, whether it's turkey calls, elk calls. Like there's a quality issue, not all created equal. Yeah. Some of them, like those sax reeds, would absorb water really fast, and then they just kind of fall apart. So I don't know if they're making them out of cheap bamboo or what, but there's definitely a difference. Do you play anymore? I haven't played one since sophomore in high school. Oh.

I bet I could probably still play one if I had one in front of me. How long does it take to put a – when you guys decide to make a new call how long does it actually take to get it right like before you can start selling it to people it just really depends um you know whether it's a box calls or a little more finicky uh you know so if we're going to bring a new box call out and and this is where i don't know if we want to talk production versus like if i was to build one is is way different um like my whole thought process the whole machining process, like I used to build box calls and pot calls out in my shop. Like I would chuck, you know, the,

the back of ours don't have a hole in the center. I would drill a hole through any piece of walnut, spin it down into a circle, you know, build the shape. And I, I sold lots of pot calls back in the day. I built a couple of boxes where I would, you know, hand chisel out the sides and sand everything down. Oh, would you really? Yeah. So I, I had built box calls, but getting your mind right to build 500, a thousand, 2000 is a completely different animal. Like you need to be on the conservative side so that when you do get that weird piece of wood. Um, so like, for instance, the walnut we bought is a lot more of a pain in my ass than the purple heart. The purple heart's all straight as an arrow. Everything's perfect where the walnut was bought is a lot more of a pain in my ass than the purple heart.

The purple heart's all straight as an arrow. Everything's perfect where the walnut was kind of all over the place. And so you're like, you know, you had to mess with it or each one had to be tuned. You know, in the future, I think we will buy a more select grade of lumber. So we're not dealing with knots and issues, especially when it comes to calls. You know, some of these calls are beautiful because they do have a swirl here or there. But for music instruments, we should probably stick to the – but I would say now with everything we know, the designs we've got, if we were to do something new, it would probably be a month or two,

get the materials, make some changes, and get something out. I want to tell you why I'm asking, but now you're making it seem like it's not a good idea. I want to do a thing where we find a tree that we really like, chop that tree down, and then take people through the whole process. We mill it, dry it, and then out of that will come box calls all right we could do that no

problem and you could get a box call that you've watched it from the tree to the call yep i think we do a series of calls that comes from one tree how many would we get off one tree a black walnut if it's old enough a lot huh like a lot of you could you could do this whole production run out of one big black walnut. Really? Yeah. I know, just the place. I think we have a- And Seth, he'd be able to grade it because he was trained up in forestry.

Did you know that? So I want structural selector better. Black walnut's the money tree. Usually high in value. I'm not going to tell the guy that we're getting it. Triple stumpage. That would be a timber trespass. Seth worked on a thing one time to where stolen trees.

Explain this, Seth. Yeah, when I was in college, we did like this. I forget what class it was in, but we had a lab where we like, there was a timber, it wasn't actual timber trespass, but we like mimicked a timber trespass where someone like a logger had gone onto the neighboring property and cut a bunch of trees. And then you have to go in and like measure indentations in the soil when the tree was dropped and just try to figure out how much volume was taken yeah it's like uh um what's that word i'm looking for damn it it's like a word about crime forensic that's the word forensic forestry dude yeah yeah i I can write a book about that. If you're hearing this, you can go to themeateater.com slash Phelps.

All right? And you'll see all of what we're talking about. And we have videos about them all. We show them the materials they're made, how they're used. We have videos of us using them. The whole thing is explained out. But then they go on sale March 4. And if you want to find out about Jason and Dirk Durham here, you can go find those guys at phelps.com,

whatever the hell you want. Can I give a shameless plug? Please. Don't add the Maverick to your cart. I'm trying not to get beat by Dirk's personal call. So add that pink signature out call to your cart. Why are they buying your trick or tails? There's no mercy purchases for you, Jason.

So, yeah, you guys have a run. Who's actually winning this? We're not going to. The results are still out. It's a long-term battle. Oh, yeah. We're not going to talk about the short-term battle that we're in. Well, do you give, because I know you guys have your own allies,

people who follow your own like signature elk calls but can't you just give better treatment of it on the website because you have control that yeah i'm gonna start like kicking in a lot of pink sales um cranking the price up on them we're gonna control it and your color is pink oh yeah yeah and if you see a new black if you see a guy open his mouth And it's a what color Dirk? Red That's been in Dirk's mouth Alright so again Check all this out

This is interesting it's been a really interesting process We're super proud of it Go to themeateater.com Slash Phelps There's a smorgasbord A smorgasbord of salient facts. A smorgasbord of videos about the calls. You know what's funny?

When we were filming those, I had a gobbler ripping. Did you really? Yeah. In a place where there are no gobblers. Well, they're there a little bit. That's how good they are. I'm trying to point in the right direction. And then later.

Approximately north. That way. Later that evening when you guys wrapped, you probably had all the turkeys there. They were all there. No, there was, yeah, we had a gobbler rip in those fun middle of the damn winter. All right. Go there, check it out. March 4, go buy some some have some fun this spring thank you guys welcome aboard thanks for having us thanks

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