The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 816: New Year's Resolutions, Mutant Turkeys, and Goodbye (Sort Of) Cal | MeatEater Radio Live!

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

Hosts Brody Henderson, Ryan Callaghan, and Cory Calkins go deep with Dr. Phil Lavretsky about turkey mutations and his latest citizen science project, throwback to their favorite hunts of 2025, make some New Year's resolutions, and answer listener questions. Watch the live stream on the MeatEater Podcast Network YouTube channel. Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Smell us now, lady. Welcome to Meat-eater trivia. Meat-eater podcast. Happy New Year's, everyone, and welcome to Radio Live. I'm your host, Brody Henderson, and I'm joined by Corey Calkins and Ryan Callahan. Today, we're not actually live.

We're actually pre-recording before Meat Eater HQ shuts down for the holidays. But we still got a great New Year's Day show for you guys, even the poor suckers who stayed up late last night and they're nursing a hangover. Hopefully you're not one of those people, but I imagine there's a few of you out there. That can be one of you, Kyle Corey? Not with kids anymore. Nope, I'm going to bed at 8 p.m. There you go. There you go.

Avoid amateur night. That's right. Yeah, I get all my fun in early. Yeah. And it seems to really wrap up within like a beer and a half anyway. Yeah. That's smart. Yeah, smart.

Today we're going to talk to our friend Jake Lorettsky about all those. Lovretzky. Phil. Jake. Jake's our producer who's. Just right next to Phil in the window. Jesus, Pete. I'm just reading. That's the problem with just reading a script.

Sorry, Phil. Dr. Phil. Damn it. We're going to talk to that Phil guy, not our Phil. About all those funny-looking color-faced turkeys getting shot out there these days. We've also got a very special in-house interview with Cow about why in the hell he decided to leave Meteor to go get a real job. no one really knows. I didn't know that was in the script.

All right. Welcome. And for our crew segments, we're going to look back on our favorite hunts of the year, and then we're going to look forward with some New Year's resolutions. You guys, new year's resolution, guys? Semi. I like to think about it, but then it rarely follows all the people. I'm going to force you into at least saying something today.

Yeah, it's a good idea. Lastly, since we can't chat with you guys in real time, we're just going to go over some questions, comments that have come up in emails in previous episodes so we're still looking out for the fans out there um before we get on to all that uh happy holidays fellas yeah um i'm looking forward to the break as i'm sure you guys are um i got about a hundred pounds of meat that i need to grind and the burger and sausage so that's a big project and cal and i were just talking i'm gonna I'm going to try and get out with a dog for pheasants and maybe get the wife out for a late-season cow elk.

So, yeah. That's like over the whole break kind of goal. Yeah, you know, the boys want to get after, well, one of them does. The one already shot a late-season dough, so the other one has to do what his older brother did. So we might try that too. What do you guys got going on? Yeah, meat management is high on my mind because I really, want to go hunt with this muzzle loader.

Mm-hmm. The timing is not great. You've only got two, three days left of the season, right? Right. Yeah, just this weekend. But, like, I would really like to get some ducks in the freezer. Yep. Now that they're finally around.

Yeah. Jeez. Yep. And just that dog work is so freaking amazing. I love that. But I am. I have I do like in my chest freezer I do a game bag storage so like this game bag is a whole parted out yep and back sealed nice elk shoulder right this one's like the nice cuts and that's what I have left of my elk from last year is it just a little bit of front shoulder and some neck meat for slow cooking stuff and then um the uh kind of really just the loins which is kind of crazy yeah um

and trying to like i i'm going to be cutting it close but it'd be like a good full freezer turnover situation if i don't kill a deer and you'll be starting fresh after you get through this pretty darn fresh yeah yeah because we got um you know mostly two and a half antelope in there. Yeah. And that were this year. And, uh, and then, yeah, the turkeys and fessons, but that puts some pressure on you, too, not having that backup meat from the prior year, you know.

I know. I know. And then, uh, I think I'll need to commit to grinding some, some stuff to, yeah. How about you, Corey? Yeah, grinding. Between my bowl and a really old white tail buck that I shot this year, I'm going to grind all of him up stinky old ruddy tough ass buck yeah very funny color on him like real pink instead of dark red like i'm used to really yeah uh just found out i shot him here close to bozeman

in town hundreds of other deer around it was yeah worried about c wd had him tested and just found out that it was negative so i'm excited i was probably going to eat them anyway honestly but uh oh you roll the dice huh yeah yeah i mean i'm sure we've all eaten it at this point yeah That's the thing, and we're all still sitting here. But, yeah, I got a lot of grinding to do. Although your face looks funny, is that? That's not like a CWD. This is tough for Corey, because we've recorded, because we've recorded the live show that aired on the 18th.

And then in order to prep for the holiday, we filmed the show airing on Christmas and the show, this show, airing on New Year's all in the span of two days. And so every single one of those shows has a conversation about Corey's face. Yeah. I want to say it looks better than yesterday, which would have been Christmas episode. So, yeah, you'll have to go back if you haven't listened to the Christmas episode and find out what happened in my face, besides the obvious. You wouldn't tell me, I'll have to watch the show. Yeah, you're going to have to. And then it's turkey season still to the end of the year.

So my boy and I, eight-year-old boy and I'd like to go out and get a bird, weather dependent on how the roads hold up. Yeah, I was peasant hunting like, I don't know, week or so ago and cut a lone gobble tree. man i tried to find that thing but i couldn't yeah out roaming around somewhere yeah loving the fall so yeah and speaking of goblers how's that phil that was incredible you're a pro people love you when you host bro um we're to do our first interview today and our guest is dr phil not jake lavretzky he's a hunter conservationist and geneticist we've had him on the show before so Some of you guys may have seen him. If you're not familiar, he's got a really cool duck DNA project going on where he's like figuring out the lineage of different ducks out there, whether they're hybrids, purebreds, whether there's like farm raised duck DNA and those things.

And he moved on to doing a similar project called turkey DNA, which we're going to talk about with him today. we got him on the line there he is thanks for joining us phil hey phil the whole world knows you is jake now yeah you were just thinking about turkeys that whole yeah yeah exactly um how you doing man look thanks yeah happy holidays yeah happy holidays yeah happy new year now it's january yep yep exactly uh Phil for folks who aren't familiar with you just give us a quick breakdown of like your bona fides and then we'll get into the the turkey DNA project you've got going on yeah yeah so i'm a professor here at the university of texas at el paso i run a wildlife genetics lab we are geneticists but we basically do everything else under the sun we're out there collecting

catching banding bleeding telemetry unit attaching working with hunters landowners farmers and others to figure out what's happening with our wildlife and answering the questions that our state and federal agencies, partners, want to know. Great. That's the gist. So leading into this Turkey DNA project, I'm not sure if everyone's aware of this.

Hopefully they are, but I'm going to tell them anyway. At one time, like, all turkeys were wild. There was no such thing as a domestic turkey. and then North America got colonized. They domesticated those turkeys here, brought them back to Europe, then brought them back over here. And so now things are all screwed up. Sort of.

That's sort of the timeline. Listen, if I got it wrong, please correct me. Are you just embarrassed because he did it so well? I mean. Man, how much did you drink last night? I don't drink at all. That's the problem, I think. Yeah, so sort of the timeline.

So, turkeys are a North American species. They're not European. There's no, there's no real, there's no Turkey lineages in Europe, New Zealand, anywhere else. They are a North American, Meso-American group of birds that evolved here. They were one of the successful domestication events by our ancestors that made it over the land bridge thousands of years ago. Oh, I got you. Okay. Yeah. So, so current ancient DNA work puts the domestication with ghouls, potentially with Miriams, potentially two different time points between different tribes that were around at that time. Right. Looking at 4,000 so years ago.

So turkeys were domesticated, much like cow and dogs and stuff in Europe, but they were specific to North America. So like European colonists didn't come over here or maybe they did. Did they, were they grabbing those

turkeys that had already been domesticated or were they also getting wild turkeys and domesticating that? Are we talking about Thanksgiving? Those would have been wild turkeys. A colonist would have been on the east eating

Easterns at that time, right? Did they also domesticate, capture, and eventually domesticate those birds? Yes, but like hundreds of years later. I got you. Yeah, yeah. So really Native Americans were the ones that had what you would consider domestic turkeys at that time. Yep. Eventually, many, many moons later, they would be brought back to Europe.

And there are, but they're not, so there's farms of turkeys. But while turkeys, as far as we know, have been brought back by the Brits, primarily back to Europe, and then everywhere they go. So there's, right, so there's turkeys in New Zealand. There were no real, there were no turkeys in Hawaii, so people brought them there. So turkeys have been expanded that way, but naturally occurring only in North America, origination of domestic only in North America and Mesoamerica.

Okay. Before we get into the next stuff, real quick, like as is now, North American wild turkeys laid on me the five subspecies and roughly where they live without getting into how they've been spread around.

Like they're original kind of range. So if we'll go east to west, right? So east of the Mississippi River where you had naturally, occurring boreal forests, that would have been your eastern Turkey. Once you get into the Florida Panhand, or yeah, Florida side, that would be Osceola. What we're trying to figure out is how different Osceolas are from Eastern right now. So there's those two. As you go, as you go west, so west of the Mississippi, you start getting into what would originally be Rio's, right? So

that would be Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, that area. Then once you go, once you get into more mountainous regions. Before you, before you move on to the next one, Rios typically or originally were like river bottom turkeys that lived in more open country, correct? Yeah. Okay. Right. Yeah.

So then you're essentially changing habitats from low elevation to higher elevation. And that's when you get to Miriams, right? So where I go in New Mexico. that would be all the sky islands there, right? The heel of the Sacramento Mountains, those would be all natural merium habitat, right? And a little into Colorado, too, correct? That's right. Yeah.

And then south of that, right, would be ghouls. So almost, not almost, all of the range in Mexico would be where Gould's Turkey would have been. And that's why all the studies have suggested that they're the, source for the original domestication than Miriams. So that's what you got. Oh, and then oscillated turkeys. We're not worried about those right now.

I'm talking about that. That's a whole different. But I feel like that is considering the advancement of civilization, like that's where the domestication had to have started, right? Like sweet potatoes.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So it's still being so for sure like some potentially we just don't have the the fossil records and the ancient DNA to go along with it but i'm sure some civilizations did go after the oscillated turkey but for one reason or another what we do have good data for is that ghouls were goulds and miriams and a mix of them were part were used for that the the earliest domestications as far as we know here in the Southwest.

Yeah. And it just became like the cool kid trend. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's like, well, let's follow those guys around. Yeah.

And they're bigger than oscillated. They're, you know, maybe more delicious. I don't know. Yeah. All right.

So we're getting into these like different color phases and weird pattern, color patterns that show up, um, which is I'm sure a large part of, of what you're working on here, like what's causing

that um yeah and correct me if i'm wrong but like we've got a few different things going on here we got completely wild turkeys that have some type of genetic mutation like albinism or melanism is that that's that's one that's one cause um then we've got breeding between wild turkey subspecies because these birds have been moved around a lot we've got overlapping naturally overlapping range and we've got like man-made overlapping range for example and here in northwestern montana you've got mariams and easterns and hybrids like kind of all living in the same zone um and then the third thing is you've got these like quote wild turkeys that are actually the product of of some domestic ancestry like it could be uh um

like a wild hen that rolls in behind the barn and hooks up with a domestic tom or a domestic turkey of either sex that maybe goes rogue and joins a flock of wild birds are those the three like main things we're looking at here those yeah so we're trying to now originally this study was all about just asking the question of wild turkey DNA was born out of the question, is this a wild turkey? Yep. But is every white, smoke face, red, black turkey, a wild turkey that some weird mutation? Is it because of the hybridization between wild and wild?

Is it because of wild heritage or wild domestic interbreeding? Or is it just a bunch of like domestic feral birds that are on the landscape and people are shooting them? Yep. I can usually tell because it's a lazy turkey hunter or somebody who can't call very good, where I'm like, oh, that's obviously got some domestic DNA in an arm range. Because you, you shouldn't be able to get a legit bird. Like that one Randall shot this year. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. I did what I wanted to interrupt. So there's a caveat to domestic inheritance. So domestic is your white turkey. that you go to Costco and buy, right? So this is a nuance within the turkey world that I only recently learned. Heritage is essentially people taking a domestic bird, breeding it with a wild,

creating some thing, and then calling it some heritage. Think of it like, I guess, back to ducks. There's a bunch of different duck breeds that people have done that with. Dog breeds, right? So it's mixing dog pools, especially when people do dog wolf and then create some weird looking thing and then breed that a bunch. Yeah. And then they get a tattoo. Yeah.

Yeah. Same old story. That's that. So that's the caveat. So we are looking at like, is it a bunch of heritage breeds? Is it a bunch of domestic breeds? What's occurring? What happens?

Yeah. It's cool. And as far as like the domestic birds go. I spent some time around those things. We raised a few every year when I was a kid. And they're stupid. And they're like not very athletic. So it's like looking at back at those birds,

it's like really hard for me to imagine one of those things just being like, you know what? I'm going with those guys and I'm going to live in the woods with them. And like that they'd survive long enough to like pass on their jeans. I know like domestic pigs can go fairly pretty rapidly but it's like how adaptable are domestic turkeys to surviving in the wild?

Well, that's a great, we don't know. And I wouldn't have guessed it, but I will give you two caveats to that. Yeah. One, remember what I said, heritage breeds are technically wild domestic parents. So maybe that gives them a bit, a bit, up and coming that they're like, oh, there's something in some of them being like, I want to be

wild a little bit. Right. The other thing that's happening on the landscape, unfortunately, is that there are tales of people now creating breeds. Like there's an Eastern heritage that looks like an Eastern, but it's not a wild bird. Right. And people are, and I've heard through the great mind, people are breeding. things that look like osceola's and other things and putting those on the landscape during right

before hunting season for everybody can envision that picture so now you got birds in the spring so now you don't they only have to really survive for for not very long to have that yeah eating experience yep yep so now in the waters out there yeah so unfortunately people are doing what people do and and you know once there's a dollar to be made people do all sorts of things um this might be too big of a question you might not not be able to really get at it but um based on the evidence that you're seeing the DNA evidence um what seems to be more common when one of these weird color face birds show up or is it like truly wild birds or is it like truly wild birds or is it more birds showing up with some barnyard heritage uh it's a mix of both so there's so in fact

i had an email exchange with mike chamberlain today where i said him the most recent results and he's like there's still a bunch of white birds that you're calling pure wild and then there's a bunch of white birds and smoke face birds that are completely heritage and then there's you know, stuff in between. The answer to that is, I don't know. We went into this thing thinking like, ah, this shouldn't be that hard. But turkeys are incredibly much more complicated than ducks and waterfowl more generally

and probably most wildlife for a variety of reasons. Their genetics is incredibly complex. And that is muddying the water even further. So we are trying to build up the data sets big enough where we could be more certain about, like, what are we looking at? Are we really looking at a wild bird that's now white? And if so, why is that? Yeah. One of the things that we're trying to do is I've got a new student that has identified most of the genes responsible for plumage.

And so what we're going to layer on is the genotypes of those specific genocytes. genes and what we're fight super preliminary but there are at least two ways for a bird to be white there are these two genes that if you knock them out you have a white bird if you partially knock them out you'll have white barring right so now we're trying to figure out how often or how frequent is that are those found in wild populations how frequent are those introduced from heritage or domestic birds and how quickly does that disappear from the population?

If you shoot a weird looking bird, what is the probability that that's, A, a wild bird and B, how much of a unicorn is that? Yeah. I imagine, too, I mean, there's a lot of states

now, Nebraska, Montana. I'm sure you could name Washington, where like California, Utah, Idaho. Yeah, like where like you could go out in Nebraska and potentially in the same area run into Mariams, Rios, and Easterns like all within spitting distance of one another.

Or at least things that look like that. Yeah. So one of the things that we're sort of gauging now, places like California, Washington, Idaho, Montana, like you talked about Oregon where where agencies at the time are like you know what we're not going to we're not we don't know what's going to take so we're just going to put all the subspecies right right so what do we have left are there are there any actual populations representing true rios miriams or externs or do we just have what potentially what we're going to coin as the

American turkey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're, we're, wild turkey DNA is expanding substantially this year. So we're not, we're, initially it was all about weird looking birds.

Now we're trying to get geography. Yeah. Right. So if you are getting your gobble on this spring or thinking about it, we're going to have wild turkey DNA is going to start doing a draw much like duck DNA has been doing for the last few years where if you get drawn, you get a kit, you have some vials in there, instructions. And if you shoot a bird, you can cut off that tip of the tongue, put it into there,

ship it back to us. We're going to do our thing. You'll get a certificate for that bird. And then we're going to start compiling datasets, hopefully to answer many of these questions. That whole project, you could really bum out some turkey hunters that are like, their goal is to get each subspecies. And then they find out, they're like, oh, man. I was actually

I was actually thinking the same thing you know, turkey slam. The only way to get turkey slam is that you actually got genetically vetted. Right. Eastern ghouls. Otherwise, you got the mutt slam. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I can't wait to go to National Wild Turkey Federation Convention

and be like, are they peer-reviewed? Is this turkey real? Really. Phil, you want to pull some pictures up? I was talking Phil the engineer Now I'm talking to Dr. Phil What are the most like common and easily identified color phases

that a turkey hunter is like likely to shoot or might shoot? You know when I was thinking of this question I phoned I phoned a friend Mike Chickland Katie with our wild turkey DNA and tried to figure that out because I'm only now looking at turkeys right you've got a duck guy expanding into the edible domain here so I'm only I didn't know that this was even happening in turkeys until a year ago so some of the most common would be what you're looking here that reddish that red phase there's a bunch of oh this is something I wanted to

I wanted to say so just like a black lab can actually make all phases of lab right So you can have yellows and you can have chocolate and black come out of a black lab. All heritage breeds, some proportion of them also can make white turkeys, right? They all have it. And so people are just maintaining these different color forms by that selective breeding. Anyways, I just wanted to put that out there. No, that's good info. So that could be why we're seeing more and more white turkeys out there.

Again, we'll be able to source because the mutations that occurred in the heritage and domestics to result in white type is what it looks like quite different than what we see in wild population is naturally occurring. So we'll hopefully be able to actually track that. But right there, what you see right there is so that white and black barring, that interchange, right? I think that breed is supposed to be known as like a nargazin. We see that quite often. And that's what I told you there. There's two genes. One gene says barring.

The other one is a melanin production gene that says turn on or off. So that's how you get barring, where you get on off, on off plus barring. So that's what you're seeing in that turkey right there. Phil, can you go back to that last one you had up? Yeah, sure. maybe that so that that there's a red one i'm guessing yeah yeah so that would be what is known as like a color phase red uh there's there's there's there's turkeys if you look them up they're called barnyard reds people have made all sorts of stuff yeah but yeah that would be

one of the things the other more more um readily observed are called smoke phase i don't know if you've got a picture. So we got a gray one up there, Phil? I can add it really quick. It'll just be a second. Yeah, just throw it up there when you get to it. So those are kind of the big, big ones, Phil. Yeah.

But you got, like, I've seen some of the stuff you guys have posted on Instagram. Some of the stuff is, like, very subtle. Like, I don't, like, if you were just out hunting and not paying attention, like, you might not even notice it. Absolutely. Yeah, no, I mean, it takes Mike Chamberlain who, you know, looks at these things every single day, be like, oh, that one feather is not right. You're right. Most of us, including myself, would be like, sweet, I got a turkey. Yeah. But, yeah, no, as we're learning more, what we're hoping to do also is to create some field guides where we start showcasing so people can actually start learning about it as we learn it. And we figure this stuff out and get this in the hands of both agency and private individuals out there so we can better potentially monitor some of these populations.

One of the things that we're worried about through these introductions of heritage or domestic birds on the landscape is that what we're finding in heritage and domestic when we have reference set is that they're incredibly in red. Every single one looks like a brother, sister, right, full siblings. And then what's happening on the landscape is our natural populations through habitat fragmentation, translocations, all of these other things also are not, are highly, are more inbred than other wild populations I studied, including mammals and other birds. Is there some concern that that could be, I mean, it's probably more habitat driven. and I'm sure Mike Chamberlain could weigh in here, but is there some concern that that could also be at least a minor driver

and where you're seeing turkey populations decline? 100%. So as you up that ingreating coefficient, what we know from every other animal, Puma or Florida Panthers are a great example of it. You lose that connectivity to other populations. More and more of them breed amongst brothers and sisters. you increase that inbreeding.

What's happening is that even if you had all the habitat in the world, the individuals that you have now are making eggs that are either inviolable or individuals that have lower survival because they're inbreeding so high. So turkeys also don't like to cross the road apparently, like right, so ducks will fly across the road. But turkeys don't. So as you get more and more of that fragmentation, bigger issue in the east, than in the West, you basically force the population to become more and more inbred.

And as you put, so let's say you're creating artificial island, island populations. And then if you throw a bunch of highly inbred heritage birds into there, what we show genetically is that if you breed those two birds together, instead of decreasing inbreeding, you actually artificially jump the inbreeding between the birds. So a nest that should have been outbred, meaning, you know, good to go. You artificially already spike it up. And turkeys aren't the only ones we're seeing the same pattern. We're seeing it in our ducks when game farm mallards and wild mallards interbred.

You should have an inbreeding coefficient of zero, but it jumps to point two within the clutch. So you're artificially inbreeding your own population through those actions. that's no good yeah a cyclical effects especially for turkeys that have a hard time with habitat connect and population connectivity would you mind um because you guys just got

some some good ink on the genetic depth in the eastern mallards would you mind just hitting that real quick like an update for everybody on on the percentage of domestic DNA within your

in your, and I'll, I'll buzzkill this. Was that that map that got posted? Did you see the map? Yeah, no, I was us. Was that the guy? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, within your quote wild population.

Yeah. So basically, uh, yeah, basically I need an hour to talk right now. But, uh, so what we're doing, right? So duck DNA was what we started with in the wildlife world being like, all right, does citizen science at this level with hunters work? And the answer is overwhelmingly yes. We're in our third year. We've doubled the participation,

doubled the number of samples every year, thankful to all the donors that provided the funding necessary for that. And essentially, we're over almost 3,000 samples collected in three years. And one of the aims of that study is to monitor the smaller populations, across north across the u.s for now we're about to get canada into the mix but across north across the u.s for now and what we've seen what we've tracked is that the eastern population is not doing great and it continues to get worse and worse and so during the fall flight when you got an influx of birds out of Canada which are mostly wild uh you have 75 percent of harvested birds

from duct DNA, and we have got other data that support this even more. In the Atlantic flyway are feral or feral hybrids. And when we look at Summerbirds, so in my other work, working with the state agencies, that proportion actually jumps to like 100% or even less than 2% for most of the states. And so 75% there, we jumped down to about 40% on average in the Mississippi, huge amount of Game Farm Mallard ancestry in the Great Lakes region, less so if you go south of Tennessee, there's this interesting population dynamic going on there. You jump to the central flyway and it essentially disappears less than 10%. You jump over to the Pacific Flyway, and it jumps back up, unfortunately, to 20%, mostly driven

by whatever's happening in California. Yep, yep. Wow. Yeah, so we're tracking this. thing and unfortunately for the for the wild mallory continues to be quite the problem and we're hoping we're starting to try to figure out some solutions but obviously everybody always asks like is the so they're interbreeding is there any sort of actual biological problem with that and in the next year we'll be we'll be putting out papers showcasing that not only does it change their migratory capacity their feeding behavior their ability

to nest, but in fact, we showcase that their brains have actually been changed to not to be more domestic-like than they are wild type when you interbreed. And all of these traits have a correlation with genetics. So the more game farm you have, the more game farming you look like. The problem with the Atlantic Flyway that we're starting to see, or at least now we can analyze is that we randomly now get a game farm mallard um phenotype and behavior by just by chance there's so many hybrids that some proportion of nests just by chance recapitulate game farm all of a sudden which is just not great no i mean that's why all those fellows who you know can't blow a duck call are posting all those pictures of limits yeah

that's right yeah and there's like we're not getting what you know me as a big duck eater would call like the benefits of having some domestic strain in there like yeah like yeah and i will tell you so people will be like oh no yeah whatever ducks a duck i'll eat that fun fact they don't put on fat oh super culinary fat content the way a wild type that's why they can't they can't We've published this now, and we were like, why can't they move? Maybe they don't know how. Maybe there's some weird thing happening. But one of the physiological differences is that even if we put them on high fat,

perine a child, they will not put fat. Oh, I feel like if we were in like the doctor who, you know, like bomb shelter, the defecon level for me would have just, just raced. I'm like, yeah. my god there's a real issue here like fatty ducks are like the the most prized possession in my freezer yeah and and if you don't have a fat duck when that polar vortex happens that duck doesn't make it and the more of your population proportionally grows with those types of traits the lower the survival and the fecundity or baby making we expect and that is what we're seeing in the great lakes

we're seeing in the Atlantic flyways. So what I have to caveat all of this, it's all suggestive. It's at least explaining some of the population declines, right? We don't, a habitat is definitely everything. But even like, just like the turkey, you need an animal that knows how to use that habitat. Yeah.

Wow. All right. We got to keep moving here. Yeah, it's such a bummer. The human responsibility thing here. really like once again a fact um phil how uh how can folks take part in the turkey and or duck dna projects yeah yeah please uh if you're interested oh if you're still duck hunting uh like how and you shoot something super awesomely cool or you're like i don't know what this is both duck

and goose go to www duck dna dot com and sign up for the hybrid kit. If you get chosen, we'll send you a single vial kit. You send it back to us. We do the analysis. You get some answers. Do we get a little favoritism there? Like, can you send us a bunch of those? Come on. You guys have a bunch of them already. I think Corinne got a bunch of them, yeah. Well, let's talk to Corinne. Yeah, but we can definitely send you some. That being said, on the turkey, go to wild turkey dna.com. Start signing up. We're going to have those polls right before turkey season.

That being said, if you do shoot a turkey during, if you have a fall hunting season, like you guys do for a few more days and Idaho and others, and you shoot something, give us a ring or an email through the website or get in touch at Wild Turkey DNA on Instagram or at DuckDNA on Instagram or at DuckDNA on Instagram or at Labretzky Lab on Instagram and we'll take care of you. I got one more question about that, especially for the people who might end up

with one of these kits. It doesn't have to be some weird looking bird, correct? No. Like anything. Like it could look like just pure white tail fan Mariams and you still want to study. Yeah.

So for turkeys this year, we're looking for geography. We're also part of the selection criteria is where do you hunt how many birds do you usually harvest those are going to be some of the information that we're going to want to know if you are a person that has access to you know three tags we'll send you three vials if you're someone that shoots one bird will send you one file so we're going to gauge gauge that so that way we can get as many hunters involved and as much of the geography uh captured as we can this year for sure great and this year for sure if you're

like my kid shot a bird, send that thing in. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be super awesome. Thanks for joining us, Phil. It's always a fascinating conversation. And on a side note, I'm looking forward to heading down to Texas. Corey, you're going to.

Yep. For a collaboration meat eater has going on with you involving Outad, which the audience, I'm sure will be hearing more about later. So we're looking forward to that. I thought we were just doing birds. No. No, no, we're doing out, doing our dad, too. But thanks a lot.

Happy holidays and thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks everybody. Have a good one. Happy New Year. Thank you, Phil. Happy New Year. Okay, folks, that's it for today's show. That was awesome.

I mean, come on. That's great citizen science, man. No, that was good. We might have to trim some of these listener questions, but that was a good time. That's cool. We can do that, Phil. We can skip them, maybe just do one each or something. Well, it's like, it's part of, like, what,

hunters bring to the table for the greater good. Yeah, and when you get a chance to talk to someone like that, it's just like, I got another question. I got another question. Like, you don't get a chance to talk to people like that very often. Yeah, some of the other critters that he'd love to dive into with other DNA, you know, he's got duck and turkey going. There's other things he's got in his head that he wants to pull off here coming up. So hopefully there's more to come. Do we got a throwback Thursday song filler?

Did you just abandon all that stuff? No, I still do the drop. Isn't that your favorite one? What's to do the drop? Throw back on a Thursday morning. Stephen Brody take me back to 1974. Throw back, I can't believe it. Did I mention Stephen Brody are old as shit?

I need you to fill out the whole song. I want all the lyrics. That'll be my winter break project. Sure. all right guys it's time to look back at the last year and share your favorite i think it's i'm doing hunting could be fishing but i don't know what you guys are doing share your favorite trips of the year so cori you're up first man yeah well gosh it was hard to top my spring black bear hunt i think i got a video up uh there and a couple photos but uh hunting a spot the best part

about it was i've been hunting the spot for about five years without being able to take aim and shoot at a black bear and finally it all came together this last spring uh early may solo hunting overnight backpacked into a spot uh bruiser spotted him the night before put a stock on him he eluded me he zigged and i zagged and uh then was able to dig him up the next morning stocked him i spotted him at probably a mile and a half away and then stocked into 90 yards and shot him on the run with a 300 wind mag, which rarely happens. I feel like spot and stock bears, you see him far off and you're like, oh yeah, it looks like he's headed that way. You know, they usually go a different direction or something. The odds of like lining up the

planets to get them within range are so slim, it's so tough, but so addicting too. And I got lucky with this one. I couldn't tell he was that big from that far away. But holy cow, it'll be probably the biggest bear I ever kill in the state of Montana at least. And fun note, I just got, the hide back from Mr. John Hayes, and he told me that was the biggest Montana black bear that's ever come through his shot. Ever. Just patting my back. Wow, that's great. What does the skull measure?

When it was green, it was just under 20 inches. I haven't measured it since I boiled it. Were you by yourself? And then a buddy helped me pack it out. That's what I can say if you had to pack all that out by yourself. Even the two of us. It was brutal, and it was hot, too. It was like 70 plus degrees.

That hide and head was in. insanely awkward and heavy to pack out had to cross creek multiple times so you got him rugged uh it's just uh the hide right now I'm thinking about getting eventually you get a rugged yeah that's not those are good things to hang on do you have a place to like hang it or throw it in the house in my office at the moment oh okay yeah right upstairs it looks pretty good up there next to my mountain line sweet uh you got a couple more here Corey I got one more just uh it was hard to pick out of the two got to kill a uh white tail buck and a dough with my son this year. It was alongside with me. It was really fun. Got some

private land access, not too far from home here. I don't think I would. I got the access if I said I'm hunting by myself, but I said I was bringing my seven-year-old boy along and it was like, heck yeah, bring him in. And we shot a dough out of a blind within the first couple minutes. And the landowner said, if you see this super old unicorn buck dragging his feet around, you should shoot him because he's probably not going to make it through the winter. And as we were dragging out the dough, uh, that buck came out of the, out of the cottonwoods and we got them too. So doubled up within a, about an hour of hunting. So it was super fun. So he literally just had the one horn on the one side. There's a tiny little nub on the other side.

Did that thing have any teeth left in its head? Barely. No, I'm dying to see how old he is. I send him in to get CWD tested. Well, did you send in a tooth to the lab here in town? Yeah. It takes about eight months though. So we'll find out. Yeah. up more to come on that one. But that was pretty special to have my son there with you. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Cal, what do you got for us? That eight month waiting period for old Marshall is going to be tough. I know. He's already forgot. That box probably older than he is. Yeah. Very possible. Easily.

Yeah, I'm guessing eight or nine. Yeah. That's cool. I had a great hunting adventures this year. Obviously, there's a big brown bear in Alaska, which was great. But we talked about that a bunch. And I just wanted to hit, since we're coming to the end of the sea. season. I get, it's depressing, but I get a lot of people who write in and tell me how bad

hunting is. How it's not good. There's no animals anywhere. Too many people. And why bother? I spend the vast, vast, vast majority of my time on public land. You meet you both. And my secret to success is just trying. Like, that's all the, all, like, it's that simple. I see spots that I've never hunted before. And I just go, yeah, probably nothing here, but we're going to give it a shot. Yep. And that's just, once you pull the Band-Aid off of like, well, I got to go to the place that I know,

a whole new world opens up to you. And, you know, if a bunch of people dump into your spot and, your choices of finding something new or pissing and moaning and rah, right, uh, go find something new. Um, go ruin somebody else's spot.

Uh, yeah, that's the thing, man. Like, if you're griping about too many trucks at the trailhead and your park there, guess what those other people are doing. Griping about your truck being there.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, so this, this picture that, uh, Phil's going to pop up is, from one of these times

where I was driving. It was getting close to end of shooting light. It was a cold, snowy day. And here, I'm looking at this river bottom or creek bottom. And I'm like, dang, that's good looking pheasant. Wish some lucky son of a gun could go out there

and knock on a door maybe, I don't know. And there's this little chunk of public land that, attaches to the highway just this place where you'd be like there's no way there's any birds here at this point in the season maybe opening day type of thing but swung off grab the dog and snort and i uh at a very fast pace went to go check this place out and cut a pheasant track we followed it and all the sudden like i was so surprised i did everything i could not to shoot this bird because I got the gun over my shoulder was just like not in the game at all and just

barely caught this rooster that snort had flushed flying over the hillside and was lucky enough to get him and I celebrated the moment um in a very unserious pheasant hunting way by taking a picture of the dog and be like God how cool is this and then we flushed another rooster right after this after talking and taking pictures and laughing and obviously that shotgun going off and 50 yards later flushed another rooster got that bird because I was prepared and then we walked in serpentine fashion five more miles never found another pheasant track at all so we were just the right place at the right time and it never would have happened had we not just tried something new amen cow amen

spot that maybe was overlooked days before you know yeah exactly so um and it's just yeah like those two birds are way better than uh shooting a limit of birds on like it would have been a wind to go out there and flush a bird right right so cool yeah guess that leaves me um my favorite hunt of the year is always going to be like the youth deer hunt with all all the kids and all the family um but like i also like to get in you know a solo hunt now and then and uh this year we got we got it going phil this year i i drew a uh colorado mule deer bachtag um and it was in november and for anyone who's who's never experienced a really good uh mule deer rut hunt it's is pretty special um during a typical

white tail rut hunt especially if your archery hunting in the woods you usually only get to experience it in like flashes right like here comes a buck chasing a dough

and then he's gone but in like more open mule deer country like when the rut's going like you just like kick back and watch the show and it's amazing like just watching bucks push

doughs watching bucks push other bucks around and that's what this day well that's what happened on this day we we just like hit it right um uh that's my buddy dan and like pretty much from first light on we were looking at ruddy bucks cruising around solo or looking for those or bucks that were chasing those and uh dan killed this buck like maybe an hour after shooting light started um we'd already glassed up two other bucks and we're like which one should we go after how should we go after them and then that buck like it's just

like there in front of us 200 yards away and and dan was like yeah man i'll shoot that one um so he killed that buck um we got him cut up and and stuff that meet up and a juniper and kept hunting um all day and pretty much all day long we were like looking at bucks was like amazing like it was a warm day like it was cold here in the morning but warm day but didn't matter there's still like deer out bucks looking at those all day long um and i guess about it would have been about like an hour and a half before dark i found um this buck glassed him up and um uh that that deer was that buck was like obvious you got the picture film there he is like that buck was like he's not a big scorn buck but like he was the

freaking man like he had all the does he was chasing other bucks around keeping him away from those does and like after watching him for an hour I'm like yeah he's the one um and part of the thing that

that gets me going like on whether I'm to shoot a buck or not is not necessarily the antlers it's like when you're looking at a buck that's twice the size of the doze that he's hanging out with like literally twice the size like you're looking at a good one no matter what his antlers look like and that was this buck um so ended up doing a pretty steep downhill stock got to 400 yards ran out of cover and

uh shot him and killed him it was cool because the deer never knew i was there and i killed him instantly but um we walked down like i had a good landmark on what like that deer just disappeared out of the scope and when i asked dan what happened he's like i don't know i've done link 20 shot and the deer's just not there and you're like that's not your job yeah so we get down there and it's like getting on towards dark and I'm like he was right in front of there was like a lone pinion pine I was like he was standing right in front of that get down there I'm like man not a track no blood no hair like you start panicking you know because I'm like if he ran he ran this way went down that way no tracks no hair and I'm like I'll fully admit like I started

swearing. I'm like, Dan, what the, what the, what the ass? You had one job. One. And then I go back to where I'm like, this is where he was standing. And I don't know why I didn't do it earlier, but I turned my head of the right. He's like, 10 feet away. The deader in a doornail. Like, and then you're like, I am too old to let panic drive my decision making. Exactly. But it was a long day, man. Like, well before dark to well after dark. A lot of miles. Big. packouts and it was just a great hunt heck yeah man beautiful buck yeah super cool yeah you can see the fat rolls on them just oh yeah shank looks those like those colorado bucks that can spend the summer up above tree line and then migrate down to good winter range like they're huge they're huge

deer um like you know two inches of fat on the back like pushing 300 pounds i'm guessing yeah um so yeah that was that was a real good hunt this year um i guess Phil do you just want to like How much time? It's up to you, Brody. I mean, we're almost at an hour right now, so. Let's just do this first one. You can cherry pick some questions. Yeah, we'll do, we'll just do one.

We're going to do a little fan Q&A section in lieu of the live chat with our listeners. And this one, the guy's name is AJ. I forget his last name. He sent in an email. It's a little long, but it's pretty juicy. So bear with me. I'm going to read it. my wife's college roommate is married to a guy who asked to go deer hunting with me every season on paper it should be perfect he lives near great public land our kids get along and it's become an annual trip north to visit them the problem is his idea of hunting couldn't be further from mine he rode hunts almost exclusively shoots deer from the truck targets spawns on purpose and only takes head shots i've made it clear i won't shoot from the road or hunt that way even so he insists

insists on helping me get one. He pressures me to stay in the truck and keeps telling me I don't need to unload my gun when we get in the truck. If I say I want to hunt alone, he takes it personally. I end up spending most of the weekend riding around instead of actually hunting. This is where it gets real good. There's more. To complicate things further, my wife already dislikes him due to him cheating on his wife

shortly after they were married. I don't want to interfere with my wife's friendship with her former roommate. but we're both on the same page that we don't like him. Yada yada there. Curious to know what the question is. Heavy yada. So my question is,

how do you handle someone whose ethics fundamentally clash with yours, especially when family and friends are involved? What's the line between being polite and enabling behavior that gives hunting a bad name? Man, like, I understand the dilemma of like the wife friendship here, but other than that, this is like very simple.

You're talking about a guy who's hunting illegally and unethically, not to mention being a cheating scumbag. So like, you just got to cut ties and not worry about being polite. I don't know if you guys have anything more to add, but like... That one seems pretty cut and dry. The email, he's basically trying to convince himself that this is what he needs to do, I think. Like, he's talking himself through it and just needs. like gentle push to be like

no more. Yeah, there's your push. Yeah. So, AJ, like get rid of him. Don't get drug down, buddy. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like you like you already have some good morals and ethics around hunting

and it's just like not worth being around that guy. I will say the only defensible thing here is there's nothing wrong with shooting fonts. No, there's nothing wrong with shooting fonts. But, you know, if you're doing it leaning out of a truck, running truck, then it's a problem. Yes.

So, yeah, I didn't figure you guys would have a whole lot to say, but I felt like AJ really needed a friendly push in the right direction. Yeah, nowhere to go but up, buddy. We're going to do another one, Phil. Yeah, okay. And also, I do think just partially because Nick already made the thumbnail and the title of set in stone. I think it would be good if we hit on just some brief New Year's resolutions. Oh, yeah, we're going to do that. Okay, great.

Yeah, we'll get there. Let's move on, all right, because we're using up a lot of time. We're going to do our Cal interview. Is that good, Phil? Can we move on? Yeah, let's do it. All right. Okay.

For our next interview, we've got our very own Cal, the conservation man, Callahan. As most of you hopefully know, Cal is officially the new CEO of backcountry hunters and anglers. He's going to continue doing some Cal stuff for Meat Eat Eater on a part-time basis. But he's going to have his hands full at BHA, and this may be his last appearance on Radio Live. So this whole thing is kind of like a bittersweet farewell, Cal. First off, congratulations. Oh, thank you. I don't think BHA could have chosen a better person for the job.

than you. But I got to know, does that, like, that CEO title making you a little nervous? Oh, my God, the things I don't know. You know, like, that's not the, um, there's no motivation there to be a CEO. There's a lot of motivation, uh, to just like fully embrace the things that I, that, that motivate me. Yep. Right. And a whole bunch of other people. Yeah. And this, Yeah, I was asked would be like the simplest way. Like, yeah. Why'd you do it? Well, they asked.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so I'm very, very excited. Yeah. And I'm just like gung ho to like be able to just like fully embrace. You know, this big thing that's been a big part of my life that I've kind of been like moonlighting in. Yep.

for a long time as a volunteer. Yep. So, um, super stoked there. And then yeah, the meat eater side of things, um,

is going, you know, to continue hosting the podcast, doing some, some video work. Um, and, you know,

that's going to be like a supportive role. Yeah. Which is pretty darn amazing to be able to do that. Yeah. Cool. Um, Can we expect anything different from BHA with, with you at Leidenham? I, you know, that's an interesting question.

So it's a membership chapter model, nonpartisan organization. I think the need in the conservation space is like true representation of, you know, like folks like us in this room, right? like a lot of conservation is the speak is aimed at folks uh with with big money and in deep pockets that want to give and like we definitely need some of that sure but the goal my dream is to have like you know the the rank and file uh folks that go out and do this stuff the end user of public land yeah uh you know represented well um we're in a lot of conservation pickles right now because it's like i swear to god people at the very top are working off of like public land

theory well we've been told right you people like these things right well let's let's get into those people at the top i want to read you a quote from an article that popped up in my feed this morning. Earlier this year, Utah Senator Mike Lee's efforts to slip permission for federal land sell off into a Senate Republican's budget reconciliation bill failed after outrage citizens forced him to withdraw the proposal. On Monday, December 15th, Lee launched another gambit to sell or transfer your public lands to private interests by adding amendments to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, which the U.S. Senate is now considering. Lees ploy is disguised by complex legalese, but if it is adopted, the effect would be to

eliminate the legal language that requires the Department of the Interior to protect public lands, national parks, historic trails, wild and scenic rivers, et cetera, et cetera. I imagine you're going to be spending a little more time in Washington, D.C. So if you were to run into Senator Mike Lee in a bar, what would you say to him? I would say thank you for putting together such a perfectly public list of working against the wishes and best interests of the American people. It's like he's writing his own resignation letter. it's like if you're dealing with a bad employee because of all the laws of protecting employees with employers and things like that you can be kind of hard to fire people for cause but it shouldn't be and this guy's like I'd say thank you yeah senator like you are an obstinate employee that has gone rogue and you are publicly working against the best interest of the American people.

Yeah. Thank you for filling out the paperwork for us. Really? Yeah. And so, like, what's, and I don't know if you guys get, like, hear my phone blowing up, but it's over what is going on right now. Yeah. And it is this, you know, it's complicated, like, backdoor dealing where he submitted

amendments at, like, the very much. 11th hour to this appropriations process that was largely getting wrapped up. Yeah. So again, he's not making friends with a bunch of people. Yeah, probably even people in his own party are like, really? Again, the people within his own party, the people within the committees that he works on. Like, he is just working against people. Like, nothing's ever easy.

Yeah. Because, like, if there's a compliment I can give this guy, is like, he's a zealot. Like, he's, he truly believes beyond the wishes of anybody that, uh, we shouldn't own public land. We shouldn't have public land. We shouldn't have the freedoms that we get to enjoy on public land. Uh, why that is we, we will likely never know. Yeah. But, um, and it is just, it's just like this, uh,

death of a thousand cuts like type of thing. Well, if I can get a little win here with this amendment change and then that'll stack up to this other little win and this other little win and it's just going to be easier because the other thing that he's doing right now, right, is there's like 20 or 25 acres in Brian Head, Utah, that the little municipality there, Brian Head would love to use this public land for the municipality. There's all these systems in place where we, the American people, can facilitate that, right? We can lease that land to the municipality and retain ownership.

And then we, the American people, get to use those lease fees for the maintenance or creating new public land. Do a land swap or some such. There's a land swap. There's the sale through the Federal Land Policy Management Act. where the revenue from that sale gets used to get public land of higher value. All these things that are within the Congress of the United States, we the people. There are existing levers that can be pulled. Yep.

And the people of Brian Head, Utah can get what they want and it doesn't shortchange the rest of us. Yeah. However, Lee doesn't want to do that. He's like, nope, free. Nothing. right? And are you really going to come out and work against these fine citizens of Brian Head, Utah? And it's like, yep, I am. Because we have all these systems in place that are public and they're for the benefit of we the people of the United States. Right? Let's work within that framework. And everybody can get what they want. Yeah. But he's just like not willing to do that. Moving past good old Mike Lee, real quick, what are some of the other big issues or fights you think BHA is going to be tackling this year and moving forward?

I think awareness is a huge part of this. You know, we, it's, you know, from the top down that we're being told there's a campaign running to tell people of how. Our public lands are not good. They're not working for us. Not in the best interest of the American people. And, you know, hunters and anglers, like, if you just look at BLM, like, we are uniquely poised to be like, actually, this stuff's incredible. Right.

It's insanely valuable. You can't put a price tag on it. And then the ecosystem services that those lands provide, in addition to, you to being like the home of like our extractive industry a lot of times it's like the case to sell this stuff off is so thin like it is just like it should be a non-starter um so that's going to remain like a goal of the organization just getting the message out you got to get the message out there who are in full alignment on this but they don't pay attention to what hunting and angling groups do or think so that coalition part of the package is something

that that we can definitely help bring to the table right so i've got done a lot of work in the past with big green conservation groups as well as big businesses that more align with the quote unquote green side of things um and the the fun thing here is like you do don't have to give anything up in order to bring some education into all sides here. So like, um, you know, very succinctly, it's America. We can have our guns and our public lands. Sure. And if somebody tells you that we can't, uh, they're working against you. Yeah. Like, there is nothing that we have, nothing that we have and enjoy right now that is not here because we didn't demand it. It's not here because we got lucky. It's because we hit the brakes and said,

oh my God, there's no more frickin' ducks left. Yeah. We got to do something about this. Yeah. Oh, my God. Remember how cool elk were? Let's come up with a giant program to reseed elk across their native range. Like, we're in this memory lapse situation right now where it's like people have forgotten all the hard work and dedication that happen to give us what we have right now. Yeah. And we just need to remind people that this stuff is not here by chance. We didn't get lucky. It's here by choice. And people demanded that we have this system of public lands that we want wildlife. And we want access to them. Yeah. Stakes are high. Exactly. Yeah. All right, Cal, I'd like to end this interview by saying that you've been a big inspiration to me over the years.

And I'm sure the same goes for everyone here at Meat Eater and the fans who are listening. So thanks for the work that you're done and the work you're about to do, fighting the good fight for all of us hunters and anglers. Well, thank you for taking your hosting job and putting in this opportunity. So membership. Yeah. Got to grow the membership. We need more names on the list so we can advocate more effectively for our public lands,

waters, and wildlife. So if you can do something for all of us, just get a solo membership and tune in and see what we've got to say. Cool. Cool. All right, Phil, we're going to end it with some New Year's resolutions. Cool. I imagine we've got enough material by now that we can end this thing. Corey.

Hey. That's me. 2026. Well, yeah. I mean, obviously I could try and eat more exercise or sorry, eat healthier. Sure. Exercise more, this and that. That'll probably come as a roller coaster ride as it typically does for me throughout the year.

Start out gold and then end up not so healthy. but then it comes back and forth. But my New Year's resolution is my son's going to be eight next year and I want to do more hunting with them. Certainly watching you and Janice and Steve take your kids out and hearing all the tips and tricks to have a great outing in the woods with them. It's been tricky up until this point. I would say we've done a little bit more this year than in years past. But now that he's eight, he's a couple years off being able to do it himself with me in the woods. So we're going to try and get out a little bit more.

A couple squirrel outings, some spring turkeys. cool every day in the summer then up next fall too so nice yeah more time in the woods with my boy that's a good one I support you in there oh thank you yeah got anything specific or oh boy I not really just improve on all fronts that's fine that's all you know that's that's good enough day by day yeah yeah yeah baby steps my resolution for weight loss comes with like I I have always kept like the same stable of t-shirts. Like the new ones come and go real fast. Yeah.

But I'm like, if I throw on an old t-shirt that I really like and go, oh, my God. Yeah. That's, that's my kicking ass. I don't view you as someone who's got a weight loss problem. Oh, man, it's just like, you know, older we get. Yeah. The old, old beer gut becomes like a real thing. Yeah.

And you go, ho, who is this? Oh, ho. cool uh big one for me is i'm doing a marathon with a goal time at 3 30 which is it's going to be tough um but it's doable if i stick with the training and uh get lucky and stay injury free it's going to be a tough one but i'm giving it a given it a go what's what's your timeline september i'll start like the the actual like regimented training program in early april so between now and then it's just putting miles on you know yeah plus around here you'd need um you know there's a good chance you need like uh indoor training yeah exactly like i like i was looking at

spring marathons because you can't like it's too hot in the summer right a lot of places but like missoula has one in june but then when you think about montana's winter it's like do i have time to get ready for that one not really so it's better that i'm doing one doing one i'm doing one i'm doing went out in billings in in september nice yeah um and then like for like our world our hunting world whatever you we want to call it um like corey it's pretty much i've kind of had the same one going for a few years and it probably shows my age and it's corny and cliche but it's like focusing on the fun the experience the people the places like that's what i'm worried about these days rather than like what an animal scores or something like that

Um, I just want hunting to be like it was when I was kid and everything was special and fun. And then there's like the old man element to it where you like grow wise enough to just like appreciate whatever you're given. You know what I mean? Like that. So that's my like hunting resolution for the year. That's a good one. Yeah. Yeah, I need.

I was going to say I have not done like my big wilderness backpack hunt for two years now. Yeah. And. Time to get back to it. I have. Like for mental health purposes, I got to make that thing happen. Yep. For sure.

Yeah. And that's like a big buck dreams type of deal. But yeah, I mean, consequently, like, I haven't shot a deer in two years because I, the whole scene is so important to me. Yep. Or it's like, it's way more. You're spending all your time protecting that stuff rather than going out and Well, that's the attitude that I want to.

to keep, though, is like, I don't want this to be a career. I want to, like, put myself out of a job as soon as fucking possible. Right. So, like, as fast as people can onboard. Make yourself obsolete. Oh, absolutely, man. Yeah, that's great. And I think that is, like, a real difference in goal, like career people and all sorts of things. Like, like, there's people in this space that I think a third of the time, they're working in a way that will never put this shit to bed. Right. Right. I'm like, oh, great. You just created more enemies

that are galvanized against you. I'm like, how about we just do the good thing and get it done? And then everybody understands and respects this stuff, and we can go, I'll go back to swinging a hammer being happy. Nice. I think that's a great place to end it. What about Phil? Swing a hammer. Phil. Where's Phil? Phil?

We're going to jump back in time. What? I need you to address something. Okay, I'm following. Uh-oh. Phil, this, we're going back to a podcast question. I swear to God, we're going to end it after this. Okay.

It's a lot of pressure. From Tate Green, at the beginning of a some meat eater podcast on YouTube, there's a dude wipes commercial. I've never heard this commercial, but continue. There's a singing voice that sounds like it could be Phil. Oh. Is this you, Phil? No! I wish I could say it was me. It is not me. I'm flattered. You think I can sing as well as that guy. He's, he's belting it. He's really reaching for the stars there. Nope, that's not me. But I don't know. If I get tired of meat eater, I might like Nancy Kerrigan him and then I'll maybe take his job or something. Yeah. Because that's the only way. Yes. It's the, it truly is.

I mean, you're already the best podcast engineer in the business and at like a in-demand stage actor, semi-professional gamer. world-renowned dungeon master world renowned but you you know you might have time to get a side hustle singing jingles i how's that song go again he won't sing it oh he told me it wouldn't well yeah dude wipes needs to pay us more money if they want us to sing the song on the show so yeah nothing's free all right fork it out dude wipes what is your resolution don't we get a fill resolution oh i was wondering mine is to read more hey there you go that's a good one solid always a good one with you on that any genre oh nothing nothing Nothing. I mean, it's fantasy, Cal. I don't, I'm not reading any nonfiction around here.

The Dungeon Master's Manual, 23rd edition. It's in my backpack, up in my office right now. Amazing. All right, everyone. Happy New Year. Happy holidays. Do good in 2026. And tune in next week. Later. You're here. This is an IHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human.