Ep. 262: The Jake Brake

are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store, nor where you stand with on X. In addition to a bunch of normal people they're sitting around here, we have from Phelps game calls Jason Phelps and Dirt during I'm here to join us, and we have like a we're making all kinds of siting, exciting, not siting exciting announcements and a little bit here, So stay tuned for that part. But first we got to take care of

the other stuff. Um then we're gonna 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 gonna cover off on a bunch of junks. Then we'll get to you. This is the first installment of a recurring segment and the segments called we need to jingle for it. It's called um Chester gets rich off Bitcoin. Now, Chester,

this is really a story about walife. I'm gonna putting like a slot machine down there. Yeah, it's cashing out coins. Can you build a little something? Yeah, I think it's a slot machine. And then something to signify a Walleye boat. Okay, so if you could hear an engine, you know, like a outboard, and you kind of got the colt pissing out and messing by through through the headphones like left to right, him hauling asked by, and then a sound

of like cascading money out of slot machine. They'll introduce Chester gets rich off Bitcoin, The Continuing Adventures of Chester the investor. Come that's it, come off. Chester once a Walleye bolt, 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 that was with him one weekend, and what shot up to like five dollars and I called you a liar, you know,

I called you something. I think, Yeah, your hundred bucks turned into four hundred 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. I'm going back, going back still to when when when we all caught COVID over you've already had it. But yeah, over the weekend, I probably made I don't know, like

over three hundred bucks. And you didn't believe me. And you know I believed you, but I didn't. I was still ignorant. 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, um,

the skeptical skepticism is the chastity of the intellect. So I was skeptical and the chest was raking all this money, and 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 I think I lost ten blocks on the bat two,

didn't I? Yeah, you said, you give me ten bucks to put it back and see if I got it right, Um, while I was sitting in my bank account, I definitely lost some money by sitting dormant, by sitting even though they give you like point o interest on that stuff. Yeah, but I got it back in there, and uh, I want me to bitcoin right now? Is in a pretty new stage. Would you rather get You can do it one of two ways. I give you twenty and you owe me ten. I give you seven and I owe

you three. Give me seven. Then when I get that Walleye boat, you just pay for gas. Okay. So 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. I was like, oh, we just heard of a guy selling AMMO. He said, up, you know, no one can find AMMO. We heard from an individual about him going to some website and this

wasn't the name of the website. But the website is like bullets are us, you know, and lo and behold he has all the ammal that no one can find. So he plays a big order and his credit card gets processed and no m O shows up. M hmm, I gotta look out for that cast. So I thought you fell prey to that by this Walleye boat scam. No, no, I did not. I just listen to my mother, who is very smart, smarter than me, and uh, he said,

you should start dabbling in bitcoin. And uh 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, your wife gets 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 and uh literally yea, and I took it out of there and I put that in bitcoin. And I've been just slowly putting you know, a hunter bucks in here and there, and uh, 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 companies are starting to dabble in bitcoin. Tesla bought one point five billion and they make they make like another one point five 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 u He said something to the effect of um to suggest that it was other other individuals were pushing for that move more aggressively than he was. Got Yeah, I had heard like he like they make I think last

really made like seven million off of car sales. And it 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 the walleye boat cost? I mean, what boat? You want your own? Walleye lake? Yeah, yeah, I am trying to get like a nice simple eighteen foot land with the motor on it, and that's all I need.

So then you're gonna quit your investment. That would be hard to do. I think 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? I think you should include me too. All right, Well that's his bottle wallet boat. You know I need. I need a Walleye boat. Partner, he did the old fashioned way. He just went down and bought them boat. Yeah, that's true.

You didn't get tangled up crypto occurrencies, al right, Chester, You can go back to whatever you're doing. All right? Oh well, I'm sorry. How much more it might blow up so much that you can just peel off, peel off what you need. I've only made like a little over a thousand bucks is all um total, But it's we haven't made it yet. Well, I haven't put it in my bank account. But because 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. A thank you, Chester. You bet you should go visit that crypto mine in 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, and the fact that he's not into these anonymous, uh, 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. Yeah, Steve, it isn't isn't your mantra, don't hate the player, hate the game. That's correct, Okay, I think that applies here.

I stold that from Clay. I'm not that Clay Nucam made it up. I stole it from him when he revealed to me that he's getting the 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 you know, as a basketball coach for a schools. It's what he's getting it now. He well, he was supposed to get it quite a while ago and it initially fell through. All right, uh Yanni, do

your correction corrections? Wow, wow back. I don't know what episode it was, but we read an email from a fella that had had found a new use for the su Vi kitchen appliance. Why why is that funny? Because it didn't even occur to me until you brought it up, Like how I thought it was genius? But then when he brought it up to be courtly 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 Subervie machine in there. This fella had a had a birthing pool set up in his house and um just was struggling with keeping it warm, and he had by idea to stick of Suvie wand in there and and it kept the water nice. My father heard there's 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, is that appliance meant for that application? And thus we should not talk about it or promote it. Da dada dada. So there you go. Don't use a suvie wand to warm up your bathtub water or um a clothes iron m that would not work either. Don't drop plugged in

stuff into your tub with you. I I And when Yad he brought this up, I initially was um, I was I rolling. I was I rolling about the need to clarify because I don't know how it really goes, Like can you imagine let me let's just say, heaven forbid, right, what winds up happening? Where does the judge wind up

being helmet? So you're saying that this that you listen to like some knuckleheads on a podcast who are not like baby experts or bath experts or electricians, and it's called like like the slogan is like hunt fish listen, but you took birthing advice from them, and now you want to hold them liable. Dismissed, Yeah, where would he be, like, by God, the buck stops here. An example that will be held accountable for this transgression anyway, pointed out you

really wanted 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 He doesn't want on him. Yeah, well it's off, you know, Yanni? Uh oh Kuran? Real quick? What was the general um? Speaking of feedback, 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. Was

it um generally? Was it all over the place? There was there like a was there like a consensus um? There were it was kind of all over the place. He was at Corey. Corey forwarded me Cory's are all right? Community manager? He forwarded me kind of the most I don't know, salient of both sides, And it was a bit all over the place. Yeah, there were there were folks who We're really glad that we were just even

engaging the topic to begin with. There are folks who just kind of railed on us not asking hard enough, you know, pressing enough questions, or folks disagreeing with Nell's, folks spouting off, folks thinking I mean it was it just kind of ran the gamut. But there was a lot of response to that, so it it hit, it hit somewhere they paid attention. Yeah, I think we can, you know, come back to it. At some point. They weren't being mean to the guess right. I thought the

guests 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 obfuse. I'm not finishing any of my sentences right now, but asking tough questions. I think we asked the toughest of all question even to ask the question like do you feel that the renewable energy industry as it is obfew skates some of the realities about what this would really take. That's like that's

like watching sixty minutes, dude. Yeah, And I mean I should get like a like a a eyes for that. I think 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. They're 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 going to not make those changes, we you know, we got to do something. So Ela must thinks we're gonna 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 don't want to have to go on then everybody else gets a stick around. I don't think it's gonna happen in our life times, but I guess some bad fomo if that happened. Man, if I knew it was just gonna be like remember that movie um Melancholia with that asteroid They like, you watch half the movie and you don't

know what's gonna happen. You know that everybody's acting like extremely weird and it eventually realized 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. UM scrap metal. The guy wrote in how they're making it way harder for like drug addicts and derrelics to turn in scrap metal. It's hard on crackheads now. So when you go in

now to a scrappyard, you gotta provide an address. They don't pay cash for and weirdly they don't pay cash for anything but steal. It cuts down a construction theft because you've got a place to send the check coreas you to have an address. The eliminating I think it's I think it's prey judicial, 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 thirty six inch diameter piece of cast iron sewage pipe stamp city property. He said that the um the cops were there before they could even unload it. Scrap is high right now, three bucks a pound from number one copper steel is a

hundred fifty a ton for low grade. He was this guy that wrote in was getting big into scrap himself, but his mom doesn't like him leaving it all over the yards. 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 him out. In fact, if you watched the episode we did on on Netflix, we have an episode where we go Neil

guy hunting. I go with Jesse Griffith's and we're on a on a big ranch. We're hunting with a guy. Wasn't you remember that guy's name that went out with us to accompany us help us out. It was with an A. I believe Amando Mondo. Amando, Yeah, but I think they called him Mondo for short. Well there to Armando, but Mondo called him that ranch. I was talking to the guy there um the family that owns it. So

far they found this is days ago. So far they just randomly accounted up eighty six dead nil guy that throws a death and weirdly some of them, Uh, kind of came up and like died against a house on the tile like that. 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 orcs and stuff? Some dead ones, but they can handle it better. It's just far fewer. And he said

he hasn't done like an exhaustive survey. It's just that just laying all over place. God, it's crazy. Yeah. This article here points out that they've died on both high and low fence, which makes sense because like why does you know? And this what'sn't this picture of all these dead creators they got? What kind of animal? Look? That's what another body mind? Um? I was telling me. Yeah, he said his body's place. All I believe he used the word all the axes dear? Is that right? Geez?

That's the place that wit knows about. I don't know about. Oh no, I was I was talking about Matt. Yeah, yeah, the same place all the axes deer died. Yeah, there's a zoo down there. They had to bring the flamingos inside. That was interesting. They're like inside a restaurant. Um. Yeah, crazy, you gotta 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, I know we're

saying that, just go down. If you woke up one day and there's eighty six dead Neil Guy, man, what's that times two D seventy two freaking backstraps you'd have if you went out and got them all. Yeah that imagine a full freezer with nothing but Neil Guy backstraps. But what's that? What's that gonna do to the industry down there? I mean it's gotta be I mean in terms of whatever industry there is is around, in terms of whatever industry there is around. Uh, those hunts, I

mean it's got a kick its teeth in. You know Jesse Griffith's restaurant, and um, he sells a lot of this stuff. So imagine that's going to complicate his world. And then he only boy I don't know what he's doing right now, but he only buys produced from Texas. Stuff's all frozen, man. Yeah. And then all those people without like acts that 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 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? Guy, were vulnerable animals? Aren't we as bad as you? Guy? This is the weirdest thing. A

guy rode 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 of that song? No, my god, does that guy look like Cal? Someone wrote in pointing out the bass player. Look, but he's wrong. It's a singer, is Cal? I don't. I don't see it, dude, it's break and cal Man. Do you see it? Said it's Cal. There's a screenshot that's not That's not the

right guy. God is it? The basis could tell I, Oh so it is the base guy. Oh my I I was looking at that trying to figure out what he was playing. It's kind of like a mix between Cal and uh Corey, Brittany's husband. Oh yeah, okay, yeah, that is a base And I'm bad at music, man, I can't tell an instrument. I'm looking at um looks just like them. But that song is a weird song. It's a dead ringer. Everyone go to a minute or second on the ram jam Black Betty. The song is

weird because he's talking about a woman named black Betty. Okay, and he likes her lot and really does she really does it for him. But since she has a child who goes blind, I thought it was goes wild and blind and blind. Dude, it's a horrible song, but it is cal big hit. This is a good one. Dude rowing in about Uh. He's a tree surgeon. He wrote the six He knew I used to be a tree surgeon, so he thought it appealed to me. But a guy,

a fellow tree surgeon, guy had a nipple ring. And the guy slid down a tree a little bit one time, and a bark and a chunk of bart grabbed that nipple ring tore his nipple right off. Another guy wrote it, I don't know if this is true or not. I have a hard time with this. We're talking a long time ago about how you can sell Like I know for a fact that Buck Bowden sold a well how big was that moose? It's like a seventies some inch moose.

Giant sold it for it like tens of thousands of dollars to a to Cabella's for their collection, and he even knows where it sits now. He would he would carry this big giant moose head around the rack he carried around he's at a show. So if you go to a show, like what's that thing in Harrisburg called the famous one? Yeah, that's where I met Buck Bolten. So there's these sporting like these outdoor shows, right, and outfitters will have boots and they always have like a

little photo album. A lot of them have like all kinds of taxes during the mouse Like you go to box, just Bucks sitting there at a folding on a folding chair with a photo album laid in front of him like nothing like just doesn't like not a marketer, not a marketer. And so I was, I asked, I feel like talking to that guy. So I went and talk 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 and asked

a bunch of questions about it. They left, and another guy came up and made the purchase because they wanted to put it in a sporting get store. Is in the Harrisburg. I don't know he could tell where it is. I can't remember where. He said it wound up best parlor whatever is there. This guy is saying he found a porcupine albino. He says Cabell has offered him seventy grand and his grandpa. What the hell was it? His dad says his dad turned it down. Oh that's where

I get incredulous. He says he monitored it on a pile of sticks and pine cones instead. Yeah, I mean, I feel like his dash would call in just so I could say, really, seventy k huh, let's see, I want to see a picture of this uh albino. I'm sure if he's listening, sure you'll send it in. If he writes in, maybe his PAPPI 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 seventy dollars. I don't know. Well, maybe it's Elon musk No, but he's saying that it's his retirement plan. There's Chester's Walleye boat get like a freaking full electronics package and everything. Man, you probably put two engines on that soccer. Uh, this show. I gotta report this because this makes us look good. This show solved the mystery. Not only we saved a ton of lives by through well too, through not us,

dr Adam Lazare 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 there's 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

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 fifteen years. This is fifteen years ago. That keeping them up at night, keeping them up at

night for fifteen years. Who wants to sum up what happened to the guy? The guy's body in that book. The amount of people shooting each other fiddling with guns, it's oh, all the time. Yeah, it must be three or four times there's someone's fiddling around the gun and like shoots himself or shoots his body or whatever. Yeah, well we didn't have hunters safety courses. Yeah. So this fella whose name was Constant Cassneil Cassnell. It's spelled q u E s n E l L. I don't know.

This guy was five six, Yeah, it's it's one of the interesting things about Constant is that he was he was a short fellow. Uh, he was a tinsmith from Montreal and had listed enlisted in in Boston. But anyway, it sounds like they there was a raid. Some sue raided their stock and had their stock run around everywhere and this fellow and another fellow went where must have been right there. I don't know if they were shepherding the stock or what um, but somehow they were part

of this being rated upon. And uh 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 some of the arrows in the hands and uh, we're evidently shot while he had his gun to his face in the act of firing at them, disabling him so he cannot use his gun a breech loader, causing him to turn and run.

He's like just and so they're saying that, like, ye, the angle of the arrow was as though he was holding a rifle, aiming and shooting. I think that's what he's suggesting. 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. I also just feel that like sure they might have hit him as he

was in the motion 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, you know, And like it's not like you're at the range, you know, shooting at at a target that's not moving. You're like in part of a raid and you're like, oh, I'm gonna hit it. Hit him in the wrist, and so you can't shoot

at me anymore. Skeptic. The skepticism is the chance to do the intellect. John m Maybe they're really bad shots, and that's as good as it. I mean, they got him in the hand, and they were yeah exactly, they were firing arrows. Yeah, and they happened to hit him in their arms or he was hiding behind a stone

mm hmmm, and that's all that was sticking up. That could be too, But I wouldn't underestimate those bows, because um, we're gonna have we're working having Michael punk back on about his new book that's coming out, The Fat about the Fetterman fight and they killed I think the Sioux called it like the Battle of One in the Hand. But they killed something like eighty four eighty four US

soldiers with bows. I mean, granted they had there was two thousand against eighty four, but killed him 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're not coming round. M hm, go on, That's all I

had about Constant. Yeah, that's pretty damn cool, though, well is getting shot up for finding that tomb stone and then learning about it just by reading a book. Because you know what especially interesting about it is that everything that happened, not everything, the vast majority of everything that happens in that book is underwater. Yeah, it's under for Peg, as an enterprising fellow would get himself a scuba tank and go down and look around and find cool stuff.

Dig around down there. Okay, moving on, We're gonna talk about turkeys. But as a segue to turkey talking. And it's almost like I almost hesitate to bring this up because it Uh, let me, let me put this question, Jason, do you know what I want? Do you know what Seth is gonna present for us? Yeah? Do what do 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 gonna listen to, like man, you know, 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 seventies seven yelper hand coming up like you know, we've always been oh, seven and nine, no, yo, you know, one lesson, you're not gonna call in the bird ten yelps, you're not gonna call the bird in like seven and nine. And then you hear this real hand out there just going down. So it's like it always makes you think, but I think 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 might sound off, but I think a lot of

real hands aren't great turkey colors. 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 and learning about learning turkey calling, right, It was almost more helpful for me to go on YouTube and just find hands, yep, find video of hands 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 darks sometime and just hear some hand just like open a tree going nuts. And you would feel funny doing that yep yep, like and this this hand on YouTube that if you heard a person out in the woods did the raunchieste does seventy seven yelp in a row sequence, you'd be like,

what is that dude doing? Yeah, that's that's a guy. Yeah, or you'd say, you know, after thirty four, you'd be like, that's not a dude. Yeah, that guy that he'd have passed out by Now. It's really interesting, man, it's really interesting to go watch stuff they do. But then it's worth bringing this up to uh, you know, the tent legion that that it's kind of like a this famous turkey hunt book by this guy, Colonel Tom Kelly. Uh

philis subject matter expert. You're Tom Kelly expert. No, Ben has just been showing it down my throat for the last few months, so um, hardy to avoid. It's a good book about turkeys. But in it he tells the 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 Hends 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 in your heads, like he doesn't think I'm a hen, right, yeah, but then that trick them. But then here's a hand standing there and they're like their head.

Mike Chamberlain was saying that their testosterone levels changed 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 ship. But the next day you're on that same and his testosterone levels have risen and he's like interested. Yeah, it sounds like a bull elk man, I got it. I got a little idea I'm hatching right now, testosterone injections for turkeys, but corn out with testosterone keep me breaking

two logs. Yeah, I see. I've always been like, I've always subscribed to the idea, Like, you know, their hand 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 it wasn't truly just a flock of Tom's or were they locked down on a hand um, Because if they, I would I would got to read the tent legion. I would throw a fit. I would pack my calls up and go home if it was nothing but Tom's

over there. No hens locked down and they didn't even look at me. I'm all right, I'm I'm out of here. You're having to change I've been having. I had a big fight with Clay Nucom down in Texas where we went out one day, bright, early in the morning to rattlebuxing. Okay um, we had reason to believe based on Yanni rattling a couple basically into the truck with them, we had a reason to believe that on this property, ratling worked very well. We go out in the morning and nothing,

and I'm like, damn, what's going on? You know? Then we go in the middle of the day and one after the other and I don't think it's at their testospherone level spiked. 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 board off their asses, and they hear a rattle and he's in The dolls are bedded, and he's like, I'd 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 betting area. He knows all those doughs are not in heat, and he's like, whoa, somebody's fighting over hot

over here. So maybe not board, but you know what I'm saying, His mood change, his circumstances changed in some kind of predictable fashion at a certain time of day. Maybe they're testosterone rises with the temperature. Mine doesn't. Okay, seth share Uh, I don't know how you want to do this. I want to play. So this is like you got some good ones. I have a couple. Um here,

let's do this first. Which one of you boys, Derek or Jayson, Which one of you boys wants to um give us like a conservative hunter sits in the woods and goals yep, yep, yep, yep. Am I gonna use your collar yawnies. It doesn't matter to me, man, whatever one you think it's gonna be the most conservative for you sitting in the woods, I'm not using either of yours. I mean used to meat coal. 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's probably still like they're just out of the tree or still in the tree, like real quick, I call that conservative. Al right now, SA's gonna share with us like some some turkey noises. Yeah, so I love these things. This first one just totally debunks the the like, don't call too much. Seven to nine, yep, Cadence, just not stop. It's like having a kazoo out in the woods. 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. Yeah, because if they don't come in your eyes, like I'm gonna give him the sigh of the treatment. Yeah, no, one's I don't know. Maybe some people are. Maybe some people are like, dude, I'm gonna pour the coals to it. There is there are I can't remember the guy's name, someone that Jay Scott hunted with, uh Yargust. Maybe you guys know that name.

He was like, there's so many guys that have been like national turkey calling in 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 set up. His attitude is pour the coals to him, just 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 at him. 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 not good. I want to be like that hand. I just want to run that call as much as possible. Hit. That's what another one seth Okay, So this one is a hand that if if I heard this, hen 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. Um, this this turkey's clocks are more like squeaks. Like some sound good, but

you'll hear a couple. They're just like squeaks. H m hmm. Like every once in a while there's one in there. It's just like a squeak, and I'd be like, that's dude, just like messed up a little bits like there's a problem with his box called. Yeah. So yeah, real turkey, you got another good one. Hits one more good one, you'll be I'll clean this all up, right Phil, This one, this one's just a hand that gob that's gobbling. Oh, which is interesting. That's the hunter turkey. That's a hand,

that's a hand. Yeah. And if I heard that in the Turkey Woods with you know, a bunch of pressure around me, be like, that's a dude on one of those gobbles things. So that's a real turkey. This this is right here. It's almost like a Jake gobble too, kind of halfhearted. Okay. One of the things we wanted to do in head into this is uh and headed in talking about some of this is um, we're trying to get our favorite turkey biologist, Mike Chamberlain. What's this

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, because 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. A lot of times I'll be like, all right, a little bit longer this Tuesday. He only gives you one a week. Yeah, what's this thing called? Is handles? Wild Turkey Doc? Yeah just one word and yeah, I highly recommend checking them out. Instagram should be called wild Turkey dock. And when you go, it's just his stuff. No, you can't start like an account and start putting your own stupid stuff up there. It's just his stuff. So Karan asked him a question.

We're here because I don't think we asked this before. Uh Karan 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 does it really cape? Is it really sitting there being like m mm hmmm, is that a person or what? Yeah? Or is it

like is it telling me to come? Is it telling me to go and telling me that there's a good food over there? Right? Yeah? Does this sound like sex sex sex sex sex or food? Food? Food? That's old Betty Lou over there. I remember her from last year. Steve is 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 here? 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 and 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 blow and behind their eyes. But without an external ear flap, they have to come up or or they have to use different ways of determining

direction and distance to sounds. So what 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 h owners will tell 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 you help you, help you, help you up, or whatever sound we make, and they hear that differently

because they can perceive different frequencies than we can. So you you kind of factor that into the equation, combined with the way that they hear sounds in the 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 cute they're hearing is and because of the way they're hearing works, they can pinpoint direction of sound with precision. And a person once told me it was a famous

turkey researcher that imprinted birds and watch 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 turkey simultaneously. So we we have tom's 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, and that just tells you that the bird knew exactly

where that call was coming from. 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 to that sound. So to 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 they'll end up hours down the

road right where you were sitting. Wow. Yeah, that's that's why. That's why God made naps. Like I'll often make mistaken of having my naps somewhere else, Like you go off to a good nap spot. 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 Heidi spot where you can call nothing calms and then take your nap right there. I'm gonna write a book about that. I'll tell you a story about choosing

a bad nap spot. Please. Yanni was there. This was what two seasons ago when we took Maggie and Tracy hunt turkey for the show. Um 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 putton and opened my eyes and the turkeys standing two ft 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, no, kid

man just walked right into us. There's a bunch of people sleeping there. You know what else I'm thinking about as he's answering his question, is this idea that you know when when we look at dear what dear c right, like when you look at your setup camo and all that, Like you're looking at you, 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 or whatever.

Their experience is probably totally different. Like you can't even 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're you're you're sort of like extrapolating, you know. I think that's why trial and air is so expensive. You can't just look and be like that's hidden.

It's it has to be more like I've done this thing, and here's how the animals respond, and I've done this thing. Here's how Andrew 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, you know, this type

of thing they just look right through. Um. Abernathey, who's a biologist, was saying one time he would talk about iridescence on birds and bird he's I know he's talking about what they hear, but he's talking about bird vision. And um 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 so, when they're looking at like a foam decoy versus a real bird, it might not even look close.

Even though all right, it looks like another turkey, it's not not what he says. He thinks that fan is just screaming at that turkey. I agree, I would. I think it's like fireworks going on. And then like now back at home, like the big things like real turkey like stuff for 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 you see, 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 hear what he said. He said something like, thirty two

turkeys have seen this decoin, they're all dead. 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 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 he sucked, but there was a bird out there that didn't agree with me, and I 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 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. The tom's, 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 tom's would be more responsive to a wider variety of calls, you know, a crappy call or you know a world champion, Grand champion caller, because they're thinking with reproduction on them, you know, on the mind. That's the way I kind

of I kind of look at it. Given how acute turkey hearing is, you know, do we do we need to screech at them at the figuratively the top of our lungs and we when we call to them. Do we really need to be like that loud and obnoxious. Um, well, they're 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 winds blowing, or you're 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 you're scratching the leaves, or you reach over to pick up your call all and you make a noise and a bird gowls. 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 that you I'm sitting ten yards from him. It's 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, 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 at internal GPS, to figure out that's where that scratching and 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, okay, 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 they're crazy noises there is because I've just seen it so many times. People that are just so good, like Jason, you know what you've talked to guys uck right, Like I've just I've gone out hunt with guys up where I've gone out and hunted all morning on a place okay,

with whatever results, sometimes good, sometimes not. But then guy, I'll be in the afternoon like, oh, let's gonn take a walk, and he let's 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 zip man, because he just keep like very quietly, just like going going, going, going, going, going, going going, and all of a 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 dude goes out, he's going to call in a turkey morning or afternoon? Is he tricking you with timing? So like the old times, the old timers, like the old timers like we were always the young bucks, like get up, you want to hear all the birds on the rust. 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 out noon and kill the bird. This isn't the old This isn't the old noon trick. This is like the this is like the four or five o'clock. Not he's just gonna get him. He's just a good he just like I don't know, he's good. Talks turkey experience. That's what it comes down to. Does he do anything different, Like you don't know, it's just the mood. I think it'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. Probably had some of the GPS trackers on that second and you didn't know it. So like we're just gonna keep but now, 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 you have these jakes come running in. You know, of course they're they're hand up or whatnot. But you always wonder like is they mature, do they become smarter or do their ears become better? Or is it just truly uh, you know, I'm in any to breed all these hands, so I'm

not worried about that hand that's over there in the brush. Um, you know, like, how do you break that code? Um, But that's why you know, I kind of mentioned timing because you know turkey hunting timing is here, like, go let all those hens go lay Now you have a board, asked Tom sitting out in the field or you know, I don't got anything to do. So now you strike them up at mid day, and that Tom more so than elk, more so than any other animal, just because the way that they have to lay on that on

that clutch eggs. You know, it's like, Bam, you can get that Tom that you fought with all morning for the last week straight, but you go hit him at noon and that thing's gonna come in just like that. Yeah, I feel like it's we 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 ten. 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, So, um, we announced what it was almost two weeks ago. Now that uh, yeah, you're my new boss. Can I call you? Boss. I would first say that we're colleagues, colleagues, co workers. We're co workers, so we we we're gonna be able to talk about turkey calls. Right, let's be the first time

I can finally like talk about the turkey call. So August seventeenth, type me and dirt drove over last year or no, it's just me this time August 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 um, I was here and I think Garrett at that time went took out the breakfast. Hey, would you ever be interested in, you know, talking about selling folps game calls? And I remember that distinctly. No,

I'm not interested. You did, Yeah, I never heard that. Yeah, So I tell Garrett, No, Dirk Durham, were you there for that conversation. We're sitting out there at the at the Western on the sidewalk eating breakfast, and I don't know. We approached you and you were like, uhh no, so wait wait wait we got wait like four more hours. So then you're not a man of convictions. No, no, well, I you know it's like it's 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. I thought maybe you sent the guys out to like go feel out films testing waters a little bit. So I'm like, no, not really, I'm 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 it looks like, it's not just and then it got some legs from there, and um, I remember like on the mountain all September, uh, like I was with Yanni in Colorado and they're like yeah, Josh, like yeah, you onnly. 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 your honest knows at this time I'm supposed to

say anything. And then by 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 in my life like getting this deal kind of straight with everybody, and uh yeah, and now we're here with kind of what launched this whole thing and releasing the Meat Eater X folks Um Turkey co line. Yeah, and you're gonna, um, you're staying

on board. That was a stipulation. Oh yeah, yeah, no, And that's remember you're saying you'd signed a twenty year contract. I wanted to. I'm worried they said five years. And I think I'm gonna once they got everything from me there, gonna kick me to the curtain. I'm just but no, it's good. Um, you know. I I'm one of those guys. I described the situation like, you know, back with Howie Mandel around, like let's make a deal, Like I'm the guy. As soon as that 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 meatter 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 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 everyhere. 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 is we me and me, my wife have you know, with what friends and family have built this thing.

And it's just basically I want to you enjoy this this little bit and 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 on set, 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 gonna work out. As we'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 somebody's kind of revolutionized the elk calling in a way and also grew up hunting like the hard elk yea like hunting the shittiest elk in the world. Yeah, you know,

and like learned how to do that. But I'm really known to be the Yeah, it's really really tough elk. And I don't like the like the well go ahead. I mean, 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 you know, the sportsman's channel, the the outdoor channel hunters, the big elk hunters we all looked up to. You can I mention names like you like the wild Primost. Yeah, 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 popping 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 mean, 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 olk 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, tiny st rows of belts in the world. You know, their bodies are huge, but we've got these little you know, I've killed meal deer that are bigger than most of my bulls I killed

my backyard. But they are hard, hard elk to hunt, and so in the I mean, the densities are so much look like everything about it you can't see there. It's not like, oh, here comes the three hundred of them out into the alfalfa field. You know, it's just like a different kind of Yeah. 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 off off of field. That 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, ferns up to your chein. It was just that. That's how we grew up elk hunting. And you know, it's like I loved it, but it was definitely tough, especially you know, getting to start hunting milk all over the West. Now, I'm like, man, that was that was tough compared to some of the other stufe. You might

as well just leave your binoculars in your truck. Um, it's just that kind of hunt. And he's Washington every year. I haven't. I've got a lot of pressure to come back though, Like it's, oh, yeah, you gotta go to all these other states and draw these tags and do this, and and there's a lot of pressure on me, I think, to eventually come back. And that was the last time you hunt in Washington. Two. You don't have this little

you don't have little local honey hooles. So I I take that back, like for myself the last time two thirteen when when some hunting partners or stuff will get like a muzzler tag and I've got time, will go out and so, um, you know, my wife drew a good tag and seventeen 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 hunt, you know home. I have a hunted with my dad um and my uncle's um for a long time. Um, you know, aside from like a weekend trip maybe to just go out with them. So I want to get back and you do that once before they get too old. When I talk to people about it too, I would say, like, man, he built the business in his backyard, you know, And I mean and by that, I mean he built a business

in his backyard. 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. Um, and like they would go into my closet like I had I had, uh, 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 the thirty six. By thirty it was literally my garage. We kicked all the vehicles out, kicked everything out, all the four wheelers, everything, and like no, this is and we're gonna do this. We're gonna do

it this way, and we made it work. Some appointed out didn't he realized this, but it Someone pointed out to me too, Um that the customer service number was your cell phone is still we're in the process of getting that transferred over. But if if you call the number on the back of the packaging, and that's why I would always pretend like we're bigger than we were, right because you use an accent when you answer, Let me transfer that to Jason. If you need to talk

to him. 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 afforded, 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 now my cell phone number. We're working on getting that change because it lives on all of our packaging. So it was easier just to get me a new phone number. Hious. He's not lying a body of mine, and I totally

go get some fellows game calls. He had I don't know what what it was, but he had something. I said, he had a problem. I said, you should just call it 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 gonna I'm gonna just auto for it everything to Dirk, like quite a few of those two. So yeah, they're they're handled to start to handle most of the email customer service stuff.

Though my numbers on there for some of that stuff, for like for dealers, but some people I think they just call numbers until they get somebody and they're like, who hey man saw 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 followers. And I think the most asked question is, oh, you guys are gonna change. We're gonna become, you know, meat eater ish. And I've I've told everybody like it's been more important to you guys, and it has to me because I want to be able to like do some of the cool stuff you do or like why do you guys 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 is are a quick wit. We use our um you know,

like you guys marketing, don't. They don't think we have quick No, No, I think you do, but like they want to. Yeah, I want to know what becoming meat eater ish 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 you want you to the polished me. You guys know how to spell and from them too good.

There's probably some software you can do the just mixture that all the words get to spell man. Know. So it's you're gonna start throwing around salient. I don't. Actually, so you guys in all your big words like super intimidating for for a guy from Po. Uh so, no, no, uh so you always been into elk, but how long have you been into turkey hunt? I end up talking to somebody this morning. I probably my passion was probably higher for turkeys early on than it was for elk.

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 to turkeys was the thing. And so I 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 the Washington State, they have three species. We

have the Easterns, the Rio, and the Merriam. They decided to put the Easterns on the west side of the state where I live, where it's wet and very very poor light reproduction rate. UM, so a lot of what's left there. But I mean, we would spend our entire March April just trying to find one or two birds to hunt. Um. And so just finding him was a tough part. Calling him in and killing was actually way easier than finding him because the hand numbers were so low.

You just start crying kind on a yelp, and that bird was at your feet. Um. 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 I got to drive over to eastern Washington. The places is pretty damn good, and like, all right, this is what real turkey hunt 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 he 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 hunt the whole, you know, pretty much matter where you living, get a turkey tag and hunt. But being like a big deal, like someone got a

turkey tag, they're driving up north to turkey. And I left around that time, so I never hunted turkeys as

a kid. And then even when I moved to Western Montana, I remember when the unit's out there, I put in one year and drew a tag when it was like they were giving out like twenty tags up in the region, one or two or something portions of it, right and 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, it wasn't raised by a turkey hunter, and 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 study it in a way where even though I've been doing it for a long time now, it's like still feels kind of new. There's still an excitement about it. Um.

I think I didn't kill my first turkey. I mean, I'm forty seven now, so I've been hunting turkeys every year very avidly for twenty years, which sounds like, oh, that's long career of turkey hunting, But to me, it still feels new 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 arch real hunter and knowing how to call to them, Like Turkey was completely foreign. We had nobody local that hunted him. 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, Will Primos in the 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 their 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 bird, we get closer, we try it, and who knows if it's right. I'm gonna get yelled at for this. There's probably gonna 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. 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 remy warrants blood pressure is rising, right, he doesn't like that, but but I get it, yeah, because it's a it's an audio experience, um not grow. When we first started hunting turkeys and the I guess the mid nineties, uh, we did, like I guess anybody would you know, we go out

and get a box call. I remember going out. We were so naive about it back then, getting a box calling, going out and not having chalk and pull over. 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 patients and then doing belly crawls. Oh yeah.

And it was fun over time because at first, like we would go out and we would glass them up and just kind of hang like almost like if you're you know again, like to go to the elk. Thing would be like the strategy of like kind of finding or heard seeing what they're doing, and trying to just like make something happen by nudging out in front of them.

We would go out and and just try to like do stuff, ditch crawl and bush them, bush whack them, and then gradually being like, holy sh it, 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 bush whack them, Like I don't bush whack them? Is there anything not that I won't? But it's not Maybe I kind of won't. You killed a cripple one year? Do you hear that 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 on a flock of turkeys. Um, you know, And I'm gonna put this claim out there. It's not necessarily the safest way, because who knows if somebody's calling do 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 calling sneak and calling sneak and then you know, eventually you know, kind of fool their eyes and ears as well aside from calling. So I still as much I do, like you said, love to call him in I there's still something about like tracking a turkey down and like beating his maybe his best defense, sneaky, sneaky hunter if you can sneak up to within shotgun range of a turkey. I'm bill for being sneaky at

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 still sometimes like especially once they get me a couple of times, I'm frustrated. I'm just gonna go track you down and kill you. What.

When we were working on so we set to a project a while ago of doing um because we're all huge like here us folks that spell real good, are slow, slow witted, are oh boy, very interested in turkey hunting, And so we hit out an idea to try to start trying to like work up that we would have like a line of turkey calls that and I think we talked about would be that, Um, I like to think about and then doing it stuffing like gets people up and running for me, because earlier I was telling

the story of just trying to like figure it out, you know, and learn how to be like basically proficient because you could be a phenomenal caller that I was

talking about, guys up being a phenomenal caller. But I'm almost kind of surprised by the fact that every spring, I like, dumb ask me, like, every spring, I'm able to kill a handful of turkeys by a combination of, um, understanding the birds work in the habitat right, like 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. And I think that the and and learning how to like just get like basically proficient at calls can be a challenging process. Um, I like trying to be pretty open about the fact that, like it's not like I just pick them up and kick ass, but I've got to the point where with the right stuff I can make the right noise and kill turkeys. And I think that's that's important to note, is everybody picks one up and

if they need to be the best. It's like, as 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, 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 to be you know, willing or able to go you know, 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 uh, getting to that level of confidence where when you're in a good situation, um, having the confidence and then do what you need to do because like you just don't want to do it and have like some crazy sound that's just so far off it's not gonna work. But getting to where you're comfortable, like, at the right moment, I'll be able to do it. Yeah,

there's a lot of 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, will kill him. If not, we're just not gonna make a sound, you know. Um, And they'll just be silent. And I'm like, well, you at least need to get to the point where 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 and draws their attention to U spot. Otherwise just sitting there. You know, your chances are are really low. I think you know, I'm actually wearing my meat or 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 in this scenario, I think you have like a nine percent chance that he'll just walk by, younge. It's like all the computations to figure out, um it's distance

from you. You just sit there and it's distance from you. And if you factor in this all these kind of things, what the odds it will pass within shotgun range at various distances as it goes about it roost. It's coming from a fixed a fixed point you call, you crawl into seventy yards? This is the question. You can see that we have a lot of different that's that, that's this computated Yeah, that's a turkey on there. That's a

computation the same thing. And be that you crawl within seventy yards of a turkey on its roost and do nothing? What are the odds that will pass within shotgun range? So thirty yards on either side of you? Yeah, I think it was like nine. Or 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 purpose. He's like, he goes, I see what they're doing, but I 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. In order to try something, you gotta have the confidence to do it. So when you're going to talk about making calls, a little bit like what like how you

make them? What the hell is the turkey call? So like specifics because I mean, I talk through the whole walk through the whole arsenal. So there's there's multiple ways to get to what sounds like a turkey. And I'm not gonna you know, I'm not gonna 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 making a turkey sound, a yelp sound, cluck per um. We've got diaphragms, which I think are probably the most popular out there. Um you know think so, I think, well, I think they're the most used. Um, maybe they're not the most popular, but they're the most used. Um, I think they were. They're the one that everybody aspires to because it's hands that's where I was gonna get. I mean,

we're calling the burden. Like I've only ever called one bird into the gun with the 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 sit there and not make movement. Same with a pot call, like it works great, Um, but you gotta have set somebody up on the air side of the tree or away from you, or some deflection so that they're not looking at where the guns at. Um. But you got

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 wingbone calls and all 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 similar sounds. Those similar sounds, like you think that they would all look like a lot like each other, but they're real different, look different. But I

think that the imagine to help me here, Jason. But like the components are friction and then a chamber, Yeah, a sound chamber. Friction aside from the diaphragm, like there were just but all the other ones technically can fall into that group of like the slot calls, the pushpins, you know, all of that, um you know wingbone. Back in the day, I tried to make some you know, wingbone 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 wingbone pretty it's fun to mess. 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 clocks on it. Got you. I've always wondered like if there's a uh you know, correlation between like how good they look and how good they sound, or because they can make him beautiful, But like does I think it's like it's like an it's like an

artisan thing. Man, he like makes artism calls, but then he has gone out and killed turkeys with them. But it's it's very much. Um yeah, it's like it's more about craft. Yeah, yeah, I think than than than functionality. But it is interesting. You take a turkey's wingbone, chop it all up, reassemble it and suck on it and make like a turkey sound. Yeah, it's cool. I mean, you can all do that with a hollow stick probably too. Yeah,

they've they've manufactured wingbone calls. To what you're doing on wingbo calls, you're basically like you're everything else is, you know, their mouth calls. You're blowing on a wingbone call, you're basically puckering and sucking. 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 said something going aside one time to do it, and I'm like it was just

too too deep. And I'm like, man, you can only make certain sounds, and I'm just gonna stick with these ones. So I wouldn't it be interesting if you could go back in time for seventeen fifty, right, and I know, you know, you know, you know, you know, like the Frontiersman and Boone's Air, like they ate a lot of turkeys. You know, they did a lot of roof shooting and whatnot. But were those guys sitting out there sucking on wingbone calls or they have been and I shoot him out

of the tree man the dark. I ain't back then when it's I think they're shooting out of the tree. They just want to eat them and mess around with them. This call and now it's frowned upon legal in most states. I think it was. Abernathy was telling me the story about an area where there was historically like very few turkeys. And he was saying that someone he knew or some relative at his has a story where they saw a

turkey in a tree and came home all excited. They went back and shot the turkey down out of the tree and brought it home and it was a buzzard. But it's like, that's how rare turkeys were. Man, 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. Um, one of the areas we've had lots of turkeys. I

was probably high school senior, junior in high school. UM, 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 and get a shotgun and I'll come back out. And that bird had dropped back down in the field and they kind of snuck through the field and that

was stinky old buzzard. Man. But as you know, it was season, it was everything was and you know, 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 all their worldly orders. Oh they're disgusting. That's not good an 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 worked well together. You know, you

could have put walnut on the walnut. You could put you know, cherry walnut. And we're 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 it to be good looking. But then also more importantly for me and us, is it for it to sound good. And so there's a there's a nostalgia to box calls where they bring out

there's the ornateness to them. Like oftentimes people touch a box calling, the first thing they comment on is it it's beautiful. Yeah, and I mean, well the listeners can't see this thing right now. Um, 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 is Steven 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 the calls, the right handed callor I'm gonna swip the paddle right to left, it will make contact higher up the box. Um. 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 we'll hear that call start to break over and that's where it gets thinner. People at 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. So we're sliding the lid across the lip of the box. And so you just be down right excited and then not

to pat myself on the back. But these things come out of some you know, some routers, some three D 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 speck it out. Oh yeah, it's point three inches exact. It's uniform wood as 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 sap wood in it, it might have some figure in am. I have a burrel on one side, and so here I am. After they'll 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 it 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, um, because I'm gonna 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 would like a scratchy it's

typically in the paddle. UM, So I'll take the paddle off, or I'll stand the paddle and try to get it to smooth out, or maybe there's like a little bit of a chunk out of the paddle. Um. If it's not like if the timing is not right, like hide to low, and like in Cadence, it's typically on the sidewall, so I'll go mess with the sidewall and then out a section and and it's kind of 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 would 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 all slowly stand 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 ten minute fit, like need a lot of work. Sometimes it's just a real quick you know, thirty swipes, ten swipes to get the angle right, and we're we will swipe, swipe, check and we're out in a minute. And you too, You always tune one wall. No, so on my personal call I brought here, I just tuned the right side because I'm 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 us the tomahawk chop, like running it this way, or if I'm running it kind of flat style. 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. Um. I kind of have a group of pre tuners that get me close so that I'm not so that I'm not doing the entire legwork myself, because five D seems like a big number. Maybe a small number, but it seems like it's a million when you're when it comes to like five box calls needing tuned, UM, that number becomes exponentially bigger than it really is one of your counting box calls. So if you want to touch something touched by the

actual Jason Phelps right now, pull a fingerprint off. Oh I know all the mouth calls have been in his mouth? Oh yeah, we pretun all those. That's a that's a little call humor, that's no old that's an old call joke. The mouth calls have not been and felps his mouth. And then one of the things I do why we're we've got the time is is like tuning a box call, like showing up here to Montana and what relative humidity

going to Washington to relative humidity. Um, 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 well, I don't recommend you take your box call and get your Phillips head screw driver out before you start to play it.

There is always some minor tweaking on that screw um 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 two you know, the second part of the note before you're all the way parallel. Um. If your call is too tight, then you can loosen it and it will actually make the

call higher pitch. UM. So there's it's kind of as I mentioned earlier, So the tunings me standing it and then really adjusting the screw um for the box called it we designed. Um A good starting place is the screw, the the the brass crew 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 started adjusting from there. UM. So like I always cringe, it's people like getting out and tune in their calls

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 the eighth of a turn would would change the call when I was tuning them from not working to speak in like Perry Turkey, it's crazy that a little bit of just changing the angle that that leads

hitting hitting the boxes is what matters. No idea is that, like I would you know, my tendencies to get in there, I don't know, quarter half crank. I mean like I'll get to the bottom of this 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 sap wood on one side, we need to come out a little bit more because it's a a bit tighter grain or whatever

it needs to be. Like you just start to learn. But um, yeah, 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 plastic bag, you know, when the rain hits.

So that call kind of just it's a it's a fair weather call, um, but it does have it's got that distance. And I just love the sound of a well tuned box call. Um. I know a lot of guys like you and just trying to you know, when you can't get nothing going on, just trying to get a gobble too, because you just get a loud piercing, you know, and you're just trying to try and something. Man, they'll pull that, they'll pull that one out. Just try

to make something happen. Talk about the before we leave the box call, that one thing that we wanted in the design of it was compact yep. Box calls can sometimes be unruly how big they are, Like they don't even make pockets in your vest that will fit some of the ones that are out there. But this one's nice where you could just you know, putting your pant pocket if you wanted to. Ye nine inches long and about one one seven inches white, So it's it's a

nice compact side that that still gets a good high note. Um. You know, like you had mentioned, you got those old fifteen inch like boat paddles that are just you know, you're out there just big old swipes and and they're just tough to hunt with. Um, how many? How many of those are we gonna have? The sky's the limit? Like we just we we kind of hit with this just like here is how many you want to pick up? Two?

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 call tuner. But we know the first five have been um, yeah, and so then we've got the pot calls. Um. I think I don't know if you honest 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 were either. We're in we're in a line together again.

So you know most of your pots are like because my turkey best has a small little the pocket heard why we have a slightly smaller pot call just so Steve can fit these in his vest um. They're a little bit smaller, like the way it feels in your head, they're easier to hold. Um. 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 of glass at crystal? And we ultimately ended up on a slate over glass and then a UM

crystal over slate UM inside of a walnut pot. Yeah. Man, that's the thing that explain it to people, how it's got how they're not laminated. Where do you describe like what how there's multiple surfaces that live inside there. So what you need is is it's kind of that sound chamber and is is you guys, nobody can see this, but these both all have like dimensions that we were

as we were prototyping these um. 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 um 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 that the debt or 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 the own their own place they play on these but on the edges. Yeah, so the edge, 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 just kind of

trying to find two surfaces that complement each other. You know, there's aluminum, there's there's you know, people use real wood sound boards. UM. There's all kinds of of soundboards and tops that you can play with UM. But crystal is really consistent. It gives that sharper high note UM 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 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. Um A good glass slash crystal call and A and a good slate

call I always carry too. And that's that same configuration because one I leave stuff laying out in the woods and I gotta go back and try to find that tree where I was sitting, UM, and that keeps me busy while you know, I still have something in my arsenal when I leave one laying out in the woods. And too. 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 when it gets wet,

it's hard to monkey with um glass, is uh? Or you know the crystal service, you just like 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. Yeah, so this little bit bulletproof, but the crystal's wet as long as you're strikers a waterproof striker, you see crystal with an aluminium like with an aluminium striker, that doesn't matter. I mean, it's all easy to dry.

It's that issue. I messed this too. I've even taken like I've even held mine up just taking a lighter. I just flick the lighter on there, and I thinks back to brand new maybe yep, So you can you know, play that. And then, you know, preps a big thing. Like we're sending these calls out and 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 say, 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 conditioning stone, if it's a slate, you know, use the you know, provided scouring pad um, and we give exact locations on on where to scratch the call up to get that

good sound. Yeah, like meaning if you open like if you open up 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 and a braided like sanded spot and people will kind of hunt around on there, and it's not It's never gonna be the same for two people, right like, because just everything about sort of how you hold your hands, you configuration, how you work the striker, it's never gonna be the same for two people.

So you're gonna 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've got to figure out. Two 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 learned how to it's good just to learn how to do it because it's not like you prep it once. And then that if if you just you got this call and you open it's like, oh it's pretty prepped. There's still maintenance. Yep. When I sit down the woods in the morning. Man, before I do anything, I'll be sitting in the dark. Before I do anything, I'd go through my little conditioning ritual to make sure that thing is

ready to start. Crank, get some noise on, and like before you make a sound, like you know, the striker tip, it'll eventually go up just from running through some of that. You know, you try to clean it off, but it's like you know, you scratching your scou scour pad just to make sure that things ready to go. So you don't you know, slide 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 it won't produce sounds. 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 war were one right, Yeah, you get like slommy grease on the end of that strikes done. Yeah. I don't understand when my kids take one or run

around the house for an hour, it never works. I think it's just I think it's just a greasy little hands that they're done for like, but yeah, you gotta take like a mill 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 that work. So yeah, the conditioning thing, and like the crystal call, man, it's got like it's it's beautiful. It's got like the

sound board has a design. Um, it's like it's collateral damage. I mean, you're gonna obscure the crystal and obscure the thing when you start monkeying with getting your thing. The slate is way different and that the same thing you used to wash your dishes. But you still gotta you still gotta take care of the surface. Yeah. But one thing, I mean, these specific calls, like we laser etch the slate, like they're gonna they're gonna get damaged in the in

the prep of this call, no matter what you do. Um, So don't you know, just just scratch over the top of the meat eater phelps name or across the bird um to get that prepped. Um. 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 turkey's good, I wind 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 the big selling points.

Like vlue. You know, they have a high volume. Um, and some people can get a lot of some people can get developed 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 fifty 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, yeah, 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 massing 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 purr on that on

that medium, over other things. And then I in my mind, for me like the real master, like the thing that's like the most alluring because you learn how the mouth call, and you could do the entire vocabulary and never move your hand. 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 an instructions or at least starting 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, you're there. Yea, you know, but it's a

journey to learn how I mean. And and you know the crazy thing is that's being 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 got hey, I can run this out call, but I can't run a tricky Callor hey, I can run the tricky calls, but I can't run your out calls. And it's like, you know, but ultimately, as you alluded to a little bit earlier, is you know, these calls.

We wanted design calls that were easy to use, but then also calls at the very experienced caller would be you know, happy to use. And so it's it's tough to kind of strike that, you know, and we develop it through materials, through the cuts, um, all of that. And so ultimately we brought out four Turkey calls. They come into three pack, which is yours, which is a Jake Break Steve, Steve and Ella Jake break. Love that term Jake break yep. Um, we've got love them, Jakes,

We've got you. This is which Jakes have saved a lot of Turkey hunts. Man. They eat the same two, don't they. Yeah. And my kids this year, like he's you know, he had his first Turkey season last year, and um, I he'll be this will be a second Turkey season 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 that'll be they'll be happy with the jake. Uh. And then so Jannice is lat via ego. It's the heaviest call in the group. Um, he used a little thicker latex. 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 it's we need more air, a little more air. It's not gonna light up, you know, as you mentioned earlier, like if you want to do a little soft purr, it might you know, that perr might be mid the loud volume by time you get it to to fire off. Where you know, like with your call or the meater's choice or the easy cluck, or you could do really subtle light clucks. You can still do it. A good

color can still do it on your honest's call. It's just gonna be it's almost to 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'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 and as lung as the the call, and so even though he's not an experienced caller, he may preferrer honest is over. And that's where it's like it's all over the board, like trying to find you know, we get there 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 eight, but you might be

the complete opposite and want something else. That's why it gets good to have, you know, to get a handful of at once and just start messing with them. Yeah U so yeah, he has got a cutter's cut on it. Um really really raspy. Um. I like that call. And then the latex should also withstand that heavier calling yeah, a little bit longer before it kind of plays out.

It's a little more durable UM where you know Steve, Steve's call UM has a lighter piece of latex on top with what we consider a combo cut with some proof as you're playing read, so it's a little lighter, but it achieves that higher pitch easier, UM without putting a bunch of air to it. UM. And then the meter's choice once again, we're using prof as the backing read,

the playing read, and then we've got um. It's kind of a modified bat wing is what we're calling it something UM so really easy that 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 uh, really really easy to use, easy to get your kiki runs out of and stuff your immature turkeys. Um. But it's typically the most easy for a new caller to run uh dirt.

I didn't know, like you don't even strike me as this, but um current had it down that you were a saxophone player. Not a lot of people know that about me. It's like you're Chevy Chase of Bill Clinton Man Bill Clinton, Hey my saxophone. Let me show you something. Yeah, growing up in a little town of Weipe, I was in the band from junior high school through my sophomore year, and I sold my sacks and about a three thirty eight wind meg. Does uh that be a read instrument

and a diaphragm call being like a read? Um? Right? Yeah? Like we're like, oh, this is easy. I used to play saxophone. Um, it's different. Yeah, but it's there's some some weird nuances between diaphragms and and saxophone reads. Uh, quality construction. Like if you buy the cheap sax reads, they don't seem to work as good. You just can't get the sweet sweet tones and melodies and something you know, brand X brand whatever. A lot of guys will kind of pick up a diaphragm and be like, ah, first

time in their mouth, doesn't sound good. I can't do it. But experimenting a little bit, you you find that not all diaphragms are built the same. Same with saxophone reads. One of my buddies would lend me a read here, try one of these. You'd have a really nice Rico read or something, and I'd throw that baby in and I was like, Wow, all of a sudden just got way better. 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 not all created equals. Yeah, some of them, like those sacks reads 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 or what, but there's definitely a difference. Do you play anymore? I haven't played one since sophomore in high school. I bet I could probably still play

one if I had one in front of me. Um, how long does it take to put when you guys decided making new call holls, how long does it actually take to get it right 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. You know. So if we're gonna bring a new ballox 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 way different. Um, Like my whole thought process, the whole machining process, Like I used to build box calls and pot calls out my shop, Like I would chuck, you know, the back of ours don't have a hole in the center. I would drill a hole through any piece of walnut, spent it down to a circle, you know, build the shape. And 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. Yeah,

and so I had built box calls. But getting your mind right to build five hundred a thousand, two thousand 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 hearts all straight as an arrow, everything's perfect where the wall and that 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. Um. You know, in the future, I think we will I more select grade of lumbers 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 there. Um. But for for um, you know, music instruments, Um, we should probably stick to the But I would say, now with with everything we we know, um, the designs we've got, um, you know, if we were to do something new, would probably you know, a month or two, get the materials, make some changes and get something out Um these I'll tell you. I want to tell you why I'm asking, But now you're making seems

like it's not a good idea. I want to do a thing where we find a tree that we really like, shop that tree down right, and then go through take people through the whole process, remill it, dry it right, 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 one tree. How many would we get off one tree, a black walnut, if it's old enough,

A lot, uh, a lot of you could do. You could do this whole production round out of one big black walnut, just the place I think we have in Seth. You said he would be able to grade because he was trained up in forestry. Do you know that? So I want structural selector bat Well, that's the money tree usually high value. But it's like to tell the guy that we're getting it triple triple stumpage. That would be timber timber trespass. Uh Seth worked on a thing one

time to where stolen trees explained this stuth. Yeah, we when we were when I was in college, we had a we did like this. It was I forget what class was in, but we had a lab where we like,

there was a timber it was an actual timber trespass. Um, but we like mimic the timber trestpass where someone like a logger had gone on to 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 trying to figure out how much volume was taking. Yeah, it's like, um, um, what's that word I'm looking for? Damn it. It's like a word about crime forensic. That's the world yea, and

write a book about that. If you're hearing this, you can go to the meat eat the meat eater dot com slash Phelps all right, and you'll see all of what we're talking about, and we have videos about them all Um, you can we show them the materials are made, how they're used. We have videos of us using them, like the whole thing is explained out. But then they

go on sale March four. If you want to find out about Jason and Dirt Durham, here you can go find those guys that Phelps dot com andever 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 called your cart whilere there buying your mercy purchases for you Jason. So, yeah, you guys have a run. Who's actually winning this? Uh we're not gonna the results

are still out. Yeah, yeah, we're not going to talk about this short term battle that we're in. Well do you give because I know you guys have like your own allies, like 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 going to control it in your color is pink? Oh yeah yeah. And

you see a new black. If you see a guy open his mouth and it's a what color, Dirk red, I know he's been Dirk's mouth. Yeah. Alright, So again, go to check all this out because this is this is interesting. It's been a really interesting process. We're super proud of it. Go to the meat eater dot com slash phelps and like I said, there's a Smorgas board, a smorge board of salient facts, a smorgus board of videos about the calls. Um. You know it's funny when

we're filming those. I was getting I had a gobbler ripping. Did you really in a place where there are no gobblers? Well they're there a little bit. That's how good there you trying to point in the right direction and then that way later that evening when you guys wrapped probably all the no, there's a yeah, we had a gobbler ripping. Those fun middle the damn winter. Um. All right, go there and check it out. March four, go buy something has some fun to Spring. Thank you guys, welcome aboard,

Thanks for having us. Thanks Jason Phelps Dirk during him famous saxophonist turned Turkey collar just say your saxophone is in some pawn shop right now. It is definitely alright, guys. Thanks a lot,