Welcome to the Vortex Nation podcast, brought to you by lovers of hunting, shooting, public lands, the Second Amendment, and good food.

What is up, everybody? Mark on the mic here, joined by Mr. Derek Dixon from the great state of Missouri.

Derek, you have a, what I would call a new YouTube channel, new to me, pretty fresh, white-tail research,

but came out of the gate hot.

You've been doing a lot of thermal drone research. In

fact, you conducted your own independent study, a year-long study monitoring deer, took the year

off deer hunting, which I don't know, maybe that was the hardest part of the study. We'll get

to that here in a little bit. But man, really cool project,

tons of great information. I'd say a fresh way of looking at a very old topic. I mean,

almost, you know, one of those topics that's the, you know, even at work here every day,

we're talking about deer in some fashion or another. And like I said, it's a fresh look. It's using new technology to, you know, even at work here every day, we're talking about deer in some fashion or another. And like

you said, it's a fresh look. It's using new technology to study deer. Man, let's talk a little

bit about your background. I want to hear about your hunting background. And then what was the,

what was the spark that said, you know, I want to conduct my own independent deer study yeah i

mean my my hunting background i started hunting as early as i possibly could legally in missouri i think

that was like six or seven years old and um grandpa and my dad got me into it it was just a family

thing everybody hunted in this area so um but but at the same time i mean hunting season was was, I mean, it was rifle season, which I guess for me, it was youth. And then as I started getting older, then it was still kind of like, hunting season happened during rifle season. And then I started realizing, like, wait a second, you can get a bow and you can like really expand this time frame that you get to do this awesome thing. So my grandpa had given me his old compound bow and I started bo hunting at the time. And I think I was 12 or 11 whenever I started. But anyways, yeah, then I'd had it all my life. And, you know, throughout high school, I kind of went in and out of it. I was really passionate about it. And then I was really focusing on baseball and et cetera, like a lot of kids do. And then I made it

out into college and then I started focusing on hunting a little bit harder and more seriously.

Yeah, I mean, my grandpa was probably the biggest inspiration to all of that in terms of getting

me into hunting and shoving me towards hunting. And he taught me a lot of the things that I've

preemptively known about hunting. He's also probably one of the leading catalysts as to why I have the mentality that I do towards him being so fascinated with mature buck behavior and how they interact with the landscape and other deer and all these different things because one of my favorite stories I've told a few times, but it's just, it is really cool, was I'd taken him hunting whenever he'd

gotten older. And me and my cousin had started, you know, our whole lives, he kind of fostered us and trained us to hunt and got us on a lot of really good mature bucks on the property. Then we wanted to kind of spin that around. It's like, let's get you back on some cool deer. So we, we, we had and we put him in really good locations,

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