Episode Details

Husband, Dad & Pro Door Knocker

On this episode of Country Outdoors Podcast, Mary O'Neill sits down with her husband Zach Phillips for a family catch-up. They talk about their 3-year-old Molly's first deer hunt and how she snuck up on a spike to seven yards, whispered the whole sit and asked to go back the next day. They also talk about the comments calling them bad parents and why they let kids do dangerous things carefully. Life and hunting has changed since having a kid but it is much more fun this way!


They talk about some of their wild stories from the road like when Zach was door knocking for turkey permission in rural Tennessee and discovered a Castle at the end of a dirt road. It was quite possibly some kind of weird redneck cult. This man had built his own castle full of graffiti, mannequin heads and paintings he says God paints at night. He told Zach he had worked out the formula for gravity and bird migrations, that God allowed him thirteen girlfriends, and a story about a brick that someone else tells very differently... Then he gave Zach permission to hunt.

In this episode, we cover:

• Mary's Good News From Around the World, from Etsy banning AI listings to wild bison passing 1,000 head
• Growing up on blue-collar hunting clubs in South Georgia, where a big buck was something you saw on TV
• Zach's first buck at 13: a bad shot from a box blind window, and the deer his dad found the next day
• Fully rupturing his Achilles on June 1 while pushing a pontoon trailer off a curb, the day they were packing for Mary's first CMA Fest booth
• Paying for surgery in cash and coming back for his first season since
• The strange DMs Zach got after posting a picture of his cast
• A door-knocking bowhunt in Kansas
• Sleeping on Farmer Dave's couch