#2350 - Ryan Callaghan

Speaker 0 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Speaker 1 The Joe Rogan experience. Showing by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Speaker 2 All right,

Speaker 2 ladies and gentlemen. We brought you in here.
Hopefully, we were going to kill that public land sale deal from the big, beautiful Bill.

Speaker 1 We did it.

Speaker 2 We did it before we even got you in here.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, we're not out of the woods yet.

Speaker 1 Is the reality, yeah. i mean we're

Speaker 1 i i was hoping that uh you and i were gonna we're gonna team up and tee off on these sons of bitches and watch it die together that would have been ideal

Speaker 2 i think it's dead it's it is dead it is dead but we're a long way from this stuff being dead ever dead ever yeah right exactly it's got to be dead forever that's not it's not theirs to sell it's very unique to the united states it's an amazing thing that we have and i don't think people in other countries understand this.

Speaker 2 I don't think people in America even understand how unique it is.

Speaker 2 Like our public lands, what they did when they set that up, not just national parks, but all the public lands, we created this insane resource, this beautiful resource where we can go into the mountains, into the woods, and enjoy nature.

Speaker 2 And it's ours. It's all of ours.

Speaker 1 And I get, I mean, the amount of response from listeners that live outside the country and to a person, they're like, are you guys really going to screw this up? They're like,

Speaker 1 how do people not know? How do people not appreciate what you guys have? Don't turn into this country or this country or this country. Basically, any other country outside of Canada and the U.S.

Speaker 2 I think the real issue is the people in America that don't experience it and don't go there and don't know how insanely unique this situation is. Like,

Speaker 2 I don't know how to say Chamath's last name, Polyhoptia. Is that how you say it? Even he was tweeting that this is a great deal, sell the land, and we'll make some money.

Speaker 2 Like, what the fuck are you talking about, man? Like, you don't, you don't understand. Like,

Speaker 2 this was an incredible gift that they gave us when they set America up this way.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. And, and

Speaker 1 it's not that they need to go out and experience. They can also understand just where food comes from, right?

Speaker 1 How we get cold water and fresh water in our taps.

Speaker 1 That public resource is working on our behalf 24-7, 365, always has been and always will be as long as we don't screw it up, right?

Speaker 1 So it's not just the recreational part of it.

Speaker 1 It is, I mean, it is no different than, if you want to think of it in these terms, than some, you know, one-arm jacked pumping oil out of the ground like it is constantly working on our behalf and it it being public land needs to be intact an intact ecosystem to do its job and there's less and less of it every year so like for instance right like america's grasslands we're living we are losing 2 million acres

Speaker 1 and grasslands are kind of like a catch-all phrase a little bit but it'd be like sagebrush ecosystem short grass prairie, mixed grass prairie. But we're losing 2 million acres a year.

Speaker 1 It's the most threatened ecosystem, not just in the U.S., but in the entire planet. And

Speaker 1 people are like, oh, it's just grass.

Speaker 1 How are we losing that? Development. Really? Well, there's development, but also encroachment of tree species.

Speaker 1 So cedars, junipers, stuff like that, working their way back out on on to the prairie, to the plain.

Speaker 1 And we used to have all these natural deforesters out there, bison, that wouldn't allow those trees to grow because they like rubbing up on stuff and they'll destroy them. So,

Speaker 1 you know, millions of bison out there physically removing or preventing that tree encroachment onto the plain. Those trees are sucking water out of the ground, making it more arid and more dry.

Speaker 1 Water table goes down.

Speaker 1 You lose a lot of species diversification.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 people just do not know, Joe. They just don't know.
And they look at it and they're like, it's just grass.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I never knew that it was 2 million acres a year. How many acres in the United States?

Speaker 1 About 2.23 billion acres in the U.S.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 1 that's a lot.

Speaker 2 Like 2 million acres a year is a lot.

Speaker 1 2 million acres a year is a lot. And, like, I was hacking on Jamie for his golf swing, right?

Speaker 1 Jamie's got a solid golf swing. You better leave him alone.
That's about all I got is the golf swing.

Speaker 2 Leave him alone.

Speaker 2 He can swing. Jamie, what's the longest drive you've ever done? I've hit it over, I mean, 310, whatever, 305.
That's legit. That's funny, but I've done it.
That's legit, right?

Speaker 2 I don't play golf, but I think that's pretty legit.

Speaker 1 What's up? I'm nodding my head because I'm like, yeah, I have no idea.

Speaker 2 300 is

Speaker 2 set someone up to hit over 600 yards before, but that's that's like with the wind and the elevation.

Speaker 2 Elevation helps a lot. Right.
Like Montana or something.

Speaker 2 I could hit at 400 yards in Montana.

Speaker 1 Really? I have on the simulator. Ooh.
Oh, that's interesting.

Speaker 1 Simulator.

Speaker 2 Oh, the simulator accounts for that? Yeah, but you don't have to dodge bears on the simulator.

Speaker 1 Two million acres of golf courses in the U.S.

Speaker 1 Is there? Two million acres of golf.

Speaker 2 Okay, so that's a good way to look at it.

Speaker 2 All the golf courses in the United States get lost every year in grassland.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Wow, that's a good way to put it, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And so we talk in as far as like the public estate, right? We have 640 million acres is the number that you hear all the time.
83 million of those are national parks.

Speaker 1 But thanks to the great state of Alaska, you can hunt inside the boundary of some national parks up there to the tune of about like 43 million acres, big, big chunks, right?

Speaker 1 And then you, you know, remove a little for structures, roads.

Speaker 1 You know, we have over 400,000 miles of road on Forest Service and BLM ground. Wow.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 it's a lot, a lot, right? And then when we get into like talking about like the budgeting of things, like

Speaker 1 BLM, Forest Service, they're maintaining a lot of stuff that people take for granted.

Speaker 1 And then,

Speaker 1 you know, so we're down to like 580 million acres of what I would consider like usable.

Speaker 1 And then you consider what those acres can actually produce, right?

Speaker 1 Which, you know, if you go to a super arid state, you need a lot more land to support

Speaker 1 like mammal ungulate type life than you do in a state that's

Speaker 1 got a lot more water

Speaker 1 that's growing a lot of a lot of food and a smaller amount of space, right?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 1 to make things things palatable for people, we're always doing

Speaker 1 the work of like dumbing things down, dumbing down the messaging.

Speaker 1 And yeah, you're right, like people don't know. They don't know because we try to distill things into

Speaker 1 like all public land,

Speaker 1 right? But it is so diverse, which is what makes it amazing. And that diversity provides all this opportunity.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 one of the things that people need to keep in mind is we have nothing but bad examples. All these other countries have gone the complete opposite way of what we have now.

Speaker 1 And one of America's largest exports

Speaker 1 is hunters. Like we send hunters all over the world to support these other economies.
And what we have here at home is

Speaker 1 insanely valuable, and it just becomes more and more valuable because we have large, intact ecosystems that you just

Speaker 1 more and more cannot find anywhere else, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I just I wish more people appreciated it. I wish more people experienced it.
There's just too many people that just are landlocked. And what I mean by landlocked, I mean in cities.

Speaker 2 Urban locked is probably the best term for it. There's just too many people that just don't go out.
They don't they don't know how amazing it is.

Speaker 2 It's like I always say that it's it's like a vitamin that you didn't know you needed.

Speaker 2 You know you get out into the real wild the real woods it's a it's a it's some kind of a nutrient that you didn't know you needed

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Speaker 1 Man, I was just up on,

Speaker 1 went up to the Arctic, went up to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to check that place out.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 24 hours of sun, right? Land in the midnight sun,

Speaker 1 never gets dark. And I was the only person on that trip who didn't bring like some sort of an eye cover to sleep with.
And

Speaker 1 I just can't tell you like how hard and good I slept up there.

Speaker 1 Really? Even without it. I'm swooping all over myself.
And it's just clean air and lots of space, man. It was magical.
Magical.

Speaker 2 How do you sleep with no eye cover?

Speaker 1 I swear to God, Joe, man, when it was time to go to bed and it started started out like bed was at 10.30 and then bed was at 2.30 in the morning and then bed was 3 a.m.

Speaker 1 Because you would get as that sun's kind of like making this low orbit

Speaker 1 I'm sure have you seen like the time lapses of the sun like kind of does a little dip yeah you get this like hazy gorgeous light that you just wanted to stay up and and see

Speaker 1 but I'd close my eyes and and I could see like the sun going down to darkness and in my brain because it was just time to go to bed. It was really bizarre.

Speaker 1 And then if I had to wake up for something, it was bright light and I couldn't figure out why.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but I mean it was so cathartic, man. Like we've been running so hard and because of

Speaker 1 this public lands battle that we've been in,

Speaker 1 I think most people are like,

Speaker 1 oh God, it just popped up last week. And then we crushed it and big win.

Speaker 1 And a little larger group of people or smaller group of people is like, oh, it started in the House about six weeks ago. And then there's a real small group of people who are like

Speaker 1 August 24th,

Speaker 1 the state of Utah submitted a lawsuit

Speaker 1 for

Speaker 1 the United States Supreme Court. to take 18.5 million acres of BLM land in Utah.
August 2024

Speaker 1 is when

Speaker 1 we were like, oh my God, we got to be on top of this. This is what's

Speaker 1 coming.

Speaker 1 Trump's going to win the election. It's going to set all these things up and we're going to be in this fight.

Speaker 1 And people were like,

Speaker 1 I don't even know why you're talking about this. This isn't a big deal.
I'm like, oh, it is a big deal. This is happening.

Speaker 2 Well, it's such a slippery slope, too. This is what people don't know or don't appreciate.
If you say, oh, it's only like 1 million acres, we'll sell off one million acres, it'll help fix the debt.

Speaker 2 No, it's not. The debt's $37 trillion.

Speaker 2 You're not going to fix the debt by selling off public land.

Speaker 2 And if you open up that slippery slope to these fucking vampire developers, they're going to keep doing it, they're going to keep sucking on that blood until there's nothing left until it's just the national parks.

Speaker 2 Oh, we preserved Yellowstone. Oh, great.

Speaker 1 And that

Speaker 1 quite literally is, you know, like Mike Lee is like the figurehead of this right now. um

Speaker 1 he's on the record saying we're gonna sell everything we need to sell everything that's the plan we're gonna retain the national parks

Speaker 1 and maybe

Speaker 1 a couple other things

Speaker 1 like and he's been on the record for damn near 20 years saying this stuff what is who's paying him

Speaker 1 there's a lot there's a lot there right like where he grew up in utah there's a lot of like um

Speaker 1 Shaffettz is from right yeah and he was the he was the guy we were fighting a few years ago exactly yeah I mean that's exactly why I dug this shirt out Joe I got one of those somewhere yeah I wore this shirt on your show the last time this shit was happening oh yeah right that's right it was happening back then that was like what five years ago oh I mean six are still in California I mean it was five years ago I moved here so it had to be six or seven years ago yeah exactly right and it's just it's cyclical cyclical.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I swear to God, people didn't pay attention to this Utah lawsuit.

Speaker 1 We were, I went back to

Speaker 1 DC for, you know, Steve's on the board for Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, TRCP.

Speaker 1 They have a policy meeting that I try to go to

Speaker 1 twice, two or three times a year. And

Speaker 1 I was in there with all these people that are super smart and went to school for all this stuff. And a couple of us were like,

Speaker 1 why is nobody talking about this? Why is nobody concerned about this?

Speaker 1 And then this idea of selling public lands got really conflated with like, oh my God, if you talk about anything that's going on with the federal government, you're anti-Trump.

Speaker 1 And it was just this ultra-politicized hot potato. We're like, no, no, no, no.
Public lands, they're for everybody.

Speaker 1 Like, this is a nonpartisan thing.

Speaker 1 We've been talking about it since August. Here's this lawsuit.

Speaker 1 Like, they're selling land that belongs to everybody, doesn't matter what state you're in.

Speaker 1 And then, like, the next domino fell, and

Speaker 1 a bunch of states and counties signed on an amicus brief for that Utah lawsuit, which is like a friend of the court filing, because

Speaker 1 they wanted to get in, like, stuff's going up for free or cheap fire sale. They wanted to be in on it.

Speaker 1 And then the next domino fell, which was,

Speaker 1 oh, Mike Lee's getting pulled into the White House and he's cutting deals. And we know exactly what's on his mind.

Speaker 1 And it was literally just like this opening in the world where nobody's talking about 18.5 million acres.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 what if we started talking about 200 million acres or 500 million acres? And it just like totally kicked the door open to this whole enchilada fire sale.

Speaker 1 And had the dude not been as greedy,

Speaker 1 people may not have gotten as fired up about it, but you know, kind of thank God he did.

Speaker 2 So, who's paying him?

Speaker 1 Man, I think,

Speaker 1 and I'm not an expert on this, there's some like real

Speaker 1 ideology here, like Mormon church ideology.

Speaker 1 You know, there's like a billion people in the Mormon church, so not everybody thinks like

Speaker 1 a billion? I don't know what the number is. There's a lot.
It's what wasn't it like the

Speaker 1 most

Speaker 1 fastest-growing religion there for a while?

Speaker 2 Is it because you get extra chicks?

Speaker 1 What is the deal? There's a lot of pretty people. There's a lot of pretty people, man.

Speaker 1 That's a hook for sure.

Speaker 2 Well, I have a friend that lives in Salt Lake, and he said that they'll literally send hot girls to try to recruit people.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, they knock on your door and they're hot.

Speaker 1 I mean, I can't blame them for going with what works, right? They're also

Speaker 2 in terms of like it's a weird religion, right?

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 2 here,

Speaker 2 what's the number here? 17 million.

Speaker 1 Global membership. Global membership.

Speaker 2 Global 17 million. So you were off by a few hundred.

Speaker 1 Yeah, a few hundred million. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 In 2024, they reached a 27-year high. Wow.
Significant surge in

Speaker 2 convert baptisms in 2024. I wonder what those hot girls going door to door.

Speaker 2 But there's the nice people.

Speaker 1 They're the nicest people.

Speaker 2 They are the fucking nicest. Mormons are the nicest.

Speaker 2 I had a few neighbors that were Mormons when I lived in California. They're my favorite people.

Speaker 1 Like, out of all the people

Speaker 2 in a weirdo religion.

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

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Speaker 1 I got

Speaker 1 asked, I was fishing down in Louisiana, super grumpy old fishing guy, and he's like, hey, Callahan,

Speaker 1 what do you think about Muslims? And I kind of put the fly rod down for a second, and I was like, where are we going? Where are we going with this? I was like, like, all of them?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm like, there's a lot of Muslims, bud. Like,

Speaker 1 all of them.

Speaker 1 I'm like, what do you think about Louisianans?

Speaker 1 Like, all of them. Right.
Right? I'm like, come on, bud. How are you going to do that? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm sure there's some really good ones, and I'm sure there's some real bad ones, and everything in between.

Speaker 2 Like all humans.

Speaker 1 Yeah, kind of like all humans. So on the Mormon church side of things, there's,

Speaker 1 you know, there's some doctrine, some church doctrine that says that the land is put here for the benefit of the people.

Speaker 1 And you're basically, and I'm very much paraphrasing here, you're spiting God if you're not developing that land for profit, like for the profit of the people. And so there is

Speaker 1 a strong theory that Mike Lee is. Is he Mormon? Yes.
Is so indoctrinated into this part of the church that this is like his divine mission.

Speaker 1 That's a problem. Right.
And so it, yeah, I mean, it's religious zealotry. Right.

Speaker 2 I was not aware of that.

Speaker 1 And so,

Speaker 1 but again, like, that doesn't have to be representative of the entire religion. And to the people that I hang out with that are Mormon, it's absolutely not.
Right?

Speaker 1 They, they're like public lands that are set aside for multiple use,

Speaker 1 don't get locked up, don't get developed in certain ways are the best thing,

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 1 But, and this is something that just like has has got to get talked about,

Speaker 1 Mike Lee is like very much in power. He is the chair.
He's a senior senator. He is the chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the Senate.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 like I said, he starts getting drug into the White House. He starts consolidating power and he starts telling everybody,

Speaker 1 Hey, I'm going to put this amendment in and you better not go against it or else for the next six years, which is technical, as long as Republicans stay in power, he's not going to lose his chairmanship of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Speaker 1 As long as he's there, none of their stuff is going to be read because it's the chair that decides what they're going to review, what they're going to look at, and what they're going to pass.

Speaker 1 So here's this dude who is leveraging everything for his

Speaker 1 personal thing.

Speaker 1 And he had his shot and he took it. And fortunately, people started cluing in and there was enough of an on-ramp

Speaker 1 that there was a blowback literally in every

Speaker 1 state, all 50 states. People wrote in to first their representatives, then their senators, and it created enough of a, oh my God, this is going to set back the entire Big Beautiful bill.

Speaker 1 This is only one part of the dumpster fire that is the Big Beautiful bill, but

Speaker 1 it's going to

Speaker 1 take this whole thing off the tracks.

Speaker 1 And that's why it's killed. Now, Lee issued a statement, which is like a gut shot.
If you're in my position, who've been like

Speaker 1 tracking this thing,

Speaker 1 you know, since August.

Speaker 1 And, you know, it said, oh, I listened to the American people, right?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 he rewrote the language. He and his team, his staff, rewrote the language four different times to get it passed the Senate parliamentarian.

Speaker 1 It did pass.

Speaker 1 And you don't do that if you're listening to the American people, right? The American people, by the end of this, were very united in saying,

Speaker 1 not one acre.

Speaker 1 It started as not one acre in the budget reconciliation process, which is

Speaker 1 part of what they're doing here in the Big Beautiful Bill, or is what they're doing.

Speaker 1 And the phrasing there really matters, right? Like

Speaker 1 we have systems in place for land sales.

Speaker 1 legal framework,

Speaker 1 both of those, you know, it's acronyms, government acronyms, Flipma, Flipna,

Speaker 1 and the revenues from land sales go back into acquiring land of greater value.

Speaker 1 There's all these acts since 1781,

Speaker 1 all of these acts for the disposal of federally managed land. And

Speaker 1 those two that I named are the most recent and they're designed to

Speaker 1 maybe not retain the same acreage, but

Speaker 1 provide the most value to the American people. And what Lee was doing in this reconciliation process

Speaker 1 was completely circumventing that. And as you mentioned, like

Speaker 1 nobody,

Speaker 1 no, no citizen of the United States is going to feel

Speaker 1 any change from dumping $100 million

Speaker 1 into the federal treasury right now.

Speaker 1 And that's where the money was going. Wow.

Speaker 1 Hmm.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 going forward in the future, how do we make sure that this never happens again? Do we have to just keep doing this every few years when it comes up?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 yeah. I mean, and that's

Speaker 1 the best thing that could have come out of this. Like, we are going to make, we made this huge stink.

Speaker 1 right from all the different buckets that politicians pay attention to right all the different user groups, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, everybody came together.

Speaker 1 And more than likely, a shitload of people, the 36% of Americans who didn't vote in the last election, probably chose to speak up, some large percentage of them,

Speaker 1 and said

Speaker 1 no public land sales.

Speaker 1 Hopefully that created enough of... you know, what they call it in Washington is like a third rail issue.

Speaker 1 It's like, it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're on, you can't have this as part of your agenda because you're going to get shot down. Right?

Speaker 1 That's that's like the near-term win because that feeling won't last forever. Right.

Speaker 1 There's a piece of legislation out of Ryan Zinke's office, who's our Montana congressman, and he was actually started as Secretary of the Interior under Trump in his first term.

Speaker 1 Zinke has this Public Lands and Public Hands Act,

Speaker 1 and it would not have

Speaker 1 prevented

Speaker 1 what

Speaker 1 just happened,

Speaker 1 this budget reconciliation thing, but it does

Speaker 1 put some more guardrails around the sale of federally managed land, and that would be like a really positive thing. However,

Speaker 1 just like I explained, like Mike Lee's position in the Senate, it would have to get through him.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 He's got to be circumvented. There's no way he's going to vote for something like this.
And it's got to go through the House. And everything I've heard about

Speaker 1 on the House committees is there's some people there that don't want to see this thing happen.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 more people are signing on to the Public Lands and Public Hands Act, which is awesome show of support.

Speaker 1 Senator Heinrich out of New Mexico has got it written for the Senate. No Republican co-sponsors.
He needs Republican co-sponsors in the Senate just to get the ball rolling there.

Speaker 1 But we still have like these knuckleheads that are saying, if you didn't vote for my thing, I won't let a single good thing happen for the next six years. That goes,

Speaker 1 you know, provided they don't get removed somehow, some way.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's so it's really interesting when you see these bills. Because these bills are like, I think they read the entire bill on the floor and it took 14 hours

Speaker 2 and no one was there. They just read it to an empty audience because nobody sat around for 14 hours.
So what was it, 900 pages?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Just like, who's, how are you signing off on things that I know you're not reading? Like, how crazy is that?

Speaker 2 That this is a part of our process of government is that they pass these bills that have all sorts of weird shit piled into them.

Speaker 2 Good things and bad things all together. And you have to figure out like how much of the bad stuff do you allow because you want the good stuff.

Speaker 2 And they all have to make these weird shady fucking deals.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, I got that text, the official text,

Speaker 1 you know, essentially as soon as it came out.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 public land sales were page 202.

Speaker 1 So I just went straight to page 202 and read through the new language to see what, because it was another revision by Mike Lee to see if he could get that thing passed.

Speaker 1 It was just typical crap. Like he's not listening to anybody.
He's still pushing his agenda.

Speaker 2 So when he revised it, what were the revisions and why did he put those revisions in?

Speaker 1 So he started at

Speaker 1 U.S. Forest Service land and BLM land.

Speaker 2 Which would be how many acres, all told?

Speaker 1 Well, it would have been

Speaker 1 a possible like 500 million acres area in 11 western states.

Speaker 1 And I want to say it would have been 2 to 3 million acres actually sold within five years.

Speaker 1 So you're identifying out of 500 million,

Speaker 1 then you're narrowing it down to 2 to 3 million acres of

Speaker 1 Forest Service and BLM land. And then, you know, he says it's for housing.
It's for housing.

Speaker 2 But a lot of that is nowhere near development.

Speaker 1 A lot of it's nowhere near development.

Speaker 1 And the language of the text, even on the very last revision, where you're supposed to be listening to American peoples, and he did throw in the word hunters there, hunters, I'm listening to you.

Speaker 1 It says, like, bullet point one must be near

Speaker 1 existing infrastructure.

Speaker 1 and then bullet point number seven i think it was was like or very hard far away and hard to manage right which is all the rest yeah so like somewhere in between here that's so crazy that's such a crazy piece of language

Speaker 1 or far away and hard to manage so all of it yeah exactly like it just it's so vague he wants to get it through and then there's super fun language in there too where it's like okay right right if your first refusal is going to be state,

Speaker 1 then local government,

Speaker 1 through tribes in there.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 the only other group would have been landowners within the checkerboard pattern, how we have like that, you know, grid system

Speaker 1 of federal land ownership and private land ownership.

Speaker 1 Those landowners

Speaker 1 could also purchase more than anybody else would have been allowed to purchase. So state, local, then your tribes and local landowners.
So basically like a huge handout to,

Speaker 1 you know, like, you know, the corner crossing case that we've been talking about, right? Iron Bar Holdings.

Speaker 1 They would have just purchased all those checkered board pieces and would have been legally allowed to do that.

Speaker 1 Corner crossing to people.

Speaker 2 So what corner crossing is, is, is like, say if there's an enormous piece of public land, but the only way you can get to it is to cross over a very small corner of private land.

Speaker 2 For the longest time, that was prohibited and you would get arrested. So

Speaker 2 you'd get arrested for trespassing.

Speaker 2 And we're talking about like a couple of feet.

Speaker 1 Oh, not, I mean, we're talking about something so small you can't even possibly see it, right? That's that's why it's been it's like a theory, right?

Speaker 1 It's it's like for all the physics majors out there right it's like that game of like well how do you get someplace if you only go 50 of the way right you'll you keep going 50 and 50 and 50 it's like a theory whereas in reality like all it is is a footstep yeah like you're gonna cross that corner in a footstep and

Speaker 1 We know where corners come together because it's right here.

Speaker 1 But that theory thing is like, well, and then the airspace all the way down to the center of the earth and to the heavens is how it's written.

Speaker 2 The crazy thing is, like, you could legitimately do it in a hop.

Speaker 2 So you would never have stepped foot at all.

Speaker 1 Dude, my 97-year-old grandma, who's hooked up to an oxygen tank, could have stepped across. Like, I mean, it's, we're not talking about a feet of any sort.

Speaker 2 We're not talking about like a football field that you have to cross.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 No, we're talking talking about like a couple inches. Yep.

Speaker 1 So just like so nuts. Oh, it's it's infuriating is what it is.

Speaker 1 So just like on your checkerboard at home, pick any four corners that come together where the two reds, imagine those are public and the two blacks are private. Here it is.
There you go.

Speaker 2 Let me explain it right there.

Speaker 2 So those little tiny spots in the corner, you were not supposed to cross.

Speaker 1 Right. Which is so crazy.
Yes.

Speaker 2 That is so bananas that that was a real issue. Exactly.
And look at this. No trespassing.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so that's really insane. That's the corner right there.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Isn't that nuts? Like that little spot, no trespassing.
That little tiny gate is all you need.

Speaker 2 Those two posts that are in the ground, those two signs to prevent people from accessing land that's theirs. So that is where the corner is.
Yep.

Speaker 2 So if you go through that little thing, that little area right there, you're breaking the law, which is fucking insane.

Speaker 1 And now, currently in the state of Wyoming, and I got to give a shout out to Wyoming backcountry hunters and anglers for having the

Speaker 1 spine and the backbone to

Speaker 1 bring this, help bring the people who were caught and prosecuted for corner crossing,

Speaker 1 you know, and support them financially. We did a ton at Meat Eater 2 to help that legal case.

Speaker 1 It went to the state court, then the Supreme Court, and then the Ninth District Court. And the last I heard is Iron Bar now wants to take it to,

Speaker 1 you know, to the Supreme Court of the United States, SCODUS,

Speaker 1 and have, which is ultimately really good.

Speaker 1 We always joke that we're going to send old Fred Eshelman, the owner of Iron Bar, like a public landowner t-shirt, because he's going to make this stuff public for everybody because it's going to be

Speaker 1 right now there's only two federal cases that have defined corner crossing. They're both in favor of the people of the United States.

Speaker 1 So you can legally step across, shocking, I know, from one piece of public to the next piece of public.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 if and when this thing makes it to the Supreme Court, the only reason he hasn't filed is because of this stuff with Mike Lee, right? It would have solved all of his problems.

Speaker 1 He would have just purchased those checkerboard pieces of BLM land within his ranch boundaries and just been done with it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Right.

Speaker 1 And that's

Speaker 1 a really,

Speaker 1 there's a lot of those pieces in a lot of states, and states actually fund the

Speaker 1 ability to trespass for hunting on a lot of those landlocked pieces.

Speaker 2 To create easements.

Speaker 2 Yep, exactly yeah but and you know but it's typically done through like the state wildlife agencies where you get an easement so people can go out there as if you got a conservation license you can go hunt out there this is an advertisement from better help stress in the workplace is becoming an issue around the world did you know that 60% of the global workforce is reported experiencing higher than normal levels of stress So it's more important than ever that we learn to take some time for ourselves, plan a nice long holiday this summer, go hiking, hiking, read a book, play video games.

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Speaker 2 Well, it's also today,

Speaker 2 I could imagine how a long time ago you would get a lot of confusion and it would lead to people trespassing accidentally on public land or on private land rather, because we're looking at maps, you know, and people would be, you know, 100 yards to the left, 100 yards to the right, and maybe not good navigators.

Speaker 2 But now, when you have things like

Speaker 2 GoHunt, On X,

Speaker 2 SpartanForge, all these apps that hunters use now that use GPS, you're 100% accurate.

Speaker 1 A lot of the law enforcement agencies are using those same things.

Speaker 1 So they can be on the same page as

Speaker 1 the hunter or access seeker or whatever you want to say.

Speaker 2 Super easy to follow.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And there's no worries at all about encroaching on private land.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And also it's like, what's the harm, right? Like when you sue somebody, you have to establish what the impact is, what the harm is.

Speaker 1 and in in these cases that went to the supreme courts they're like well what

Speaker 2 what are the damages right explain to me what the damages are right right and what they really can't right there's no damages they just don't want hunters on their property people that have a lot of land for whatever reason i guess it's how they acquire a lot of land in the first place a lot of them are fucking greedy well there's some greedy in a weird way

Speaker 1 right yeah

Speaker 1 yeah um

Speaker 2 but that's a greedy thing. Like, you know, you have 800 acres and there's this like little sliver and you're like, no.

Speaker 1 Can't have that. Mine.
I know, man. Mine.
And

Speaker 1 then, I mean, there's absolutely wonderful humans on the spectrum. Oh, yeah.
This dude that I grew up with, we guided on parts of his place growing up.

Speaker 1 Right when I got my first ever GPS and the ONX was a card that you inserted into your GPS. He used to come pick me up so I could open the gates for him.
And then he'd just BS and it was amazing.

Speaker 1 And we'd drive all over eastern Montana, all on his property. And

Speaker 1 his name was Leo

Speaker 1 Solph, Leo Solph. And we came up to this fence line and

Speaker 1 I was like, Leo, did you know that this brand new fence is 100

Speaker 1 feet on your side of the property line? And this was a whole section, right? So it ran for a mile.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he goes, Ryan,

Speaker 1 can't own the whole world

Speaker 1 and just didn't say another thing about it. Like,

Speaker 1 not worth me worrying about.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, how many acres did he have?

Speaker 1 Like 30,000, probably.

Speaker 2 That's a rational gentleman.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly, right?

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 2 Somebody fucked up.

Speaker 1 But there's people,

Speaker 1 there's people on the other side, too.

Speaker 1 You know, and that's like that old rancher mentality of like, you know what? there's going to be a fire,

Speaker 1 and we're all going to need to get together and help each other out. And maybe I'll talk to them then about it.

Speaker 1 Or, you know, whatever, calving season, harvest season, all the things that bring those communities together, these very independent people,

Speaker 1 they got to work together at different times of the year. And that's like kind of a beautiful thing.
You can only be so much of a dick. Right.
Right. Right.

Speaker 1 But then there's that other side now where it's like, I'm going to patrol my property from Florida via drone. Oh, God.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to hot dial the sheriff's department anytime I see anything that looks like stepping over that property line, right?

Speaker 1 Whether it's to fix a fence that I'm not there to fix or get your cattle off of my property, I'm calling the sheriff.

Speaker 1 And that exists too. Sure.
Right? Yeah. And it's that community breakdown, which is horrifying to me.

Speaker 1 But also, man, like

Speaker 1 people don't understand the jobs that these lands do, right? And like you're saying, like the urban folks, where that state comes from,

Speaker 1 where their groceries come from, it's not the grocery store. Like there should be an instructional video before you can enter the supermarket,

Speaker 1 you know?

Speaker 1 Because it takes space. It takes this land.
And

Speaker 1 we think, people think in terms of like, oh, a million million is a big number.

Speaker 1 Let's say we do have 640 million acres of public land, right? Well, there's like 1.2 billion acres of land in the U.S. set aside specifically for agriculture.

Speaker 1 And I think some like private timberland falls in that too, right? So that's private land.

Speaker 1 1.2 billion where the bulk of our food's coming off, ideally.

Speaker 1 On the public land side of the fence, we have have grazing leases

Speaker 1 so you can run cattle and sheep on public ground. You pay a minimal,

Speaker 1 I would say a very minimal fee for that, right?

Speaker 1 And it's based out off of

Speaker 1 an animal on that ground for a month, animal unit month AUM.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 on our public ground, that's like a dollar, I want to say it's a dollar

Speaker 1 35

Speaker 1 per animal unit month

Speaker 1 and just in the state of Montana it just got dropped again but it hit as high as $24

Speaker 1 animal unit month so if you have those federal leases it's a big thing that you want to protect too right so you have to in theory show that stewardship aspect out there on the on the public land because everybody can come check it out

Speaker 1 to retain your ability to keep running cattle out there or sheep or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 What is going on with that American prairie? Savannah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the American prairie thing. Yeah, so that's in the home state of Montana.

Speaker 2 Explain that to people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. So basically the fear is it's going to be a privatized national park that people aren't going to be able to go out on.
Well,

Speaker 1 I don't think that's true. It might be

Speaker 1 a bunch of private philanthropic dollars,

Speaker 1 a lot of which is coming from overseas.

Speaker 1 I think the Dutch have somehow, some way, dumped a bunch of cash in there.

Speaker 1 And it is to connect a bunch

Speaker 1 of private land

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 Bureau of Land Management land out there, BLM,

Speaker 1 into one contiguous chunk,

Speaker 1 remove as many fences as you can, and allow that chunk of prairie

Speaker 1 to basically revert back to its natural state with natural species, the American buffalo being like

Speaker 1 their big goal species.

Speaker 1 They're raising,

Speaker 1 they've done an incredible job raising cash to get this done.

Speaker 1 They're purchasing these places.

Speaker 1 They would say at fair market value, there's a big argument there because they have so much money, they're going to win a bidding process. So is it really fair?

Speaker 1 Is what the local ranchers would say.

Speaker 1 But right now,

Speaker 1 and knock on wood, for as long as they exist, they're going to keep providing public access. And they have a really good public access program.
So

Speaker 1 they can work with the state of Montana for our private land public access program where

Speaker 1 you can sign up either at just like a kiosk type deal, sign-in box, and walk out on their place.

Speaker 1 But then they have like yurts that you can rent.

Speaker 2 So the kiosk is just, it's just set up as you get there, and you just put in your name and what time you're going there. And do you have to have any kind of ID that you put in there?

Speaker 1 Nothing? No. No, I mean the state of Montana want to ask for your license plate number

Speaker 1 and your home address and phone number and that's it. So

Speaker 1 and then

Speaker 1 it's I mean they they have a lot of gorgeous ground. Honestly, you know when we did our our big float in Montana

Speaker 1 they own some of that property now that that runs right up to the Missouri, right there around Cow Island is kind of where we took out real close to there.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they own some of the stuff that we hiked around on. Oh, wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But

Speaker 1 their vision is to have this big, contiguous chunk and have it run

Speaker 1 like,

Speaker 1 you know, pre-European civilization here on the North American continent. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's, I mean, it's gorgeous stuff. And they

Speaker 1 provide for some buffalo hunts out there. So you can draw a tag

Speaker 1 and go out and shoot a yearling or an old bull.

Speaker 1 And they give you, it's not like a handhold thing.

Speaker 2 When they say an old bull, how do you determine?

Speaker 1 Just by sheer size.

Speaker 2 Just size. Yeah.
So you have to be experienced. You have to know what you're doing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and they'll give you some classes and some pointers, but they don't hold your hand and say, hey, come shoot this one. It's like, here's this information.

Speaker 1 Return it when you're done.

Speaker 1 Rules of the ranch, all that stuff.

Speaker 1 Go through this gate, enjoy it, leave it how you found it type of thing.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I've never done it myself, but people have had really fantastic experiences out there doing that. And obviously, that's an an absolute shitload of meat, right? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 And if they do that widespread, like what is the ultimate goal? Like, how much land are we talking about? And, like, are they bringing animals in or are they allowing the existing animals to breed?

Speaker 2 And, like, how are they doing it?

Speaker 1 So, yes, to allowing the existing animals to breed, and yes, to bringing the animals in. So, they're coming out of the, I think, the Yellowstone population more than anything.

Speaker 1 And then they work with the local tribes up there to kind of

Speaker 1 bring those animals in and some go to the tribe and then some go stay on the prairie, I think is how it goes.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 the reason that they're allowing

Speaker 1 for these old bulls to be shot is because

Speaker 1 they're no longer breeding. Right.
Yep.

Speaker 2 It's interesting. Have you ever read Dan Flores' piece on American Buffalo? Yeah.
The Buffalo Diplomacy. Was it Buffalo Ecology, Buffalo Diplomacy?

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 I read the American Serengeti.

Speaker 2 That one. Yeah, that's great, too.

Speaker 2 His theory is, and I think it's valid, that the time where they saw millions of buffalo was because the Native Americans had been wiped out by disease.

Speaker 2 This is the idea, is that there was never a time where there were that many bison. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that the reason why there were that many bison was because the Native Americans weren't hunting them anymore because they were 90% of them were wiped out by disease. That's why when they

Speaker 2 made their way across, and I guess it was like the early 1800s.

Speaker 1 Oh, like Lewis and Clark.

Speaker 2 Yeah, when they saw millions and millions of bison, the reason for that.

Speaker 1 Was that human predator population

Speaker 1 was in a trough? Yeah, exactly. And it allowed the bison to be in a spike.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That completely makes sense. Oh, it totally makes sense.
Yeah. Because, yeah, we always have those conversations about like when would be the best time to go back if you could, right?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 also,

Speaker 1 how could it be that that

Speaker 1 big total buffalo population number that always gets thrown out there was really on the landscape. Right.

Speaker 2 Like, why wasn't there a balance of predator and prey where there always is if it was really natural,

Speaker 2 right? It does make sense. This episode is brought to you by Activision.
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Speaker 1 Oh, it totally. I mean, humans have been stirring the pot forever.
That's why it drives me insane when people are like, well, before people. Yeah, fuck it.
I'm like, well, what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 One that doesn't get us anywhere right now. Right.

Speaker 2 Before people is the dumbest fucking argument ever. They were here first.
Well, this is the argument they use with wolves. You know, like they were here first.
Like, shut the fuck up.

Speaker 2 Just shut the fuck up.

Speaker 1 Stop.

Speaker 2 Stop. No, they weren't.

Speaker 2 first of all i love people okay i'm only concerned with when people were around so before people fuck off you want to kill all the people off so the wolves can run things like what are you even saying right what are we gonna learn from a pre-human time doesn't make any sense and there was obviously some sort of an imbalance that led to these enormous populations of bison and i think dan flores is an incredibly brilliant guy i think he makes a really compelling argument because we do know that the Native Americans were wiped out, that 90% of them were killed off by disease.

Speaker 2 We know that we're talking about millions of people.

Speaker 2 And if millions of people were subsistence hunters and they were riding around, living off the buffalo, following them around, which we know they did, completely makes sense.

Speaker 2 Especially when you take into account the long gestation period,

Speaker 2 that bison, I think they have to be pregnant for a long time, right?

Speaker 1 Boy, I don't know about that one.

Speaker 2 The woolly mammoth, I know, is a long time.

Speaker 1 I'm sure it was because, yeah, that that was was like African elephants. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I wonder

Speaker 2 what is a buffalo gestation period? Nine months. So, like a person.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Very different than like a deer. Very different than a lot of other animals.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 1 it's badass seeing those things out there. Like, I mean, it really.

Speaker 1 Really is because there's some part of like your whatever people call it these days, your lizard brain or whatever,

Speaker 1 where like you know that

Speaker 1 that's their home right and then you see that thing on that landscape and something just clicks and you're like

Speaker 1 holy shit man

Speaker 1 pretty cool oh it's it's amazing it really

Speaker 2 cool just to see them in yellowstone yeah you know which is kind of weird but yeah the yellowstone thing is weird i i went there a few years back with my family and it's really beautiful and i enjoyed it but i did not like the fact that all the elk were hanging out at the visitor station you're right because they know they can't be hunted there and they know the wolves won't go there.

Speaker 1 It was real weird.

Speaker 2 They're like so domesticated, they're just like 30 yards away from a fucking vending machine.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you see this big herd of elk just laying down on the ground, staring at people, and people taking selfies with the animals. I'm like,

Speaker 2 I don't know about this.

Speaker 1 I know, I know, yeah, habituated as shit, as a lot of my biologist friends would say.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's

Speaker 1 the national park system, right, is like, it's an absolute wonderful thing.

Speaker 1 I know there's lots of dedicated civil servants within the national park system that bust their asses educating folks, but they just can't keep up.

Speaker 2 Have you ever seen the Instagram page Torons of Yellowstone? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, doing God's work right there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Darwin in action. If you go to it, it says like people are just getting launched through the air by bison.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And God,

Speaker 2 how do they not know by now? I mean, how do you not know that you can't get because of the exact, exact thing you're describing.

Speaker 1 They're like, oh,

Speaker 1 it's on the tour. Right.
Right? Yeah. It's like, it's

Speaker 1 fortunately, they've trained the bison to stand right next to the visitor information sign or the bull elk or whatever, right?

Speaker 1 It's like, this just is the way it's supposed to be.

Speaker 2 And then they'll walk right up to it to try to get a selfie. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's fucking...

Speaker 2 Here's one.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 Nothing happens here besides they're just close.

Speaker 1 Well, that there's a calf in the middle.

Speaker 2 There's no fucking way that guy should be standing there.

Speaker 2 If I was that guy, I would be in that car as fast as I could. I'll climb into the passenger side.

Speaker 1 Like, fuck this. Because

Speaker 2 danger, do not approach wildlife.

Speaker 1 I went up to watch the bison hunting season there in Yellowstone in the gardener entrance, south entrance or north entrance to the park.

Speaker 1 And a bunch of the tribes were down doing their harvest. And

Speaker 1 I was riding with Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. Got to do a little ride along.
And it was the most successful hunt they've ever had. So this was three years ago now.
Tons of snow in the park.

Speaker 1 Some old cow bison decided to just lead everybody out.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there's like hunt rosters. So you draw your bison tag, but then then you can also be on a list in case those tags get filled, which they never do.
But this year it did happen.

Speaker 1 And then all the tribes came up for their harvest. And it was

Speaker 1 amazing. Like there were people knocking buffalo down everywhere.
And

Speaker 1 in fact, so many that they had to come up with a system to where they'd be like, okay,

Speaker 1 between

Speaker 1 daylight and like 9 a.m.,

Speaker 1 nobody's going to walk beyond this line.

Speaker 1 Because let everybody shoot

Speaker 1 and then we'll all go out together and start cutting up bison and get them out of there. And then the next round of hunters can have at it.
It was like a safety issue. Oh.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Is this actually on the park? No.

Speaker 1 So this is,

Speaker 1 it's called the zone of tolerance.

Speaker 1 Which is a creepy,

Speaker 1 creepy name, if you're asking me. Zone of tolerance.
So

Speaker 1 all the states, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, that's around Yellowstone National Park, they

Speaker 1 have the cattle producers have real fears of brucellosis, which is a disease that bison and elk pack around, and it causes domestic cattle to abort calves. So hurts them in the pocketbook.
Bad deal.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 they want slash need to reduce bison populations within the park.

Speaker 1 Can't hunt inside the park.

Speaker 1 But at the same time,

Speaker 1 all the cattlemen associations, they don't want those bison coming out of the park. So what do you do? Well, they came up with the zone of tolerance idea, which is a hunting

Speaker 1 perimeter around the park.

Speaker 1 They remove all the domestic cattle from within that zone. And then the bison, if they come out of the park into that zone, they're fair game for hunters.

Speaker 1 If they make it beyond that zone somehow, some way, then anybody can shoot one.

Speaker 1 But typically, there's like a brand inspector

Speaker 1 there to take care of any bison that make it beyond the border of the zone of tolerance.

Speaker 2 What do you mean by brand inspector? What does that mean?

Speaker 1 Cattle brand.

Speaker 1 Oh. Yep.
Yep. So how does that work? Well, so he's an agent of the state.
Oh.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he is there to, in this particular case, like protect the interest of

Speaker 1 the cattlemen's associations,

Speaker 1 cattle ranchers. Right.
And so,

Speaker 1 yeah, somehow, some way he's authorized to whack those bison as if they make it beyond. But really what...

Speaker 2 And what do they do with the meat?

Speaker 1 It gets donated to

Speaker 1 any one of those tribal members that's there probably has right of first refusal at least. If not, it would go straight to the food pantry.
Yeah, I mean, no waste.

Speaker 1 And in years past, there's been groups that go up there

Speaker 1 just to go pull anything that's left in the field, the

Speaker 1 bones, stuff like that for making stock. There's groups that go up there

Speaker 1 and literally take the carcasses off the ground because it is like highly sought after food stuff, right? It's a lot of bone broth you can make with a 2,000-pound critter.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That was an amazing experience. And like the each tribe brings their own tribal game warden with them.

Speaker 1 They're kind of like in charge of their people. They're coordinating to maximize the harvest.
And

Speaker 1 so they're helping, very willing to help people like coordinate to to get their animal and get out of the field so they can get the next person in there and that's that's part of the system outside of trapping so they trap inside the park

Speaker 1 and then they'll take those animals move them to a separate facility where they go through

Speaker 1 I can't remember how long of a period of monitoring for brucellosis and then once that herd is the trapped herd is considered brucellosis-free,

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 they can be given to the tribes or sold.

Speaker 2 Interesting.

Speaker 2 So that's how when people have bison on private land, that's how they get them there?

Speaker 1 I mean, there's a couple other populations, but yeah, yep, that's one of them.

Speaker 2 And what's the population of bison in the United States now?

Speaker 1 I don't know. I mean, I think they're gunning for 6,000 just inside the park.

Speaker 2 What do they have now?

Speaker 1 Oh, I don't know. Jamie, you'd have to look that up.

Speaker 2 Weird. Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 1 It says estimated at around 500,000, smaller portion, 31,000 managed,

Speaker 1 and then like 6,000 in Yellowstone.

Speaker 1 Yeah. There it is.
Very, varying numbers, though.

Speaker 2 Boy, they came so close to being wiped out.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's so wild. It's so really it's crazy.
So wild. I was staring at,

Speaker 1 I was like, Jeff, what's the deal with this skull? Your bison antiqua skull that you have out there?

Speaker 1 That thing is amazing.

Speaker 2 That's from my friend John Reeves in Alaska.

Speaker 1 I was wondering. Yeah, I was wondering what that was.
You know about the boneyard? Yeah. Do you know about that place? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 That place is nuts.

Speaker 1 For a dude who likes to pick stuff off the ground,

Speaker 1 that's like a porn pitch. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 It's a crazy place. And

Speaker 2 there's no real explanation of why there's such a population of dead animals in this one spot.

Speaker 2 You know, and he thinks it's connected to the Younger Dryas impact theory because there's a very clear, distinct line of carbon in his ground.

Speaker 2 Like that, you know, when you go deep, deep, deep into the ground, which represents where these, like a lot of these things that he's pulling, they're plus 10,000 years old.

Speaker 2 Like that step bison head, we didn't get it checked. We didn't have it sent off.
But a lot of the stuff he has dated, you know, older than 10,000 years.

Speaker 2 And so what he thinks is that this is one of the areas where there was an impact. You know, this Younger Dryest Impact Theory, there's two time periods.

Speaker 2 One is around 11,800 years ago, and then there's another one somewhere around 10,000 plus years ago. And he thinks one of those areas is where he was, where his spot in Alaska is.

Speaker 2 And this deep, rich layer of carbon seems to indicate some massive burn that happened through that area. And it coincides with this immense pile of bones and ivory and

Speaker 2 mammoth skeletons and cave bears and all this shit. It's just a small area.

Speaker 2 His area is only like the area where they're pulling these bones from is only a few acres.

Speaker 1 No way. Yeah.

Speaker 2 He thinks it was a wash. So with the impact came this immediate melting of a lot of the ice caps.

Speaker 2 And this is what they think happened that ended the ice age in North America.

Speaker 2 10,000 plus years ago, you're looking at more than a mile-high ice in a giant chunk of North America. And then almost instantaneously, that stuff gets melted.

Speaker 2 And this coincides with Randall Carlson's theories about this, too, which are also

Speaker 2 unsubstantiated until they came up with the core samples for the Younger Dry Sandback Theory. And they go, no, this happened.
Like, there was a fucking massive impact.

Speaker 2 Somewhere around 30% of the entire world was hit by comets. And this area area where John has, look at this, 2.1 to 2.3 acres.

Speaker 2 So if you look at the amount of stuff that he has, I mean, 2.3 acres is like a nice yard, right? It's like a nice, a person's really, oh, you got a nice piece of land here, nice yard.

Speaker 2 That's where he's pulling thousands of dead animals. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And if you look at his boneyard, if you look at some of the

Speaker 2 some of the warehouses that he has. This is his Instagram page.

Speaker 2 Boneyard Alaska is the instagram page but he's got enormous warehouses filled with tusks

Speaker 2 and it's only from a couple acres yeah so they didn't walk to that spot and tip over they got exactly they all got collected there into there yeah exactly and very similar time period look at all this stuff man

Speaker 2 fucking crazy and look back at the other picture when you right before look at that truck filled with heads I mean, this is nuts, man. And this is like a day's haul.

Speaker 1 Oh. This is crazy, man.

Speaker 2 It's really crazy.

Speaker 2 It's really pretty extraordinary. And thankfully, John has both the resources and the desire to blast the permafrost with these high-pressure hoses to get all the stuff out of there.

Speaker 2 But I mean, he's trying to set up a legitimate research facility out there. You know, these scientists, they want to take the stuff and bring it somewhere.
He's like, fuck off.

Speaker 2 If you want to do it, you're going to do it right here. This is my land.
We're not, he already had a problem with the

Speaker 2 Museum of Natural History. Is that what it was? Yeah, in New York.
They dumped tons of his bones into the East River. So the property that he owned before he owned it, someone else owned it.

Speaker 2 That is his property. They took it, and they were supposed to do research on it, but they had so many bones that they dumped a lot of it in the East River.
And the museum denied it.

Speaker 2 And so he got divers to go look for it, and they found it exactly where they found it.

Speaker 2 And they found steppe bison bones and all kinds of crazy shit that's not supposed to be there

Speaker 2 in a pile in the East River.

Speaker 1 When we were looking at

Speaker 1 the zone of

Speaker 1 tolerance. Not the zone of tolerance,

Speaker 1 the range, sorry, of bison, of buffalo. I was

Speaker 1 thinking of your skull that you have out there, but I found a gorgeous one in this wash in Alberta.

Speaker 1 It would be like their summer range. So north of the Montana border, not all that far, up near the Saskatchewan River breaks.

Speaker 1 And you get up on these bluffs that overlook the river and you're like, oh, you just feel like somebody would have been sitting there watching stuff. And then if you look around, there's all, I mean,

Speaker 1 thousands over a lot of miles, but thousands of teepee rings. So all the tribes would go up there to hunt bison.

Speaker 1 and camp out, a little bit of cooler weather. And that's where I found this bison skull.

Speaker 2 Do you find the arrowheads up there?

Speaker 1 There's a ton of them, but you can't take anything up there. Yep.
Yeah. Yep.
Yeah. And I called the Alberta Fishing Game on this thing because I was so stoked about it.
And

Speaker 1 they were like, oh, we just consider that cattle up here.

Speaker 1 Like, you can take it.

Speaker 1 Like, okay. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 How old is the skull? Do you know?

Speaker 1 Well, it was such a pretty skull. People are like, oh, it's got to be Bison Antiquus.
But it's just, it's nowhere near.

Speaker 1 That's amazing. Is that a freshie? Did somebody make that or no? No.
No way.

Speaker 2 No, that's a

Speaker 2 Comanche head from here.

Speaker 1 That's crazy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I showed it to Remy, and he said it's really big, so they're probably using it for fish.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's amazing.

Speaker 2 It's interesting that the bigger ones, like, that is like kind of a normal arrowhead for elk or deer. Like if in

Speaker 2 today's standards, you know, if you look at that, that's like, that looks like an iron wheel. That's basically an iron wheel wide, right? Yeah.
And they didn't use them that big.

Speaker 2 They had smaller ones because they didn't have much that much.

Speaker 1 They wanted high penetration. They wanted real penetration.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Pretty cool. Oh,

Speaker 1 so cool. So cool.

Speaker 2 There's a friend of mine who has a ranch out here, and they've got thousands of them. You know, like the Comanche must have used that area, and he has literally thousands and thousands of arrowheads.

Speaker 2 He's got boxes of them, all

Speaker 1 just

Speaker 2 all of them are dated and certified. Like, they know what time period they came from.

Speaker 1 And yeah, so like, why was that chunk of ground in use for that long, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, if he's got that many, yeah, it's not because one group of people camped there for a couple of days, those thousands of years, probably.

Speaker 2 Well, it's because it's really rich, you know, it's like it's right off the Colorado River, so

Speaker 2 a lot of resources, a lot of

Speaker 2 foliage, a lot of animals animals there to this day.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's one of the things that you can tell people. It's like, do you want, you want to know why public lands matter?

Speaker 1 97% of winter vegetables consumed in the U.S. that are from the U.S.

Speaker 1 are irrigated by the Colorado River.

Speaker 2 97%.

Speaker 1 So if your mommies and daddies are out there eating a nice green salad in the winter months,

Speaker 1 all that is fed by water from public land.

Speaker 1 Like, do we want that shit to be privatized? Right. Yeah.
Like, what happens then? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, Bill Gates already owns more farmland in this country than anybody.

Speaker 1 You know, I keep hearing that. Is he doing good stuff with it?

Speaker 2 There's no way.

Speaker 1 No?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 There's no way. I can't imagine that.

Speaker 1 What's his angle?

Speaker 2 Oh.

Speaker 2 Well, I know he was in the fucking veggie burger business for a while, but that shit went tits up.

Speaker 1 Dude, I am so anti-anti the lab-grown and

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, that stuff's not even a real burger. It's filled with seed oils and all these fucking, all this goo that you need to make sure that it connects together.

Speaker 2 And then people would pretend that it's delicious. Oh, this is delicious.
You can't even tell the difference.

Speaker 1 You can't tell the difference?

Speaker 2 Where are you getting your burgers? Because you're eating cardboard burger. This is bullshit.
And it's just bad for you.

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Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Well, listen, I think it's just bad for all of us because if people think that your food can come from someplace other than the land,

Speaker 1 then there's no value to that land.

Speaker 2 Well, it's vegetable-based, right? But then it's highly processed.

Speaker 2 It's not like you're eating an eggplant.

Speaker 2 You're not eating a squash.

Speaker 2 You're eating something that's gone through this insane process to make pretend that it's a burger. And there's a lot of investors who lost a shit ton of money because they were lied to.

Speaker 2 They were told that this is going to be easy to make and it's going to be really convenient and people are going to love it. And people are looking for an alternative to meat.

Speaker 2 No, actually, they're not.

Speaker 2 And this is the only thing that was... My buddy Duncan, he was living in North Carolina.

Speaker 2 And when COVID came and, you know, there was a lot of shortages in the supermarkets and the lockdowns and all that jazz, he's like, the only shit that's available here is this fucking bullshit fake meat.

Speaker 2 Like fake meat was the only thing he sent a picture. It was the only thing left on the shelf was like Beyond meat or beyond burger or whatever the fuck it's called, impossible burger.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a good litmus test, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, if the world's gonna end and nobody reaching for it, people still aren't eating it.

Speaker 1 It's fucking, it's actually bad for you.

Speaker 2 Seed oils are bad for you, and those things are filled with seed oils, and it's also filled with a bunch of process because you can't just, it's not, you know, look, if you want to be vegetarian, just eat vegetables, okay?

Speaker 2 Don't pretend you're eating some fucking fake burger.

Speaker 1 Oh, Oh, yeah. One of my biggest pet peeves in life, a buddy of mine, was like going down the vegan train, and we had to stop in all these towns that had like the best vegan restaurant.

Speaker 1 And I'm like,

Speaker 1 they're stealing our names for food. Right.
The meat eater's name for food.

Speaker 2 Tofurty.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. Yeah.
And be like, chicken fingers, Reuben sandwich.

Speaker 1 I'm like, can't you just be proud of what you're putting in your body? I don't care if if it's just vegetables, but.

Speaker 2 Just eat Indian food. There's a lot of really great Indian restaurants that are totally vegetarian.
I used to eat at one that was in Woodland Hills.

Speaker 1 It was great.

Speaker 2 It was really cool because you'd go in there and everyone was speaking Hindi. Nobody, you know, all the

Speaker 2 like it was like a cafeteria place and all the menus were all in another. I had to point at things.
I didn't know what the fuck it was. I'm like, give me one of those.

Speaker 1 It tastes great. That was great.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But it was all vegetarian. Like, there's vegetarian food that you can eat that's really good.
It doesn't, you don't have to pretend that it's a fucking burger.

Speaker 1 It is a mental exercise, right? It's like, no, no, no. Love vegetables.
Can't eat meat. Meat's evil.
I just happen to need all my vegetables to resemble meat.

Speaker 2 Well, and then there's the problem of what actually happens when you have monocrop agriculture, because a lot of that stuff is coming from that.

Speaker 2 And by the way, there's way more death per calorie of food that you get from monocrop agriculture, from growing just one crop in an area than you're ever going to get from meat.

Speaker 2 Like, there's thousands of animals, millions of animals have to get killed

Speaker 2 in order you to grow this food. That's just a fact of life.

Speaker 1 Well, you used the word convenience earlier, right? Like, convenience is like the killer of conservation because it's hard work, man. It's not convenient.

Speaker 1 Like, these animals on the landscape that have been doing things for

Speaker 1 ever,

Speaker 1 like they just don't adjust to things. You know, I was talking about like the prairie, how we're losing 2 million acres of prairie a year.
Well,

Speaker 1 there's this super badass little chicken, lesser prairie chicken, super charismatic little dude, dances, puts his tail fan up, big cheek flares, and

Speaker 1 game bird. Used to be in the possibly into the millions in that time that you described when Lewis and Clark were coming out onto the prairie.

Speaker 1 It

Speaker 1 is a prairie bird

Speaker 1 to the point where it will not nest within,

Speaker 1 God, I want to say six acres of a vertical structure of any size. Interesting.
Right? So there are no trees on the prairie. No fence posts.

Speaker 1 And this bird can't nest if it's around any sort of a a vertical anything.

Speaker 1 Because that's just the way its brain is wired. Whoa.
And that shit is so inconvenient for people that

Speaker 1 it's just hit the endangered species list.

Speaker 2 So is that because it has to be completely away from all predators, that it has to know where everything is?

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 it's got to be something like that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So it doesn't fly? It does fly. Does it fly like a chicken does, like short periods?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 Or does it fly like a turkey?

Speaker 1 There's like a colloquial, you know,

Speaker 1 hunter name where they just call prairie birds chickens.

Speaker 1 It's not a chicken at all, but it's like a little grouse species. What does it look like?

Speaker 1 See if you can pull it up. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But it's a great test case for the greater sage grouse.

Speaker 2 A cool-looking little animal. Oh.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 which one is all the same?

Speaker 1 We can't tell.

Speaker 1 It's a smaller version of that. That's the greater prairie chicken.
We're looking for the lesser prairie chicken.

Speaker 2 So the greater prairie chicken, how big is that?

Speaker 1 You're looking at

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 16 to 18 ounces, I bet.

Speaker 1 We got a size on that, sucker.

Speaker 2 That's the big one.

Speaker 2 So the little one's tiny.

Speaker 1 But 95%

Speaker 1 of the native habitat left for that bird is on private ground at this point. Oh, wow.
Yeah. And that private ground is used for grazing.

Speaker 2 So 24 ounces to 42 ounces.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's a big one. Adults.
There you go.

Speaker 2 That's the greater prairie chicken.

Speaker 1 What a cool-looking little bird.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 2 Charisma. When I was in.

Speaker 1 This guy's got ears. Oh, whoa.

Speaker 2 That's crazy looking. Rabbit ears.

Speaker 1 Yeah, how weird. There's this awesome group of ranchers kind of in the Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico zone.

Speaker 1 And they formed the Lesser Prairie Chicken Landowner Alliance. And what they've been trying to do is get,

Speaker 1 because there's this huge conservation bill, biggest conservation package in the world called the Farm Bill. And it has a lot of

Speaker 1 incentive, subsidy for

Speaker 1 farmers. Isn't that thing amazing?

Speaker 2 I've never seen a bird with ears like that.

Speaker 2 Like, other than like an owl, kind of has them, but those are so pronounced.

Speaker 1 How cool is that thing?

Speaker 2 Is that his actual ears?

Speaker 1 Or is that just like a weird feather structure? Those are just feathers, yeah.

Speaker 2 But where's his ears?

Speaker 1 Behind that? They're right behind his eyeballs.

Speaker 2 So do you think those that feather structure enhances hearing? I mean, it has to, right?

Speaker 1 No, that feather structure is there is to enhance his sex life.

Speaker 2 Oh, let the ladies know.

Speaker 1 What's up? Yeah.

Speaker 2 What's up? Look at my ears, baby. I've got it going on over here.
Do they wiggle them or something?

Speaker 1 Oh, they dance.

Speaker 2 Interesting. Yeah.
And so it's almost kind of a grouse.

Speaker 1 It is a grouse. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Ground nesting.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's probably also one of those animals that feral cats fuck up.

Speaker 1 Oh, for sure. Yeah.
For sure. Oh, wow.
Look how cool it is.

Speaker 2 Wow, so beautiful looking. Look at his eyebrows.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Let's go get it on.

Speaker 2 Let's go, baby.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Look at that guy's cockbucking. See that?

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 What a cute little animal. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And this thing is tied to

Speaker 1 wide-ass open grass, wide-ass open prairie.

Speaker 1 Right? And so what this group, the Lesser Prairie Chicken Landowner Alliance,

Speaker 1 is doing

Speaker 1 is, you know, they're trying to get folks in the Department of Ag

Speaker 1 to set up some

Speaker 1 funding specifically for grassland ecosystems that are used for grazing. So it's going to be good for the rancher and good for the grouse in this case, too, right?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that funding doesn't exist, but there's lots of programs to take like monocrop agriculture and turn it into CRP, which, you know, mixed grass,

Speaker 1 basically like rest that ground. That was one of the programs that came out of the Dust Bowl era.

Speaker 1 So instead of turning the ground over and all that dirt dries out and can get blown away, we lose that topsoil, plant it with grass and let it rest for like a three-year period, a five-year period.

Speaker 1 Part of our like big ag incentive structures, balance out markets and all that fun stuff.

Speaker 2 Yeah, monocrop agriculture is such a problem and industrial agricultural in general. I had Will Harris on a couple of times from White Oaks Pastures.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so his family farm was an industrial farm forever. And then when he took it over, it was like a 20-year period of converting it to become

Speaker 2 regenerative. And in that process, what's really, if you look outside in our lobby area, we have two jars of soil that were given to us by Will.
And one of them is from his neighbor's property.

Speaker 2 That's an industrial farm. And it's just like this weird, pale-looking fucking, just, you know, it's all industrial fertilizer that they have to use and pesticides.

Speaker 2 And his is like this rich, dark soil that he's like super proud of, like what they've turned it and converted it over to just this natural process that's supposed to exist when animals graze, the undulates they poop and they make manure, and then the the grasses grow, and the animals eat the grass.

Speaker 2 It's all that's how it's supposed to be.

Speaker 1 But you know what else it is? Inconvenient. Yeah.
It's hard freaking work. Oh, yeah.
Right?

Speaker 2 It's hard work. Well, fortunately for him, he's got a big name now, and so people seek out his food.
Yeah. They want to buy from him.
But, you know, these

Speaker 2 and there's a lot of like bullshitting from supermarkets. Like he had a real issue with Whole Foods lying.
And even after he had stopped selling them food,

Speaker 2 they were saying that it was coming from him. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Even the concept of like grass-fed, like for how long? Like, and how are you feeding them the grass? Are they in a pen where you're feeding the grass?

Speaker 2 Are they actually wandering around eating grass like they're supposed to?

Speaker 2 There's a lot of that, you know. Like, when you hear about like chickens, you know, they're free range.
Like, what does that mean? Yeah. How much of a range?

Speaker 1 I just had dinner with our buddy Jesse last night, and it was

Speaker 1 insane it was so good dai dewey oh yeah that's an amazing restaurant here oh but we were just i was like okay well tell me about this tell me about you know longhorn and what wagu means on his menu and right and all the the pigs and the things that he's seeking out and like the breed of chicken that they have um but like you were saying like

Speaker 1 it's not just the breed what what's that chicken doing right

Speaker 1 and it's it's insane. It is so freaking cool, man.

Speaker 1 Like, it's a heartwarming place to eat. And it was just like, knock your freaking socks off.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Jesse does it the right way. And he's such a good chef.
He's so amazing.

Speaker 2 When Steve and I went to

Speaker 2 Etoria down in South Texas to hunt, Jesse came and he cooked for us. It was the most incredible experience because, and he cooked diver duck, which everybody says is gross.
He's like, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 This is just, you just have to prepare it properly and it was some of the best duck i've ever had in my life he just has a marinating process that he does and then he grills it and it was insane it was so good man it was so good yeah i mean they got nominated for james beard on his turkey book which is super awesome um

Speaker 1 the people down there just

Speaker 1 you know his employees stay there. They've been there for they're like everybody in that house has been there for a decade and they they're just loving the stuff that they're doing and putting out and

Speaker 1 the stories that he can tell on that menu, right? Like the bread

Speaker 1 is he's like, yeah, I went and picked grapes out of the alley across the street, which doesn't sound all that great, but that's how he like started the yeast for the bread, and that's been going for six years.

Speaker 1 They got yogurt that came from a culture that's been going from for 200 years from one of their employees whose family's from India and they brought it over. Whoa.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, just I love that stuff. Yeah.
I love that stuff, but it takes like dedication and commitment to

Speaker 1 know where your food comes from. Right.
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I swear to God, when I go back to DC and I'm talking to people, Like they are so disconnected from this stuff.

Speaker 1 And I just often think, I'm like, God, if you guys just knew where the food comes from,

Speaker 1 what the land actually provides,

Speaker 1 we wouldn't be having these conversations.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, human beings, for the most part, in urban areas, are completely disconnected.

Speaker 2 If you had a survey of how many people really understand where food comes from in your average city, I would imagine it's less than double digits.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Probably a small percentage of people really understand.

Speaker 1 Yeah, man. I mean, the economics of food I've gotten really into

Speaker 1 recently because

Speaker 1 there is

Speaker 1 a real inability in certain areas of the country where the cost of getting anywhere near an actual grocery store is prohibitive to a lot of people.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, they're just like, they're shit out of luck for a real food. And then it's a cultural thing of

Speaker 1 mom didn't know what real food was. Dad didn't know what real food was so I don't and my kids won't right you know and and then on the flip side of that

Speaker 1 it's like food comes from DoorDash food comes from you know people spending big bucks yeah and they don't and they're just as disconnected as the folks who don't have any bucks to spend now imagine a younger dry's impact today

Speaker 2 Imagine some kind of impact like that today that forced people to actually find their own food. You know, first of all, you'd be dealing with a small amount of survivors, right?

Speaker 2 Let's imagine an

Speaker 2 apocalyptic scenario where 20% of the population survives, which has probably happened numerous times in human history. If that happened today,

Speaker 2 how many people are equipped to find food? How many people are equipped to live off the land? It's such a small amount, man.

Speaker 1 Such a small amount. I also

Speaker 1 think about the

Speaker 1 anthropologists digging through that bone pile. Oh, yeah.
And they're like, why is it that when we do cross sections of these bones, they're so much more unhealthy

Speaker 1 than the cross sections of the bones from 4,000 years earlier. I know.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Because I think that's convenience. Convenience, man.
We love our convenience.

Speaker 2 Convenience is killing us. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think there's a moment here

Speaker 1 we had all these different walks of life come together and be like, oh my God, public lands matter. We had all these businesses come together and say public lands matter.
I got to tell you, when I was

Speaker 1 chatting with our buddy Cam Haynes the other day,

Speaker 1 when I was about to be disconnected for a week, right? And I've been like eating and breathing this fight, this stupid lawsuit that came out

Speaker 1 last

Speaker 1 year.

Speaker 1 Then

Speaker 1 it's in the house. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 We get it pulled out of the House. Thank God.
Then it goes to the Senate. Oh, my

Speaker 1 Mike Lee introduces the damn thing in the Senate, sneaks his language in,

Speaker 1 blindsides everybody. And I got to get on a plane to go to the Arctic.
And there's this little like bellwether moment

Speaker 1 where

Speaker 1 I look at, I make like a last Instagram post,

Speaker 1 last thing I can do,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 I see Cameron Haynes is like, you guys, you got to get off your asses and call your senators. They're selling our public land.
And the same day,

Speaker 1 Josh Smith

Speaker 1 from Montana Knife Company did it too. And I bring those two guys up as examples because they were also like

Speaker 1 on the mega train, right? They were like

Speaker 1 pro-Trump in through the election. They're representing the right side of the political spectrum.
And when that moment happened, I did draw like a little

Speaker 1 breath of relief right there. I was like, okay.

Speaker 2 And people that aren't afraid to criticize aspects of the big, beautiful bill.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
And they're not afraid to say,

Speaker 1 yeah, we voted for this guy, but this part of the pie sucks.

Speaker 1 It's super important to us that this

Speaker 1 gets pulled out of here

Speaker 1 and we're going to go to the mat for it. And I'm like, that is,

Speaker 1 that is the thing, right? We have

Speaker 1 people who aren't so self-conscious that they're like, oh, God, I said this thing a month ago. I can't come out and say what I really think right now.

Speaker 1 Because that would kind of contradict what I said a month ago. Right.

Speaker 1 You know, and that gave gave me like

Speaker 1 really, really made me feel good.

Speaker 1 I'm like, okay, things are starting to go our way now because all the other people who were afraid to say the same thing were like, oh, thank God some other people with a big microphone came out and said it.

Speaker 1 So now I feel emboldened to stand up publicly for what I believe in.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's such a terrible thing to be so trapped in the ideology of your party that you can't stand up for what's right. That's that's gross.

Speaker 1 Yeah, man.

Speaker 1 It's so unit promoted, though, too. Like, one of the things I feel when I go back to DC is there's a lot of people spending time on making sure,

Speaker 1 not that America is better, but that that system persists.

Speaker 1 So the next generation of short, short, little boat shoe, no sock wearing people can have jobs.

Speaker 2 Yeah, those boat shoes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's gross.

Speaker 2 It's really gross and it's prevalent. You know, it's been around for a long time,

Speaker 2 this weird system that we have.

Speaker 2 It's not effective. It's not good.
It's not good for anybody.

Speaker 2 And it's all being fed by lobbyists and special interest groups. And they're all just,

Speaker 2 they want to keep it going. They want to keep the griff going.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 there's palpable frustration out there. Like, I feel it every day.

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Speaker 1 You're like, dude, don't read the comment section.

Speaker 1 And you're a thousand percent right. I can't say how right you are, but during this time

Speaker 1 of like, why aren't people clicking into this? Right.

Speaker 1 I was getting

Speaker 1 real depressed, like, shaken, pissed, tears at times over feeling so underrepresented. And

Speaker 1 then, when we started gaining momentum, I was like, okay, what the hell else can I do? I'm calling my senators. I'm calling my representatives.

Speaker 1 I'm establishing contacts with their staff.

Speaker 1 I'm talking to them about how important this is. I'm asking them what else we can do.

Speaker 1 Trying to build these bridges for this goal of protecting my public lands that I love, right?

Speaker 1 We're working with all these nonprofit groups, are coming together, even groups that traditionally don't focus on public land access issues, you know, like your Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, who has done a bunch of stuff for access, but, you know, they have an elk on their logo.

Speaker 1 They're the elk people. And then Pheasants and Quail Forever, they're the Pheasants and Quail people.
National Wild Turkey Federation, they're the turkey people. But they started being like, oh,

Speaker 1 this is real serious. And then we started getting all these people in the same room together, sharing information instead of being competitive.

Speaker 1 And then businesses started coming out and saying, well, what can we do?

Speaker 1 Little breweries down

Speaker 1 in Arizona. This guy

Speaker 1 Ren House Brewing called me and he's like, hey,

Speaker 1 what can I do? I have have a brewery. What can I do?

Speaker 1 And we came out with a beer that has a QR code on the label and it's just called rep because at that time the fight was in the house. So call your representative and you hit the QR code,

Speaker 1 you put in your zip code, and it connects you with your representative.

Speaker 1 Right? It's like, crush beers and crush the phone lines, whatever tag you want, up to I was on, I'm on a steering committee that has

Speaker 1 REI, Patagonia, Rivian, all like big,

Speaker 1 big companies, right? That are like,

Speaker 1 we want to put some muscle behind this. We want public lands to stay public.
Then we launched a Hunt Brands for Public Lands Coalition

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 had

Speaker 1 a huge name. Sig Sauer is on there, right? They have military contracts, and they had the guts to stand up and be like,

Speaker 1 we don't want to see public lands get sold off. That's awesome.
Yep. Weather be another firearms manufacturer,

Speaker 1 you know, first light meteor, obviously. But we started like building all these bridges

Speaker 1 and unifying groups and people and businesses around this common cause.

Speaker 1 And it's that public persistence that we the people part that folks kind of tend to forget

Speaker 1 that is literally saving public lands but like being out there public and loud and

Speaker 1 It's working

Speaker 1 But we need to take it to the next step right

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 maintain the momentum

Speaker 1 and stay unified and the the thing that was really interesting right is like we're up to up to the date up to the absolute

Speaker 1 second

Speaker 1 that language is pulled.

Speaker 1 Before it's officially pulled, Mike Lee's team has his statement out on,

Speaker 1 I listened. I still want to sell public land,

Speaker 1 but I listened to everybody.

Speaker 1 So I'm not going to do it right now, is really what it says. And he's completely fabricating this story.
He was told, like, this is is going to get pulled. So you can do it now and save some face,

Speaker 1 or

Speaker 1 we can pull it, and you're going to look like a loser, right?

Speaker 1 And unfortunately, he got the option to, like, fight again another day,

Speaker 1 which is brutal.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I get that information

Speaker 1 and I get to announce it to this awesome group of people at this off-road rally trash pickup deal that I'm out at called the Gambler 500, which is super cool. And then

Speaker 1 I put that online. I'm like, hey, thank you to the Democrats and thank you to the Republicans and thank you for all the voices that came out and the businesses and all this stuff.

Speaker 1 And then I was just like set my clock as to when people were going to just start tearing each other apart.

Speaker 1 And it fucking happened, right? And it's like,

Speaker 2 you guys guys voted for this.

Speaker 1 You were getting exactly what you deserve.

Speaker 2 Right, right, right. I did see a lot of that.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I did see a lot of that. Like, no, we didn't, stupid.
No, we voted because we felt like the country was moving in a terrible direction.

Speaker 2 It doesn't mean that they can't also move in a terrible direction once you get them in.

Speaker 2 The important thing is, people stood up, people like you, luckily, that are very invested in this and used the considerable resources you have access to and got a lot of other people involved, like Cam and Josh Smith, and everybody else.

Speaker 2 And I jumped in too.

Speaker 2 We're just lucky that a lot of people care and recognize that this is a slippery slope. And that if they got through with this and they did this, this is just one step.

Speaker 2 And if you let them sell one acre, that's why just not one acre was the best motto. It really was.
Not one acre was the best motto.

Speaker 1 You can't.

Speaker 2 It's not yours.

Speaker 1 It's ours.

Speaker 2 It's everyone's. And if you sell it, you should make zero profit.

Speaker 2 It should go, literally, if you did sell it, it should have to go to every fucking person that lives on the planet or in this country, rather. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And we don't want it. We don't want that money.

Speaker 2 Keep it the way it is.

Speaker 1 No, the value of this stuff only goes up.

Speaker 2 Not only that, again, we're 36 fucking trillion dollars in debt. You're not even going to put it.

Speaker 1 If you sold all the public land, all of it that we have, it wouldn't put a dent in it. No, it wouldn't.
You could strip all the timber. Yeah.
Sell the land.

Speaker 2 Everything. Minerals, everything.

Speaker 1 Not going to put a dent in it. No, it's not.
So we got to find a better way. And you know what? It's not going to be convenient.
No. It's going to be hard.

Speaker 1 And that's like the thing that I keep coming back to. I'm like, all they're doing is being like, oh, see, we did something.

Speaker 1 They're not doing the hard work.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 And this particular thing would divest the American people of,

Speaker 1 in my mind, and we

Speaker 1 started doing it as a slogan for backcountry hunters and anglers, is like public land freedom. Like you are divesting the American people of the ability to be free.

Speaker 1 Like these places represent like a lot of goofballs, man. Unstructured fun.
And I feel like there's a lot of people in the lawmaking side of things that get very nervous.

Speaker 1 about American people out there having unstructured fun.

Speaker 1 Really? Is that really what it is? They're like, what's going on out there on that BLM land?

Speaker 1 There's somebody riding a motorcycle and there's somebody shooting a gun and there's somebody fly fishing and there's somebody bird watching. There's a family camping.

Speaker 1 Can't have that.

Speaker 2 Do you really think that's it? Do you really think it's like they don't want unstructured fun?

Speaker 1 I'm coming around to that thought a lot, man. A lot.
Like,

Speaker 1 right? They're like, why?

Speaker 1 There's no kiosk.

Speaker 1 Right? Nobody's out there charging

Speaker 1 for your use of America's public lands. You're not signing a liability waiver.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 And once you're out there, you just kind of make up whatever it is you want to do that day.

Speaker 1 That's freedom, buddy. Right? And I think people are fucking nervous about that.

Speaker 2 That's a weird perspective. It is.
Yeah, I don't know if I agree with that. I just think they look at it as an opportunity to cash in.

Speaker 2 I think they look at it as an opportunity. Like, we have all this land.
It's public. Let's sell sell some of it.
I think it's just like incredibly short-sighted.

Speaker 2 I think they think in terms of, literally, in terms of terms where they're elected.

Speaker 1 And it's not sell some of it, right?

Speaker 1 They're like, we're going to maybe hold on to the national parks, but there's another play there where we're going to turn those over to the states or privatize them completely. Yeah.

Speaker 1 get full control of, like I said, like Colorado River, right? Like, we're going to control the pipes for the watersheds.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've heard that language before that water's not a right.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That

Speaker 1 people are gross, man.

Speaker 2 If you let them be.

Speaker 2 If you let them be,

Speaker 2 they'll be gross.

Speaker 1 And yeah, absolutely. And some of these people want it purely for the fact that they can't have it.
Right. And it drives them insane.

Speaker 2 There's definitely that. Yeah.
There's definitely that. There's a lot of short-sightedness.
It's

Speaker 2 a lot of people could use a mushroom trip.

Speaker 2 It's just a lot of people that are just, man, you're missing so much of what this life is because you're so concentrated on your election cycle. You're so concentrated on making more money.

Speaker 2 You're so concentrated on things that when you're 90 and you're in your deathbed, it ain't going to mean shit, man. It's not going to mean a damn thing.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 No. You could have been having fun and enjoying life with your neighbors.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 2 you can't keep it. You're going to die.
You can't take it with you. You're going to die.

Speaker 2 And they don't see that while they're on the hunt, while they're in the middle of this process of trying to accumulate zeros in their bank account.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Got a little endorphin high.
Saw another zero hit.

Speaker 2 That's all they want. And they're competing with other people that are doing the exact same thing.
So they're in their little short-sighted echo chambers. You know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yep. Keeping it.
But I hope

Speaker 1 to God people learned, right?

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 there's a lot happening in between elections, and you got to know if you

Speaker 1 weighed in during this, you made a difference.

Speaker 1 Like, everybody who jumped in and wrote to their representatives and senators and told their buddies about this and asked businesses, why aren't you on that list?

Speaker 2 Yeah, you can actually make a difference in this country.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. And it's not

Speaker 1 just at the election hash marks.

Speaker 1 Like, if people didn't hold our elected accountable,

Speaker 1 they would have been like,

Speaker 1 they just want to get this stuff passed. They're like,

Speaker 1 path of least resistance. There's some really good ass kickers out there on the Democrat and Republican side of things, for sure.

Speaker 1 But we need to lift those people up in order to get the rest of the coasters involved.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and we need to also let people know that this is an issue going forward now that we know, this is an issue that can affect whether or not you get elected. You need to know that.

Speaker 2 Like, we're going to be on you. You can't do this.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 We're going to be consistent, and we're going to be on your ass.

Speaker 2 And now that this has happened, and we've had some success and it worked, now people know it'll work.

Speaker 2 And so now all the Randy Newbergs and all the people that were really enthusiastic about this, that really did their job,

Speaker 2 you know, they're getting more support now, and it's going to build. And and then we'll be much more aware of whether one of these things is trying to get snuck through in the future.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Absolutely.
I would say

Speaker 1 the early folks, right? Like Randy,

Speaker 1 I feel like we were kicking ass at Meat Eater, Katie Hill at Outdoor Life,

Speaker 1 Andrew McKean, Outdoor Life,

Speaker 1 Travis Hall, Field and Stream, like those people

Speaker 1 were on it.

Speaker 2 And yeah, I think all those people have a significant following on social media.

Speaker 1 And they have a lot to lose, too, man. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yep.

Speaker 1 National Wildlife Federation, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers

Speaker 1 were talking about this way early. And then a lot of other orgs jumped in and

Speaker 1 some early, Pheasants Forever, Quail Forever, they started, they were awesome. I just got it.
I got to mention them because they're like they're farm bill-oriented

Speaker 1 hook and bullet organizations.

Speaker 1 They do an amazing job, but that's largely private side of the fence. And they came out and started talking to their membership about this early.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you kind of get punched in the face. I got to be honest.
Like, we took a lot of shit on the meat-eater side of things. Ronella took a ton of shit.
How so? Just people being like,

Speaker 1 well, one, they're like, Steve, aren't you a Trumper?

Speaker 1 You can't also support public lions because that's going against Trump.

Speaker 2 But this is just people in the comments, right?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Who are those people?

Speaker 1 Way too much time. Yeah,

Speaker 1 don't read them.

Speaker 2 You're dealing with such a small population of morons. The problem with comments is, especially negative comments, it's such a small population and almost, all of them are fucking losers.

Speaker 1 I got sucked in though because I'm like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I was like, I was so desperate to make an impact, right? At the end, I'm like, I'm feeling like I've pulled every freaking lever that I can.

Speaker 1 I'm asking the experts. I'm like, could we get, and this is a screwed up piece of information.
I was like, okay,

Speaker 1 I want to do a Freedom of Information Act.

Speaker 1 request, sue for information

Speaker 1 for all the senators' offices and find out how many people called on behalf of public lands and how many people called to sell them off.

Speaker 1 And I want that information to be public. Well,

Speaker 1 those offices, they don't have to give over that information, I found out.

Speaker 1 So, like, where the hell is the accountability on that? Right. Yeah.
But anyway, I'm going nuts trying to figure out what other levers I could pull.

Speaker 1 And I would just sit there and be like, okay, I'm going to find one person

Speaker 1 on the feed

Speaker 1 and just

Speaker 1 understand their side of things and see if I can pull them over to my side of things. And maybe that butterfly wing effect will do some sort of good.

Speaker 2 You're not those people. Yeah, you voted for this.
Those people are just trying to win. They're just trying to like get you.

Speaker 2 And they're people that, for whatever reason, thought Kamala Harris would be a good president. And then there's also people that I don't even know if they're real humans.

Speaker 2 I think there's a lot of this stuff that we have to understand about social media is coordinated bot farms.

Speaker 2 And so anytime you have a hot button topic that could, you know, maybe get a bill rejected or get a bill passed, it's not organic, the comments. There's some organic comments.

Speaker 2 Some of these people that are negative, you voted for this, they're just a real fucking loser who doesn't like people that have public profiles, doesn't like people that are successful, doesn't like people, and they just want to find some way to call you out.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of that. But then there's a lot of coordinated artificial interaction.
And

Speaker 2 we've highlighted that, and we've been on that for quite a while because we found out through this one former FBI guy that 80%, his estimation was 80% of Twitter is bots.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 80%.

Speaker 1 You know, people are having...

Speaker 1 Their whole life is talking to bots then, if that's the case.

Speaker 2 Oh, it is the case. I know it's the case.

Speaker 2 I don't know if it's 80%, but I do know that it's an enormous number because

Speaker 2 I don't interact, and I'm now

Speaker 2 since separated myself so far that I'm kind of not even on social media anymore. I might check it in the morning.

Speaker 2 I check Twitter in the morning to see what everybody's mad at, you know, and then I usually feel bad after I check it. I'm like, why am I even looking at this? Jesus Christ, and I just get off.
And

Speaker 2 when you do that, you feel better. You just feel healthier.
You feel better.

Speaker 2 But when I do check and like there's any sort of a hot button issue, I'll look at someone as saying something outrageous and then I'll click on their profile.

Speaker 2 And then I'm like, it's like a bunch of letters and a few numbers. And then I look at their profile.
I'm like, oh, you're not even a real fucking person.

Speaker 2 And then you see, oh, this is like half of the people in this aren't real people.

Speaker 2 And it's, there's no laws. Like, there's no, I'm, first of all, I'm going to be real clear.
I'm against a law where it says you have to post under your name,

Speaker 2 your social security number has to be registered to this account so we know you're a real human being.

Speaker 2 The reason why I'm opposed to that is because I think whistleblowers are essential, because I think corruption is real.

Speaker 2 And I think if you hold someone accountable for everything they post, man, you're going down a dark road.

Speaker 2 You're going down a dark road where you could possibly get people fired for posts that, you know, like England is out of control right now. Like, I don't know if you know this, but England,

Speaker 2 I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood. How many people got arrested for social media posts in England this year? We've looked this up before.
I forget the number. It's in the thousands.

Speaker 2 Arrested for saying immigration is a real problem. We got to stop these grooming gangs.
We got to, you know, stop these Muslims from, you know, illegally immigrating into England. Arrested.

Speaker 2 Go to jail. Like, for real.

Speaker 1 That's insane. People do time.

Speaker 2 They're doing time. Like, no bullshit, real time for saying things.

Speaker 1 Like, I could kill for a cheeseburger. No, I always said I killed.
Not like that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Not like that.

Speaker 2 But it's mostly about policy issues. And what they're trying to do is make sure that everyone stays in line.
And so they're doing this by scaring people away from being critical of the government.

Speaker 2 And the way to start it is to attack people that say anything bad about immigration, attack people that say anything bad about the government.

Speaker 2 In fact, they just tried, they're just doing this in Brazil right now. They just passed this huge fucking law that

Speaker 2 you can get removed from social media for anything that's critical of the government, anything that's critical of Lula, who's the president of Brazil right now.

Speaker 2 You get removed from social media. Like, you can't be critical.
Like, they don't have freedom of speech anymore. And this is the slippery road.

Speaker 2 This is a slippery slope that we were going down with the last administration, what they had done during the pandemic. It's scary stuff, man, and people have to be aware of it.

Speaker 1 Well, I think there's a version of that, too, with what we were talking about on like the hard party politics people, right? Where it's like the social backlash of being a critical thinker

Speaker 1 is so much that

Speaker 1 it then creates a non-thinker or you just totally leave that zone.

Speaker 2 you don't pay attention anymore you're not going to talk about it yep yeah it's um you you self-censor you self-censor out of survival you know you're really like this is too dangerous I'm not going to say anything and that's how they get things passed because then you don't have any criticism and then you don't have any

Speaker 2 you don't you don't have any people that are opposing you it's very scary because again, a lot of this stuff that you're seeing that's causing people to self-center is not real self-censor is not real human beings.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's bots.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's my fear is that when you finally get that person to be like, all right, you know what? I'm going to leave this part of it behind and step out to advocate for what I believe in.

Speaker 1 And the first response they get is, you voted for this.

Speaker 2 Fuck you.

Speaker 1 You're getting what you deserve. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Right. Police make 30 rests a day for offensive online messages.

Speaker 1 Oh, God.

Speaker 2 No, nuts.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 officers from 37 forces made 12,183 arrests in 2023, the equivalent of about 33 per day. Marks an almost 58% rise in arrests since before the pandemic.

Speaker 2 In 2019, but still, like 2019, 7,000 detentions for online shit.

Speaker 2 So what we have in America is incredibly unique in that regard. And other countries are setting a standard, and it's a dangerous fucking standard.

Speaker 2 And we have to really make sure that that doesn't happen here. And we also have to make sure, I wish there was a way where you could identify bots.

Speaker 2 And Elon tried to find this out when he bought Twitter. So when he purchased Twitter, they told him that it was less than 5%.

Speaker 2 And he's like, well, how did you figure that out? And well, they only figured it out. It's not real.
It's not a real number.

Speaker 2 But they just took a random cross-section of 100 users and found 5% of those people were clearly bots. That doesn't mean anything.

Speaker 1 Job's done. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But you could also do that.

Speaker 2 You could take a random section of users that interact with very non-controversial subjects and find a small number of bots.

Speaker 2 Like, let's say you find a bird-watching group of people on Instagram or on Twitter. Like, what are the odds of those people going to be bots? Very small, right? There's no reason.

Speaker 2 There's no benefit financially or otherwise, politically.

Speaker 1 Big bird seed. Yeah.
You know, coming in.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Like, so if you go after bird, I use birdwatchers because I see them all the time.
You know, that's like the purest form of just this is what they're into.

Speaker 1 Great group. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Great group of people, but there's no financial incentive to support or deny bird watching.

Speaker 2 You know, so if you go to the birdwatcher group on Twitter, yeah, it's probably 5% bots because they're fucking everywhere.

Speaker 2 But if you, I guarantee, if you go to abortion or if you go to immigration or if you go to anything that's a hot button controversial ICE raids, whatever it is, any meat, anything, any hot-button controversial subject,

Speaker 2 there's a shit ton of them, man. And it's kind of creepy because

Speaker 2 who is paying for it? Who's paying for it? And why do we don't, how come we don't have any laws to stop that from happening? Because it's not real.

Speaker 2 You're getting this artificial sense of what the general public wants because they've monetized it and they've figured out a way to artificially inflate these numbers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I think

Speaker 2 it gives this illusion of this consensus amongst people. And they can do that even with ridiculous conclusions.

Speaker 1 And I think consensus, though, is so dangerous to any political party, right? Like what we just saw, there was an agenda. And everybody had to stand up and say something

Speaker 1 because of one freaking person who wanted to make this happen right

Speaker 1 and i guarantee you i guarantee you

Speaker 1 that what they're thinking about right now is holy how do we break up this consensus

Speaker 1 like what do we need to do we can't have bird watchers agreeing with off-road users and bow hunters right that's that's we can't win that right we need them to be only bird watchers, only bow hunters, only off-road users.

Speaker 2 Well, what we need to do is be apolitical. And I think we were with this, which is beautiful.
So the Democrats, the Republicans, and the people like me that are fucking politically homeless,

Speaker 2 they all came together on this and said, no, this is stupid. And all these people, oh, you voted for this.

Speaker 1 Fuck

Speaker 1 you.

Speaker 2 Nobody voted for that. Fuck you.
Like, this is one guy. And if history, if that didn't work, if we didn't have an impact, and if nobody stepped up and people like you weren't so steadfast,

Speaker 2 that would be in the history books. That Mike Lee guy would be the guy that you see, you know, your kids see in 40, 50 years.
And they read the history books, they go, oh, that guy?

Speaker 1 That guy did this? Yeah, he'd have a proud statue inside a giant strip mall,

Speaker 1 something that used to be public land. And be like, why is that here?

Speaker 2 Probably wouldn't.

Speaker 1 Because we gave up.

Speaker 2 Yeah, probably. That's what happened.
Well, it depends on who's writing the history books, right? It could be that he would be a hero.

Speaker 1 He turned it up.

Speaker 2 They generated $200 extra billion dollars that did nothing. did nothing for this.
I mean, this big, beautiful bill, doesn't it raise the debt by 3 trillion?

Speaker 1 I think that's what they came down to. It started at 4 and now it's at like 3.3 trillion.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And there's so much to it, too. Like, like I said, this is my own personal dumpster fire.

Speaker 2 What Trump wants is growth. He wants economic growth, and he thinks he can get it out of this, and that's the overall net benefit.

Speaker 1 Oh, and there's some bending over backwards, right? Like that Arctic trip that we were talking about.

Speaker 1 We went up to the 10.02 area on the Arctic plane. Just to add that.

Speaker 2 That ceiling increased by $5 trillion.

Speaker 1 Did that just happen, Jamie?

Speaker 1 That did pass this afternoon

Speaker 1 when we started, yeah. Okay.

Speaker 2 $150 billion in additional border security. Well, we probably need that.
$154 billion in additional defense spending.

Speaker 2 That's you got to

Speaker 2 feed the demons.

Speaker 1 The Golden Dome thing,

Speaker 1 which is not.

Speaker 2 What's What's the golden dome? That's space-based golden dome missile defense system.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Trump was enamored with Israel's missile defense system and wanted one. And most of the experts were like, that doesn't really work with our land mass.
Oh, boy.

Speaker 2 There's also hypersonic missiles. There's a lot of shit it doesn't work with.

Speaker 1 There's a

Speaker 1 there's a line item in here for

Speaker 1 I think it's a few billion bucks for our next big birthday, America's next big birthday, which

Speaker 1 I always think of affordable housing when we think of it.

Speaker 1 I bet the folks like having their own little individual parties and might

Speaker 1 think it's okay to throw that couple hundred million at an issue versus fireworks and parades. You know, I don't know, maybe, maybe.

Speaker 1 But yeah, man,

Speaker 1 we got it. We have got to stay unified

Speaker 1 on these things.

Speaker 2 Stay unified and avoid the comments, folks. And don't be scared.
Don't be scared to speak out against something that you know is wrong.

Speaker 1 And you jackasses, if you want something real bad, like I want public lands, public waters, public wildlife for the people real bad.

Speaker 1 I don't, when that shit talker converts and is like, yeah, public lands are sweet. I called my senator.
I don't say, say, fuck you. Right.
Shit talker. I say, thank you, dude.
Really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, most of those shit talkers don't have good friends. The people that actually are actual human beings that are losers.
The reason why they're losers is because they're in a bad spot. Okay.

Speaker 2 And any one of us could have been that person. Any one of us could have been that person that's surrounded by bad people.
They have a bad job. They got a bad relationship.
They live in a bad area.

Speaker 2 There's not a whole lot of hope.

Speaker 1 There's not a whole lot of happiness.

Speaker 2 And so you try to tear down everything around you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you put your petty shit over the top of the real shit.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but my perspective is, look, I can't fix everybody, so I can't help you. But I don't want to interact with you.
So I'm not going to, I'm not, I don't have the time. I don't have the resources.

Speaker 2 It's impossible. And I don't like it.
I don't like arguing with people, so I don't want to do it. If you talk to people one-on-one, most people are pretty fucking reasonable.

Speaker 1 Pretty amazing.

Speaker 2 But when they're just shouting out into the void like that Guess what? You don't have to read it.

Speaker 1 You don't have to listen.

Speaker 2 You don't have to interact.

Speaker 2 It's fucking bad for you. It's bad for your brain.
Everybody that I know that's on social media all the time is super unhealthy. Every one of them.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 For good reason.

Speaker 1 It's a trash pit. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It worked really.

Speaker 1 It worked really well in this case. Yeah.
Because

Speaker 1 it allowed that community to build fast and be reactive.

Speaker 2 But you have to curate your community online the same way you curate your community in the real world.

Speaker 2 And this is a part of not reading the comments because the comments is the whole world,

Speaker 2 or the people that are interacting.

Speaker 1 It's not really the whole world, but again, it's just,

Speaker 2 it's not worth it. It's just not worth it.
It's not worth going in there.

Speaker 1 And people,

Speaker 1 if you want to win,

Speaker 1 like identify that freaking goal. And

Speaker 1 think, okay, what's going to help me achieve that goal? It's not putting your petty shit above the goal, right? Right,

Speaker 1 you

Speaker 1 bury that stuff deep down inside and you say, great, thank you. Thanks for hopping on board.
Please tell your friends. We're gonna get to this goal together.
That's awesome.

Speaker 2 I think that's best done on a group basis. Like, just make a post.
Thank you to everybody that did it, but don't interact with individuals. It's just not worth it.
The people that I know that do it,

Speaker 1 they all get fucked up.

Speaker 2 Because it's just like, it just takes one comment that gets under your skin, that you carries you around while you're hanging out.

Speaker 2 You're at your kid's baseball game, and you think that cocksucker on Twitter, you know, and there's a lot of people out there that are doing that, man.

Speaker 2 You're watching your kid hit a home run, you're not even happy.

Speaker 2 You're mad about some fucking random dude who you don't even know if it's a real person.

Speaker 1 No, is the truth. I told that

Speaker 1 group I was with

Speaker 1 up in the Arctic, man. I'm like, I read them because I want to understand the argument and see if that's really the argument.

Speaker 1 Like, is this really where people are coming from, or is it just an asshole?

Speaker 2 There's mostly just an asshole, and even their argument probably sucks, but also a lot of it's artificial.

Speaker 2 You got to think about how much money is involved in selling off this public land, and how much of an interest do

Speaker 2 people have in pushing a narrative that would say that selling this public land is a good thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 there's money involved in this. Whenever there's money involved in this, you can pay for it.

Speaker 2 There's services where you can start a campaign like it's not real you there's services where if you want to push a narrative you can use their service and they will incorporate this bot farm and they will push it towards whatever you want to do

Speaker 1 and it's legal that's what's fucked that's so fucked yeah it's fake it's lying it's just lying with computers Yeah, and unfortunately, there's still a lot of people out there on the interweb going, well, I read it on the internet.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Well, there's whole articles reading.

Speaker 2 One commenter said, no, they didn't.

Speaker 2 You know, if that's a fucking robot, are you going to make a retraction? No, you're not. You're not.
If it's AI,

Speaker 2 are you going to say something about that? Are you going to say there's a problem? No, you're not going to say it. Because your whole business is clickbait.

Speaker 2 And the more you have negative comments you could use to start the formulation of an article, okay, that's how you make a living. And so don't read their fucking articles either.

Speaker 2 This is the key.

Speaker 1 Just like you have to just interact only with real humans i uh got in the practice of just being like okay what i'm about to say is going to be political involves scary words democrat republican it's going to make you uncomfortable don't believe me go to the federal register.gov

Speaker 1 that's the source material read it for yourself yeah i'm just going to tell you what i read in there on these pages That's the source material. Go read it.

Speaker 1 Like, that's where the land sales are happening. That's where it's outlined.
The text is there. It's the journal of the government printed every day online.
Go read it. And,

Speaker 1 you know, for the little stuff on the podcast, I don't deal with it. It's like the

Speaker 1 Montgomery Teller said an alligator came out.

Speaker 1 I don't say that. Cal's Week and Review.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Tell everybody your podcast.

Speaker 1 Cal's Week and Review. We do news, outdoor news, and we cover legislation.

Speaker 1 It's a fun podcast. The legislative desk.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 You have a good time with it, though.

Speaker 1 Man,

Speaker 1 there's some good times. There's some burnout times, right? Yeah.
Where I'm like screaming into the void. Like, guys, this land sale's coming.
Yeah. Yep.
Coming hot.

Speaker 2 Well, people listen to you, fortunately.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 2 It's got to feel a little good.

Speaker 2 Doesn't it feel good that people united and listened?

Speaker 1 I am trying to make it feel really good.

Speaker 2 But you're scared that it's going to happen again.

Speaker 1 Because I know it's going to happen again.

Speaker 1 Again, I'm wearing the same shirt that I wore on this show, talking about this same stuff six years ago or whenever we decided it was, right?

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 and I do, I feel really, really good. Like, a lot of people came out.
They threw political baggage aside. And

Speaker 1 they talked about how important this stuff is, and it's incredibly important to me.

Speaker 1 And I thank them all from the bottom of my heart because it is so important. And one voice is just not going to do this, right? So that does feel good.
That does feel good.

Speaker 1 I just kind of wanted there to be a vote on this amendment so all the American people can see exactly who voted for it and exactly who voted against it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And just lay it out on the table for everybody.

Speaker 2 That would be nice. Yeah.
And it'd be nice to see what special interests were involved,

Speaker 2 what money was pushing it in that direction.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 absolutely. Yeah, I mean, just

Speaker 1 we need a higher, and most people won't do this even if we had the ability, but we need

Speaker 1 more peaks behind the curtain, right? We need more accountability. Like, so just a great example.
I'm up at the state capitol in Montana. We just, our legislative session just ended

Speaker 1 at the beginning of the year.

Speaker 1 And there's some knucklehead brings this

Speaker 1 judicial amendment up to join, for the state of Montana to join

Speaker 1 Utah's lawsuit to sell off 18.5 million acres of public land. And 115 people showed up.
to testify against the state. This is during work hours in a Montana winter.

Speaker 1 115 people show up to testify against this. And there's some on online two there to be fair.

Speaker 1 Originally there were 10 people signed up to testify in favor of joining the lawsuit.

Speaker 1 All 10 of those people drop off.

Speaker 1 They only give everybody two minutes to testify in front of committee. Everybody testifies, don't do this, bad for Montana,

Speaker 1 bad for all these other reasons. Professional people,

Speaker 1 some lobbyists,

Speaker 1 nonprofit people, but just a lot of people being like, yeah, I'm a dad and this is where I take my kids. Like, why would we do this?

Speaker 1 That committee

Speaker 1 approves it and sends it through.

Speaker 1 Wow. And there's no accountability.
You can't say, okay, how many people called your office? How many emails did you get? None.

Speaker 2 Right. Your representatives just decide against the will of the people.

Speaker 1 The ones that showed up and were vocal.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 So, how do it work? And I understand why people do not trust this stuff.

Speaker 1 Right. Like, that's a hard experience to have.

Speaker 2 It's hidden on purpose. You know, they want to be able to do what they want to do.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And there's a lot of money that gets them elected.
And once they get in there, they get these phone calls from these folks: hey, I need you to do this.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Montana's a good example right now.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 So John Tester, who was an awesome public lands guy, Democrat, farmer out of Big Sandy, Montana. That's the only political

Speaker 1 donation I've ever made in my life was to his campaign because he was awesome on public lands. He got he lost this year.

Speaker 1 So we have Tim Shees, our freshman senator in Montana.

Speaker 1 So he's brand new. He won John Tester's seat.
And then we have Steve Daines, who's been in for a long time. He's a senior Republican, also on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
And

Speaker 1 Republicans, and they said,

Speaker 1 not in as strong a words as I would want,

Speaker 1 that they're not for the sale of public lands during this fight, during the House, and then during the Senate fight again,

Speaker 1 we're not going to sell public lands. Our Republican Ryan Zinke, also,

Speaker 1 he's a representative in the House.

Speaker 1 You know, he said, that's my San Juan Hill.

Speaker 1 He's like, I'm going to die on San Juan Hill before I vote to sell off America's public lands, right?

Speaker 1 So I think for everybody else who's naysaying whether a Republican can do this or it's just the Democrats that are willing, I think we have a good example in Montana right now.

Speaker 1 And I'm not saying give up. I'm going to hold these people accountable.
And I think everybody else should too.

Speaker 1 Um, that these Republicans are willing to go to bat for public lands right now, and we're making it that like third-rail issue where it's like, if you want to win in the state of Montana, you better be good on public lands.

Speaker 2 Were there any Democrats that were in favor of selling off public lands?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, one of your uh one of your California folks came out early in the

Speaker 1 mine.

Speaker 2 I abandoned those people,

Speaker 2 uh, you know, because I identify as a Texan now, I converted.

Speaker 1 I've been transitioned. Yes, I tran.
Oh, I support you, Jim. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Thank you for seeing my truth.

Speaker 1 But, you know,

Speaker 1 it's just

Speaker 1 another easy answer to the very hard question of affordable housing. Right? So I think there's plenty of Democrats out there.
I think it's a bullshit answer. Oh, it's a total bullshit answer.

Speaker 2 They just want to sell the land. I don't think they had

Speaker 1 any

Speaker 2 interest in turning it into public housing.

Speaker 1 No. Fuck off.
Fuck off is right.

Speaker 2 Put public housing in the middle of the woods.

Speaker 1 Fuck off.

Speaker 2 No. It's not what you're doing.

Speaker 1 No. No.

Speaker 2 It's one of those things that you say to people. So they're like, oh, it would go to the greater good.

Speaker 1 Well, my God, we've been talking about urban renewal for how long in this country, right?

Speaker 1 Like, there's a lot of places that are not going to be good for wildlife, not going to be good for the matriculation of clean water. They're not producing clean air.

Speaker 1 That could be great affordable housing or just housing in general for people.

Speaker 1 But that's hard. It's not convenient.
Exactly. Not convenient.
That's the thing.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you for doing what you do, brother. And thank you for being such a vocal spokesperson during this time because it was really, really impactful.
It made a lot. Made a lot of difference.

Speaker 1 Really did. Well, I'm going to be here for the next one, Joe.
All right.

Speaker 2 Let's hope we don't have to do this again.

Speaker 1 I want to change my shirt.

Speaker 2 Let's hope we don't have to do it again. But if we do, we'll do it again.

Speaker 1 All right. Thanks a bunch of people.
Thank you, brother.

Speaker 2 And Cal's Week and Review. It's available everywhere.

Speaker 2 Apple, Spotify, all that jazz, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Old Cal406 on the Instagram. And if you want to do me a huge favor, I'm the North American board chair for backcountry hunters and anglers.

Speaker 1 And we put in over 150,000 comments, phone calls from real people who used our Action Alert Center during this public lands battle. And

Speaker 1 that's made a big difference because we can go into those offices and say, Hey, 2,500 people called your office today. Have you heard about public lands?

Speaker 1 So become a member. It helps us out and we'll help you out.
And we're not going to give up on this stuff.

Speaker 2 I'm a lifetime member.

Speaker 1 Love you, both. Love you, too, both.
All right.

Speaker 2 Bye, everybody.

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