Braxton McCoy: Iraq, Opioids, and Defending US Land From Foreign Governments & Corporate Giants

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Speaker 2 So you basically single-handedly stopped the sale of federal lands, a huge expanse of federal lands. You're not a politician.
You haven't been a public public figure.

Speaker 2 I'm not exactly sure how you did that, but I'd love to know.

Speaker 2 Just give us the two-minute background. Who are you? Where are you from? How did you wind up involved in this question?

Speaker 2 Fundamentally, I'm just an idiot horse trainer

Speaker 2 in Idaho. I'm not

Speaker 2 anything important or

Speaker 2 powerful or anything like that. I'm just a regular guy.
I've always been a regular guy. I have no desire, despite how many people have tried to push me, I have no desire to go into politics.

Speaker 2 That's probably why they're pushing you.

Speaker 2 I want to write write my books and hang out with my kids and ride horses and go fishing and hunting.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's who I am. I don't, I've said this many times elsewhere.

Speaker 2 I don't think it's just me. I think it worked because there were so many people that were upset.
Yes. To a degree, I guess I ended up

Speaker 2 kind of spearheading some things.

Speaker 2 I mean, maybe a way I would look at it is it wouldn't be the first time I've taken point and I'll take point, but it's still a team effort at the end of the day and it has to be that way if if it be if something this important becomes about one guy versus another guy we'll lose yes it can't be like that well and that's never a reflection of reality anyway there are always huge forces that get embodied in individuals but it's not so much about the individual it's about the huge forces behind him and the horses the forces that you harnessed i think just watching um

Speaker 2 fundamentally were like the great love of the land by normal people like people understand that land is is essential it's connected to identity it's connected to the definition of america and so don't treat it lightly maybe that's one of the lessons i think that's totally right uh

Speaker 2 we talked about this at breakfast but

Speaker 2 ultimately it's the love of my people And the land is a part of my people. Those two things are inextricably connected.
Yes.

Speaker 2 I believe that fundamentally, and I don't want to be like overly pious or anything like that, but I believe fundamentally we're called to serve our people. Yes.

Speaker 2 So if it took an idiot horse trainer to, you know, in my view, save a bunch of small family ranches throughout the West, then, you know, so be it. It worked.
Where are you from?

Speaker 2 I'm originally from southern Utah. I live in Idaho now, but I grew up down in, well, I guess I probably shouldn't say, but southern Utah.
Big town, small town? We're very small.

Speaker 2 Not a lot of big towns in southern Utah. No.
I mean, maybe St. George has gotten a lot bigger, but

Speaker 2 no.

Speaker 2 I don't even want to say the size. Sub 1,000 people by a lot, I guess.
Wow.

Speaker 2 Your hometown is fewer than 1,000 people. Yeah.
Cows outnumbered us probably 12 to 1.

Speaker 2 Also, legit rural. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I grew up on a little horse place.

Speaker 2 My old man was

Speaker 2 a horse trainer, but he's an electric electrician. I think he got an electrical engineering degree as well.
But that's what he did to kind of make ends meet was the electrical stuff.

Speaker 2 And then we raced horses and

Speaker 2 cowboy did a lot of day working growing up, helping neighbors and family and all that. So you see the struggle from a young age.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 right now, what's happening?

Speaker 2 You've elided over an interesting chapter in your own life. I just ask you to address it really quickly.

Speaker 2 You clearly don't want to talk about it, but you, you joined the military at some point. Yeah.

Speaker 2 When?

Speaker 2 I was 17.

Speaker 2 We, I was skipping school as I was wont to do at the time when I was at my cousins, and we watched 9-11 happen

Speaker 2 on TV live. Wow.
And you know, back then there was that famous, I forget, it was a pace, some salsa commercial, you know, the New York City.

Speaker 2 So New York City. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And we didn't have any, there was no love loss between us and New York City, right? I mean, that's kind of the whole point of the commercial.

Speaker 2 But when that happened, it's like, okay, I don't like them, but that's still my brother. You don't get to punch my brother in the face.
Amen. So

Speaker 2 a lot of rural kids felt the same way and we enlisted. And I remember my mom, because when you're that age, your parents have to sign for you to, you know, join.

Speaker 2 And I told her, I said, yeah, I mean, you can either sign this now and I'll get a little bit more money. You know, I'll go in as like a PV2 instead of a PV1 or whatever,

Speaker 2 or I'm going the day I turn 18. So, I mean, you're just delaying the inevitable if you don't sign this.
So, she signed it and I went to Benning and then to the war. You joined the army.
Yeah. At 17.

Speaker 2 Yep. And, well, I think by the time I shipped, I had already turned 18, like for boot camp or basic training.
But you signed up at 17. Yeah.
Yeah, I wanted to go to war. A lot of us did.

Speaker 2 You're young and stupid, and a lot of cultural forces were telling us this was the right thing. And I believed it, you know, and plus

Speaker 2 wrongfully

Speaker 2 as misguided as I was,

Speaker 2 I wanted to get, you know, take a swing back at the person

Speaker 2 in our mind, at the people that are taking a swing at us. You know, I think everyone, every American, most Americans felt that way for sure.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you get there and about three months in, you get a little disillusioned.

Speaker 2 Well, yes.

Speaker 2 So you join, you go to Benning, then they ship you overseas to Iraq. Yep.
Well, yeah, I got back to my unit and they weren't going to deploy.

Speaker 2 So I volunteered for this other deployment because I just wanted to get there. And this artillery battalion needed a PSD team.
So they were a personal security detail.

Speaker 2 So they were, you know, looking for guys. And we ended up with this kind of hodgepodge of random MOSs of just guys that wanted to to do this job.

Speaker 2 So, we did a train-up, learned how to do that. And it's funny, like in keynotes, I used to say we were to try to explain it.
You know, if you're talking to bankers, they don't really know what PSD is.

Speaker 2 You know, they certainly know what EP is, but I would say we're kind of like the Army's idea of secret service, except for better trained or not as well trained, you know. But now, I'm like,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 2 yeah, a lot of us are rethinking questions like that. Yes.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And so we go, we end up in Ramadi.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 the first thing that happened that really changed, I think was

Speaker 2 important,

Speaker 2 but really changed my view of the war altogether. We drove up from Kuwait.

Speaker 2 A lot of our guys airlifted, but we had all this heavy equipment. Well, of course, the PSD team is going to do security for.

Speaker 2 So we took the drive.

Speaker 2 It's quite a drive, isn't it yeah yeah oh man i've done it it's scary yeah you know you first you cross that border and you know there's oil wells on oil wells on fire and you know busted up cars and then like you know just poverty like you've never seen before busted up cars from the first iraq

Speaker 2 correct yeah yep yeah i mean just the highway of death they never never cleaned it up no yeah it's amazing and then we get to scania and that night well i probably shouldn't tell that story, but we stayed with some Polish SF guys and they were fun.

Speaker 2 They were like very cool. You know, I just ended at that.
And then we go from there, I believe, I don't think we stopped again.

Speaker 2 We refueled somewhere just south of Baghdad, Scania or something like that.

Speaker 2 And then there's this, their highway system is like ours for anybody who doesn't know. I mean, it looks like a western highway.

Speaker 2 And there's this turn just past Baghdad where you turn toward Fallujah or Mahdi.

Speaker 2 mahdi and right after that you know there's these compounds all over around there they'll have like these walls around them and all like rich people poor people rich it's almost like houston yeah

Speaker 2 so we we end up the lead truck spots an id

Speaker 2 and it's dark it's like two o'clock in the morning or something And we had a Marine escort because we'd never been there before. So the Marines were taking point.

Speaker 2 And then we were just kind of additional security. Well, this Marine comes and knocks on the door of our truck and he says, Hey, do you want to go help us clear this complex?

Speaker 2 And of course, I'm like 19. I'm like, hell yeah.
That's why I'm here. You know what? So I'm like grabbing.
And what we were told is we're going to try. There was a prayer rug.

Speaker 2 You know, they found this prayer rug. And that prayer rug had suspiciously an ID and some stuff left there.
And then there was debt cord going back toward this compound.

Speaker 2 And the plan was to go in there, find whatever was at the end of the debt cord and take care of the problem.

Speaker 2 One version of taking care of the problem was going to be just blowing up the house and moving on. You know, we got shit to do, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I'm pretty excited because I'm thinking, oh my, I'm going to get to blow up a building.

Speaker 2 like grabbing extra flags and an AT4 and like, or frag grenades, you know, and an AT4. And

Speaker 2 well, we get to this compound.

Speaker 2 There's like a brick wall around it and we're trying to find an ingress route you know you don't want to just go over the wall yeah because who knows what's so we end up finding a part of the wall that had been busted by a mortar or you know one of our guns or something i don't know and and we were able to kind of skirt the side of the building

Speaker 2 And I was in my mind the entire time. I kept thinking, I cannot wait to blow this freaking house up.
This is going to be so cool.

Speaker 2 And just like every 19-year-old kid, right?

Speaker 2 Unless you've been a 19-year-old boy, like it's probably hard to understand what that means. We're sorry to say it, but this is not a very safe country.
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Speaker 2 Yeah, good luck.

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Speaker 2 We

Speaker 2 get around the front of the house and we can see this debt cord going through into the home.

Speaker 2 And we're like, well, let's go all the way around and make sure that it doesn't go through and out just in case they were trying to set somebody up, you know, some innocent

Speaker 2 people.

Speaker 2 And as I was looking inside the building, there was a generator running in inside and it was sitting on a piece of plywood. And I remember thinking, that is strange.
Why would they do that? You know,

Speaker 2 well, we get around the front and there's right at this stoop, there's a bunch of sandals lined up and it's like oldest to youngest.

Speaker 2 So it's like dad, mom, kid, and then all the way down to this like two-inch pair of pink like flip-flop deals.

Speaker 2 And I had just left my little sister with my mom, who was roughly the same age. And man,

Speaker 2 I went from wanting to do that to not wanting to do that really fast.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think that changed my war for me for the rest of the time.

Speaker 2 I probably could have got sucked into being overly aggressive and uncompassionate, but that really helped right from the jump solidify that these are actual people. Oh, yes.

Speaker 2 Well, luckily, we go all the way around and the deck cord was running through out into this olive orchard.

Speaker 2 And one of our guys without warning, without warning us, hit a pin flare to light up so we could see the olive orchard.

Speaker 2 And my team leader just dove into the ground because he thought we were taking incoming. So he's like diving into this olive orchard.

Speaker 2 And it ended up we were able to solve the problem without doing anything to the home.

Speaker 2 And it had turned out, at least from what we were told, that what they had done is captured that family and stuffed them into a cellar and then put that board, that plywood over the hole and then put the generator so we couldn't hear them down there yelling.

Speaker 2 And they were hoping that we would just blow them up, you know.

Speaker 2 And we didn't.

Speaker 2 And I think that, like, as I say, I'm sorry to just keep rambling, but. You're not rambling at all.
So this was like within days of getting into the country. I think day two.
I think.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It really helped understand the war. You know, we're fighting a war in cities.
You know, and first of all, I've never even lived in a city.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you didn't really have to convince me that cities were bad.

Speaker 2 So Baghdad was really the first big city you saw.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, I had family in the suburbs of Salt Lake and stuff like that, but we would go eat at Lamb's Cafe when I was a kid.

Speaker 2 Salt Lake used to be a fundamentally different place than it is right now.

Speaker 2 Thank you, immigration.

Speaker 2 So I had been to Salt Lake, but you remember Salt Lake in the 80s and 90s. It was totally different.

Speaker 2 Nothing like it is now.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 this was the first city I'd ever lived in, was Ramadi when we got there. I mean, to the extent that you're living in it, right?

Speaker 2 Uh,

Speaker 2 they mean like kind of hilarious.

Speaker 2 The first big city I ever lived in was Ramadi, Iraq. Yeah, it's true.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've only ever lived in two: Salt Lake when I was going to school for a minute, and Ramadi. That's it.
And it'd be at this point, I don't even know which one I hated worse.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you know, Ramadi's probably pretty nice right now, actually, like relatively.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then after that is just pretty typical war. We,

Speaker 2 you know, one story, we, we were there for about a week or two. And this guy,

Speaker 2 he's driving a truck, like a big truck. And we were on an OP out in front of Fabromati on route mobile.
And we were kind of running a blocking position up there.

Speaker 2 And this guy comes winging in like he's just going to drive by us because he's got a... a cross hung on his radiator, like a lit up cross.

Speaker 2 And we shot just warning shots into the ground like, hey, you got to stop. What the heck are you doing? You know, and he jumps out waving his arms.

Speaker 2 I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian, you know, and we're like, You're an Iraqi dude. I mean, we're happy that you're a Christian, you know, but you're an Iraqi.

Speaker 2 And that's there. I think for the average American, it's really hard to process just how tribal those regions really are.

Speaker 2 Yes, like he genuinely believed you guys are Christians, I'm a Christian, we're just the same team without any

Speaker 2 we need no more justification than that, is kind of his worldview.

Speaker 2 And looking back at that, I wish, you know, he was kind of right. I totally agree.
I mean, he was right. He was right.
We should have just trusted him. Probably.
Of course. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But so, like, we had some things like that. And then,

Speaker 2 you know, typical war stuff beyond that. Some stuff.
How long were you there?

Speaker 2 I think about seven months before I got wounded. It's six, seven months.
How did that happen? I got hit by a suicide bomber at a glass factory on on a security mission and

Speaker 2 yeah we were

Speaker 2 we were we were providing just to tell briefly we were providing security for a marine element that was recruiting iraq sunni iraqis to become ip iraqi police officers what what we you know bremer and others had decided that we couldn't hire any baathists And they also seemed to think that it would be a good idea to have Sunnis police Shia and Shia police Sunnis.

Speaker 2 And that's just, I mean,

Speaker 2 talk about ancient tribal conflict.

Speaker 2 You'd have to be,

Speaker 2 how could you be that dumb? I don't know. You're conducting a war.

Speaker 2 This is basic level stuff. You have to understand the people, you know.
Or people in general.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So we're... Why make it a humiliation ritual?

Speaker 2 You know, it does feel like that. Of course.
It's the oldest.

Speaker 2 Right. It's why the peace settlement after the First World War,

Speaker 2 you know, the Western nations wound up sending African peacekeepers to Germany

Speaker 2 to humiliate the Germans. And, you know, how that worked out?

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 How did the Iraq experiment work out? I mean, I don't understand. Right.
So, anyway, sorry. No, no, you're right.

Speaker 2 And that

Speaker 2 sort of Bremer era. and I try not to criticize people

Speaker 2 with the benefit of hindsight. Yes.

Speaker 2 But some of this was so dumb. So we had to, we were recruiting Sunnis to, you know, be shipped over to a allied

Speaker 2 country

Speaker 2 for training,

Speaker 2 an allied Muslim country. I just don't know if you're supposed to say.
It's not hard to figure out who was going to. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And they were training them and then, you know, going to send send them back and so we were just the security almost is all

Speaker 2 and it was day four of what was supposed to be a three-day mission typical iraq thing

Speaker 2 and i i was out there and my interpreter

Speaker 2 was with me and we were just kind of asking questions to the people like why are you here and stuff like that because there was a lot of people there and they were there early And as I've said elsewhere, these are not a punctual people, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So we knew something was wrong. And this guy comes up and he's frantically yelling at me.
And of course, I barely know any words in Arabic at all.

Speaker 2 And it ends up being translated to me as, I saw a grenade with wires. He was genuinely trying to tell us what he had seen and help us, but we thought tripwire because he was saying grenade.

Speaker 2 Well, then it ends up a couple minutes later, we end up in a scramble and

Speaker 2 this, the semi-truck crashes through this eastern perimeter that we had set up and that morning we had been told to look out be on the look for v-beds so he crashes through

Speaker 2 uh vehicle borne explosive device uh improvised explosive device but so he crashes through and of course we everybody lights up the truck you have to and then you know now there's iraqis scattered all over the place well in the I don't know if they changed this after my time, but in those years, you were not allowed to hire any Bathists for any reason into any government position.

Speaker 2 So now we have

Speaker 2 that. So what did they do with their time? Well,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 so much of that war, even as a young idiot kid, you look back and just think, how?

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Speaker 2 but but so the result of that was now we have iraqis running all over the place and we've got to get them back into lines and you know get this mission done

Speaker 2 and the lines had to be person with no id person with a government id person with a government id that says bathys on it and then we were separating them that way and then eventually uh really high-speed guy lieutenant colonel uh mclaughlin we colonel mac we called him he came out there to help us and some dog handlers.

Speaker 2 And we were getting these guys in line. And the next thing you know, a suicide bomber goes off.
And this killed or wounded like 106 people or something like that.

Speaker 2 Killed two Americans,

Speaker 2 our friend and dog handler, Sergeant Cann, and then Lieutenant Colonel McGlofflin.

Speaker 2 And I try to

Speaker 2 say this as often as I can now.

Speaker 2 He was like 30, he was like 33 years old or something at the time, and a lieutenant colonel and i was a 20 year old kid i turned 20 over there

Speaker 2 and he was out

Speaker 2 genuinely in harm's way everyone knew that it was a dangerous situation and certainly colonel mack knew and he put himself out there and died and there they don't make many officers like that he was a very very brave man he did not need to be there no Not even at all.

Speaker 2 He was the highest ranking guy there by, I mean, the other highest ranking guy would be like an E7, you know.

Speaker 2 Uh, so he died and I got wounded. Basically, everything that in the same explosion.
Yeah. Do you remember it? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's, um,

Speaker 2 I don't know if the concussion knocked me out and then I woke up on the ground, but I was awake on the ground.

Speaker 2 Um, but do you remember the

Speaker 2 truck went off? No, a suicide bomber with a vest. So what had happened is our dog handler or one of the dog handlers that was helping us sergeant cann

Speaker 2 his dog detected the bomb and grabbed this dude by the arm and was trying to pull him to the ground and then it it went off and amazingly bruno the dog that had done that lived through the explosion seriously yep he later deployed again to afghanistan i mean just incredible dog

Speaker 2 what kind of dog uh Malino. Malino.
Malinois, yeah. Malinois.

Speaker 2 Really neat dog. And it was funny.
Right before they came out there, he was sleeping on my truck, like the hood of my truck. And Sergeant Kan's like, you know, do you want us to come out and help?

Speaker 2 And in my mind, I'm thinking, yeah, put that thing to work. He's just napping, you know?

Speaker 2 And he was a cool dog. We all liked him.
But he lived and Sergeant Cann didn't, unfortunately. And he was an incredibly brave man, too.

Speaker 2 He had, I think this was his third tour. I think he had been to Iraq once in Afghanistan once before this.

Speaker 2 It might have even been his fourth tour, but he had been out at Fob Hit on the Syrian border and he requested to be.

Speaker 2 This is my understanding of it. He requested to be moved to Armadi because they were bored and he wanted to like fight.
So he was an incredibly brave guy. He also did not have to be out there.

Speaker 2 And he made that choice and deserves, you know, admiration for his courage. He was profoundly brave.

Speaker 2 And he died. And then I, me and a couple other guys got wounded.
And for me, it was multiple bilateral femur fractures. My tibia was broken, both my hips, all the bones in my right hand.

Speaker 2 So my right hand doesn't work very good.

Speaker 2 My radius and ulnar and

Speaker 2 my right median nerve was transected at my wrist. So I don't really have much feeling through.

Speaker 2 through that part of my hand and like this

Speaker 2 my fingers fused you know my little sister calls me Captain Hook.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 I had brain injuries and some broken ribs and broken back, and I was pretty busted up. Do you remember it going off? The noise, yeah, it's funny.

Speaker 2 I remember the flash and the sound, and then waking up on the ground, and there were bodies on top of me. I talked about this a little bit on Sean's.

Speaker 2 I should have done a better job describing it, but I, I could hear my first line leader, Johnny, yelling you know just like every other mick kid they just call you mac you know

Speaker 2 so it's like mac mac i can hear him and i'm like trying to yell back at him and i i'd had myself propped up on this elbow

Speaker 2 i had like my left hand worked but my left humerus was busted and my right humerus worked but then everything down here didn't work so i was like kind of in this and i had myself prop propped up and there was this pile of guts

Speaker 2 uh underneath me and when i was was looking at that, I was thinking that I'd been blown in half.

Speaker 2 I mean, who else's guts would they be? And so I was like running an organ through my fingers trying to see if I could feel it, sitting there thinking I'd been blown in half.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 we'd seen people get hurt really badly, but I had never seen that. So I wasn't sure exactly what that would look like.

Speaker 2 And I was trying to figure out. if it was like a pancreas or something.
Oh, you know, and

Speaker 2 you know, I felt anatomy. So I'm just

Speaker 2 like winging it. You thought it was your pancreas.
I did. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I also didn't even know if you could feel your organs in that way, you know, so I like, I didn't know if you really had external feeling on them. Most people have never had this experience.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, I was one of those.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 eventually Johnny gets there.

Speaker 2 And like I say, I'm kind of propped up. And he, he started, what I didn't know was that there were like three bodies on top of me.
and these organs belonged to a different person an iraqi person

Speaker 2 and he started removing the bodies and i could feel like a little bit of weight go off and then a little bit more and then that was pulled out and then i could see my hip bones uh or the top of my hips not the actual bones but

Speaker 2 um like my uniform and then they rolled me over and my my legs were cooked as the kids would say and you could tell because they were not it was like jello you know, moving around. And your femurs,

Speaker 2 you know, your glutes and quads are so strong that if your femurs break bad enough, they just contract.

Speaker 2 So my femur was like, as both of them were like the leg was now like as wide almost as it was long. Like it just retracted like a slinky.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 2 which might have been the only thing that kept me alive. Because I have,

Speaker 2 I'm not, I can't even remember exactly how many holes it is, but between knee to hip on both quads is like 30 holes, something.

Speaker 2 So had I not had that, it sort of acted like an internal tourniquet and kept me from bleeding out, probably.

Speaker 2 Because when they got my uniform cut off, you could, every time my heart would beat, you could see the blood kind of ooze out.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 of the through and throughs, I have some through and throughs.

Speaker 2 And you could just, it was like, I always describe it as like squeezing a water bottle, but with rhythm, you know, and it just kind of pour out like that. You could see this? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I had no, my, my blood pressure was so low, they weren't, weren't giving me any, and it was good that they didn't, but they weren't giving me any pain meds or anything.

Speaker 2 You know, morphine will kill you if you don't have enough blood pressure. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Um, so they started working on me and then life flooded me, or excuse me, medivaced me to uh

Speaker 2 uh Fabromati. What made the holes? What was the projectile that a ball bearings? Oh, wow.
Yep. And probably came from Iran.
You know, probably. I mean, we don't know that.

Speaker 2 This was a Sunni person, but a lot of the materials for that stuff was coming from. Ball bearings.
Do you have any of them? Yeah. I've got, I think I pack around like 12 of them in my body still.

Speaker 2 And then I've had like three more cut out since I got home that have kind of like surfaced in different. Ball bearings.
Yeah, straight up.

Speaker 2 Do you have them?

Speaker 2 With me? No, no, but did you keep them? Yeah, yeah. Well, not all of them that they cut out.
I didn't get a choice in like Fallujah when they were cutting stuff out there.

Speaker 2 But at home, yeah, I think I have three or four that I've had cut out of like my forearms and my rear end and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 So I had like a little jar.

Speaker 2 How big are the ball bearings?

Speaker 2 Like

Speaker 2 about the size of a pee is what they'd be. Wow.
Yeah. I think we counted one time.
I don't want to lie. Like mega buckshot.
That's what it was. Yeah.
It's like getting hit with exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's exactly like that. And then there was one spot on my one quad where my right side where you could about put your fist in the hole.

Speaker 2 And there's been confusion since day one about whether that was a gunshot from an AK or just more ball bearings. Could have really been either.
Were there rifles going off too? Yeah.

Speaker 2 RIPs started just firing. I bet.
So, and it's a Rocky policeman. Yes, I'm sorry.

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Speaker 2 Does he really love the product? Would he keep the product at home? Ask my dogs. Yes.
Now we are in a garage. I'm not going to tell you where it is because, again, this is prepping.

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And this. is a part of my stockpile of Ready Hour.

Speaker 2 Completely real. The second I put it here, the second Ready Hour sent it to me, I felt peace of mind.

Speaker 2 Because no matter what happens, we're not going hungry in my house. I moved a lot of fishing gear out of the way to keep it in my garage.

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Speaker 2 With the peace of mind that comes with having it.

Speaker 2 And when that kind of thing happens, it's hard.

Speaker 2 Are they doing that intentionally or not?

Speaker 2 You know.

Speaker 2 But the best IP we had,

Speaker 2 I don't want to say his name for fear of he died, but his family.

Speaker 2 He died out there with us. He was extremely brave, really good kid.
He was like 6'4,

Speaker 2 120 pounds.

Speaker 2 Yeah. He's the weirdest looking Iraqi you've ever seen.
It's like, it's like running into Yao Ming, but then, you know, it's like when your brain's trying to compute. Like, wait a second.

Speaker 2 He was a great kid. He was a great guy.
I really liked him. I remember remember one time we were,

Speaker 2 I don't even remember where we were at on an OP or something, and we try to teach each other the languages, you know, and he points to the tire on their technical, on their truck, and he says, tire.

Speaker 2 And I was like, yeah, good job. You know, and he's like, no, tire.
I was like, wait, is that how you say it in Arabic? You know, it's like this bonding moment, you know? We're like, yeah, dude.

Speaker 2 We were just all kids, you know, arm wrestling and screwing off, and,

Speaker 2 you know, and

Speaker 2 punctuated every once in a while by war stuff, you know.

Speaker 2 And I think it's,

Speaker 2 I think that experience really matters.

Speaker 2 It's so easy to dehumanize people that you're fighting with at that level. And I think I was really blessed to have multiple experiences to remind me that they're all people.

Speaker 2 You know, how long did it take you to recover from all that?

Speaker 2 They retired me about a year and a half later, and then it took probably another eight years to get to where I could run. Uh, I didn't think I was ever going to be able to run again,

Speaker 2 and in the hospital, wait, so it took until you're almost 30? Yeah, took like a decade to get better, yeah. It did.
I think I was 28 when I ran the first time, or seven maybe something like that.

Speaker 2 Uh, might have been 29, whatever, whatever that year was

Speaker 2 2012 maybe i can't be right whatever year it was um

Speaker 2 yeah i mean i could get around but i you know i couldn't really walk or anything i mean i could walk but not well certainly not well for a 25 year old you know

Speaker 2 uh and then i finally got to get up on the mountain again i packed a cane on my back because i thought who knows what coming down is going to be like you know and that felt really good to get up to a mountain lake and be like, holy shit, we did it, you know, after all this time, you know?

Speaker 2 And then I was coaching a little kid's baseball program. It was this girl that I was with.
It was her son's team. So I was just helping.
And I was throwing BP to him.

Speaker 2 And this kid hit a ball, batting practice. And this kid hit a ball to my glovehand side.

Speaker 2 And this is like eight years later or however many. And

Speaker 2 I took a couple of steps that just felt different,

Speaker 2 like they felt almost athletic, if that makes sense. And I dropped my glove and I just jogged.
I was like, I think I can run, you know, and I ran around the bases.

Speaker 2 And then I called some of my buddies from the war and Casey and Johnny and a couple others. And Casey's like, wears his emotion on his sleeve.
So he starts crying, you know.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, I was like, over here feeling like sea biscuit or something you know

Speaker 2 did you i should have asked so did you go immediately back to the west when you got out of the hospital oh yeah yeah they moved me back to my hometown and i got really lucky in that my civilian physical therapist and my civilian doctor were really great uh i did that in

Speaker 2 in central Utah. The one guy, my civilian doctor, he was an MDDO.
So he leaned away from drugs really hard, which was a blessing.

Speaker 2 Cause I was, you know, leaving Walter Reed, they had me on some ridiculous amount of opioids, like 380 milligrams a day or something. How long were you there?

Speaker 2 Four months.

Speaker 2 You were on opioids for four months? Oh, yeah, longer than that. Well, so in the, in Walter Reed,

Speaker 2 take a step back.

Speaker 2 We

Speaker 2 basically everybody who gets wounded over there was contracting this infection and they weren't sure it was some bug that does not exist here. So they had us in quarantine.

Speaker 2 So I was in an ice, a quarantined ICU unit for

Speaker 2 three or four weeks because I couldn't leave ICU until one, I was stable and two, I could be in a wheelchair of some kind. And they couldn't do that without putting rods.

Speaker 2 in my legs because I had external fixators on those big cage deals.

Speaker 2 And you can't get the rods until you clear the infection, you know? So, they were trying to clear this infection, and there was some question about whether they were even going to be able to do that.

Speaker 2 I mean, who knew? And

Speaker 2 they finally got that cleared, and then I developed gangrene.

Speaker 2 Oh, come on. Yeah, they were, I don't want to crap on Walter Reed, but they were doing some

Speaker 2 some guys were doing their best, and other guys were like changing through and through wounds with a, like the, the packing with like a number two pencil and shit like that you know it's in the united states at walter read yeah in dc

Speaker 2 but a lot of them were really great people and i don't want to crap on them i mean they helped me put me back together and they did a pretty good job uh but so then i got that infection so i couldn't get rods then you know i'm just kind of stuck so you got gangrene at walter reed

Speaker 2 yeah it was horrific and then i finally they finally get rods in me just picture david from face when you're saying saying this, you know, just casually, access of evil.

Speaker 2 We're bringing democracy, no care at all for what it means for men from southern Utah and like destroying their lives. It just makes me upset.
And I was lucky.

Speaker 2 I mean, I could have lost my legs really easily.

Speaker 2 Really easily. Did you get, I mean, how are your spirits? Did you get down? Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I wrote a lot about that.

Speaker 2 You know, it was like a roller coaster experience at Walter Reed. But

Speaker 2 they first, to back up even one more step, just to kind of give an idea of how fragile everything was at the time,

Speaker 2 I first went to Landstool.

Speaker 2 And my understanding, and this could be wrong. Based in Germany.
Yes,

Speaker 2 they have a big medical hospital there.

Speaker 2 And my understanding, and this could be wrong, but what they would try to do in Landstool is really get somebody very stable and do preliminary surgeries and then send them to Walter Reed.

Speaker 2 But they did not do that with me. They were like,

Speaker 2 we got to get you to Walter Reed. So I was only in Lawnstall for

Speaker 2 less than a week, I think is what it was.

Speaker 2 And so I was in tough shape is the only reason I'm saying that.

Speaker 2 And, you know, you're waiting. All I want to do is be able to go take a piss by myself, man.
You know,

Speaker 2 you're a couple of days ago, you'd been a proud, young former athlete and soldier. And now you're this, you're basically in hospice care, you know.

Speaker 2 And so, yeah, it starts to weigh on you. And I wanted to get rods in my legs so I could get a wheelchair and have some sense of independence.

Speaker 2 But I couldn't do that without clearing these infections. And then I finally get the rods in and they move me up to a neural ward next to some other guys

Speaker 2 that had had like the same bug before. And then they put a label on your door.
I think that's all necessary. I'm not, you know, you should say, hey, this guy had this weird bug.

Speaker 2 We don't want to spread it, you know. But I'm up there next to this other guy, and things are now better because I can talk to a guy, you know, at least room to room.

Speaker 2 And, you know, we're kind of hollering at each other through the wall or, you know, the doorway and stuff. And

Speaker 2 then I had a pulmonary embolism and it collapsed. I think it was my left lung.

Speaker 2 And then right back into surgery, emergency, you know, they had to decide whether to put one of those IVC filter deals.

Speaker 2 Uh, inferior, in your inferior vena cava, I think is what it is. I can say, I'm not good at anatomy, largest vein in your body.

Speaker 2 And if it, yeah,

Speaker 2 it's like if you think of like an umbrella without a skirt on it, and then some extra wiring to work as a filter, that's what it is.

Speaker 2 But they would deploy it like this, and then it had some kind of legs that would then open up and stick into the vessel to hold it there, and it would break up blood clots.

Speaker 2 What they were trying to figure out is if I had had,

Speaker 2 because I had deep vein thrombosis already, which is like blood clots in your legs, essentially.

Speaker 2 But they didn't, they weren't sure if I had had a clot originate in my lung or if it had traveled to my lung from my legs. So that's why they had to put that in.

Speaker 2 And then,

Speaker 2 you know, that was another, I can't even remember how long before I finally got into a position where

Speaker 2 they could even think about walking.

Speaker 2 And one day, my,

Speaker 2 I'm pretty sure I wrote about this too. So I'm sorry if I'm retelling stories, but

Speaker 2 an uncle of mine came out and he was really close to me. And we used to bow hunt and fish together.
And then he got drafted by the Royals out of high school. And so he's kind of a neat guy.

Speaker 2 And I always looked up to him, you know. And he came out to visit.
And

Speaker 2 I told him, I was like,

Speaker 2 they don't think I'm going to be able to walk, you know?

Speaker 2 And he said, bullshit. And I got a new young surgeon assigned to our team.
Because at that stage, you've, you know, you've got like multiple trauma going on.

Speaker 2 There's like an actual surgical team that's like planning out what to work on next and triaging. And well, this guy got assigned on the ortho side.

Speaker 2 And he was like 27 and right out of med school and really smart and just kind of a go-getter type guy. And he said, I think you can do it, but you're going to have to get on your feet like now.

Speaker 2 We don't want to risk atrophying your muscles anymore. And, you know, you're just going to have to start trying.

Speaker 2 So my physical therapist at Walter Reed, his name was Solomon. And he was like this giant black guy.
He played defensive end or something with Phil Sims on the New York Giants.

Speaker 2 And then he just did this as a job, I think.

Speaker 2 mostly to be a charitable guy. He was a really neat guy.

Speaker 2 So we go down there to PT

Speaker 2 and he said, You can walk today. And I said, Yeah, let's do it.
You know, so he helped me up and my bones. I'm like,

Speaker 2 my right hand is all in this cast thing. And then I've got a

Speaker 2 like a soft cast they put on my humerus because they were trying to let me have at least one ambulatory limb.

Speaker 2 So I just put up my arms on those parallel bars and

Speaker 2 however long those are 10 feet or whatever

Speaker 2 and walked down and then back. And I was like shaking, you know, I mean, it hurt like hell.
And

Speaker 2 anyway, I got to the end and then Solomon helped me to

Speaker 2 my wheelchair and got my arms draped around him like a prom date or something.

Speaker 2 He sat me down and that was my first time I walked. And

Speaker 2 yeah, and so it's like the peaks and valleys. At that point, you're, you know, you're riding really high, feeling like, I'm going to make it kind of thing, you know.

Speaker 2 What's it like to be in a hospital for four months? Oh my gosh, it was the worst. And I was just thinking, I think the blood clot might have been right after that.

Speaker 2 Anyway,

Speaker 2 it's terrible. And I'm from a cow town, you know? And so I look outside and it's drab.
And that area of DC is like Soviet block with architecture.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's the government built it all. Right.
Right after, during and after the Second World War. and they did a terrible job.

Speaker 2 It's funny

Speaker 2 that, like,

Speaker 2 even we couldn't learn the lesson of Protumpkin Villages. No.
We just did it unashamedly. We copied it.
Yeah. Just made Walter Gropius in charge of America's architecture.
No, I know.

Speaker 2 It's, it's, and all that war is what did it.

Speaker 2 And you're not invited to think about what that means, but I'm not fully aware of what it means, but there's something, something about that war totally destroyed the spirit of the country.

Speaker 2 The good war, that is. But anyway, sorry.
So, but you're stuck there for four months. That's a,

Speaker 2 what do you do? Like, what's your day like?

Speaker 2 P.T., occupational therapy, watch Dukes of Hazards and King of the Hill.

Speaker 2 You know, one time Brian Dennehy came and the actor. Yeah, really.
genuinely great guy. He sat with me for hours.

Speaker 2 We were talking about the Civil War and he said, have you ever read Shelby Foote's trilogy? And I said, No.

Speaker 2 And he said, I'll be right back. And he went to a bookstore and brought me the trilogy, which was a really neat joke.

Speaker 2 Brian Denahy, the actor, shows up at your bedside and then buys you the Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy. Yeah, it was really great.
So then I had something to read. So that was, you know, helpful.

Speaker 2 But you had to wait for Brian Tennehy to bring it to you?

Speaker 2 Yeah, he was great. And I don't want to crap on too many people.
Orin Hatch was very helpful despite our political disagreements. He was a very kind man to me.
He's a nice man. He was.

Speaker 2 And very connected. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
He was able to get things done and a good guy.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So there, you know, there were people that were coming around

Speaker 2 trying to boost the spirits. Brad Paisley, you know, he is his stepfather came one day and just sat with us for, you know, hours just because it's nice to talk to a normal person.
Yes.

Speaker 2 You know, he was a wonderful man.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So it wasn't all bad, but I did sure as shit did not want to be there. You know, I wanted to go home.
I missed my grandpa, you know,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 I just missed home. And I don't,

Speaker 2 I enjoy, God blessed us with tremendous beauty out there, and I try to appreciate it. You know,

Speaker 2 and I wanted to see it again. So what did you do when you got home? So at this point, you're in your 21 or 22.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yep. I, uh,

Speaker 2 and the army severs your term. I mean, they discharge you, I guess? Not yet.
Oh, eventually, yeah, they retired me.

Speaker 2 Before I retired, I was basically just doing outpatient care at the civilian hospital. And I was lucky.
My PT guy, he used to be the PT guy for like the Olympic wrestling team.

Speaker 2 And I loved wrestling growing up. So it was a good connection.
And, and of course, he's good at what he's doing and has seen a lot of young guys hurt pretty bad. So that's helpful as well.
And

Speaker 2 so it's just like that and

Speaker 2 being depressed as hell every day because you're a professional patient at this point you're still a soldier technically

Speaker 2 but your job is to go to pt and

Speaker 2 oh yeah it was not good

Speaker 2 it was not good yeah and in in in retrospect that program was not a good idea

Speaker 2 As much as I wanted to get out of there, it would have been,

Speaker 2 I think this bore out in the data. Like, I don't think it was just me,

Speaker 2 but I would have been a lot more mentally healthy if they would have just forced me to stay,

Speaker 2 you know, doing

Speaker 2 outpatient stuff at Walter Reed, because then at least I'm around guys who get it instead of like my family. That's

Speaker 2 how could they possibly, it's not their fault. Um, I think that would have been better, but

Speaker 2 but certainly I was happy to be out of there. So,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 2 how long did it take take you to get right mentally?

Speaker 2 Shit.

Speaker 2 A long time.

Speaker 2 Quitting pain meds was the biggest thing. What was that like?

Speaker 2 Realizing how bad it was fucking my... Sorry for cursing.

Speaker 2 Realizing. It's warranted in this case.

Speaker 2 You're allowed.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's a certain family I'm not too thrilled with either.

Speaker 2 Realizing that it was a problem, like really messing my mental health up was motivation enough. And then my doctor was really great.

Speaker 2 What was it doing to your mental health? The opioids. And the family you're referring to has got to be the Sacklers.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, enough people are mad at me right now that I don't know how many more fights I want to pick.

Speaker 2 If you can't criticize America's richest drug merchants, then like what, I mean,

Speaker 2 at a certain point, you have to be like, I'm sorry. It's just true, right?

Speaker 2 I had two friends die from opioids while we were recovering. You know, they drink some alcohol and die because, you know, you're, it represses your ability to breathe.
Of course. Or suppresses rather.

Speaker 2 And then drink and pass out and die. So

Speaker 2 I was lucky that didn't happen. But so yeah, I don't, I don't care.
But what does it do to your spirit? That's the one thing I don't think

Speaker 2 we talk about that very often.

Speaker 2 I had, I was on opioids for one day for back surgery a few years ago and not enough to get dependent. But the first thing I noticed is it completely, it just, it, it transformed me inside.

Speaker 2 Like it crushes your spirit.

Speaker 2 That's one day of it. And you were on it for how long?

Speaker 2 Years.

Speaker 2 You're not, you're definitely not the same person. You know, it's linked.
It's,

Speaker 2 I'm, I have read, I don't allegedly also link to this suicide epidemic. Of course.

Speaker 2 It makes you a different person. And I

Speaker 2 try to be very careful about not pretending to be more pious than I am, but I do believe in spiritual war. And I do think that there is really something to ingesting stuff like that.

Speaker 2 Like, like, I mean,

Speaker 2 something real, not just some chemical changes in your head.

Speaker 2 I couldn't agree more.

Speaker 2 Can you flesh that out a little bit? Well,

Speaker 2 yeah, I think you should be very

Speaker 2 careful

Speaker 2 tempering with like allowing things into your body.

Speaker 2 You know, the term spirits.

Speaker 2 That originated because my understanding of this is that that term came from people thought you were putting spirits into your body. Of course.
And you probably are.

Speaker 2 Now, why? So you're speaking of liquor, alcohol. Right.
Yeah. Well, there's absolutely no question.

Speaker 2 So opioids are just that in a different form is what I would think. And, you know, people get mad at me for this, but I think the same thing about other drugs.

Speaker 2 Like if you're communicating with some entity because of something you've taken,

Speaker 2 I would, I think I would take that pretty seriously because you

Speaker 2 probably. People hate it when you say that.

Speaker 2 I've done those drugs. So I feel like I have as a child.
So I feel like I have some authority on it. And I was talking to a friend of mine, someone I really,

Speaker 2 really, really like

Speaker 2 the other day about it. And he was talking about,

Speaker 2 you know, whatever,

Speaker 2 a trip, taking hallucinogens for good reasons, by the way.

Speaker 2 He said, I was visited by demons and I said, do you think that they were real?

Speaker 2 And he goes, oh, no, no, they're real.

Speaker 2 You know, I'm not a, I try not to be a judge, judger, um, because I have no basis for judging other people, period.

Speaker 2 However, I wanted to say, but if you think they're real, then

Speaker 2 maybe don't fuck with them at all. Like, that's not good.
That's scary. It's really scary.

Speaker 2 It's terrifying. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, even

Speaker 2 I went through an atheistic period.

Speaker 2 I'm deeply, genuinely, deeply ashamed of that period of my life. I think I was mad at God more than not believing.

Speaker 2 Seraphim Rose writes some stuff about this.

Speaker 2 I can't remember where, but he says

Speaker 2 it's not that the atheist disbelieves in God. It's that he believes in God and doesn't understand him and is sort of therefore angry.
Of course.

Speaker 2 Certainly described me. Kind of prefer.
I feel like the atheists have a better shot than

Speaker 2 people who just don't think about it.

Speaker 2 Sarah from Rose said, not that I want to speak for anybody here, but he says in a follow-up to that, he says something to the effect of those people are actually more

Speaker 2 your brother than the people whose Christ is only on their lips. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, what do I know? But that sounds right to me. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So what was the effect of the opioids on your spirit? Oh, I'm sorry. You keep trying to get me to.
No, no, not at all. I just think it's interesting.
And I rarely hear people talk about it.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of talk about the effect of opioids on your respiratory system. You know, dark can work.

Speaker 2 I think it's all important and I'm not mocking it. However, the condition of your spirit may be more important than anything.
And I never hear that discussed. Yeah.
Well, you're not the same person.

Speaker 2 And I mean, that's what I mean with like bringing things into yourself. We use euphemisms like that.
Like, well, I wasn't the same guy at that period of my life.

Speaker 2 Well, think about what that actually means. Like, what do you mean you weren't the same guy?

Speaker 2 You know, if you believe in body, soul, spirit or body, soul, mind, however you want to think of it, what do you mean when you say you were not the same person?

Speaker 2 Because, like, did your soul leave and go somewhere else? What do you actually mean? And I think what you mean is that you have

Speaker 2 you have given controls the control of you over to someone or something else. I mean, that's the way I view it.

Speaker 2 And that, you know, can be wrong. I would sound like an idiot or whatever, but that is the way that I view it.
You don't sound like an idiot at all. And you're clearly not wrong.

Speaker 2 And that's like a central piece of Christian theology. I mean, Paul says at great length in Romans, this is Paul.
This is like the hero of the early church.

Speaker 2 This is like one of the after Jesus, the founder of Christianity. And he's like, I do all these terrible things that I don't, I don't want to do.

Speaker 2 And that's because the sin, which he describes as sin, is like taking control of me. Like something from outside came into me and is making the decisions.
He says that.

Speaker 2 And I don't think that's far from the experience of every person who pays attention to his own behavior. Like you do kind of like, what is this exactly?

Speaker 2 Yeah, you always want to figure out what's animating you. Yeah.
And if you don't think about that, you're probably being driven by something.

Speaker 2 There's probably a reason you're not taking a step back to think about it. You know, so when you say, what does it do to your spirit?

Speaker 2 I really believe that it's you've you've given control over to something else. And so it changes you in every way.
You know, you become dishonest,

Speaker 2 angry, bitter,

Speaker 2 deeply depressed. And when I say angry, I mean at God.

Speaker 2 You know, there's a line in there somewhere where he says, even the devils pray.

Speaker 2 I think that's kind of like that. It's like, why would.

Speaker 2 What is the, what are the devils praying to God for?

Speaker 2 Because if we believe in a redemptive God,

Speaker 2 surely, and again, I don't want to get things wrong and God forgive me if I am, but if we believe in a redemptive God,

Speaker 2 then they're not praying to ask for forgiveness or else maybe they would be able to get it. I don't know.

Speaker 2 So what are they saying in their prayers? Well, probably

Speaker 2 they're probably bitter, you know, saying, I cannot believe you did this to me or whatever it may be. I don't want to speak for them either.
And I want to be careful here. But

Speaker 2 I think the the source of the bitterness if the root of it is being angry at god and i think opioids do that and the minute i got opioids make you angry at god i do think that i i do and drinking too much i think does it and definitely you know anything that

Speaker 2 anything that makes you not you

Speaker 2 is gonna lead to that eventually in fact like all sin they say again i'm not i i don't want to pretend to know things because i don't.

Speaker 2 But I think that the end result of all sin is ultimately anger at God. And what you're mad about is knowing

Speaker 2 what you have done. You know?

Speaker 2 So getting off of those. Let me just add a vehement amen to that.
I totally agree. Thank you.
And I don't understand anything either. That's for sure.
And may I be.

Speaker 2 punished for pretending I do because I don't. But what you're saying is, I believe that's true.
Yeah. So you get off opioids.
What happens then? It was crazy.

Speaker 2 About,

Speaker 2 I don't want to misremember here.

Speaker 2 10 days to two weeks later,

Speaker 2 it was so weird. Genuinely felt like a cloud had been lifted from my vision.
Like, like the world felt and looked different to me two weeks later. And I don't know how to describe it beyond

Speaker 2 it just everything felt to some degree pretty again. And

Speaker 2 like that my mind actually worked again rather than just thought negative things all the time. I could, I could like think about the things I cared about.
And

Speaker 2 how long were you on them, do you think?

Speaker 2 Boy,

Speaker 2 probably.

Speaker 2 Probably like five years. Oh, gosh.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, it's the first half of your 20s. Yeah.
When you're the dumbest person you're ever going to be on top of that, I had gotten to where I was taking way, way less, but I still like had,

Speaker 2 you know, I had those hooks. Yes.

Speaker 2 And then just getting rid of them all together was totally life-changing. And within like two years, all of a sudden I felt like the same person again.

Speaker 2 And I usually connect that. It's funny we're having this conversation because I'd never thought about it in these terms.

Speaker 2 I usually connect that to being able to run and hike again and going bow hunting.

Speaker 2 And I wonder if it wasn't actually like the time away from that thing.

Speaker 2 I'm sure it mattered.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it transforms you into a different person, totally different person. You said that you lost two friends from OD,

Speaker 2 accidental, I guess, OD.

Speaker 2 But you must have known a lot of other people who were also on opioids for years.

Speaker 2 Did they recover? No. Oh, gosh.
I know one person,

Speaker 2 and I don't want to give too much information because I don't want to hurt his feelings or something, but he looks like a different human being now. I mean, it's been so long.

Speaker 2 I saw a picture of him recently and I hadn't seen him for a couple of years. And I had to look at it for like five minutes because I, it just didn't even look like the same guy.
You know,

Speaker 2 I have

Speaker 2 another

Speaker 2 family member that went through the same experience looks looks like a totally different human being now

Speaker 2 uh the one friend who physically physically like face you know like a different guy what are the pardon my ignorance like what are the changes like for long-term opioid use

Speaker 2 i don't know the the look on them is the like shrunken

Speaker 2 you know their eyes look different like deeply set so it's not just a weight loss or gain. It's like deeper than that.
I think so. Like this, like the spark is gone, you know? Yes.

Speaker 2 It's they're horrible drugs.

Speaker 2 I made my daughter when she was like 13. I made her sign a contract.

Speaker 2 We notarized it and everything.

Speaker 2 That's the next. So typically, you know, you clean your rifles when the boyfriend comes over.
This is the next level beyond that. The notarized contract.

Speaker 2 And it's in my gun safe, actually.

Speaker 2 But I made her sign this contract that said she will not do any drugs, drink any alcohol, or have any premarital sex till 21. And if she's able to do that, then I'll just give her $5,000 in cash.

Speaker 2 But if she's able to take that same thing till she's, I cannot remember whether I put 23 or 25, then I'll just give her $10,000 cash.

Speaker 2 You know, to a 13-year-old that, I mean, that's a lot of money to me, but to a 13-year-old, that's like you're offering them. Yeah.
You know,

Speaker 2 and the reason for that is I've seen how dark that world is and how many people, when it gets your hooks, those hooks in you at a young age, it just ruins kids. I mean, it ruins them.

Speaker 2 Some of them never, ever recover. And they're, we're otherwise going to be, they're good people at root, and they were otherwise going to be great, productive members of society.
And

Speaker 2 now they're just not, you know. Just the anguish, the suffering that it causes.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 you've talked about this before, but I mean,

Speaker 2 this stuff is borne out in data. You can see the

Speaker 2 deaths of despair across rural America.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, you drive through

Speaker 2 rural America. We both live in rural places and you see in people's houses, you know, there are certain houses that are just tidy, squared away.
The cordwood is.

Speaker 2 at right angles and like you can tell these are happy productive people

Speaker 2 and but there are as many homes with you know broken children's toys on the front lawn and um that are just a disaster and you know they're everyone's poor it's not a matter of but like

Speaker 2 those you know that's like depression the disorganization the chaos i think that comes from drugs yeah

Speaker 2 Yeah, although my yard is a wreck right now, I'm ashamed of it. But

Speaker 2 I have three young boys and I've been caught up in some other BS for a minute.

Speaker 2 Well, but there's a difference between like the happy chaos of small children and the kind of, you know, multi-year, just like, I just don't give a shit at all. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 I know exactly what you mean. Yeah, the not caring is a sign of drugs.
I've always thought. Yeah,

Speaker 2 deep depression for sure. So what did you do after? So

Speaker 2 by this point, I mean, you said it was two years before your head fully cleared. No.
Oh, yeah. After you got off, dope.

Speaker 2 So that's, I'm just trying to do the simple math here. So you're 20 when you get wounded, right?

Speaker 2 That's 27. I know.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I had a divorce scattered in there and, you know, a string of broken relationships.
And

Speaker 2 then I finally started feeling really good. And

Speaker 2 life was going well. And then I met a new girl and she's wonderful.
And my entire life changed.

Speaker 2 Everything, I mean, it was already on that path or else it wouldn't have worked with her because she's like a well-put together person.

Speaker 2 And then I was like back to living the life of my youth. You know, when I first started dating her, I went down.
My old man has back problems. It's like

Speaker 2 every person that's rode colts their whole life.

Speaker 2 He needed help. And I remember when he called me, he had this buckskin horse and he needed a road.
And he's like, well, you're younger. And I was like, well,

Speaker 2 my body's in better shape than yours.

Speaker 2 But I wanted to do it. So I go down there.
And

Speaker 2 this is now I'm doing good in life and at least mentally.

Speaker 2 And I get on this Colt and we're doing good. And what my old man didn't tell me was that he had a, he would get scared when you'd go to get off.

Speaker 2 But my old man didn't want me to know that because he wanted me to kind of solve the problem for him.

Speaker 2 So I go to swing off and he starts bucking and it twists my knee pretty good.

Speaker 2 And anyway, that was my first time back on a colt like that.

Speaker 2 And then we go sit in the bunkhouse and have like a couple beers and he's just feeling really good, you know, like, wow, I'm like back to my real life. And so then I started riding Colts again and

Speaker 2 back to normal. And that's where I'm, I, I, I'm at now.
And I was guiding hunts for a while, elk and deer and help with some lions in Utah a little bit and an occasional bear, huh?

Speaker 2 And just, you know, back being a normal kid from the mountain west. And

Speaker 2 it's great.

Speaker 2 It's like really great. So, how did you go? So, that's an thank you for taking the time to tell that story.

Speaker 2 How did you go from there to like being on Sean Ryan's show and like becoming a

Speaker 2 figure of public adulation and

Speaker 2 attacks as well? Like you become this like polarizing figure.

Speaker 2 How'd that happen?

Speaker 2 I,

Speaker 2 there's two pieces to it. I got involved in public lands advocacy around 2015 or 16.

Speaker 2 There was this, there had been this push, the public lands initiative, which was like

Speaker 2 a different version of the same thing.

Speaker 2 Like Rob Bishop, who I think is otherwise a good guy and, you know, some other names were involved in that. And I just got involved with some organizations and learned more about it.
And

Speaker 2 the more,

Speaker 2 the more I've learned, the

Speaker 2 more my opinions have shifted, you know, more into the direction of conservation, not less.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 that's kind of the root of that. And then I've spent like the last five years on Twitter arguing with people.
I mean, they will write, they would write me like horrible

Speaker 2 emails

Speaker 2 over the public lands thing. And these are right-wing people.

Speaker 2 You're pretty liberal, I assume. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's just incredible. It's like my own side very angry at me over there.

Speaker 2 And then something flipped this time.

Speaker 2 Oh, but I should tell you how the Twitter platform,

Speaker 2 I had been doing keynotes for a long time, a source of income.

Speaker 2 And I enjoy doing them,

Speaker 2 depending on the group.

Speaker 2 But it made up about 25% of our annual at the time.

Speaker 2 And I had guided this guy from a big construction company in California, really good guy. I guided him on a hunt in southern Utah, got to be friends with him.

Speaker 2 And then he wanted me to speak as a keynote at this construction conference in Las Vegas, a real big one.

Speaker 2 So I'd been booked for that. And then this freaking COVID thing starts happening.
And it's evolving in the news in real time. And I'm supposed to leave on like Saturday morning to go speak on Monday.

Speaker 2 And he texts me at like 5 p.m.

Speaker 2 West Coast time on Friday and says, bro, they canceled the whole thing. Like not just speeches, but like the entire conference.

Speaker 2 And it's hard to blame anybody for doing that at the time, given the way the machines were or the mechanisms were turning.

Speaker 2 So I had been very careful with my right-wing opinions publicly for years because I wanted these people to still hire me. me to I mean you know how

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 you know that

Speaker 2 you know bankers and things like this they don't they don't like people with opinions like me so they don't hire people like me no speak to a lot of tech organizations and you can about imagine how that would go if you're a right-wing in fact one time I'm sorry I'm doing the Trump weave

Speaker 2 One time

Speaker 2 a gal had hired me and she's a really wonderful person.

Speaker 2 She comes up to me after a speech and says, this is really great. Everybody's really happy, but could you lean less on the like, you have to learn how to pull yourself up message?

Speaker 2 Because that sounds too much like bootstrapping and that's a right-wing thing.

Speaker 2 I'm serious.

Speaker 2 So that made me paranoid about sharing my actual opinions on anything. So I would never talk publicly.
And then this COVID thing happens.

Speaker 2 And I had created a Twitter account while we were night, we we were night calving in the fall on the fall herd.

Speaker 2 And we,

Speaker 2 this friend's ranch, they have like a Frito truck that they built into like a cabin. Like they took the lid or the top off and like made a calving cabin out of it.
So we're in the Frito truck.

Speaker 2 And I create a Twitter

Speaker 2 and I get on there and I say something to a left-wing politician and it kind of got some traction. I was like, oh, crap.
I deleted it, you know, because I'd made it with my real name.

Speaker 2 And I did, I thought I I could just like slide in there slowly. But that was in, you know, like September.

Speaker 2 So I deleted all my tweets and then just didn't even use it anymore because I was scared that I wasn't going to get hired. Well, when this COVID thing happened, that one got canceled.

Speaker 2 And then the next one and the next one. And then, you know, you start getting emails.
It's like all seven or eight that we had scheduled for the year got canceled like within a week's time.

Speaker 2 And so I just got on Twitter. I told my wife, I said, you know what? Fuck it.
I'm just going to tell people what I really think about things. And somehow that grew into,

Speaker 2 it's not a large platform, but a platform. And then you end up on Sean Ryan, you know?

Speaker 2 Interesting. So this one that

Speaker 2 I'm, I would just say on the outset, I'm completely 100% on your side, probably for the same reasons on this question, but it is one of those rare issues where it doesn't break down along left and right at all.

Speaker 2 And I probably should have asked you to explain what the issue is since we were

Speaker 2 an hour and a half into this or whatever. I haven't even asked you.
What is the public land? What's the, what's the divide on public lands? What are public lands?

Speaker 2 What do some people seek to do with public lands? And what's your view of that?

Speaker 2 We, so

Speaker 2 this one organization I was with for a while,

Speaker 2 I implored them to not let this become a liberals who hunt kind of thing or else we're going to lose.

Speaker 2 It made, we were, they were trying to evangelize the left on public land protection measures which is just dumb because at the time there was zero aggression coming from the left it was all from the right and i said just let me message this i understand right-wing people what's i am one like let me do this and they wouldn't so i think a sizable

Speaker 2 portion of blame belongs on the left for the way they've treated public lands over the years. What they have done is they

Speaker 2 first of all, their central ethos is just they don't like like you. Oh, a hundred percent.
So, they don't want you on the land, exactly, or your dogs on the land. They don't, they don't.

Speaker 2 Oh, I have dealt with it. Yeah, they want to build like a Truman show, and you can get on like an electric train and look at it or something.

Speaker 2 That's totally right.

Speaker 2 And then the right wants to sell it, yeah. And

Speaker 2 so that's kind of the crux.

Speaker 2 That's nice. That's so, oh, that's so

Speaker 2 The left wants to turn nature into a Truman show experience where you get an electric train and view it. And the right just wants to sell it.
That is like the most, that's just perfect.

Speaker 2 Well, and we, when I say we, I mean better men from older times figured out the correct compromise to this problem. And it's basically what we have as a status quo right now.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 The multiple use mandate, you know. And what is that?

Speaker 2 That got established in 76 under

Speaker 2 Flipmo, which is the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 76. But that had rolled lots of older conservation laws into one, into kind of one thing

Speaker 2 and established a very clear multiple-use mandate. In fact, I think it's the very first paragraph of the bill.
And the multiple-use mandate says these lands are held in trust for the American people

Speaker 2 for hunting, recreating, grazing, and extraction of all forms, just whenever it makes sense. I mean, we can't go clear-cut the redwoods.

Speaker 2 I don't think anyone would even, well, people would advocate, certain people would advocate for that, but I don't think anyone's doing that right now.

Speaker 2 But there are other places that we should be logging and we can, you know, figure this out.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you can manage the forest. Yes.
And by the way, you should. It's a better forest when it's managed.
Sensitively, I mean, I have a lot of experience. It's like, it's great.
Yes.

Speaker 2 If it's done wisely, prudently like it's good exactly maybe the best example of what you're talking about here is the whole spotted owl stuff yep

Speaker 2 they label

Speaker 2 they label the spot so there's the endangered species act of i think 73 nixon signed it

Speaker 2 uh and we basically put into

Speaker 2 uh the we put into effect some of the most forward thinking in in

Speaker 2 this kind of way.

Speaker 2 I hate how the left has ruined useful words. Oh, I know.
But

Speaker 2 we instantiated very powerful protections on the main goal: we don't let species die here because we, as a people, think that that would be a sin because God made them. That's the way I view it.

Speaker 2 And I think that's what that's how Nixon thought.

Speaker 2 Well, the spotted owl comes in,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 the claim, so they made it threatened, and the claim was that this owl needed old growth in order to survive. It couldn't survive in second growth or new growth.

Speaker 2 And second growth is like something that's been cut down, replanted, and then

Speaker 2 after you whack the forest, this is what comes up. It's very thick.
Yep.

Speaker 2 And they had said that they can't survive that way on and on. Well, the loggers were saying, we see these things in second growth all the time.
What the hell are you talking about?

Speaker 2 And so then we end up with, I believe it's called the Northwest Forest Plan. And that was in the early 80s, if I'm remembering correctly, or late 80s when that happened, if I'm remembering correctly.

Speaker 2 And that locked up something like 56 million acres and just killed timber towns all through Washington and Oregon and had an effect on northern Idaho and destroyed. Yeah, western Montana.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then it turned out down the road that the loggers were right. That spotted owl was living in the second growth stuff.
And it actually was not the harvest that was killing off.

Speaker 2 It was the some other kind of owl whose name escapes me was out competing it. Yeah.
It was intra-owl competition. Yeah.
And it was an invasive owl, of course. So there's probably a Chinese owl.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right.

Speaker 2 I know there are some loggers who think they did that on purpose. And knowing the way,

Speaker 2 seeing the way, I don't want to be too conspiratorial, but it would not shock me if one day we learned that people were doing that on purpose because what they actually hated was loggers. Oh, I know.

Speaker 2 They don't even love trees. They just hate loggers.
Oh, they don't love trees. No.
They'll cut down the trees to put a solar farm in

Speaker 2 a second. Yeah.
In places where the sun doesn't shine very much. No, they hate trees because they hate God and they hate God's creation.
Of course. It's never about saving nature.

Speaker 2 They're destroying nature. They're spraying chemicals into the atmosphere to manage the weather and poisoning the

Speaker 2 like these are the enemies of nature. These are the offshore wind farm people.
Which, yeah, those wreak havoc. Oh my gosh, on the fishery, of course.
They don't care.

Speaker 2 So they're not for nature and don't ever allow a professional environmentalist to tell you he loves nature. You know, I mean, I'm sure there are some who do, but

Speaker 2 in general, the environmental lobby is opposed to the environment. You know, yeah, totally.
Exceptions and rules, right?

Speaker 2 and the the exception doesn't make the rule

Speaker 2 well

Speaker 2 so that's kind of where we where we're at but then if you look at what happened here more recently and this is important for understanding how we got to this new push for sell-offs around

Speaker 2 2016 or so, a lot was happening right then because of POI and some other things. But around then,

Speaker 2 some

Speaker 2 environmental groups really born out of scientists at universities who actually do care, regardless of what people try to tell you, a lot of those people actually do care.

Speaker 2 I mean, they've recovered all kinds of species because of these people, you know, Gila trout and black-footed ferret and the greater sagegrouse. You know, these people do care.

Speaker 2 Well, they come up with a science-based management plan for this because the environmental groups were pushing and saying

Speaker 2 you can't do any oil and gas, oil and gas extraction in sagegrouse country. You'll kill off the sagegrouse.
Well, these scientists come up with this plan and say,

Speaker 2 don't list these things as threatened. What if you, Mr.
Oil and Gas Company, give us, you know, work with us on this plan?

Speaker 2 We think if you do it this way, it can be done without killing off the sagegrouse. So the oil and gas companies give some concessions and then they do.
And what do you know? Like they worked.

Speaker 2 And oil and gas is still being extracted and the sagegrouse have recovered. Yeah, there's really good sagegrass hunting.
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 So we now we have people who can solve these problems. But if you look at the way the right wing,

Speaker 2 the tools that they use

Speaker 2 or the levers that they use to kind of pry on the right to get them behind sell-offs is like, well, you're going to get locked out of it by this thing or that thing.

Speaker 2 They're going to come spotted out you, you know? Well, we figured out a solution to that. And as long as we keep doing that, there's just absolutely no reason to give up our birthright.

Speaker 2 So what is the idea

Speaker 2 about selling federal lands? Like what, I mean, there was a recent proposal, which I think more than any other person, you killed by bringing attention to it.

Speaker 2 You're really hated by some people for that.

Speaker 2 But just leaving the people out of it. Like, what was the idea? What was the proposal?

Speaker 2 It changed a bunch of times, but the proposal was the way it was being sold was: hey, we're just trying to get rid of 0.5% of this land, but that's not how it was originally written.

Speaker 2 Originally, it was like a mandatory sell-off of 0.5% of the land and then like 249 million other acres to be evaluated, something like that,

Speaker 2 which means that's a floor with no ceiling.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 why do they want to sell it off

Speaker 2 my gut tells me minerals but i i don't know sell it off to whom well

Speaker 2 i don't know

Speaker 2 they're not telling you and we do a lot of oil and gas and mineral extraction on public lands right now but a thing that i think viewers need to understand is

Speaker 2 when they do it on public land there's a royalty paid back to both state and federal government. But if you own the

Speaker 2 mineral rights or the subsurface rights altogether of your property, you're not paying a royalty. I mean, sure, you're paying taxes, but you're not paying a royalty whatsoever.

Speaker 2 How? Well, how does that work?

Speaker 2 Well, it's if you own the rights. I mean,

Speaker 2 this is like I don't.

Speaker 2 Private land, you're talking about. Private land.
I'm sorry. Yes.
Okay. So this is.
Of course, right. If you own the mineral rights,

Speaker 2 you own the minerals. Well,

Speaker 2 and so if you're the original thing was we're trying to balance, I mean, that's how they got it in a budget reconciliation bill, right? Is we're trying to balance this budget.

Speaker 2 We need a little cash flow here. That's what this is for.
Well, why would you sell the mineral rights then? Like, wouldn't you keep the mineral rights?

Speaker 2 If what you were trying to do is solve the debt problem, wouldn't you keep that asset on your portfolio?

Speaker 2 Well, yeah.

Speaker 2 And they didn't. So I think that the, I think there are large.

Speaker 2 So they were going to sell the land with the mineral rights. So that means the state and federal governments would never benefit from the extraction past the sale.

Speaker 2 That was what the fine, that is how the final iteration read to me. And I think to everybody else that, you know, plus it's a 900-page bill.

Speaker 2 So you're feeding it to chat GPT, you know, and trying to figure out where the stuff is. And I think the most of the public land stuff was on like page 202 or something.

Speaker 2 What would, well, that's interesting. So that, I mean, that kind of proves that it's not about

Speaker 2 solving the debt with sale of public resources. No, and they used the term fair market value in there.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 on a lot of these,

Speaker 2 I mean, you've been to southern Utah, on a lot of these chunks that they were trying to sell off, the fair market value is like 500 an acre. I mean, you're not going to say 500 an acre?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it's alkali soil with like almost nothing as far as uh bunch grasses. It supports an ecosystem,

Speaker 2 but it, you know, to run,

Speaker 2 to make it produce, if you're thinking in terms of GDP, which I sometimes I feel like this is all those people are capable of, this is unproductive.

Speaker 2 Right. Unless you're a lizard farmer.
Right. Yeah.
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So fair market. So that establishes that it's definitely not about the debt because you're either pulling money out of the coffers or selling it off for next to nothing.
So this is not about the debt.

Speaker 2 It's about something else. And this is why i think minerals at one level or another was it in a was there any restriction on who could buy it

Speaker 2 they had said i'm trying you know that there was like seven iterations of that and i'm trying to remember what the last one said about that but i don't think so i don't think there was any kind of guardrail

Speaker 2 And I think Utah has like 34,000 acres owned by the CCP already.

Speaker 2 I read that. Seriously? Yeah, I mean, I don't know if that's true, but I read it on Twitter, so it has to be.

Speaker 2 But there is foreign ownership of land in Utah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, in Canada, I think they own, I think they're the largest foreign owner of agricultural land like tillable in the U.S.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, Saudi owns a freaking ton of stuff down in Arizona, and they're putting all kinds of guys out of business down

Speaker 2 Like they'll punch a deep well because they've got money, lower the aquifer, and then the rancher guy, he can't afford a thousand-foot well.

Speaker 2 So then they're able to buy up his stuff because now it's dry.

Speaker 2 So there's all kinds of conflicts spread out across this region.

Speaker 2 I just can't see why you wouldn't want to limit having more of that problem. But it doesn't.
Why wouldn't Congress pass a law saying we can't have foreign ownership of land in the United States?

Speaker 2 You can't sell the country to other countries.

Speaker 2 That's, I think, the primary question. I don't understand that at all.
So far as I'm aware, I can't buy property in Canada, right? Unless I become a Canadian citizen.

Speaker 2 Yeah, a lot of Americans, I own property in Canada. I sold it because I was worried about all this kind of thing.

Speaker 2 But certainly you can't buy Mexico. You can't, right?

Speaker 2 So.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 I don't understand why. I mean, that just seems like a really easy fix.
Foreigners don't get to own our country. So

Speaker 2 happy to have you. You can do whatever.
Come on vacation here. You're great.
We love you, but you can't own our country. Right.
Right.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Recreation,

Speaker 2 the last number I read

Speaker 2 was $1.2 trillion contributed to our economy through outdoor recreation.

Speaker 2 That's extraction by another means. It might not be pulling oil and gas out of the ground, but that's still a form of extraction.

Speaker 2 You're extracting wealth off of the thing. I mean, right.

Speaker 2 And with the multiple use mandate, now you're doing both. It's like best of both worlds.
You're maximizing value in that way.

Speaker 2 So why should, I mean,

Speaker 2 this has been, as we both acknowledge, kind of a partisan issue. You referred to liberals who hunt.
I think there can't be more than eight of those.

Speaker 2 But there was. and this effort in the last 15, 20 years to like create these astroturf groups, you know, hunters for Kamala, but also it's always hilarious, like,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 loading the shotgun through the muzzle kind of groups. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But, um,

Speaker 2 but there are also more serious efforts to do that where these are clearly fake groups and they're trying to subvert something here.

Speaker 2 So that's, it's all real, but it's kind of axiomatic, I think, that like hunters,

Speaker 2 some fishermen,

Speaker 2 ranchers, people who train horses. Like, these are not Kamala Harris voters.
These are almost all conservatives. So

Speaker 2 why would you, as

Speaker 2 a product of that world, somebody who shares the values of that world, why would you be all of a sudden on the side of like not selling public lands?

Speaker 2 Why is this a, like, why do you have a conservative position on public lands?

Speaker 2 I fundamentally, I think I've said this before. I'm not sure.
So forgive me, but it's, I love my people. Yep.
I mean, that's why. I mean, I love the land, but my people don't exist without the land.

Speaker 2 And small ranches. Wait a second.
If the country's an idea,

Speaker 2 as long as you have that idea,

Speaker 2 you're part of it, no?

Speaker 2 Sorry. I think we probably agree on this one.

Speaker 2 I've said this elsewhere too, but

Speaker 2 some people on Twitter will say it's not magic dirt. you know yeah and i understand what they mean when they're saying that uh but but it is magic dirt It's 100% magic dirt.
I completely agree. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I keep some in my travel bag so I can sniff it when I'm out of the country. No, I mean, for real.
That's cool.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah. But why, why do you, oh, I'm sorry.
Why do you, so flesh that out, if you don't mind?

Speaker 2 I think you have to start at the, I believe America as a people,

Speaker 2 I believe the ethnogenesis of that happened on our frontiers.

Speaker 2 Like, if you

Speaker 2 at least, you know, history is the thing that's interpreted. So people get mad when I talk about history sometimes and I'm like, okay, well, this is my interpretation of it.
Fuck off.

Speaker 2 You know, like, this is the way I see it.

Speaker 2 The Revolutionary War was in some ways a very European war. I mean,

Speaker 2 we, you know, we kind of did some guerrilla stuff. So that was a new invention in terms of European people doing stuff to a degree.
But it was kind of a civil war between Anglo peoples. Yes.

Speaker 2 But then something happened as we, you know, from

Speaker 2 Manassa Manassa Color in the Ohio River Valley to the 49ers, where we developed as a people out here.

Speaker 2 You know, if you stop somebody on the street in New York City and you said, well, maybe not there now because it's like 60% foreign born, pick an actual American city where you're not traveling internationally

Speaker 2 and stop Americans on the street and ask them

Speaker 2 what it means to be an American. They're going to say things like like hard work, perseverance,

Speaker 2 you know, grit,

Speaker 2 love of country and

Speaker 2 county and all of that.

Speaker 2 They're going to use all of these ideas that actually tie back to knowing what our people went through crossing those plains, you know, fighting Indians and fighting, you know, Mexicans and then the Brits again and, you know, the Spanish and all of this, you know, all of that stuff fed into where we finally somewhere, I don't know exactly when, I don't think I could put a pin in it, but at some point we became a people that are Americans.

Speaker 2 We, we never describe ourselves in the same way as it seems like Europeans do to me. And

Speaker 2 so I think that's a very important piece of this. And I also think it's somewhat ironic that

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 area where the frontier closed is now like the primary source of the people trying to kill the country off

Speaker 2 uh

Speaker 2 and then another thing why do you think that is i don't know well resentment leftism i think leftism is animated by dark things i don't think every leftist is a bad person but i think that that belief system is fundamentally animated by envy And that's like the earliest story in the book.

Speaker 2 And hate. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I think it's that. i don't think it's too much

Speaker 2 more complex than that

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 look at think about the civil war the reconstruction the period of reconstruction it had there not been the pressure relief valve of the frontier we would have fought it again because that boot on the neck of those proud southern people is not going to last forever if they didn't have somewhere to go And we have towns in Idaho that were established by Confederates.

Speaker 2 And they, you know, they had had enough of that shit. And

Speaker 2 so I think it's, it, it's an important part of our identity, a very important part of our identity.

Speaker 2 So I think in many ways, this entire, I'm sorry, I'm doing such a bad job addressing your actual questions. I'm like pontificating over here.

Speaker 2 Well, I think to describe what you're saying requires what you're saying,

Speaker 2 which is it's part of like a multi-hundred-year story and evolution. Yes.

Speaker 2 And it's also one of the reasons that the country was able to assimilate people from different parts of Europe that hadn't always been friends. I mean, the Irish and the English.

Speaker 2 You know what I mean? Totally. And

Speaker 2 like the true melting pot was Europeans from like non-friendly countries. It didn't have that much in common, actually.
I know now they're all just white people, but

Speaker 2 the English and the Irish didn't feel that way. No.
Right.

Speaker 2 And, but they were able to come together and build this amazing country. And,

Speaker 2 but I think it's through the process that you're describing. Like that, that really is America.
Absolutely. And then now, as a modern people,

Speaker 2 we,

Speaker 2 there's no,

Speaker 2 there is absolutely no way

Speaker 2 like small ranches,

Speaker 2 a lot of them are run

Speaker 2 like 90% of their ground on public allotments and 10%

Speaker 2 on deeded. And it's been this way for a very long time, like basically since the TG, the Taylor Grazing Grazing Act, which was, I think, 36, 1936,

Speaker 2 another one of these things that rolled lots of laws into one, but it essentially protects the right for Americans to graze on these public grounds to protect the cattle industry, small family farms.

Speaker 2 And on that 10% of deeded acreage, at least where I'm from, much of that is going to be like their alfalfa, their hay production for the winter. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then, of course, a pasture to feed on in the winter. So my people from

Speaker 2 just won't exist anymore without this. And some people will say, oh, well, then F them, this is welfare for rich people.
It's like, no, this is welfare for people who are scraping by.

Speaker 2 If you want to call it welfare,

Speaker 2 I don't,

Speaker 2 I don't at all view it that way. But

Speaker 2 these people are scraping by. The margins on cattle are thin.
And if, you know, if you kill grazing, it is over. And we are already.

Speaker 2 Everyone in the country is on welfare at this point.

Speaker 2 and people who are paying you know half the tax rate that you are through the carried interest loophole um that's not welfare i think it is people who are you know taking their income as dividend and as interest income and paying half the rate of people who work for a wage i don't know i mean what

Speaker 2 All of these things are aimed at the same group, which is legacy Americans. So in the short end of everything, I don't think that's an accident.
No.

Speaker 2 No, my family family went out there in like the 30s, you know, the 1830s, not the 1930s, you know.

Speaker 2 What are the 1830s? Yeah, I think, I think 36, somewhere around 1836. Yeah, they were, yeah, they moved out.
Well, a lot of them were Mormons. So pre-DoorDash.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 So 47 is when the Mormons got to Utah, but a lot of them started that journey west, you know, back around that time, like from Connecticut, New England area. Yeah.
Started, you know. Upstate New York.

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 2 Yeah. A lot.
like most of my family's been here since, you know, the late 1600s, but they were over here, Yankee type people, and then they, you know, moved away.

Speaker 2 I don't mean that as a pejorative, but like that's where they were at, like kind of, you know,

Speaker 2 uh, in New England. And so, yeah, it means a lot to me in that sense.

Speaker 2 But another thing that the people who are not connected to this industry should think about, we have less than 90 million beef cattle in America right now.

Speaker 2 Our herds, our beef herd herd is smaller than it was in like 91, like 1991. How?

Speaker 2 Killing off small

Speaker 2 like almost 100 million more people. Maybe 100 million.
I mean, because there's so much lying about population. Right.
Because there's so many illegal aliens here.

Speaker 2 But we have a much larger population than we had in 91.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, what is it? It's like 330 million or something.
I mean,

Speaker 2 I'd say 360, but like go outside. I know.
It's insanely crowded.

Speaker 2 So there's just, as with GDP and inflation and every other relevant number from which we make decisions about how to run the country, it's a lie.

Speaker 2 Population is, I think, the biggest of all lies. Now we're saying, I mean, three years ago, we've got 10 million illegal aliens.
We've had 10 million illegal aliens for 30 years.

Speaker 2 And now, since Trump got in, they're like admitting, I think it's more like 60 or 65 million illegal aliens, foreign nationals living here in violation of our law.

Speaker 2 So, anyway, no, no, pardon the lecture, but like I agree with you. We've got more than 330 million people in the United States.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and that ties into this whole idea of a housing shortage. Um,

Speaker 2 someone said, Well, illegals are not impacting housing, and

Speaker 2 who said that? I mean, the leftists were saying this, and one of my buddies had such a good way of uh countering that. He said, uh, I don't know, I assume these motherfuckers live inside, you know.

Speaker 2 yeah

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 i'm sorry um

Speaker 2 that's um yeah

Speaker 2 so so food security is a national security risk i think hegseth even uh endorsed this idea recently that food security is national security to to a degree of course food water energy Those are the building blocks of any society slash civilization, food, water, energy.

Speaker 2 And if those, if you don't have those, I mean, that's why people go to war. That's why populations, that's what you know, migration is about.
I mean, everything is about those three things.

Speaker 2 And, but only in America that's been rich for so long can people be like, no, it's really about self-esteem or you know, or whatever. No, it's about food, water, and energy.
Right.

Speaker 2 And you think, so our beef herd is smaller than it was 35 years ago. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Um, so why is it? Is that Brazil? Oh, it's a lot of it is. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Import, imported beef and the artificial deflation of prices uh

Speaker 2 and due to illegal immigrant labor you know every time they go to one of these packers it's like 1600 arrests you know those the whole plant is illegal yeah and you're not going to tell me these people don't know they're doing that and then

Speaker 2 i think there's about i think 30 plants in the u.s

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 process 80% of the beef in this country.

Speaker 2 So now you've got, you're also

Speaker 2 sort of as a byproduct, putting your old local butcher out of business. He can't compete anymore with like $6 hamburger and a tube from Walmart that's got 70 animals packed into it.

Speaker 2 He can't compete with that either. The local guy can't.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a huge problem. And then if you add on the sell-off of public lands and squeeze the last of these guys that are hanging on with their small family ranch, it ain't going to get better.

Speaker 2 What role does immigration play in the story?

Speaker 2 I mean, it's fundamental, both legal and illegal.

Speaker 2 A thing I would say to right-wingers, to like really try to think about

Speaker 2 these are low population states. They're high land mass, but the density, population density is extremely low.

Speaker 2 I think Wyoming, I've said this elsewhere, but I think Wyoming has around 300,000 voters, but that was 300,000 people voting for Trump, which means we don't know what the next turnout will be because he is a once-in-a-lifetime figure.

Speaker 2 There's only one of that guy. So presumably there's going to be less in the next election cycle.
Who knows?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 50,000 new votes, if you sell this off and fill it up with illegal or legal immigration, whether it's H-1B, H-2B, whatever,

Speaker 2 I guess those people aren't voting, but...

Speaker 2 you know, aren't voting.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, illegals or just imports of whatever variety, you flip these. There's not a ton of electoral votes there, but it is.

Speaker 2 Wait, so the idea was to take public lands and like build housing for immigrants on them?

Speaker 2 Well, they say not, but there's a crap load of money going into

Speaker 2 immigrant resettlement in the West.

Speaker 2 I say this everywhere, but Randoland on Twitter. Go look at that and you can see these grants for yourself.

Speaker 2 It's like 4 million, 15 million, you know, 50 million, whatever, going to all these different NGOs and state governments to bring, to put refugees. Like, I see Burkas in Idaho Falls now.
What?

Speaker 2 Idaho Falls was in southeastern Idaho. It's always, I think it was the most Mormon town in the United States, certainly the most Mormon city in the United States.
It had to be up there. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Had to be. Like that in Provo or whatever.
Old Provo, not new Provo. But

Speaker 2 you see Burkas there? Yeah. And this is another thing.
I always get called a racist. And I don't have to hate someone to not want to be replaced by them or have my children replaced by them.

Speaker 2 I don't hate you. People are still calling you racist.
Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
Still? Oh, it's just incredible. Boy, that's so 2021.
I know, yeah. That word's over.
Oh, shut up. I know.

Speaker 2 But I don't.

Speaker 2 And also, here's an important thing to this.

Speaker 2 That person in Aberca did not choose to live in Idaho Falls. where it's 40 below for a week a year.

Speaker 2 You know, they moved here from whatever desert and now they're living in some of the harshest climate in the U.S. They didn't choose that.
Someone put them there.

Speaker 2 And then you have to ask yourself why someone would put them there. I've seen a lot of it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Let's empty the refugee camps of Somali refugees in Kenya and fly them to Lewiston, Maine, an impoverished, dying mill town full of French Canadians and just see how that works. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Didn't work. No, of course not.
And I love my people and

Speaker 2 I don't want them to be replaced. But from just a basic, in terms of politics, practical level, if you flip these states in the West, you're done.
You're not winning another.

Speaker 2 You're not beating the left with the Electoral College, not without Wyoming, Utah, to some degree, Nevada. Like if you lose all of those, if they all go the way Colorado did, it's going to be over.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And Colorado Centre is a Democrat.
It's like affirmatively evil.

Speaker 2 We'll take your kids away unless you let them become trannies kind of thing. It's just like, it's, it's, it's a place that Christians are having trouble living.
It's so anti-Christian in Colorado.

Speaker 2 And some of the best people on earth live there. Oh, I couldn't agree more.

Speaker 2 But I'm just saying it has ramifications. It's not just that like, oh, they get, you know, they had a sort of conservative senator.
Now they have a sort of liberal senator.

Speaker 2 It's like, you know, when the revolution comes, they're not joking at all.

Speaker 2 They're not, it's not like what we're going through now where it's like, do a Fox News hit and, you know, we're fighting the liberals. Okay.
No, it's like

Speaker 2 can't live there anymore if you believe in God. So

Speaker 2 they, are you familiar with the wolf reintroduction out there? I feel very familiar. Yeah.
And you know who's driving that.

Speaker 2 And it's not working. And look at where they put them.
They did it via referendum that won by 1%.

Speaker 2 So the Front Range voted to dump wolves on ranching communities is what they did because they hate them. I mean, that's why.
Why do they hate them?

Speaker 2 Because the ranchers are just so mean or just hate the idea of them. Man, you know,

Speaker 2 sometimes the left is just hysterical by nature. So it's hard to know if they've just been propagandized into.

Speaker 2 Independent-minded white Christians are

Speaker 2 the enemy. It's why they hate Russia.
It's why they hate the ranchers. I mean, let's just be honest.
Let's stop lying. Yeah, I think that's probably it.

Speaker 2 And then they also think the cows are destroying the climate. And so beef production is a great evil, despite the fact that beef have largely reoccupied the ecological niche that bison used to.
So

Speaker 2 you're going to have to replace those with something. I think you're actually giving them too much credit by trying to be rational.

Speaker 2 It's like they don't think that, you know, Jeff Bezos' G4 fleet is wrecking the environment, but they do think that cow flatulence is.

Speaker 2 They pick the group they hate and then they backfill the justification for crushing them. So, oh, it's climate.
We hate the ranchers because of climate.

Speaker 2 No, they hate the ranchers because of who they are. I agree.
I mean, obviously.

Speaker 2 I agree. So, is so the idea was that this land was going to be used for housing.
I mean, that's what they told us. But if you why wouldn't you just kick out the 60 million people here illegally

Speaker 2 between that and

Speaker 2 something like 16 to 18 percent of homes in Utah are owned by investors?

Speaker 2 It's like, well, the state could pass a law that would solve this problem real fast. You know, like, I don't, I'm not against anyone making money.

Speaker 2 And I'm not one of these hate people because they're rich. I've got a friend of mine who's a billionaire is the nicest guy in the world.
He does all kinds of good for people.

Speaker 2 One of the best people I've ever met.

Speaker 2 So it's not that. But also, I mean, I'm not going to fallate.

Speaker 2 the people who are trying to ruin me for greed, greedy reasons. You know, I'm not going to, they are not my friend clearly and they feel the same way right now um

Speaker 2 sorry for being fishy my back is stiff but uh so it's not about housing if it were about housing there are solutions to that

Speaker 2 and they're not doing that they're trying to

Speaker 2 you know i don't want to impugn motives but it ain't housing it's not they're trying to do something else oh and then from a legal perspective

Speaker 2 i'm nearly certain of of this. Please correct me if this is not right.
But

Speaker 2 when you are building affordable housing, like apartments and condos or whatever,

Speaker 2 that comes with stipulations. And I think part of that is that land has to be sold for very cheap to the developer.
And it's like 50 acres, not, you know, 3 million.

Speaker 2 I mean, how many acres do you need? What kind of apartment complex are we building over here? You know, 3 million acres?

Speaker 2 It's very clearly not about affordable housing or your kid and his ability to buy a house.

Speaker 2 So here's the problem that I have with it and why I'm so grateful that you have done what you've done and why I want to talk to you is I'm worried about what the end stage of our debt crisis looks like.

Speaker 2 So when you're in debt to a lender, that debt is secured with assets. So you take a car loan, your loan is secured by your car.
Same with a home mortgage. They can take your house.

Speaker 2 The United States is trillions in debt to a bunch of different countries, investors all over the world, but Japan, China,

Speaker 2 South Korea, et cetera, Europe.

Speaker 2 And we can't pay it, obviously. And

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 how do we make good on that debt? Well, what is the United States?

Speaker 2 The United States is a continental-sized landmass that has some of the most valuable resources in the world, which would include the largest bodies of fresh water in the world, the Great Lakes.

Speaker 2 which would include some of the biggest oil and gas deposits, energy, and which would include some of the most productive farmland in the world.

Speaker 2 So I'm really concerned that at some point, it sounds stupid now, but at some point, not so far in the future, we're going to be like, well, actually the Chinese own Lake Superior.

Speaker 2 No, I'm serious. I know me too.

Speaker 2 And there are oil and gas fields and

Speaker 2 the nation itself.

Speaker 2 And so if you set up, I don't think that's crazy at all. Like in the end, the US dollar is a joke and everyone knows that.
It's backed by nothing.

Speaker 2 Full faith in credit. So, like, what do we have? Well, we have federal lands, actually, land, minerals, water.

Speaker 2 And I just don't think you want to set the precedent in motion where you could just sell those if you needed to, because they don't belong to the current occupants of the White House or Congress.

Speaker 2 They just don't, they belong to the people.

Speaker 2 Correct. And I, another thing they lie about is the actual numerical value of that land.
Yeah. There was a number floating around 100 trillion, they were saying.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I kept thinking, how on earth did you get to 100 trillion? That just does not make sense. It's just a round number.

Speaker 2 So I started plugging in to the calculator, like, let's see what this would actually work out to. And if you sold at fair market value,

Speaker 2 every piece of federal land in Idaho, it'd be like $110 billion.

Speaker 2 That is not going to touch the national debt in any serious way. Not to mention now you're losing all the

Speaker 2 other revenue streams that come from that. Of course.
So I just, it's not, I don't believe it's about debt. I think

Speaker 2 if you did it all by,

Speaker 2 if you did it all, let's say you could get to 6.2 trillion if you did 10,000 an acre or something like that.

Speaker 2 I'm having a hard time remembering what I came up with, but 6 trillion is a crap load of money. But we spent 2.2 or whatever it was in the CARES Act a a couple of years ago.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's in the grand scheme of the way we spend, that's not a lot of money. And now the everyday guy is just losing.

Speaker 2 What are you doing now? I mean, are you going to retreat from public life having achieved your goal? Well, I know. I don't think it's over.
In fact, they're already pushing for it again.

Speaker 2 I started.

Speaker 2 My friends and I started a thing called the Sagebrush Institute. It's just kind of a small brain trust of people that are much more

Speaker 2 qualified than me. And

Speaker 2 we're just going to do the best that we can to message and get these ideas out in front of people. I take no money from it.
We don't even have a bank account right now.

Speaker 2 It's absolutely in no way. It's my kind of foundation.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 In no way is it about money. We collected emails and we're just trying to disseminate information because I think we need a lot more than one voice out on this stuff.

Speaker 2 Because here, like, here's an example.

Speaker 2 The everyday American hears, well, why don't we just do a new homesteading act? And that sounds good. You're like, oh, that'll take care of our kids.

Speaker 2 No, it won't.

Speaker 2 All that. First of all, the very last iteration of homestead acts, I think the average more than 50% of the people that claimed land on that left it after two years.

Speaker 2 So you're just doing a sell-off with a slight delay if you do that. I think they did this in Zimbabwe.

Speaker 2 Yeah, how about we we homestead act

Speaker 2 Rhodesia? You know?

Speaker 2 Sorry.

Speaker 2 So we're just going to try to pass information as best as we can and also help. I think we have a golden opportunity right now to do two really important things.

Speaker 2 One, reshape the narrative and make

Speaker 2 conservation cool on the right wing again.

Speaker 2 I think Zoomers have been let down by everyone their whole life. They just like constantly getting screwed screwed by someone.
And we got a win here and we cannot let them down.

Speaker 2 Like we want to help them

Speaker 2 keep stacking wins here. Like we want to be something that doesn't end up screwing them in the end.

Speaker 2 So the next time they push, you know, we can help Zoomers. And if we can shift this narrative with Zoomer, Zoomers and tell them like, this is yours, man.

Speaker 2 This belongs to you. Regardless of what people tell you, this is yours right now.
You can go uh to

Speaker 2 birch creek valley in idaho right now and go camp and fish and do whatever you want uh get off your ass and go do it it'll be fun you know and it's yours experience it if we can get them to understand that

Speaker 2 then that is a huge accomplishment for uh posterity in the future because then they'll want to protect it forever and that'll give us at least until they have grandchildren which would be great and then the second thing i think we have a real opportunity to do is shift the narrative in science back to people who actually want to do real science.

Speaker 2 I think COVID

Speaker 2 for

Speaker 2 righteous reasons made a lot of people very skeptical of any expert class. And that, I mean, I am one of those people.

Speaker 2 But there are scientists out there who genuinely really want to save this stuff. That's the guy that's trying to save the healer trout or whatever.
Exactly.

Speaker 2 So I think we can help them establish some more credibility. Like, no, we actually, we as scientists, not me, but them as scientists don't actually want to pave over

Speaker 2 the Mojave Desert. No.

Speaker 2 So we have an opportunity to shift two narratives that are really important.

Speaker 2 If we can do that, then I think we've got another couple generations of security, you know, from my children and your children and grandchildren. And that's what I care about.
So that's what we want.

Speaker 2 It's not an accident that that the most articulate voice in this debate is you and you spend the most amount of time outside.

Speaker 2 And maybe part of it is convincing people that nature is more compelling than porn or video games or anything that's happening on your phone.

Speaker 2 And I,

Speaker 2 I mean, the decline in hunting and fishing licenses nationally, as much as I so enjoy being alone. You don't have to compete for a spot because there's nobody there.
I do think that's ominous, right?

Speaker 2 oh yeah it's terrifying

Speaker 2 yeah people don't even know what public lands look like

Speaker 2 right i mean it's it's hugely important uh yeah that one is there's a lot of advocacy groups that are trying to get people into bow like get into bow hunting and stuff like that i think that's great

Speaker 2 And we should try to do more of that.

Speaker 2 And then just think of like shooting. How many kids are going out shooting on public land? I see this weird narrative every once in a while where guys will be like,

Speaker 2 they won't even let you out there to shoot. And

Speaker 2 the leader of a huge gun rights organization tried to tell me this a couple of days ago. And I was like, first of all, why the hell are you trying to fight with an ally?

Speaker 2 And then secondly, what are you talking about? That's everyone shoots on that stuff all the time. So even things like that matter.

Speaker 2 Like go out and take your AR-15 and go shoot a bunch of rocks, you know, have a good time. At a distance, though, because Ricochet's.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Don't shoot one four feet away.

Speaker 2 Don't Adam Kitzinger, your your buddy.

Speaker 2 Whatever happened to him?

Speaker 2 I don't know. Does he still exist? Adam Kinzinger.

Speaker 2 I hope he's happy. Sad guy.

Speaker 2 There was a funny, my brain is doing a squirrel thing, but one of the funniest tweets I ever saw, I don't, you know, me and this guy disagree at times, but right after that half,

Speaker 2 first thing in the morning, Josh Hawley tweeted, I wonder who Loomis will shoot today.

Speaker 2 I laughed for like an hour about that

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 but yeah we need to get those kids engaged and there are some college programs that do this kind of thing uh a friend of mine runs one of these at a university in the west takes kids out and teaches them how to hunt ducks and you know shoot and

Speaker 2 so we need to do much much more of that And that's important as well. And then one other thing, I guess, if I could say, and I apologize, I'm so bad at answering your questions directly.

Speaker 2 No, I love it.

Speaker 2 I can understand why someone from Maine would be thinking right now, well, I'm never going to see that.

Speaker 2 Why do I care?

Speaker 2 There's one answer I think I would give to that that no one else does is we are a union.

Speaker 2 And even if you don't want to come out and enjoy the land that is yours.

Speaker 2 Help support us because we support you with various policies that help protect your fisheries and your way of life up here. And we are a union.
So, you know, we help you, please help us back.

Speaker 2 That kind of thing.

Speaker 2 Same thing with like, I've heard other people say this, and it's true with like the farm bill, which is, although it's like 60% snap now, but the farm bill helps, you know, a guy in Iowa or whatever.

Speaker 2 You know, and that's the farm bill, 60% in food stamps. Oh, I think it might even be more than that.
It might even be more. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't think the real threat is Iran. I'm just saying.
I mean, that's, wow, that's sad. It's horrible.
So if people want to learn more about you and about

Speaker 2 these debates and i think anyone who's made it two hours into this trusts you um i do

Speaker 2 where do they where can they find i mean because some of this stuff is complex so like where's a trusted source for learning more very um sagebrush institute.org is where we're disseminating everything and there's an email sign up

Speaker 2 and that's it we're just going to keep pushing uh

Speaker 2 That's it. Eventually, it's possible that we could try to bring in small funds for like leaflets and stuff, but I'm not getting paid.
Nobody on the board is getting paid. That's not happening.

Speaker 2 And we'll be straight up. If that ever, like if there ever becomes a point where we're asking for money, we will always be straight up about it.

Speaker 2 And you will see that I believe that charity should be for the sake of charity. So no one's paying me to do it.
I can promise you that. I agree with that.
And we'll live by that as best as we can.

Speaker 2 And that's where you can go to just sign up and we'll start emailing you. And, you know, this is what's happening with wolves or whatever.
Keep people informed. Thank you.
That was amazing.

Speaker 2 Thank you, sir.

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