The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 062: Seattle. Steven Rinella talks with Brad Brooks of Argali Outdoors, along with Ryan Callaghan of First Lite, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: May 4, 2017

Subjects discussed: Diswashers today; peelin' fricken trees, man; dippin' smelt; remembrances of a former violater; The Wilderness Society; electroshocking fish; Steve as radical conservationist; mountain bikes; The Death Hike; the federal land-transfer threat; politicians against public lands and whether or not their motivations matter; Jason Chaffetz and Rob Bishop; The Midnight Forests; the Yellowstone Park Super Tag; high-grade Missouri turkey hunters; low-elevation Wilderness with a capital W; discourse and the other kinda 'course; Argali Outdoors, and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by First Light.

Go farther, stay longer. You know, we haven't talked about it forever. Giannis, you do. This is not an ad. This is just like you do a pitch for the guidebooks. I feel like we haven't talked about the guidebooks in so long. There's a lot of people that don't realize that we have a 700-page volume one, volume two, complete guide to hunting, butchering, and cooking wild game.

Everybody's asking for them. Yeah. But we should pitch them. Pretend like you're doing an ad. And that's like being put on the spot here on the media podcast. Yeah, try to wing an ad for it. New to hunting, veteran hunter, somewhere in between, guaranteed you'll find something interesting to read in both volumes.

Yeah. That was our aim. No, it's 700 pages long. Yeah. There's no way you know. There's no, like, I don't care if you went and asked. Yeah, you go ask Daniel Boone. He's not going to know all the shit in there

because they didn't have tag draws back in Daniel Boone's day, and it explains that stuff. I don't want to act like you or I also know everything that was put in that book. I forgot a lot of what I wrote in that book. Right, but we also had a lot of other veteran hunters that are more experienced in certain

subsets of hunting that helped us out and wrote short pieces, some of them longer than others to so we could get a little more depth in places where we might not have had the expertise. Yeah, experts from all around the country weigh in on various subjects. We even call it that.

So-and-so weighs in on various subjects. But when we finished the manuscript, it took years to do the books. We finished it. I brought it to my publisher, and she's like, books aren't this, you can't do a book this big. You can't have a 700 page book. That's when we broke it into volume one and volume two. Volume one is big game. Volume two is small game. Everything from squirrels on up to cranes. And then volume one covers all North America's big game animals. And it's got a bunch of cooking stuff, sausage making. I mean, they're big ass books.

You know those books. I think you're, Cal, you're in the books. Did you write the books? Yeah, I was asked to. I'm not sure exactly what you guys use. Oh, no, no, no, you're in it. And your picture's in it a bunch of times. You guys should know, though, every time I recommend those,

I deal with a lot of beginners for sure. And every time I recommend those, folks don't know they're out there. Yeah. Which is amazing. And they always follow up. It's 100% rate. Like, thank you so much. This is so helpful.

Now, that's an ad. Yanni needs to take something from Cal's book on how to sell. Well, that's a testimonial. That's a testimonial. You can buy them on Amazon. I seen them see our guest here who we haven't introduced yet uh brad brooks from the wilderness society you read him you actually bought one i bought one for my brother yeah i thought he could learn how to hunt better did you look at it yourself of course yeah what was your first impression was it like holy shit there was a lot to digest it's a dance it's

a dance book but it was good beautifully illustrated actually I guessed. It's a dance. It's a dance book, but it was good. Beautifully illustrated. Actually, you know what? There's a section on glassing that I thought was really useful for most folks, like how to pick apart a landscape. Most folks don't know how to glass properly. No, they don't. And most people don't recognize

that it's a thing you need to learn. Yeah, you don't just go out and throw up your binoculars and start seeing big stuff right away. Yeah. You're not like, oh, I need to learn. No one's ever like, I need to learn how to find animals with your binoculars and start seeing like big stuff you know right away yeah so you're not like oh i need to learn like no one's ever like i need to learn how to find animals with my binoculars you just think like i'll just start doing it i'll just see them yeah but it's like a thing you gotta it's like if it's like if you're gonna start like if i want to start making

my own socks right i'd have to like go and look that shit up on youtube it's like you should approach glassing like a thing you're gonna learn totally yeah it's like tips and tricks and yeah so did you buy this book for the brother that kills bigger stuff than yeah that one yeah well no that's weird you want him to get even just bigger stuff than you you know i figure he's uh he might stumble across a big animal every once in a while but doesn't necessarily make him a better hunter yeah so i figure you know if we're gonna keep hunting together you need to learn a few things and like he doesn't want to listen to me all the time so i figure make him a better hunter. So I figure, you know, if we're going to keep hunting together, you need to learn a few things. And like, he doesn't want to listen to me all the time.

So I figure, give him a book, have him read it. And then, you know, then he can decide if he wants to acquire that information or internalize it. But yeah, you just tell him to be like, I ghost wrote this book. These people that say they wrote this book did not write this book. I need to clarify, your brother called me out right now.

So this is my brother, Curtis, my older brother. He has shot bigger stuff than me. I'm going to claim right now, not because he's a better hunter, but because he has more discipline in waiting for and passing up animals, which is not a skill that I really have cared to acquire. But that falls under being a better hunter. No. No, absolutely not.

The discipline to wait? So you have to want to wait, number one, right? I mean, that's what makes a good hunter. It's not what makes a good hunter. You're saying what makes a good hunter is passing up animals. Oh, I thought you just meant like as in just the patience just to wait and hunt a whole day. No, you got nine days to hunt. He'll eat his tag.

He'll eat his tag. You got nine days to hunt. You're like, that's He'll eat his tag. You got nine days to hunt. You're like, that's a nice bull. I'm going to shoot that bull. And your buddy's like, not me, man. I'm waiting for a giant. Yep. Yep.

And then he risks, you know, empty freezer syndrome. I misunderstood. Yeah. Cal, we're going to get to Brad. Brad, he's going to, we'll get to him. We're going to cover him thorough. But Cal, what's your story lately? Do you still have the unusual job title?

I do. I have this extremely unusual job title, the Director of Conservation and Public Relations at First Light. So like, are there a lot of apparel companies that have that role? I do not think so. I certainly haven't run into anybody. As far as I know, that's a very unique title. I think there's a lot of people doing what I do.

Yeah, but not with a name. Yeah. And you're like, I know you work more in this, but let's just say, oh, it doesn't matter how many hours a week you work. What percentage of your time is spent on those issues? Oh, man, at this point, you know, we're so face forward on a lot of conservation issues,

but you know, mainly the public lands situation that's going on right now, that it's a huge part of my job because it also falls into PR when I'm talking to lots of different writers and into our marketing side of things because we use it throughout our digital marketing and we're pushing the message.

I think that's one of the biggest values we have for these conservation groups out there is we can use our platform to make sure people are at least aware of these issues. So what I'm getting at, though, is in your work week, are you only, like, you're paid by First Light, and the most of your work is directed towards conservation issues?

Certain times of the year, yes. Oh, I see. Yeah. So stuff comes up. Yep, stuff comes up. You know, there's very few people out there doing what we do. So it is, you know, it's valuable for, you know, writers that have written about the same stuff over and over again to look at things from a different angle because you know really in the hunting

community it's always been very taboo to take a stance on anything yeah because you're always you're afraid you're going to piss someone off right yeah and it's everybody uses like the you know it's a small pie can't can't afford to cut anybody else or, you know, offend anybody or push anybody out of it because the industry is not that big, but it's just really not the case. And like you've said in the past, man, you got to, if you don't stand for anything, what do you stand for, right?

You stand a little bit better. I think you're thinking of a country and Western musician. You got to stand for something or you'll fall for anything. Who is this good one? Top ten country song at one point in time. When I was washing dishes at Steiner's Point, Twin Lake, Michigan, and it was a song on the radio. Yeah, I used to wash dishes sometimes on weekends.

Yeah, I was in the dish pit quite a bit myself. It gets so greasy. The lower part of your t-shirt just gets ruined washing dishes in a bar, man. I was in the bar and grill part of the bar. It's like the kind of place where people go on a Friday night to get prime rib. Yeah.

Like that kind of place with a big boiled potato or like a baked potato wrapped in aluminum foil. Yeah. That kind of joint. Yeah, that was my first job outside of working for my dad. It was a place called

Mi Ranchito. And they did not have like a Hobart with the drop-down door that just runs like a minute cycle. No. It was three bins.

Dishwashers today, they don't even know what a three-bin sink is, I don't think. No, dishwashers day are pants. That sucked. Dishwashers today.

Let me tell you about this washers today yeah three bins that that was my whole deal yeah just be like the dips like super greasy from like the neck up but just kind of soaked from the neck down and in an inexplicably dirty feeling by the time you're home yeah my first job was running a whole bar when i was 13 i was it wasn't even legal for me to have a job. And I remember I was 13 because my brother, Danny, who's two years older than me, wasn't even able to drive yet. And we would both ride on his Honda moped on a spree to go to a summer camp.

My area where I grew up was full of summer camps. It was very rural and cabiny back then. And one of the summer camps was Camp Pendulum and we'd go down there on this moped and we had to be there at 6 a.m. to do breakfast. We'd do breakfast, lunch, just washing dishes with a machine and we were

younger than the damn campers because band camps would come in and the kids were older than we were. We'd mix Kool-Aid in a garbage can and stir it with a canoe paddle. That was one of our responsibilities at Pendulum on.

Oh, man. Glad I'm not doing that shit anymore, man. But, man, oh, man, a little bit of like actual work goes a long way

in life. It teaches you humility, man. Big time. It teaches you humility. I was a janitor. It was my first job my first job i didn't wash dishes good i was like in a water park i used to get paid for hours to scrub gum scrape gum off the sidewalk you're out there with like some chemical like scraping those little gum stains like yeah you know it was like someone's been stepped on and like you know worked into the the concrete you rethink when you see someone spit their gum out on a sidewalk probably oh i don't do it yeah i won't do it still to this day absolutely not you'll just eat it rather than

spit it out absolutely was this a incentive type of janitorial position like per piece of gum you could find no it was it was out the perk the biggest perk of the job was there was like a pizza hut in the joint in this water park and uh what state was this in this is idaho yeah so you know it's a top quality water park just outside of boise and uh you got to uh at the end of the day they were gonna throw the pizza away and so they would give it out to all those employees so so you ended the day with a little pizza yeah that lasted like a week but after a week of eating like pizza hut pizza like i won't i can't eat that shit again either it's like i'm over it yeah i can't do it i can't stomach it i imagine not so i imagine burns you i the most interesting job i had as a youngster was peeling logs for log homes

so you had a draw knife oh yeah old school yeah because here's the thing i think they still do it like that yeah and even with, like it depends, when they cut the trees, if you cut the trees in the fall, right, and the trees freeze in the winter, when the spring thaw comes, the bark falls off. But by then that tree is hard.

So there's no bark on it and the outside is hard. But you still had to draw a knife the whole damn tree because they want that look. Yeah. The hand-peeled look. So you'd think like, oh, it'll be easier now because there's no bark on it. had to draw knife the whole damn tree because they want that look yeah the hand peel look so you'd think like oh it'll be easier now because there's no bark on it it took you it was it paid 35 cents a foot so you get a tree be like 42 feet long 35 cents a foot to strip the bark off with a

draw knife and if and when you were peeling if you were peeling in the spring and it was like old trees that the bark had come off it was way less money and it was like old trees that the bark had come off, it was way less money. And it was really hard to get your stroke. It was hard to get your cut to look nice and smooth. Your cut would have this kind of jagged, torn look. And then Ed Thompson, who I worked for, wouldn't like them like that. So the thing to do is just peel fresh. But then you get to the butt end of those things, man, that bark's like three inches thick and and you could a good peeler could peel enough to be able to afford leather gloves because if you were like a shit peeler you'd lose money buying leather gloves you i mean the gloves just don't they take heat shrink tubing it's just like ed thompson to make his ownife. He'd take three-quarter-inch rebar, bend it like in a big U,

and then put heat shrink tubing on the handles and then weld the blade on there. And he'd sharpen them for you free of charge. So he'd do the sharpening, but he'd just go down there and just start freaking drawknifing those trees, man. What kind of trees are these? He had a variety of things we'd work with, yeah. He'd get some stuff from out west, some stuff from Michigan.

I think they mechanically peel them, but then they almost had to go back and add. That's my understanding now. It was this dude, Wendell. It was me. Sometimes my brothers would peel a little bit. It was a dude named Barefoot. Yeah.

When I was doing the dish pit. Peeling freaking trees, man. It was interesting guys like yeah i'm gonna pay you five dollars and 50 cents an hour which was 25 cents more than minimum wage in montana at the time i was because you're a good kid stoked about it uh two weeks it was minimum wage i'm'm like, oh, yeah. First job on the books job ever. And the guy's like, oh, yeah, I didn't really know if you were going to stick around, so I put you at minimum wage.

We'll talk about this later. I still don't understand. Never got paid the promised $5.50. Oh, really? Yeah, good lesson for a kid. And then about halfway through that summer, I got an offer, we'll call it, to bust rocks, big river rocks,

in the basement of a building with a sledgehammer because they couldn't get any equipment in there to get them out of there so they could expand the basement of this office building. So that's what I did. How big are the river rocks? Huge. You just want to hammer all day? It's glacial.

Glacial Lake, Missoula, big aquifer boulders. Like you can't pick them up and carry them? No. Really? Yeah. That's interesting. How'd that pay? Eight bucks an hour.

And I was just like, woo, eight bucks an hour. Give me just like woo eight bucks an hour give me that hammer yeah i'll start wailing on a rock yep when i was washing dishes at steiner's point um i remember the owner was a lady named gretchen and steiner was her dog but what i was trying to do in the daytime then is i was trying to commercially trap snapping turtles, which is a hard business to make money in because I'd get a buck a pound for turtle meat. Turtle, I could have the lower shell on the turtle. So you'd like, you'd skin the whole turtle, leaving everything connected to the lower shell. So guts, head, feet, upper shell gone, buck a a pound very hard to make money i don't think you do that in michigan anymore at the time you could now is it all the weight in the upper shell is that all the way to

everywhere else all you're left i mean you're left with the yield on a turtle's not big okay you know it's like a big game animal the yield's like 45 percent right the turtle is not even near that shit i've never attempted never attempted to cut one open yeah yeah it's a chore what happened how we got into that line of work not even a line of work how i got into that attempt is one day we were dipping smelt and did way more smelt uh than we really had any use for and like you don't know about restraint when you're kids i remember me and my brother were out, and we went to Pentwater, and we dipped eight five-gallon buckets of smelt one night. Tell me a little bit about, because you always talk about dip and smelt, but I really don't even know how that works.

There's three ways we'd get them. And you don't clean them, right? No. I got a bunch in that freezer because my buddy in Michigan sends me bags of smelt every year. But even for human or human edibles. You clean them or not. We would typically take a pair of scissors,

cut their head off and gut them. Clean with scissors. Oh, okay. But you're cleaning buckets full of them, you know. He freezes them whole and then cleans them before he eats them. Or we would now and then just fry the whole damn fish whole and eat it like that anyways. So we'd get them three ways.

One, always at night. So always in the dark. One way we'd get them is in a run-up stream mouth, okay? So you go to a very small stream. Like one place we used to catch them a fair bit was Duck Lake Channel. So there's a place called Duck Lake. Duck Lake has a channel, flows out in Lake Michigan,

and smelt are in the Great Lake. Well, everywhere, not everywhere, but this type of smelt is an anadromous smelt. So this smelt lives in the big water, runs up river to spawn. And they spawn like right in the lower sections of the river. So not in the Great Lakes, no. So they would run up and just spawn

like basically in the mouth of a stream. They'd come up in the dark and you just stand out there and you could either, if it was really good and real high and muddy, you'd dip them blind, where you're just taking a big net and running that net down current. If it was clear water, we would just hang a lantern on a post and you'd wait and big schools of them would come by and you'd dip them up. Or we would go to the places that had break walls. So like Pentwater, White Lake Channel, Muskegon Channel, any of these various channels. And we're just smelt or getting ready to go up big water courses.

And you just sit on the break walls built out into Lake Michigan and hang a lantern. And they'd hit the wall. They'd hit the break wall of the schools. And I'm talking giant schools. You see like pods of them that were like a car, right? Just dense with thousands of them. They'd hit the break wall

and just go up and down the break wall trying to figure out what to do. And you'd have what's called a drop net. And then they, there's a certain size. Like I believe at the time, I think you could have a 36 inch square drop net. So you had nine square feet of drop net on a pole and you'd lower the drop net down

to the bottom and you want it to be like the color of sand. And as the school drifted over your drop net, you just lift your drop net up. And that was when you were really like knocking the hell out of them. It was typically like drop nets were very effective. So when me and Matt went to Pentwater one night, we dipped 40 gallons with a drop net two drop nets but we were getting so many you we were filling the bucket like it was a long walk one guy one that i remember that night in particular just to take one bucket up the car and come back and the other the guy dipping would have his bucket full so our fishing mentor down the beach, a guy by the name of John Gary, who passed away some years ago, he fished, he lived by himself, but fished 200 days

a year. And I'm not just like bullshit. Like he would show you, he kept track of how many days he fished and what books he read. And he would like pull out of his notebook to be like, here's the days I fished, what I fished, what I caught. And it was always like a mystery, like how could John Gary eat as many fish as he caught? But then he tells us what I do when I get a lot of fish is I sell them down at Captain's Wharf. And he'll buy anything that, this is illegal and I was young and stupid, but he's like, they'll buy anything that there is a legal market for. So there's still like commercial perch fisheries in Canada and other places. So he would buy yellow perch fillets, no questions asked. John Gary said, when you're, told me, warned me at the time, when you're buying something from him, he has his thumb on the scale.

And when you're selling him something, he's got his finger under the scale, but it ain't his thumb. I remember what he told me. So we took all these smelt down there. And I remember the guy gave us 40 bucks. He gave us a dollar a gallon for smelt. And that's how I entered into this illicit relationship with this man that lasted from when I was around that same period when I was scrubbing dishes legally at Steiner's Point. Yeah. Notes from the life of a former violator. All right. So here's a segue for you. Brad Brooks. Brad Brooks, our guest.

Tell us what's going on. What's your ax to grind? That's not a good way to kick it off. Tell us what you do. I have a few things I do. Sometimes I'm Ryan Callahan's handler when there's media around gotcha i do that keep him from making embarrassing himself i do yeah i do um make sure he gets his haircut on time uh i also i have a company called argali um it's like a lightweight backcountry hunting uh company let's do some filming stuff um and then my full-time

job is i work for the wilderness society and i'm the public lands campaign director also real specific within the wilderness society yeah i mean i've done a bunch of stuff but that's kind of what i do now is run our public lands campaign now so break down the wilderness society for me i'm venturing that mo like a lot of folks out of the the hunting and fishing world are probably not real familiar with the mandate of the wilderness society yeah so we have a mission to protect wilderness and inspire america's care for wild places i've been around since 1935 one of the oldest conservation organizations in america founded by the likes of bob marshall Alda Leopold,

some of the folks that kind of invented this idea of conservation in America. We are headquartered in DC. We have staff all over the country and we work on a variety of issues, but public lands conservation is kind of the core of it. What's your guys, what's your working definition of wilderness? that's that's that's a really uh tough question to answer uh there's like capital w wilderness congressionally designated wilderness that's very federally recognized yeah federally recognized wilderness there's a law and a definition right uh i think that is a very small subset of what we consider to be wilderness that we call small w wilderness is really kind of in the eye of the beholder um so for some people like a park in a city is their idea of wilderness uh that's

that's a stretch but sure really sure but for some people that's that is their wilderness experience like the central park because they wouldn't be like hey i'm going into the wilderness and they'll walk into the park man i don't know you'd be surprised uh some don't call wilderness call it like the wilds the wilds going for a walk in the woods i think would be fair to say but this is where it gets really that's not the woods dude that's a park comfort zone though yeah okay well let me ask you this then okay let's talk let's get into this because like my idea of like a wilderness experience is being dropped off in like the frank sure or the frank church or some wild place i just i don't really like to see other people when i'm in the wilderness but that is a very unique perspective of the amount of people the types of people that

use wilderness if you go to like the red rocks uh ncaa outside of vegas red rocks the rainbow canyon wilderness yeah it is just like you'd think you were in a theme park there's so many people like hiking up and down the trail and i mean it's just like a never-ending stream of people they drive to yeltsin national park it is like people got speakers they're listening to music it's like uh but it's wilderness uh to that designated wilderness and for people, they might go like 100 yards into that area, sit down, kind of look at the mountains and be like, I love being in the wilderness. This is just so much fun.

And that's their wilderness experience. So that's why I say it is kind of in the eye of the beholder. That is not what I would consider to be a wilderness experience, but that's kind of my thing. But are you guys involved in all 50 states? No. Most of them. Certainly all the western states. Pretty much states where there's public

land. So a heavy presence in Alaska, all over the west, and then on the east coast, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina. Michigan. All those beautiful national forests. We do do some work in Michigan. Sleeping Bear Dunes. Oh, yeah yeah you familiar with that yeah we worked on right south of there man really yeah okay um there's a wilderness bill uh they got designated

there what was that not too long ago yeah can't remember the year um so yeah so we work on uh we work pretty much anywhere there's public land um and it's not just, I know wilderness is in our name, but we work on public lands issues sort of writ large. So it's not just, we're not myopically focused on, just designate wilderness. It's like, it's very, it's much broader than that. In fact, wilderness campaigns, I've worked on a number of them over the years,

but that's a very small part of what we do. So what's your, I know you like to hunt, but what's the organization's relationship to hunting? Are they adversarial to hunting? No. Do you have to like hide the fact that you'd like to go hunting? No, not at all.

No. It's a fair question. I get it a lot actually. You know, I was fortunate when I first started with Wilderness Society, I got hooked up with them out of college. I went and worked. I was on a fish biology crew up in the Sawtooths.

I lived in the Sawtooths. You were born in Idaho. No, I actually wasn't. But I moved to Idaho shortly after I was born. Oh, okay. Like as a little kid, you got there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see.

But I lived in the Sawtooths in the white clouds for a summer, shocking bull trout, looking for new populations of bull trout. Did you find any? I did, yeah. Yeah. Sworn a secrecy. I can't tell you where they're at, but found some big ones.

You found a population of bull trout that wasn't like on the map? Several, yeah. Really? Oh, yeah. We would go place these temperature, God, what the hell are they called? Little temperature sensors.

We'd go zip time to like rocks and brush and little creeks. And then we would go back. If the temperature, the water temperature was certain, within a certain range, the biologist would send us back to go shock it because they knew that the bull trout only exists.

They like to spawn in a certain temperature range. So then we'd go, we'd hike. I mean, I would hike a car battery and like two pairs of like rubber boots, like deep into the wilderness. It was some of the most miserable work. I mean, I've done everything from picking up, you know, dog excrement for a living as a young kid, scraping, scraping bubble gum. And I'll tell you what, man, when the mosquitoes and the horse flies were like really bad and the ticks were really bad. And you're

like just trudging through brush all day off trail. So I'm that thick stuff. It was, it was kind of miserable. Um, at some point in time, it sounded like a dream job. When I got the job, I was like, oh man, I'm in heaven. I get to hike every day and shock fish. But then reality of it was like, this is work. I want to interject on two points. I think I might've talked about both these, but I was in the Philippines and I saw a subsistence fisherman who had homemade fish shocking rigs where they had car batteries. They made a backpack out of detergent bottles. They'd take a big, huge detergent

bottle and cut the top off, put a car battery in there, and the shoulder straps were made out of rope, and they had wands. They would go out on the rocks in the river and just run those wands under the rocks. Another guy would be on a rock downstream with a net and they'd shock up little shrimp and crabs and stuff.

Yeah. And then cook them up. The second story is like, I feel like this is sort of a, a, a story about a divinity where my brother was shocking fish in the state of Pennsylvania when he was, I think he might

have been in graduate school or doing small jobs, had to go into graduate school for ecology. He was shocking fish. It was walking back from doing a sample on a stream and a bolt of lightning came out of the heavens and struck the ground next to him. And the electricity went up into the sack of fish and shocked his arm. Now, that isn't like big man saying, hey, taste your own medicine, buddy.

Just so you know. Just so you know. I'm watching. The challenge was shocking. It was always like finding the right voltage, right current, because you didn't want to, you know. Oh oh because you could smoke a beaver too like the bigger it is right the bigger it is the more the more it shocks so you could smoke turtles and

beavers on accident right yeah oh yeah and i uh i mean we can go deep into this but it was also like always you know you're always trying to find the right voltage and then i was always surprised to do what have range but not be lethal correct yeah you want to stun them but you don't want to kill them right so you want to be able to put them back um we caught a ton of sculpin there's sculpin all over those mountain streams you just don't know about they had no idea they were there like you don't catch them when you're fishing no yeah exactly um and big ones too but you also catch some really big fish uh that i wouldn't have guessed exist up in some of those mountain streams so like big game fish?

I mean, for like cutthroat. Yeah, I mean, big cutthroats. You have a little stream that's only like that wide and you pull out 14-inch cutthroats. Where's that dude when I'm fishing? I know, right? Because I'm like catching these little guys. So when I did that, got hooked up to the Wilderness Society.

I mean, I've always been into hunting. So I didn't really like – I went to work for for the wilderness society because i knew what they did but like i didn't have any like i wasn't worried that like oh man i wonder if these guys like you know are pro hunting i knew they were pro hunting um but i didn't really have any like bob marshall and aldo leopold yeah maybe i was just naive i didn't realize there were folks that kind of had that opinion of the wilderness side that maybe were were, we're not a group that's supportive of hunting, but where did the, where did that sense come from? From me?

No, no, no. If people have it, where do they get it? Oh, you'd have to ask them. Is there like a high profile thing where there was like a, where there was like a pissing match about some sort of hunting activities on designated wilderness or there's a lot of folks who just think conservation groups in general are some uh you know ultra liberal um conspiracy to eventually take away hunting

and fishing yeah yeah like that dude that wrote to us suggesting that the Clintons put wolves into Yellowstone as a way to disarm America because the wolves would eat all the game and then no one would have a reason to buy a gun anymore. And it was a gun control measure. It's called the long con. The long game. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. There's a lot of, there's probably a lot of reasons.

I think Ryan's right. I think that probably a lot of reasons i think ryan's right i think that like just folks just generally it's like you work on conservation you're just kind of suspect in general um yeah but it is possible like it is true that some organizations okay that maybe they'll maybe they even you know we always had yannis and i had this ongoing discussion about who gets to own the term environmentalist, right? So we have this, so for a long time we had like, we have like conservationists, like conservation,

and that has a connotation or that has a sort of rings in a certain way in people's minds. And it's a term that for many, many, many years was, you know, a term of sort of describing a type of environmentalism owned by hunters and fishermen. Now you see that groups that were traditionally

might've identified as environmental groups start to use the term conservation because conservation has a more positive connotation in the popular American mind. People hear the word environmentalist, they think radical. People hear the word conservation and they think that it's like more of a business friendly, pragmatic, realistic form of environmentalism. And I think there's, and this isn't true. I mean, it's not true across, no, it's not true. It's not universally true, but it's like this sort of wrestling match that has occurred

around this word. And I think that there are some groups like, I know for instance, like Sierra Club. So they'll do some stuff around, like you'll see Sierra Club stuff where they'll have a guy doing a little upland bird hunting, right? He'll be like hunting some pheasants. And maybe a guy's like catches a trout and pokes a hole in its face and lets it go. And that's like, they're like, yeah, you know, we're kind of cool with that. But you're not going to go on their website and find some dude doing a grip and grin with a dead bull. His tongue hanging out of his mouth.

It's just, they're just not going to go near it, right? Because they want to sort of, they want to kind of like not alienate what they would call the hook and bullet crowd, but they don't really want to embrace it either. And then when an issue comes up, you'll often find that they're on, you up, you'll often find that they're on, you know, you'll often find that they're maybe a little bit adversarial to state management of

wildlife. And they generally tend to side with a hands-off federalist approach toward wildlife management. And so you'd say to a Sierra Club guy like, hey, are you guys anti-hunting? Of course not. We just had a guy holding a trout on our website but when you look at the mean you know the the average of activities that they've centered themselves around they haven't generally been friendly toward yeah no consumptive users i have a real i have a strong i have a theory as well on this whole like environmental versus conservation term like how do you self-describe somebody asks you hey steve conservationist environmentalist radical conservationist radical conservationist yeah that's a good one i haven't thought about that one i haven't thought about option c uh you know if you say i mean the term the the term environmental environmentalist

has been is it sort of a catch-all phrase for folks that are in the animal rights camp to folks that are in the sort of the the more left flank of the environmental world so yeah so like i can't tell you how much i cringe when like i see like you know animal rights group a is doing x y and z you know they don't say animal rights they say the media is like an environmental group you know it's you know doing x y and z and i'm like they're not an environmental organization they're say animal rights. They say the media is like an environmental group. It's doing X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, they're not an environmental organization. They're an animal rights organization. Yeah, they're focused on individual animals.

That's exactly what they do. That's all they really are focused on. They're clueless about habitat, clueless about long-term. If it's a little bear and he has a name like Petals, they're like, that's what I'm looking out for. It's that bear right there who's got a life expectancy of about three years yeah and you know i also remember like wilderness society like our constituency our members like we have a wide array of members right so like it's

not um you know like while a sportsman's organization might be like we only like we represent like this one segment of the populations. Our constituency, it's everybody from hikers, horseback riders, hunter, fishermen, mountain bikers, runners. And so we try and be like, not try to be too offensive in our messaging. And we're cognizant of how we present what we do to everybody. So yeah, you're probably not going to see a grip and grunt on our homepage. It just has nothing to do with what you're talking about.

Yeah, and it's not... But you're not going to see a grip and grin on a vacuum cleaner webpage here because it's not related to the message. No, that said, we have used... There have been grip and grins of me in our media work. Is that right? Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, on various campaigns in fact one uh one picture

it's like i didn't realize but my hands were just like i just got done it was like a mule deer photo it's like me just like blood kind of just smattered about and like hands bloody and i've got like hands on the horns and that ended up in some of our our uh communications materials uh for a while when i can't there's no big blowback no i mean i don't see all the mail so i don't know as far as nobody told me if there was you know so can i can i ask you about one issue has nothing to do with hunting just to get a sense of sort of how you guys look at stuff are you familiar with uh this push that people think that you should be well let me bring the listeners up to speed then then I'll ask the question.

The way... So wilderness with a capital W, like federally designated wilderness areas. You're not allowed to use mechanized equipment and you're not allowed to use wheeled conveyances on the land. So you can hike and use livestock. This is generally true. Like it's very difficult.

You can't land helicopters, land airplanes, ride bikes, pull wagons, anything with the wheels, anything with the motor. But, I know that mountain bikers are all fired up about that they can't go ripping around on their mountain bikes through wilderness.

Tell me, where is your guys' stance on that? I got a strong opinion on that one, Steve. I used to race mountain bikes. So this is coming from a mountain biker. I don't, yeah. I mean, I self-identify as like a recreational mountain biker now, for sure. And yeah, I mean, we're strongly opposed to it. That's good.

Yeah. Like guys going 25 miles an hour. Yeah. Along trails. You're not, like their thing is like, oh, we enjoy the area. It's just like, just enjoy it an hour. Yeah. Along trails. You're not walking, like their thing is like, oh, we enjoy the area. It's just like, just enjoy it somewhere else. Yeah.

There's plenty of places to go real fast on wheeled conveyances. Yeah. I do not feel like I need to, as a mountain biker, I don't feel like I need to be able to take my mountain bike anywhere. You know, I don't feel like you have to be able to ride a motorcycle everywhere.

I feel like there's kind of like a, everybody has their place in the landscape. You just got to like figure out, you know, where't feel like you have to be able to ride a motorcycle everywhere i feel like there's kind of like a everybody has their place in the landscape you just got to like figure out you know where those uses can can occur and what percent of the country is federally designated wilderness uh two percent 2.6 percent something like that so there's a lot of ground there's a lot of ground out there for bike riding you could say there was 97 of the america that is open for my yeah like mountain bikers are like yeah i know like i can ride my bike on 97 of the american landmass but that's just not enough for me gotta have it all man i need it yeah yeah it drives me crazy i can't ride my bike anywhere i want yeah no it's it's a certainly you guys you guys pushing it push back on that yeah i mean we

uh yeah i mean that is very much a direct like assault on the wilderness act i mean to allow So you guys push back on that. Yeah, I mean, we, yeah. I mean, that is very much a direct like assault on the Wilderness Act. I mean, to allow- The intent of the Wilderness Act. Well, how do you, I mean, draw the, I mean, if you know anything about mountain bikes, you know that the line between electronic motorcycle

and mountain bikes is incredibly blurry with these new e-bikes, e-assist bikes. And you can even hide now, you can hide like an electronic assist motor in like the tube of your bike. That's what I heard people were doing. Yeah. And so you can, you look at it, if you're like trying to enforce, it's like, you look at it, you're like, oh, it's just like a mountain bike to me, but the guy's got a motor in there. And you can go, I mean, a charge will get you, I mean, you can go back. So you're hunting, you can go back like 12, 15 miles on your bike. bike no problem not a ton of effort um so that line is really blurry so if you allow like

you know mountain bikes and what's next you know like what's the case against like motorcycles atvs it's like so it kind of just cuts at the core of like why do we even have wilderness if you're going to start allowing you have to draw it is, but you do have to kind of draw a line somewhere. The line's not that blurry. If you're the poor fool that's got a 65-pound pack who just hoofed it 15 miles back in there and here comes some blowhard on a fat tire bike. Yeah, I tell you, that's pretty crystal clear.

So one thing I'll say about the whole mountain bike and wilderness thing is that, you know, this is my personal view of the whole situation is you know there was a a relatively high profile high controversial designation in idaho around the boulder white clouds wilderness oh yeah um i worked on that campaign and uh it was it was uh an end to a very it was like a four decade long campaign basically. And I did a backpack hunt there with my, my older brother and to this one area where there was some controversy around, should we open, you know, leave this trail open or not. And I have to tell you, like, I kind of tried to go in with an open mind and just like go to the area and kind of experience

it and see, just try and see how it would be with mountain bikes. And I, I came away with just personally feeling like they just absolutely didn't belong in that area. It was a wild place. And if you had guys and gals just ripping down this trail all day long, it would make it feel, even though I had to go like, whatever it was, like seven miles to get back in there,

that it would make it feel like I was just like in my backyard because there was just people everywhere. So it's kind of a subjective thing, but just for me personally, it's like there's some places where it's just okay to. So it's kind of a subjective thing, but just for me personally, it's like there's some places where it's just okay to just walk, you know. But it's not really that,

it's not really subjective. We look at what the, I mean, like they kind of spell out pretty clearly like what it is. Yeah. Oh yeah, there's no room in the wilderness act for them, but they were talking about drawing the boundaries kind of.

Oh, I'm sorry. Like in that case, yeah. How are you going to draw it? Yeah. I mean, the argument here is is is we want people to appreciate these places and if your preferred means of access is by a mountain bike you aren't going to go in and uh see these areas and therefore appreciate them and want to want them to be around long term is kind of the flip side of the argument and all these lands are managed for everybody

lots of different user groups out there it's got to be space for everyone so yeah I mean there was a big the mountain bike community around Ketchum was certainly up in arms over the fact that this Germania, isn't it? Germania's open still. Oh, Germania's open. Castle Divide was open. Castle Divide was the trail. And Castle Divide, two trails. Because they're pissed about having lost access. Like a spot that

they used to be able to go, now they can't. Right. Yeah. That riles people up more than the continuation of a closure. Yeah. That's kind of up more than the continuation of a closure. Yeah. That's kind of, I was talking with somebody about this recently. I don't know if it was you and I, Cal, but that's true just in politics in general, right? It's like you got people know when they don't know as much who gives them a benefit, but they sure as hell remember who takes something away from them.

So you take something away from somebody, they're going to remember you. Politicians know that, right? So it's like same thing. It's like, I don't know who gave me that mountain bike trail but like you take it away like i'm gonna remember who you are so hey real quick before we get back into what what remind me like what's the hike you guys do oh the death hike yeah tell me the death hike yeah uh you come this year like i don't think i am not not because i'm not because i'm chicken i just don't think i am because i'm just various obligations uh i remember when we talked about it,

it didn't line up with what I had going on. Now, this is something that Ryan really wants to try and do this year too, right? I was going to say it. I'm busy. Ryan doesn't believe in that. Ryan's like, you're going hiking just to go hike? So what's the walk again though? It's not my thing.

It's my buddy Steve puts it on. It's called the Death Hike. And it's essentially like last year, we got dropped off in Chamberlain Basin in the Frank. And it was like a 40- Frank Church Wilderness. We call it the Frank. And we got dropped in Chamberlain Basin,

which is kind of the middle of the Frank Church. And then hiked out. Dropped off via? Airplane. There's like a landing strip in there. There's 18 airstrips in the Frank Church. They were grandfathered into that wilderness area um really 18 in the frank church or 7 17 or 18 yeah yep god the place is huge it's massive um yeah it's well you need especially if you combine

the subway and the frank together it's like the in the lower 48 it's the biggest contiguous wilderness in lower 48 so i feel like two places claim that who's that what's the other one the um bob marshall scapegoat all that oh they're wrong yeah north fork flathead is it contiguous i've never heard that the the spotted bear bob scapegoat bob marshall wilderness complex is contiguous um 2.2 million acres total yes yeah i'm pretty sure that's quite a bit smaller clash of the contiguous wilderness areas we're gonna hash this out later ryan let's all meet up in our respective wilderness area you bring your stats i'll bring my stats all right so anyways all right so big ass big ass you fly in we got fluent in it was like the whole point was that you just hike out you know it's kind of as as uh quick as you can so you just go light you know bring like a pack no

tents a sleeping bag and this last year uh got pretty uh got pretty western because you know first we walked like i don't know like 26 miles for and which isn't too bad. You've got a light pack and then we camped on this peak. And then the next day we had to drop into the South Fork of the Salmon River corridor and then climb back out. Well, it's 6,000, 6,500 vertical down to the South Fork of the Salmon and 65 back up. And if you've never dropped that much and then climb back out that much, like it's a lot. And so as you're going down, it starts getting hotter and hotter and harder.

The rattlesnakes are coming out. So by the time we get down to the South Fork, the salmon were probably 38 miles in, a few hours of sleep. And, you know, everybody brought just real minimal food. And then a couple of guys kind of out, let's see, they thought they were tougher than they were, I think is an easy way to say it. That's a hard hike if you're coming, especially if you're not used to elevation, right? And guys are starting to fall apart at this point in time. You got blisters, real bad.

Guys' feet are just getting torn up. Those guys are going down first. And then you've got heat exhaustion is getting real serious in a few guys too. Guys are puking, couldn't hold down water. And we still had to climb up out of the canyon. And really there was two options at that point. Like one guy, you can go down and take a jet boat out or climb back out. And three of us realizing how kind of the general feeling in the group were like,

well, the trucks are at the top of this next mountain. So we'll go hike to the top and then we'll drive down this ridge and we send everybody else down to this other spot, which was like shorter distance and not as much climbing and uh it ended up i think it ended up being 46 or 47 miles uh got out right about dark and uh it was and how many hours did it take you guys to go 47 miles uh let's see i can't't remember. It was like, we got dropped off around like midday, hiked all the way till dark and then got up early the next day

and got out of darks. What is that? Like 36 hours, something like that. So it's not an incredibly fast pace. Like a good ultra runner could do that. No problem. But I think just with a heat,

distance, elevation, everything kind of got to a lot of people. The real pisser was though, as we were climbing up out of South Fork Salmon Corridor, I started getting into like nine bark brush country. So brushy undergrowth and like it was a burn. So there's like logs down.

Oh, that's the other part of the story. It was like, there wasn't really a trail for the last like half the trip. So you're just like crawling over deadfall for like half that mileage yeah which is not fun and then the snakes the rattlesnakes started showing up so i started like almost stepping on rattlesnakes in that nine bark brush and down timber and i'm not a fan of snakes and so like that was when i that was not a fun situation for me um almost stepped on two

rattlesnakes came real close to him so. So nice little hike. Nice little hike. And I think a few guys found religion that night. I'm serious. There were some guys that were like. Come out worshiping the snake gods. Dude, they were happy to be alive. Like one guy I thought for sure was going to have to go. I thought he might have to get medevaced out.

Like he was serious. How many people started the hike? There were 13 of us last year. How many people finished it just ready to rock? Or how many people finished it? Four of, I think four of us last year people finished it just ready to rock or how many people finished uh four of i think four of us finished that weren't puking four or five of us that weren't puking or kind of like really struggling yeah so uh i just want to check on that real quick because that's yeah we're doing it again this year different hike different hike though yeah yeah what i might come do that sometime that sounds fun so the boys in arizona do the rim

to rim to rim you heard of that one no that sounds fun. The boys in Arizona do the rim-to-rim-to-rim. You heard of that one? No, that sounds pretty interesting. Grand Canyon, all the way down to the bottom, up to this side, turn around, come back, and do it again. They'd probably look at our hike and be like, that's cute. We do that for a warm-up. Theirs, I think, ends up being 47 miles, and the goal is to do it sub-24.

That's some coyote stuff right there. I mean, I felt like what I would like to do is just like keep going it's a nice trail the whole way that makes a big difference when you have to concentrate on where each foot's going that doesn't make it easy

it's a heck of a hike when you don't have to be like where am I going to put my foot every time you take a step it's a lot different and when you're crawling on like you know like deadfall like stacked on each other you know in fact i saw a monster bull right about time i started seeing those snakes and uh i knew exactly i was like this is a good looking area for elk started seeing a lot of elk signs saw a huge bull and this is like what is this july and i was like i don't care i'll don't care. I'll never come back here. I'll never come back here.

It's like not worth it. Too many snakes. So we covered you guys and bikes, which was what we're going to talk about. Now talk about you guys. Here's the main thing I want to talk about is your findings and your work around the federal land transfer debate,

which is this ongoing thing that comes up often on this digital radio program and comes up often in American society. It comes up and then goes away and takes a decade off and it comes back again. And right now we're kind of in the worst of it that we've seen i think in the in the modern era um hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24k topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the

excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all.

The worst of it we've seen since uh teddy roosevelt fought tooth and nail to establish our federal land management system um it's the worst like affront to that we've seen which is going on right now last few years is uh unparalleled efforts to force the federal government to dispose of your public land hunting and fishing grounds. And you guys are one of many groups battling this. And a thing that I want to talk to you about. They're not just hunting and fishing grounds, right? No, that's what I think of them as. Yeah, but it's important.

Bird watching grounds. I don't know. Fill in your favorite thing. That's just how I view it. as. Yeah, but it's important. Bird watching grounds. I don't know. Fill in your favorite thing. That's just how I view it. Whatever floats your boat. Outdoor recreation. I'm talking mainly to the kind of Joe blows that are listening to us. But yeah, federally managed public lands.

Well, just in case there's someone else that's in the background. All right. So if there's someone else who has no ability to imagine, think in broad strokes, yes, Yanni, rattle off a list of activities that one might participate in on federally managed public lands. General water sports.

Okay. Your federally managed water sports locations. When I say federally managed, that's important because when people say like federally owned, like the federal government doesn't own the land, okay?

What it is is the American people, right? The citizens of the United States own the land and their trustee, like the person that we have dedicated to managing them on our behalf, in many cases as multiple use landscapes, is the federal government. So that's why we're saying federally managed public lands. And a big part of this debate, a way that the people who want to ditch

federal managed lands, one, are generally motivated by, they want unfettered access to extract mineral resources. Like if you eliminated the pool of people, the pool of this very small pool of very wealthy and very influential individuals who want a less cumbersome pathway to extracting mineral resources and making boatloads of money

off it, if you remove those people, we wouldn't be having this conversation. That's not Brad talking, that's me talking. That's generally what this is about. And a way that they push this agenda is they feel that rather than saying we want to privatize it, what they say is that we want to hand it over to state management. And they'll do like, oh yeah, because locals know best. And so they want to hand over to state management. But states, unlike the federal government, aren't in the large-scale land management business. And states oftentimes, because of their own constitutions, can't run an unbalanced budget, right?

So if they have a deficit, they need to liquidate assets. And what often happens is they liquidate land. So when people are talking about handing federal land over to the states, it's like code language for the gradual, what will become the gradual privatization of land that now belongs to the American people

and is open access. And what they know is whether it goes to the states or whether it eventually winds up being privatized, it will have, it'll be a greasier, easier path toward some people monetizing resources on that land. You cool with all that? Sounds good. All right. A thing people say is they say, no, that's not true,

because the states, they'll do a better job. All right. Does that sound like a thing people say? It does. Yep. Now, Brad, like take that, take it from that point and explain what you have found as you guys have looked into state versus federal management. And is it really just the same thing, but a different name when the land goes to the States? Yeah. So, um, as part of our work, you know, we, we

realized too, we would, uh, you know, do some polling on folks. Like, how do you feel about this issue? People would be like, I like land, you know, they don't really understand like the difference between state, federal County. It's all just land that they can use. Right. So to try and really, uh, help people understand the difference between state and public land, we've done a series of work that's kind of shined a light on kind of the difference between state and public land. And done a series of reports when we did in Idaho that focused on state land sales, just like what's the track record of Western states with managing and selling land? And a couple of important things, like you mentioned some of them.

There's like the difference in maximum revenue generation that states, all Western states have an obligation by their constitution to abide versus the multiple use mandate of public land. Federally managed public land. Federally managed public land. Federally managed public land. Yeah. So, and the other thing we found is that, you know, states have a long history of selling off their lands. And there is, you know, if I was going to, this is another book idea for it, you could write a whole book on the corruption about how state lands have been disposed in the West. It is a fascinating tale as I sort of got into the-

Maybe like Cadillac Desert, but about public lands. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, for sure. So in Idaho, for example, the state has liquidated 41% of its state lands. You all know Nevada is like 99.8% of its public lands. So back up, back up on a couple of things here.

Yeah. Of the land that the state of Nevada has owned, they have liquidated what percent? It's like 99.8. It's all, but they have 3,000 acres of state land left. Out of the, when every state was formed, I don't know if you guys talked about this. School trust land.

School trust, but there were other lands too. So the state was given lands for public uses. So that include hospitals to benefit hospitals, schools, the vast majority of federal lands given to states when they became states was to be used for the benefit of schools, the call and download lands. Yeah, and oftentimes, I'm not sure this is universal, but oftentimes it'd be one section out of every 36. Correct. So if you had a six by six square mile chunk of land, one of those, one section would be like what some states would call, or in some, I guess, probably in some periods of American

history, those parcels were described as school trust lands. And it would be that the state could use revenues from that to finance public education. Correct. And some states would just literally, they'd just get it and then sell it and be like, there, done. Or some states would use it and lease out grazing rights on it or mining things on it. Or some states would do trades, swaps. And instead of having one lone section out of 36, they would do swaps in order to get a contiguous block of a bunch of sections and then do whatever to monetize it. Some states on those lands, like Montana, it's pretty open. Like on state lands, you're allowed to do certain activities. Other states really curtail the activities you can do

on like most state lands in Colorado. You can't camp overnight. Yeah. There are some states that don't even allow hunting on state public. So their state lands are not public land. No, no. I mean, you go to, I can show you pictures from like New Mexico and Idaho, like signs that say, you know, property state of Idaho, keep out like they're all over the place. So, so yeah, no, state land is definitely not public.

And when you start looking at the history too, so each state was given these lands, some states got a better deal. They must've been better negotiators, but like New Mexico got like, I think it's like every like 16, 32nd, they got more land. They had like 12 million acres. They were given a statehood. What did they do with it all? New Mexico was sold off, I want to say like four and a half million acres of their state land. So they still have some of it. Texas sold all theirs. Virtually all theirs.

It's Texas. All together in the West, like there are states have disposed of 30 million acres of state land to date. And a lot of states like have as a part of their their management portfolio you know remember they're mandated to make money they have you know real estate you know investment as a part of that they're what they do so that includes you know selling buying land um so like utah for example

like utah has like massive planned communities on state land i mean mean, I'm talking about massive planned communities too. So you're talking about like- They're built already. That they are in the process of building. Really? Yeah. They're like in the land development business. A hundred percent.

Like go to St. George. Like you can find us all on their website too. It's like not hard to find. But you're going to St. George, they have this massive planned community. I'm talking like golf courses, like, you know, strip malls, like houses, like imagine like

if you were at your favorite hunting hole and that little like spot of ground outside of St. George and then like next, you know, come back like two years later and you're like, holy hell, there's a golf course. Dude, I know.

I would rather they somehow dug it out and made it that it was a hole in the earth rather than put a golf course on it, man. Yeah. Yeah. I'm with you. Oh my God. It's just like, yeah. So, so those are going out and beating around little balls to be like, Oh, mine's close to the hole. Oh, mine's even closer to the hole. Oh my God. The people like that. I just can't even bring your dog. I can't not understand. Oh, look how wide by the hole. So I tell you, you're not a golfer.

No golf. Dude, I didn't say golf. I just, I cannot understand it. Yeah. But nuts and bolts of this issue comes down to, or they say it always comes down to, well, who's going to manage it better? Yeah.

So, you know, I have buddies that are state foresters in Montana, take a lot of pride in their work, and they point at the feds and say, oh, we're doing a better job than those guys are. Yeah. I think what always, always gets lost in the shuffle is the federally managed lands are managed for everyone. Yeah. federally managed lands are managed for everyone yeah and the state managed lands they have typically one objective which is make us some money can i can i interrupt real quick just to

clarify that my old man was a golfer my dear bygone father was a golfer so i don't want to you know i don't want to speak ill of the dead. Your dad did so, like, what kind of golfer are we talking about? He had a three, I remember he had a three, he had a three wheeled Harley Davidson golf cart. I'll tell you that. That's interesting. Um, all right. Anyways, Cal, you're talking about the feds.

No, I think you're right though. It's not that, and the point isn't that state lands are bad. You know, it's not like, oh, state lands are bad. No, they serve a purpose. But the question is like would you want all public land to go over to that bucket where you're taking what you're doing and that bucket has a propensity to tip over and get emptied yeah clear like look at the records like people are like no it wouldn't get sold if it turns the state and i'm that's why we're doing

this a lot it's where it's like just look at? Who's saying that? Why do I hear that from so many people? Well, because they're like, I have a way to say it, but it's probably not appropriate for your podcast. I don't give a shit. What is it? I think they're full of shit. I mean, it's like, no.

I mean, they're just, I think it's dishonest, right? And that's what we try to point out. It's like, you're saying that the states won't sell it, but then I'm looking over here at the data and the real estate transaction, and lo and behold, it's like um you're saying that the states won't sell it but then i'm looking over here at the data and the real estate transaction and lo and behold like it's been sold it gets sold every year like so should i believe what you say or what's actually happened over the last you know

100 plus year history of state land management what i heard the other day was well why don't we try something new and just like we transfer them but then we write in this rule that says they can't they're not state trust lands they're not going to be sold they're not there to make money that they should be just actually kept as public land yeah no that's that's where this whole so this issue is kind of like an amoeba it's like just shape-shifting like oh yeah it's like oh and dodging bullets like okay we don't want to sell public lands. We'll keep public lands public. Let's just like give all the management control to some county officials

and like the timber industry and the mining industry. How does that sit with you? So it's the same thing. In some ways it's even worse, right? It's like, you're telling me that we're going to keep public land public, but we're going to take all the decision-making authority out of the public hands.

And I mean, I'm not talking about theoretical bills. These are actual bills that are in Congress right now that would cede management authority to a select group of people. So it's like- Yeah, there's like the recent piece. So there was a bill that was dismissed or withdrawn that was just telling the Department of the Interior,

like a mandate to the Secretary of the Interior that he had to dispose of three million acres. And then there was sort of a cousin or sister piece of legislation to that that would strip away law enforcement capabilities.

Still around? Yeah, to strip law enforcement capabilities away from federal agencies so that the blm didn't have a law enforcement division and when you get into that stuff that's just being like uh i i equated at one point to uh me and my wife have an argument about whether or not a dishwasher is good to have or not okay and i i say say like, well, it's less efficient and doesn't work as well as washing it by hand. And my wife says, no, no, no, no, no. Washing it by hand is less efficient and doesn't work as well as the dishwasher. If I were to go in and disable

the dishwasher some way, like screw up the dishwasher, in order to make my argument more true, right? That's what, when people do this stuff, like the law enforcement thing, they're so pissed and blinded by like hatred of federal land management that they're like, yeah, but it doesn't work this way. It doesn't work this way.

And people are like, no, it actually works pretty well. If you look at the alternative, it's like, oh, no, no. Because wait, when I strip away law enforcement capabilities from these agencies, then you'll see that it doesn't work. See what happens then. Yeah, see, now tell me it doesn't work because I'm going in and sabotaging the whole system to make what I say true.

And this way, when there is a bunch of crime on federal land, I can go, see, see, you guys don't know how to manage. Well, that's what's been going on for years. It's like so cynical. Oh, it's been going on for years with the budget. It gives me the idea that I might go sabotage my dishwasher. And then be like, ha, the dishwasher doesn't work. Told you.

Be careful with that one, though. It's on the fire. Yeah, no, I mean, it's like, I think, you know, if you just look at the trajectory of this issue, like it is moving away from, we're at a point now where it's becoming less popular to be pro sell off public lands, right? Because people are like calling truth to the bullshit, man. Oh, yeah. They pulled this stuff for a long time, but just people weren't really like woken up to it yeah but now it's becoming a the issue it hasn't gone away i think the folks are who are pushing us to become smarter more savvy and they're really pushing this like

death of a thousand cuts of public land management right so it's about all right we're not going to get that we're not going to get the big prize so let's focus on all these other things that can undercut the idea of public land yeah it's like what animal rights people do to hunters yeah yeah for sure you're not going to get a law that says no hunting right but they're like but we probably could ban hunting lions with dogs right we work around yeah we probably could ban something like trapping right right so then you get these bills where yeah these like bills like uh um raul labrador my congressman has one called self-sufficient community Lands Act. It's like up to 4 million acres of land in any state can be given to, it stays public according to the bill,

but there are like, it waives all conservation environmental laws and gives decision-making authority to like four people, like a county commissioner, somebody from the logging, mining industry, and somebody from the timber industry and like a motorized recreation person. So in some ways it's, you know, I feel that I almost view that as like more insulting um so you're like oh no

we're going to keep it public but like you have no say in anymore it goes from multiple use to like single use but this is the same one where the if in the event of a major catastrophe the fed federal government pays for it so the people oh yeah so yeah we still pay for like firefighting and everything so we're like your tax dollars still like footing the bill for like roads infrastructure and everything so how does that sit for you but isn't that what what kind of like what wound up happening with wyoming whereas wyoming looked at this idea like because because of the what's being discussed the state of wyoming took a look at like what would it mean for us? Yeah. If we were to assume management of the federal land that they're talking about.

And they looked at just the firefighting budget alone and decided, you know what? I think we're going to pass on this one. Oh, it would bankrupt Denny's. I mean, a big fire would wipe us out. So yeah, like to put that in like financial terms, like state of Idaho last, this is not last year, but the year before budgeted like $50 million for the state to fight fire. Right.

We had one fire in North Idaho called the Kamiya complex that like doubled, it was at least double the amount of money the state had had budgeted. Now when the state, like, what do you do then? Right. It's like, oh, well the fire was 50, we budgeted a $50 million. That's how much we got. And it costs us $100 million. You can't spend more than you have in a state, right? Constitutions require you to balance your budget.

So you either got to like- That's why you always have these emergency school closings and budget cuts. Yeah, it's like, there's no buffer. There's no hard times buffer. Right. So like, imagine if like the state had a bunch of public land up there.

You know, they got a couple options. One, they can start taking money from teachers to pay for firefighting costs right that's going to be a real popular move for a politician or you can start selling some land to pay for your costs how well do you understand the elliott state forest thing because there's a nice concrete example that people might understand uh i understand it like casually i'm not super tuned into the elliott i mean i know what's going on, but I wouldn't call myself a subject matter expert in the Elliott. What do you have there? I can try and explain it. I'm trying to think of a good point

where you say, here's a piece of ground that the state held, and they had a reason why they had to dump it. Elliott State Forest, like 82,000 acres roughly in Oregon. It's a piece of ground owned by the state. And it has been for various reasons, not making as much money as the state claims it needs to make. And so they are in a

position right now of trying to sell it off because for no other reason than their constitution mandates that they maximize revenue generation off state ground and this particular piece of ground and i don't know i don't understand why is not they don't feel some politicians feel like it is not maximizing uh revenue for the beneficiaries for the school trust so they're looking at selling it off for that very reason it's got people real riled up because a lot of people like to use it for recreational use, hunters, fishermen, I guess, and whatever else people do on public land. Hula hoopers.

It's so weirdly short-sighted and frivolous when people look at a piece of ground and they go like, well, what's it doing for me right now? Yeah, I know. Because we'll sell it and get a one-time payment. It's like, oh, is your state set to cease to exist

at some point in time in the future? The other interesting thing is we found, so we did some digging around in Idaho looking at state land sales. And most constitutions, mine in Idaho too, we have, there's a cap on, when the people that formed our state, they're like, we're going to cap the amount of land

any one person can buy, any state land, at 320 acres and 160 acres. Back to, I don't understand that. So the folks, when they formed the state of Idaho, they were worried about land barons, because remember, this is late 1800s. I see, I see. The heir of the land baron, right? Timber barons were sort of gobbling up all the land. We have like a single individual who owns vast portions of a certain state and winds up having undue influence on all aspects of the state.

And the folks, they also, when they were like, well, we're getting these state parcels from the federal government, but they're meant to benefit schools. What we don't want is some like politician who's in the pocket of like, at the time it was a timber industry, who's in the pocket of the timber industry

to decide that it's a good idea to liquidate all these lands. And then you have, you know, the one guy that can afford it coming in and like buying up all the land. So they were trying to prevent mass divestiture of state lands. So they put these caps on how much land could be sold in any one year in any one individual or business. Right. And so then I got curious. So I started looking around a little bit and to see whether or not that cap had been violated. Cause I noticed like a long time ago, companies like Boise, uh, Boise Cascade and Potluck Timber Company had bought like tens of thousands of acres of state land. And I was like, huh, I thought you could only buy like 320 acres of state land. So I started getting the records and just kind of out of curiosity looking,

and we found what appeared to be a fairly serious set of constitutional violations out of Idaho's history of people exceeding that cap. Going back how far? To like the early 1900s. From like the early 1900s to like the early 70s. So like long period of time. Most of it happened a long time ago, but, and it's real hard to prove,

but we, you know, I spent months going over this data, working with the state to say, am I reading this correctly? Like, tell me I'm wrong. Surely you haven't violated the constitution, your own constitution, and selling more state land than the constitution allows you to do.

And they didn't have an explanation. So eventually we kind of went public with some of this stuff. And the state is now, the state of Idaho has hired an independent auditor to go back and see whether or not the land board of the state has violated the state constitution

in terms of state land sales. And how many instances? 300. 300 separate instances. And what would happen is, it's really interesting. You'd see like um uh several individuals private individuals all deeding the same say deeding land to the same company like

on the same day okay so we think what's happening my hunch they're doing like a shell game totally yeah they're sending out like somebody to be like oh we're gonna bring it up they'll you know put it out in the paper hire like 20 people go have them go out buy land and then wait a little bit and then have them deed it back to you and that and that is like it's illegal for sure but it's hard to uh it would have been hard at the time to enforce or know that it was happening um i imagine but uh certainly in the 1970s they should have been able to figure that out so do you have any sense with the stuff you found um do you have any sense with the stuff you found, do you have any sense,

would there be any real repercussions from this or would it just be more of a soul-searching, fact-finding mission? Yeah, that's kind of the question to do right now. Ultimately, the buck stops with our land board, which is made up and comprised of our governor, our attorney general, and a couple other folks, superintendent of public schools. I don't know what the ramifications would be. I asked a couple of lawyers governor, our attorney general, and a couple other folks, superintendent of public schools.

I don't know what the ramifications would be. I asked a couple of lawyers that most of these transactions happen with folks that are no longer on the land board. A lot of them are no longer with us. So I don't know. The real question is whether or not those people that bought land illegally,

essentially, if you think about it, if these two do turn out to be constitutional violations there's no statute of limitations on a constitutional violation right okay so if you bought state land on you know uh illegally violate the constitution does that land then have to go back to the state that's where it could get real interesting real fast and i don't have any interest in like pushing that like my whole angle on this is just like, hey, if you think you can trust the state to not sell your public land and follow the law,

like here's 300 cases where we're not so sure they even could follow their own constitution. And it's not a unique case. I mean, this is not something that I think is unique to Idaho either. So it's something to keep in mind. No one's just done any digging like that in Montana or Colorado.

Not yet, but people are on it it's it's a lot of work i mean this is i mean this is a lot of research and a lot of digging around in old records that uh takes a long time so but i think people are going to start uncovering a lot of stuff and this is what i mean it's like the history of you know lands in general in the west is not any surprise it's a tale of corruption right people are always trying to get their hands on more land and um and that's you know, lands in general in the West is not any surprise. It's a tale of corruption, right? People are always trying to get their hands on more land. And that's, you know, to me, one of the greatest things about having our public land stay public is you don't have to worry about like, you know, robber barons trying to come in and gobble up all the resources. Like we all own it right now. It's working okay. You know, it's not perfect, not a perfect system. But if you think that you're going to give it to the States, transfer it to them. And that's just okay you know it's not perfect not a perfect system but uh if you think that you're

going to give it to the states transfer it to them and that that's just you know everything's going to be just the same you might want to think twice and just look at the data and the facts what do you think about all that calihan i'm constantly amazed by all this stuff. The Raul Labrador thing, that should be plenty of an eye-opening awakening for everybody in the U.S. This is a ground that we all own. This guy is proposing that we seed a chunk of it

to the state of Idaho. They can do whatever they want with it. Right now, they may say you know we can go out there and play on it but really it's for resource extraction but if things don't go well and there's some major catastrophe everybody in the nation can pay for it yeah it's like oh gosh if there's something you know that we're not willing to pay for, then the feds will come in and pay for it.

So if you're in New Jersey right now, that's your land to play on. But if this were to happen, you probably won't be able to play on it, but you're damn sure you're going to be able to pay for it through your taxes. It's an amazing thing.

Can I talk about Zinke real quick too? Yeah, man. I think that's interesting. So Zinke voted for that bill as a congressman, and he got absolutely hammered by some of you folks in Montana. I'm not in Montana. No, I was looking at Yanni over there. And Callahan, he still claimed Montana as your...

I certainly don't give up the phone number. Yeah. No, I got a Montana phone number from... Do you? I had one of the first cell phones that I think ever was produced. Hard to get rid of. No, I never changed my phone number. I don't like to change my email address.

Nope. Someone was recently trying to get me to change my email address. I'm like, yeah. It's a lot of work yeah dude yeah anyhow so yeah so um i don't know if you want to talk about zinky at all but like that's really interesting tie to kind of having like zinky a secretary of interior guy who has a fairly spotty record on this issue um i don't think people really understand like how spotty it is if you go looking back um you mean you mean spotty in that since since assuming his position now he's articulated a certain viewpoint and you feel that his past record doesn't

i think not reflected here's what i think i think you should evaluate politicians not just politicians this is a good rule for evaluating people in general okay but uh i'm ready evaluate people by what they do not what they say right so if you say that you know like ryan zicky's got he's been saying the right thing support keeping public lands public but if you look at how he voted different story a little bit right so he voted for this bill to give four million acres in each state to the states okay um now people can change i want to give them credit i want to change you know like positions change and sort of their mandates change and they get appointed to carry out different missions correct so like i want to give him like he has an

opportunity to prove himself but i'm just saying if you look at what he's done versus what he said, I'm not there yet where I'm like, I know. I totally understand where you're coming from, man. It's like, I want to believe him. I'm going to say,

I'm just trying to, I'm trying to stay very optimistic. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good place to be. I've been doing this too long, man. You've lost all that.

All that got beat out of your head. Yeah. All right. So, so, So break it down there. He voted for this transfer to Idaho. No, it was the bill applies to all states. It's 4 million acres in any state that wants to do it. Basically the way the bill reads, it's like if you have a governor in a state that has public land and that governor decides, yes, I want up to 4 million acres of land, he gets to choose that. It's totally at the governor's discretion. Why is that?

Can we do a side note here? Yeah. And I don't know if you, okay. Why is there no push for land transfer in the Eastern US? Is it just because, because if you look at the upper Great Lakes states, for instance,

have a tremendous amount of national forest land. Yeah, they do. It came about in a different way. Like so much of those national forests in the East, in my home state, a lot of the national forests, rather than sort of just by default belonging to the federal government all along, it was the federal government was buying up chunks of land

that was basically being forfeited by homesteader individuals. Oh, yeah. So people were getting land, defaulting on debt, they were applying for homestead lands, farm parcels, and then economic hard times came about, or all the giant fires that just destroyed the upper Great Lakes after the logging boom.

People were walking away from land. And the federal government was bailing people out by basically acquiring it, just burned over scarred land, acquiring it for fractions of what would be its value today. And they built up, they would designate these, they would drop these chunks of ground and be like, hey, we're gonna make this.

Everything in here can become part of this national forest. As it comes up for sale, no one wants it. Or if it's abandoned and just has back taxes, we'll assume it and buy it up. And they started patching together these patchwork national forests that I grew up, you know, 0.8 miles from one. But why is there never any rhetoric there?

There is actually. There is rhetoric. Yeah, for sure. Like now they'd be like, you know what? Now let's get rid of it. So there've been, so 17 states have introduced what I would characterize as anti-public lands bills. So that includes, it was like Tennessee.

I think I'd have to have a list in front of me, but Tennessee, I don't want to say like Georgia and like South Carolina, some of these co-states. But it's certainly a Western centric issue because that's where most of the public lands in America are located. I also think the folks that are pushing this issue, they want to compartmentalize it.

They want to keep it a Western issue because I think that's where folks have the most frustration with federal government. And they want to kind of keep Eastern politicians out of it. Like, this is not your issue. This is our issue out here. So I don't want to hear your opinion. You know, you guys in the East,

even though they all own it, right? It's everybody's land. It's to the political advantage, I think, to the folks pushing it, the Rob Bishops of the world to keep it sort of, keep it a Western focused issue. I also think my theory too,

is that folks in the East and the West, I don't think they have the level of frustration, maybe anger that a lot of folks out West do with public lands. Just because it's not, I don't know Michigan per se, but like you don't have, I don't know many counties in like Midwest and the East where public land counts for like 60, 70, 80% of the land in the County. So like the tax base issue, that's a real issue too, you know, out in the West, like having enough land to be able to charge income tax on to pay for teachers, you know, just county services, roads, that kind of thing. So there's all these things kind of, and I also think too, that like folks in the East and

Midwest, like because they don't have as much public land, they also like cherish it a little bit more too. I think if you don't. It'd be a much harder fight. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think so for sure. It's like, why would you want to get rid of that?

Like the place I take my family camping once a year, I kind of like that place, you know? Whereas out in the West, it's like, you know, you almost like most people just aren't aware that public land is just, it's everywhere around you. So you just take it for granted. Like people don't, you know, you almost like, most people just aren't aware that public land is just, it's everywhere around you. So you just take it for granted. Like people don't, I would, I think you probably wouldn't be surprised,

but I am often continually surprised that people are not aware that they might be surrounded by public land. They might go camping all the time, fishing, hiking, park their car, shoot their gun, whatever. And they just don't even think that's public land. They're just like, I just go and use go and use it that's how we perceived it we grew up around a lot of public land you were aware of it we thought it fell from the like it was like it fell from the

sky manna from heaven oh dude we had no like notion that it was a thing people like fought for yeah i didn't and i talked about and tried to create this system that was like this great repudiation of european oppression and then the aristocracy no he saw it was like a bunch of shit you could go and shoot guns on and ride around yeah because on a small level it's not like your your dad was like guys here's the deal he thought this is why we're going out he thought it fell from outer space too it just was it just what it always was no it was yeah exactly it's like i don't know it goes back to that thing like people don't realize who who gave him a benefit although i argue most people

now seem to be that are in the public lands world seem to be aware that teddy roosevelt is largely responsible for giving given public lands to us but they do know again who's trying to take that away from him so everybody knows who jason chaffetz right? Yeah. Nobody used to know who he was. No, no. He's become famous now outside of his own state. But I would really like to just drive around, have a burger with Bishop, Rob Bishop and Chaffetz, Jason. Because I honestly want to know.

I honestly want to know what – if you look at a mountain, if you look at a mountain that's non-developed, non-road, does it make you angry? Do you hate it? You're like, oh, I hate that mountain. I wish it had his shopped up. I think they do hate the fact that it's not producing more at the moment. For the guys that give them money.

Well, yes, but I think they pitch it as in like, well, everybody that lives here, I don't know how they would designate who gets it to get their chunk, right? It's like if you live in the county or the state or whatever, but they're just like, well, it's not producing anything. If we did something with it, then we could just hand out this money or hand out jobs to you. Yeah, I'm not naive

enough to think that they look at a mountain and hate it no like i know that that's not true but i just like wonder like what like what is it you know like what is it because i i like i used to view the world more like there's like evil people and not evil people but then i realized that it's not really a very constructive realistic way of viewing it. It's actually a lot more complicated than that. So but I can't know like without knowing them without hanging out with them. I can't know

right. It's hanging out with someone you learn a lot about them in a hurry. Yeah, we should do their temperament is going to like a three day backpacking hunt. I don't know if they make it. No, it wouldn'ting hunt. I don't know if they'd make it. No, Rob Bishop wouldn't make it. I don't know if they'd make it.

But you'd know. I heard a rumor. I don't know if this is true. I heard a rumor that the dog, when he pulled his piece of legislation, and it was him with a hunting dog, I heard a rumor. Like I said, I heard a rumor about that dog. I heard a rumor about that dog. Let your imagination go where it will.

The dog came out? No. I heard a rumor about that dog that I'm not going to share because it's hearsay. I will tell you this. I've spent a lot of time with elected officials, and I sort of gave up on caring about their motivations. They just have a lot of fun. Well, how can you say that?

Because I want to know, like, I don't, I just don't think like I, I'm never going to accept that. Like, I was like good people who care about, who love their children,

care about their state patriotic. Yeah. Okay. Want the best for, for their country. I'm making this assumption. So what is it? Why do you hate that shit so bad i think no it's just it's not that they hate it i think it's just not a priority for them and they just

they have a particular worldview that is very dogmatic like if you if you spend i can say this i don't think raul labrador is going to listen to your podcast maybe he's your biggest fan but let's just assume raul i've spent enough time with raul to know that raul has a view of the world that is like this is the way it is i don't like i don't care what you think i don't care what you think i have my beliefs and like you're wrong and like i'm right i don't just that's where that's where it starts and ends so like it's hard if you try i mean you, you could spend so much time trying to understand where these guys come from and it would drive you nuts

because the folks that are really, now I'm not saying Rob Bishop is that way, but I'm saying some of these folks, like they come at it from a very black and white view of the world and there isn't room for like, oh, maybe you've got a point there. It's like, no, you're wrong, Steve.

Let me tell you why you're wrong. That mountain right there should be doing more than it's doing. Like just wrong steve let me tell you why you're wrong that mountain right there should be doing more than it's doing like just sitting there yeah doing nobody any favors up there you know giving me the stink eye when we could put a theme park up there and i think that's better and you're wrong and i'm right yeah because i think there's because you could have a world view you could have a national view that the government is meant to, not to stand, not to impede,

but is meant to facilitate and provide a safe environment for business transactions. And to have a guy be like, Hey man, I can come out. I'll create a hundred jobs for the next three years. I'm going to gouge that motherfucker out and pull some minerals out of there. I'm ready to write checks.

And there's someone who'd be like, well, it ain't doing nothing. This could put it to use. And my thing that I always feel is like oftentimes that becomes a very short-sighted thing. Yeah, for sure. Someone says to me, yeah, I noticed you're not using that toolbox right now. I'll give you five bucks for that toolbox right now. I'll be like, sold,

because right now I'm not using that toolbox. Then tomorrow I'm like, God damn, my toolbox. Need that toolbox back. There's law. I have my toolbox. In the whole damn system, this is an altruistic view,

but this is certainly the way it was explained to me in my first government class when I was at WeTike, is these people are there you know kind of damn their opinions to a certain degree they're there to represent the people within their district and so everybody within that district better want to gouge the shit out of that mountain too or at least the majority yeah and they can take their opinions what they say to their buddies behind closed doors and stick it up their butt but there's also like the donor factor because like yeah you remember this is a very small thing but it kind of made a national thing where where when so so when uh

when michael bloomberg left left his he gave up his you know was done turned out on being the mayor of new york uh a guy came in named bill de blasio and became the mayor of new York. A guy came in named Bill de Blasio and became the mayor of New York. One of the first things Bill de Blasio does, we talked about this yesterday. One of the first things Bill de Blasio does is he comes out and says, from now on, no horse. You can't give horse rides in Central Park.

One of the first things he did. Now, do you think anyone in New York, if you were to poll the 8 million or 13 or whatever the hell number of people live in new york gives a shit like they'd look at a lot of horses got a job he's well fed he's got like a great stable he's got great veterinarian care right it was seen to be like it seems to be like if you're gonna be a horse that's not a bad horse to be. But one of the first things he does is can't have horse rides in Central Park.

It's mean for the horses. You know that that was some guy gave that guy some money when he was running and gave him some backing and gave him some support, and that was the deal they made. Because that shit did not come from public opinion it never came million people called or emailed and said those horses i feel bad for those horses little kids riding there's a guy with like a llama a llama a llama carrier business who's like paying him under the table get rid of those damn horses man stinking up the place so i'm saying isn't like it's not always it's not always that this is the rising tide of popular sentiment.

No. Sometimes you make arrangements and it takes money to win an elected office in this country. You make arrangements with people and then you need to fulfill and make certain deals. It's not like, oh, because my constituents are all, when they look at all the problems in New York, the thing that they've isolated

as the real pressing issue is horse rides in Central Park. We got to fix it. It's just that it's like a thing. He's like, yeah, okay, okay, okay. I'll do something about it. But you got to do something for me.

That was the third leg of his political stool too. It's like education, healthcare, and horses in central park and making uh yeah no like for sure like money matters i mean i guess i guess let me just say this way like i i learned doing this work like i could spend an inordinate amount of time trying to understand like the motivation of of some politicians some politicians i say are very open to listening understanding some are not and the ones i feel like are not like i don't feel like it's a productive use of my time to invest in understanding why i just view it as like this

is where they're at and this is what we need to do you think there's no moving them some of them no absolutely not no and like i know you're looking i'll be like you just like this guy's cynical man no no no it's interesting it's interesting so you don't think because because if you're gonna do i think persuasion if you're gonna persuade you know what i think a part of persuading is being able to articulate to them their viewpoint so i think what will persuade them is if they see people with similar opinions as them starting to get losing office that will catch their attention real fast because that is what you know if you're and then speaking in

general terms but it's like you start kicking guys out of office who are anti-public lands because of their anti their public land stands oh yeah you better you better watch people just starting to change your opinion real fast but if you try and like just convince them on the merits some people can be persuaded you know i not saying it can't, but there are some folks who I think, I think Raul is one of them. If you spend any time with the guy, you'll know what I mean. You're not going to persuade the guy on your opinion. He doesn't- But politicians do get their opinions changed because just look at, we're a hundred days into the Trump administration. He felt that Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted, now feels she should not be prosecuted. He felt that we should disalign with NATO, now feels that it's

a powerful ally of ours. He thought that enhanced interrogation techniques were a really good idea, campaigned on it, and then turned around and said that based on further analysis and conversations he's had with experts in the intelligence community, he feels that it might not be the best strategy to extract information from people. That's not because he sees presidents losing elections. It's because he's having conversations with people who are saying, here's how I'm looking at it. Well, they're not all like people are not all change their minds. Absolutely. But they're not all the same either. What motivates them is not all the same. I think you can make an argument that someone like Donald Trump, he can be influenced on some issues just like everybody, but he has a different way of making up his mind than others. Now, someone like Raul, just as an example,

Raul can change his mind, but I have seen some people, I'm not going to name names or companies, but I have seen some people that I would consider very much a part of his base who have a lot of money and a lot of power, unable to move him on issues, very simple issues because he's like, no, this is what I believe. Really? Yes. And they're big donors and they have lots of power. So you're saying not even change in his mind for wealthy people who have influence. Yeah. There's this one, there's an industry. Yeah. I probably shouldn't even say it. Plush toys? How'd you guess? Went to Raul. They're like, hey, we got this issue

and we want you to vote our way. And I only know this because I'm friends with this guy and his industry. And they are very powerful in the state of Idaho. One of the most powerful industries. And Raul's like, I don't really believe in that. Sorry. Really?

Yeah. And that's not, I'm not saying that's indicative's like, I don't really believe in that. Sorry. Really? Yeah. And that's not, I'm not saying that's indicative of like, he's unique, but he's not alone. Almost makes me respect him. Don't say that. Respect that aspect.

So yeah. I like people. For sure. I see what you're saying. I like people who, it's like there's two kinds of people. There's people that think you can break everybody down into two groups. There's people that don't. No. It's like, I two kinds of people there's people that think you can break everybody down

into two groups there's people that don't no it's like it's like i like the guy who can who can hear about something and be like yeah that's a good damn point yeah i changed my mind i also like the guy who's like uh-uh never i know what i know hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers

get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high-end titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light,

Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. For sure.

I kind of like that guy. Yeah. So I'm not saying they can't be changed. Mines can't be changed. But what I'm saying is if I've got time, if I'm working on an issue

and I'm like, Raul's on one side and I'm working on this side or over here, I can invest time trying to figure out the way his mind works or I can just spend time trying to win. And I'd rather spend my this side over here. Like I can invest time trying to figure out the way his mind works, or I can just spend time trying to win.

And I'd rather spend my time trying to win. I know you're a curious guy. So you like, no, I don't want to interrupt you anymore. And I want you to lay out your approach, but why you don't care. Like why?

No, I know. I want you to lay out your approach about why the motivations don't matter. Well, they do. But this is just like, you're, you're just like my personal opinion of like

if you're talking about motivations for public lands no you're saying no i just like continue with your thought that that you tried to bring up 20 minutes ago that at a point i don't you're saying it doesn't matter what he thinks when he looks at a a piece of undeveloped ground. Yeah, it's just like, that's his opinion. And there are ways to change his opinion. But like, if I am, let's say, because I run a campaign that's all over the country, right? And we have, we're trying to, let's say, try and get ex-congressmen to vote a certain way

on a certain bill. He might have, we know his opinion, we know his voting record, we know what he said in the public. And so I don't invest a lot of time into thinking, to worrying about what he thinks. I will get a base. If I know he's a guy who cares about what other people think, that's important to know because that influences my strategy. If I know that he can't be influenced by his you know, his base or his big donors, like that's also important to know. And if I realize that like a guy like Raul, like

no one's going to get to him. The only way you're going to get to him is with like, you know, hardball politics. It's like, great. That'll influence how we approach him. A guy like Chaffetz, who I would argue does care what people think about him. Oh yeah. A lot. It tells me a lot about how I'm going to approach a guy like that too. Um, uh, it doesn't care much for dogs or good camo. We also know that, right? Uh, so that's what I'm saying. It's like, it's not that it doesn't matter, but I also just like, you know, you could

just invest endless amount of time trying to understand why people think a certain way. And at the end of the day, it doesn't mean we shouldn't have conversations about why public lands and try and understand each other. That's great. But this public lands issue is a, in many ways, I do think it's a war over this birthright that we've been given.

And when you're in a war side situation, man, you gotta fight fire with fire sometimes. And that's how you're gonna win on this issue. So I know that sounds like super cynical in some ways. It doesn't sound cynical to me at all. When I say it out loud, I'm like, man. Yeah, because I think that people have guiding principles. Now, I spent a lot of my life studying, practicing rhetoric.

So just a native interest in rhetoric. How do people give persuasive arguments and be persuaded? There's a lot of things. There's a lot of issues in my life that I have moved 180 degrees on. Same here? Yeah. But I'm telling you, when I, like you have guiding principles, okay? And a guiding principle of mine, like I think a litmus test for me,

when I look at an issue is I'm always going to ask myself, like, I'm going to ask myself, what's on land issues, wildlife issues. I'm always going to ask myself like, what's best for hunters, fishermen, and wildlife and public lands. Like what's best for this entire package. And I'm going to weigh that out and ask that question. And that's going to be my guiding thing. I cannot picture someone coming up and I just don't think there's an argument out there that would pull me away from that. Yeah, but you got to understand too, like you're a, you put more thought into how you approach issues than most Americans, I would say. People react, tend to react to issues emotionally,

not logically, right? So think of how people react to, just to bring up a touchy subject that we talked about last night, wolves. People react to wolves with an emotional response like somewhere, right? And the same thing is true with politics. So I don't think we're gonna win on this public lands issue with like a logical argument.

Like we need to articulate those. We need to articulate this. We need to have an emotional... You're never going to be like, oh, yeah. I should have thought about that. Yeah, fuck the whole thing. What was I talking about? Oh, I didn't realize that point. Thank you for pointing it out.

I changed my mind. Let me go. I'll be back at five. I'm going to withdraw some legislation. Talked about it all that long, and I didn't see that particular graph that bar graph yeah and i feel like that's a shortcoming of like this is a shortcoming of like educated folks in general it's like we we assume a world view that's like if we could just talk some sense into these people they'll get it like if i if ryan and i

could just sit across the table and have a beer and just talk it through, like you're going to come along and see why I'm right eventually here. And it's like, no, you need an emotional, like there needs to be a response to like this whole Bundy, not to go down a dark path, but like the Bundy situation, it's like people were angry, right?

They're like pounding the table. I am pissed off at this situation, right? That's why the folks went out to Mal here. Right, wrong, or indifferent, they felt a certain way and you can't tell them their feelings are wrong, right? That's why the folks went out to Mal here. Right, wrong, or indifferent, they felt a certain way and you can't tell them that their feelings are wrong, right? That's how I think we need to approach

this public lands issues. You need to strike an emotional chord with people, help them understand emotionally why this matters to them. Because at the end of the day, like that is how, because think about it this way too. Again, it's like public lands have existed so far

because theoretically the American public want them to exist. They will only continue existing into the future to the extent that the American public like them, understand them, appreciate them, and are willing to stand up to fight for them when they're under attack like they are now. That is a challenge we have because I can tell you there is a shocking amount of the population that has no idea what public lands are. And if they don't know what they are, why are you going to stand up and protect them when they're threatened? You're not.

You shouldn't be like, I don't even know what those are. Whatever, something going on in the West, you know, I've got my like kids to deal with right now. So there has to be, you know, again, this is like bigger picture, like 30,000 foot level. But that's how we've got to approach this public lands issue if we're going to win on the long run. And I think it's important to remember, it was contentious and divisive at the time. Oh God. The national forest system.

There was like, when Teddy Roosevelt did like one of his biggest single creations of national forest land, there was legislation coming that was going to ban him from doing it again and he knew he couldn't defeat it he didn't have the votes he couldn't veto because he didn't have the votes to override yeah or they were going to override the veto yep he had till midnight on some night so he sits down i think with gifford pincho and some others and they drew up what's called the

midnight forest because they were up till midnight. Declares, what do you make, like 17 forests or something? Yeah, the Forest Service System we know today. Yeah, millions of acres of land, finalizes that, and then signs a bill saying he'll never do it again. Yeah, crafty move. The Midnight Forest. Yeah, it's a good story.

Have you read The Big Burn? Phenomenal story. No, I haven't read that. Big Burn, that's good. You read that about north idaho forest and sort of the creation of forest service system uh um tim egan is not paying me to plug his book by the way but it's a good read and if you read it and you've got the politics of the time you could you could transfer that that time in the early 19 uh early 1900s so like right now it's like people are upset about the way you know land is managed and like people are fighting over resources it's like it's like going back in time but it's like

exactly the same but here's my question why is it so roosevelt did that people were pissed okay uh business interests all the same all the same business interests mining industry logging industry pissed um then something happens and we go and carve his image into a giant mountain that gets visited by millions of people every summer. And he has, you know, 21, whatever number of biographies written about him by some of the most influential historians. If you poll Americans, he's among the top five or top seven most popular presidents of all time. We have kind of decided that that was a good move, right? You don't just get your face carved in the damn mountain for nothing. It was his hallmark thing. So we as a nation sit back and go some he was

visionary yeah visionary what a trip what a phenomenal like who was this guy let's celebrate him and write books about him for a long time and then uh we'll start a bunch of shit to undo what he did. Like, how can we occupy both of these spaces as a nation? I don't know, man. Every politician in the country would love to be favorably compared to Roosevelt. Oh, yeah, real popular. That's what I hear Zinke say all the time. I'm a TR Republican.

It's a popular thing. Let's see it. Let's see it, man. Yeah, prove it. Let's see it. Yeah, I don't know. It's a popular let's see it let's see it man yeah proof it let's see it yeah i don't know it's a good question dude it's just it's like it's like it boggles my mind well you get you get rewarded i think as a politician for like creating things um right it's like nobody you don't hear many people say they regret the national park system right i don't see many people

like sitting around the coffee table it's like god damn it well i do because what i think oh we got one right here there should be a thing called the yellowstone super tag oh yeah i'm on board with this that's a good yellowstone super tag and it's a lottery draw is this for tourists or for animals no the yellowstone super tag big game on and no one can go there at all except for the SuperTag holder, you see. It's five, six, you do a drawing, you get the Yellowstone SuperTag, big game tag. That's what I think they ought to be doing with that part.

I can get behind that. You want me to work on that one? Pick that, float that idea and see how that goes. You get a month, a cabin, and a hot spring. I did call in. I called in a couple uh a couple turkeys in zion a couple weeks ago is it really yeah just with my mouth i can actually yeah call them in so and they uh they've never heard the crack of a shotgun no they were pretty tame actually but

i mean they were wild but they were kind of tame but you know we were just talking about yanni tell about where you were uh without giving away too many details explain the the uh the place you're just hunting turkeys and sort of the the weird uh the weird collection of critters sharing the ground where you're just hunting turkeys yeah we were getting ready in the mud room of this fellow's cabin putting our gear on and uh he starts doling out bear spray i'm like what we're turkey hunting you dumbass we're like i'm like looking out across a green meadow and i can see a few houses around and there's i'm guessing i don't know three or four hundred acres we might be hunting that then borders some public land we might be hunting and uh just around, and he's like, yeah, right now,

there's probably no place in the lower 48 where grizzly bears are thicker, more concentrated. And this guy's a grizzly bear researcher. Yeah. No, he deals with bear-human interactions. All right. Well, all right. That's interesting.

And then what was the other animal? Oh, so they're eastern turkeys. Yeah, eastern wild turkeys. Yeah, so we started looking at gobblers that are eating on this haystack that we couldn't hunt on. Had to wait for them to come off, and we're looking. We're like, man, look at those tails. There's like no buff band at all.

They're just brown. And we started looking around, and sure enough, the merriams didn't take. And so the next time they tried to transplant something, they did Easterns. So now you got Eastern turkeys, grizzly bears. Eastern turkeys that are getting preyed on by lynx. Yeah, lynx. In grizzly bear country. There's wolverines running around that country.

I mean, we were on the edge of the bob. We were looking at, you know, you can look up in the mountains and see, you know, the edge of the Bob Marshall wilderness. Those turkeys are like, bring me back to Missouri, man. I'd rather deal with that. I don't know, man. I'd probably rather face that. I'd rather get away from coyotes and deal, if I was a turkey,

I'd rather be in Lynx country. Not that there's any shortage of coyotes in that area. Yeah. Then to have the woodsmen and good old boys of missouri chasing after you all yeah that's a different grade that's a different grade of turkey hunter down there as far as far as skill sets go man yeah yeah a montana turkey not to not to dig on the west but like hunting turkeys in the west not hunting turkeys in the east no one it just has turkeys in the east are paranoid caught on and uh

it's like it's the same thing with the squirrels and the rabbits out west people are just like what yeah squirrel out west he'll hide on the side of the tree but squirrel in the east is like no no no no you hide on top of a fat limb you don't hide on the side of a tree or at the very top of the tree on the last bud that can support me. Yeah, they're like, only a squirrel who was high would hide here. Yeah, that's interesting about that spot. I think a guy a few years ago

got scratched up by a grizz who was hunting pheasants. But I would like to be a turkey hunter who got scratched by a grizz hunting turks. I, years ago ago was calling turkeys and heard a loud exhale like this like where i thought a dude had come up and was like exhaling as he looked through my backpack and i uh whooped my head around and face to face with a bear who's coming into the call. But me turning my head around and looking at him freaked him out more than he freaked me out, man.

I think our both of our hearts kind of like, you know. What kind of bear was it? Black bear. All right. But yeah, calling turkeys, I've called in bobcats, coyotes, black bears. My buddy Robert Abernathy was down in New Mexico calling turkeys. He's a South Carolina hunter, but he's in New Mexico calling turkeys. And he looks

and he's on a toot track and belly crawling down the grass strip of the toot track is a mountain lion. Whoa. Coming into the call. I got a good story of scared bears that I learned while I was up there turkey hunting. This fellow does a

lot of work with uh camera traps and uh we're talking about grouse somehow and he says yeah you ever had just a rough grouse just scared the bejesus out of you right it seems like it's almost like these montana rough grouse don't flush quite as hard as the ones back in wisconsin no we used to walk the edge edge of just the forest and you know, 10 yards away is like where the corn starts. And you'd be walking there and just kind of chilling and daydreaming. And one of those grouse would take off at that edge going into the forest. And you would tell people, oh, yeah, that was a bird that just flushed. And they'd be sitting there looking at you wide-eyed,

their heart beating out of their chest, just like, that wasn't a bird. And you show them how big it is, and they're like, no, no, no. It was like a herd of deer that just ran off no it's a little bird that flew away you know but it means loud anyways he's got a trap set up camera trap yeah camera trap cam and uh grizzly bear farting around there doing something at the rub tree or whatever he had it pointed at um i think he does a lot of points about a lot of rub trees and a uh ruffy flushes right next to that bear and he said that that grizzly bear turned inside out oh scared the

shit out really yeah i know how he feels man i know how he feels i got empathy for that bear uh all right so what else brad well i want to touch on here i'll tell you what else how uh so you're talking like how do we make like make it like a hot button emotional issue so that people fight for right and you're saying how like back east people are like yeah whatever man bunch of land out west why do i care so like yeah why do why should they care they do care oh no they care in some ways they care more it's just not in the uh you know why you care? You've been paying for that shit your entire life. When you pay federal taxes,

so you should hang on to it now and go use it. Well, I mean, the easy answer to that question is like, yeah, like, would you give up, you know, 640 million acres of land you owned? No, you wouldn't give up. Even if you didn't know you owned it, like you wouldn't give it up, right? I just don't think it's not an issue that's as as present in their daily lives it's not on the news as much

it's not like just something they're as aware of it doesn't mean they don't care they do care in fact folks out east uh the idea that they would not have they do care about parks a lot of folks out east care about the parks more um so like the idea that yellowstone like that's what resonates for them it's like wait a minute they're gonna take away yellowstone or like yosemite yeah yeah that gets them like real real riled up um so it's not that they don't care i don't want to like make it sound like folks folks have that you must have a lot of eastern listeners here so yeah but that's that's one of the ways that's one of the ways and uh and, and I've identified and talked frequently about something I call Yellowstone Syndrome, which is like where people,

like everything they understand about land management and wildlife management and the politics of wildlife is all framed around because they hear so much about Yellowstone. Yeah. And it corrupts their view of every other thing. I was just watching a Nat Geo video the other day,

and it was about elk migrations. And it's these elk that are going, these elk that spend a little bit of their time in the summer. Oh, I've seen this, I think. Yeah. Yeah. They're all the way over in Cody, Wyoming, right? And they spend a little bit of their time in Yellowstone.

And it's like about the Yellowstone elk. Yes. I'm like, well, it's like about the Yellowstone elk. I'm like, well, why is it about the Cody elk? Yeah, I know. I know what you mean. It's like everything becomes, it's just that place. It kind of like troubles me in the way that so many people are just having a really hard time understanding that that is a piece of ground

laid into a much larger piece of ground that has serious like management issues and wildlife issues that are not just centered around that little patch of space people act like oh if yellowstone's okay everything's okay yeah so but like here's the no i'm with on that. Like the flip side of that is like, if your only experience in public land is like, if you don't have any experience in public land, it's really hard for you to understand what it is and why you should been to Yellowstone twice or whatever you do the National Park Circuit and that's your introduction to public lands and that's what makes you care about public lands and get angry when somebody tries to take them away from you. I don't think people make the jump. You don't think so?

I think they care about Yellowstone. Oh, that's interesting. That's your theory? I feel that's the case. And you think that's like people think like all wildlife is like a theme park like it is in Yellowstone and that's like i think i think it contributes the thing i rail about all the time is people who look at wildlife and they view it as a relic of the past it's like and it's like you go to like a museum it's like yellowstone's like a little museum

where you go to view this like this this remnant relic of the past that doesn't really have any implications or pertain to our lives today. Yeah, no, I think that's fair. But it also does give you at least a baseline than if you were to be able to circle back around with those people and say, oh yeah, so you know, you're familiar with this thing called Yellowstone.

Well, guess what? There's also like other millions and millions of acres. Go on the other side of the road and walk up and it's all the same shit, except there's no people there. Right. Right. Yeah. Go into the Lee Metcalf and it's like your own private Yellowstone. Right. Yeah. At least at that point, then they're kind of like, oh, okay, really? So because then you don't got to ask a park ranger permission to look the other direction. Now, I'm going to be a heretic for saying this at some of the works for the Wilderness Society, but I'm not like, I mean, parks are wonderful, really great, love the parks, but I'm not like someone who, when I'm picking a place to go,

like picks parks to go. And I just like the whole theme park experience is just not my idea of an experience. We were joking, we were in Zion that we felt like we should have been getting paid because we were doing some climbing and the buses would drive by and you could see us every day, you know, and the buses would stop. And like, I think tourists would get out and like take photos of us, like cross the Canyon. You were an attraction. We were an attraction. And we,

my buddy and I were like, we should be getting paid by the Dan Park service to entertain these people over here. Cause they're like looking for us to fall down and die. You know, I feel like climber. Uh, yeah. So I was like waiting for like, I was like, I know everyone down there is like, I wonder if they're going to fall today. You know? This could be the day. This could be the day.

Everybody. You never know. You might just fall. Everybody in on your left over here. Everybody get out your cameras. You might be lucky enough to see a climber falling from the cliffs over here. So, but yeah, they're different all right so yeah concluders low elevation wilderness can you talk about what uh this is your concluder

wilderness like concluding question yeah yeah yeah i'm very interested because in colorado especially where i spent a lot of time living and uh hunting and enjoying public lands is like all that wilderness is you know high elevation um certainly humans do enjoy in the winter time but you know not many animals up there in the winter and then they get you know they come out of there and it's all that like winter range is is uh private and it seems like it'd be nice if we could have like a nice balance. High elevation, low elevation. Is that something that you guys think about?

Trying to get more low elevation wilderness? Or is there ever talk of trading? Obviously, these mountain bikers are like, I just want to ride my bike over that 14,000 foot peak. Why don't we just carve off that and trade it up for a bunch of sagebrush

down the road? Yeah, or a big major riparian area wilderness area. That'd be interesting. Because it doesn't exist, right? No, that's a very cutting question, Yanni. We talk about this a lot. Yanni's going deep. He's going super deep, man. His concluder, man.

You should probably have... You could pay you as a consultant to come like... Just for the big ideas. Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah. I'll have my guy Cal call you and we'll talk. We have a team of scientists

who think about this kind of stuff. And yeah, absolutely. Most of the wilderness in the US is rock and ice. We call it rock and ice. That's a relic of, if you think of areas that are suitable for wilderness are areas that were probably either too difficult to get to for like resource extraction or roads, right?

And so the steep, the rugged country, it doesn't produce trees as well, harder to get to. Those are the areas that present day are either designated wilderness or were still suitable for wilderness, which is why there's a lot of high altitude wilderness. Yeah, because Aldo Leopold, when he proposed the first wilderness area,

was pointing out an area where he said, really, its greatest value, and at this time, like its only value, is just in it being wilderness. Yeah. There's no other possible better thing for it. And that was kind of like how he sold it. Yeah.

And people were like oh yeah it's got a point no one's gonna do shit in there let's make it a wilderness yeah that's a lot of times i hear people say it's like yeah it's useless anyway let's just make a wilderness you know i hear that all the time he turned out yeah he took that thinking and manipulated it into wilderness area yeah and i did work on a great hunter aldo leopold he's a great owner um uh the owyhee canyon lands in Idaho, I worked on that. That's a wilderness area in the desert of Southern Idaho. It's like 500,000 acres, 517,000 acres.

Desert wilderness. Big lonely desert too. So there is some low elevation wilderness. It's harder because it's also, when you look at just historically the places people homesteaded, they didn't homestead where there wasn't any water. They homesteaded places where they wanted the land with the water because that was you need to you

know for cows or took up the best timber ground so um uh it's harder there are fewer options for lower elevation but there's quite a bit of like desert suitable wilderness in the u.s and it's something we think about all the time is like how do we diversify the wilderness system so it has a good representation across the board is that right right? Yeah, absolutely. Clearwater country in North Idaho, good example. Relatively low, it's like inland temperate forest. I don't know if you spend much time in the Clearwater, but big, huge roadless country, lower elevation, a lot of recommended and suitable wilderness up there would be a good addition to the system. If for no other reason, then there aren't a lot of other ecosystems that are sort of lower elevation, kind of that big cedar country, that thick forest.

Not a lot of that country is designated wilderness. So we do, when we're- Looks like Endor on Star Wars. It does. There's some cedar groves up there that uh blew my mind i'd never seen like you know gigantic cedar trees oh dude i remember driving over from uh like just crossing over into that stuff where you come over the bitter roots and drop down the other side and um just feeling like you like it's feeling like you drove a thousand miles yeah when you hit the other side like holy shit this is over here yeah exactly looking at the other side of the hill for 10 years and had no idea man you know it feels like you're on the coast i mean there's a lot of amazing coastal species over there too tree species so yeah i

don't know if i answered your question but like yes we think about it yes we work on it um it's hard it's hard still working on it check back in couple years, and maybe I'll have some better news. Cool. Thank you. Cal-An? That was good. Boy, I hunt to eat T-shirts, preferably one that says animal rights activist.

That is a hunting-themed shirt. I find myself often talking about the conundrum that I appreciate these animals surely more than anyone else. Oh, I got you. Taking the old, turning it around. But occasionally, man, I like to stuff one in the freezer. Sticking it.

Yeah, I like it. Man, I support them more than anybody I know. Steal their name from them. Absolutely. Steal their term from them. Like. Steal their term from them. Like they did to us. That's good. What do you think about that?

Environmentalist? Animal rights activist. It'll be a new line. Squirrel eater. Sign here, and it could be like the X on your conservation license. Yeah. I like that. That's good, man.

That's good thinking. Thanks, Steve. Anything else? yeah like that that's good man that's good thinking thanks steve anything else you can have a bigger concluding thought than that oh i'd categorize that as a joke offhand joke not that you need to have a bigger concluder no i yeah we i mean we just kind of gotta keep an open mind mind on this different types of use and the fact that these federally managed lands are managed for everyone. And I agree with Brad where it's like we got to tug at some heartstrings and open some minds and probably vote some folks out of office by bringing new folks into office

if we're going to win this public lands battle because it's a legit deal. And it's certainly where those are public lands are the lands that I appreciate the most. You know, it's what shaped me for better or worse. hey has uh has first light have you guys had uh has there ever been like any like big kind of like important kind of blowback for you guys being involved in like advocacy for public lands in the political sphere like in your in your guys home state idaho there has not been not not that i'm no one's ever said like what in the world you boys doing nobody knocked on the door and said oh yeah you guys forgot to pay these taxes so you guys have never had someone say like what's up what's up with this uh no we have not i mean truthfully we get uh feedback constantly i mean every every day saying you know you guys make a know, you guys make a great shirt.

These guys make a great shirt, but I bought this from you because of what you guys do for public lands. So, yeah. And animal rights. And animal rights. That's right. And I like it. You don't do it all that.

That sanctimonious goody twotwo-shoe-ism type activism that you associate with Patagonia. Yeah. Where the founder is like a half-closeted hunter, and it's just like, you guys got a good way of doing it. I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah, so no, there hasn't.

We certainly take emails and phone calls and stuff to the negative um seriously and and i try to field all that stuff myself and but generally hunters are like hey man like you guys are it's cool that you guys are making a stand and yep yeah and uh yeah i've had some real serious conversations with folks, especially just my personal media stuff. I spoke up about the HR 621, 622, and definitely had some people say, now, what exactly do you mean by this?

Yeah. Yeah, which is great because the thing that i think is dying the most and why i appreciate so much and thank you for uh asking me to be on these podcasts on occasion is is the conversation man we're losing it discourse yeah discourse is that old dying thing and i like discourse and then I like the other kind of course. What do you mean? Start out. Intra.

Brad, you got a concluding thought? I'm spent. I got no concluding thoughts. Do a pitch for Wilderness Society, man. Tell people. You do whatever you want. I can do. I'll pitch a bunch of stuff. That's all right. I got a concluding thoughtserness Society, man. Tell people. All right. Or you do whatever you want. I can do. I'll pitch a bunch of stuff.

That's all right. I got a concluding thoughts, concluding question. Yeah. You have a two-year-old? Almost two, yeah. Almost two. You're married? Mm-hmm.

Good. Okay, go ahead. I like to see fellows married, man. I love being married. I like to see people. I like to see people. I like to see people married. I like to see them have kids best thing i ever did yeah uh people always dogging on marriage but i'm like i love it if you dog on marriage you don't know what you're

talking about that's what i say the amount of time it's like people like oh it takes so much time it's like it saves you so much bullshit that you don't need to be involved in totally besides all besides all the stuff about like and all that, which I'm a firm believer in, but just the noise that it takes out of your life. It's just cost-benefit analysis, really. He's looking at us like, I know what I'm focused on. I know what's important to me, and I know all the junk I don't need to do, like spending all my money in bars, being all hung over all the time trying to find girlfriends

in bars yep that doesn't do any good yeah you think i'd be done with my remodel i had an extra set of hands around dude if you were married your remodel would have been done within a month yeah oh yeah somebody keeping you on task yeah if you're like oh what's going on what do you know what's these uh what's these beers i heard about yeah you, you'd be done with it. Yeah. Someone would be pissed at you until you got done with it. Motivation. And then they'd be happy forever once I was done.

And you'd have eternal bliss until you died at 85. All right. All right, so yeah, tell people what they ought to do. If they're curious about you guys, Yeah, so I would say a couple things one is like pay attention don't listen to what your elected officials tell you pay attention to how they vote because how they vote matters and if they

don't vote they'll be sneaky with votes it will be sneaky with votes don't listen to like what's coming out of their mouth. The slick, like salesman pitch, like look at their voting record. It's not hard to do. And then if public lands are something you care about and you vote for somebody that votes against public lands, you ought to think about your values and think long and hard about what's

important to you. That's my plea to people. If you want to. Yeah. I wish hunters were as to yeah i wish hunters whereas like i wish hunters were like is rigid about that as they are about someone who wants like curtail your gun rights yeah we'll go after them bad right totally you should be like yep and if you try to curtail my land ownership rights i'm coming that. That's the way I vote. Yeah. It's like very black and white.

Simple. How you on public lands? And Wilderness Society, check us out. Check us out on our website. Feel free to reach out to me. You can track me down through our website

if you have any questions about what we do or if you need that route from last year's death hike. I got that too. Yeah. Cut to these trees. Yeah, I got that. Put an X where the big bull hike. I got that too, yeah. Cut to these trees. Yeah, I got that.

Put an X where the big bull is. I am selling that, by the way, those GPS coordinates. Pretty sure he's safe. Oh, I want to bring up something real quick. It's kind of a conundrum. Did you... Oh, never mind. I need to find out more.

Before I bring it up, I need to find out more about it. I don't know enough about it to bring it up. All right. Can I plug our golly is that yeah plug away uh check us out on uh if you want to see what we're doing in my uh hunting world you can check that name come from our golly it's uh i mean it's just the name of a species that i like um kind of like the one species of sheep. Marco Polo. Where does it live? Mostly in like Middle East. Don't know if I'll ever get to hunt one.

It's on my bucket list. So, but yeah, I like the look of the animal. I like the name. Got a nice cadence to it. So we named the company after a species. But you can check us out and kind of see some of the... We have a conservation-focused mission, which I think separates us a little bit from pretty much everybody else. Everything we do is in service of conservation of wild public lands. So you can

check us out at ArgaliOutdoors.com and see what we've got going on. As in like all your profits are going towards that? No, no, no like a little bit we we we exist to serve a conservation focused mission that means we give money we give our time but like everything we're doing i view it through the lens of is this furthering our mission to protect wild hunting experiences if it isn't it's easy it an easy choice. Now we have like an online gear shop. It's like, that's a, that's where we carry products. People, I think people want to use, go backcountry hunting with, but that is in service of the way I look at it is in service

of our mission. So that allows us to give money to causes. It allows me to spend more time working on, you know, conservation, wild hunting experiences. Um, we have like, you know, featured content content do some films and stuff all of that is in service of both bringing more people helping people both care about and understand the value of wild places um through the lens of hunting because i think that's how we're going to get people in the long run to really stand up for them um so what's the website uh argali outdoors.com a-r-g-a-l-i outdoors so a-r-g-a-l-i outdoors yeah all right man brad thanks for coming on thanks for having me man i appreciate i appreciate what you guys do by the way this is really cool glad you're talking about conservation public

lands and oh we'll keep hammering at it yeah thanks man until i get scratched up by grizzling turks all right thank you. you you you you you you you you you Thank you. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land,

hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.