The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 241: A Half Life of Never

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Tim Bristol, Miles Nolte, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: The skinny on Pebble Mine; size, type, and location; dead snow geese in a toxic hole; Butte’s Berkeley Pit; ten billion tons of waste; cyanide leech mining; the Richter scale and how Richter was a nudist; milk, bourbon, and other causes of mass fish die offs; the incredible value of sockeye salmon to life; how everything is keyed in to the salmon lifecycle; the Pebble Beach golf course; when the state pays you to be a resident; Steve being clear on where he's coming from and his $1,000 bet with his sister-in-law; the EPA and Clean Water Act as the last stand; empty statements like empty air; how Alaskans don't want Pebble; the amount of money spent on lawyers and how the debate on Pebble is an economic driver; how conservation in Alaska is a different fight; holding on to perfect things; how to take action and stop Pebble Mine; 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.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Hey everybody, I don't want to discourage you from listening to this episode. It's about Pebble Mine in Alaska and everything you're going to hear is pertinent and relevant. But here's the weird thing. While we were recording this episode with Tim Bristol about Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, Alaska, a big news story broke. In this episode, you're going to hear mention of a guy named Tim Collier, who served a CEO role on the Pebble Mine Project, was secretly recorded saying some things that are speculated about in this coming episode. This will make more sense after you listen. For instance, he acknowledges to some people who are posing as potential investors to the mine we're going to be discussing today. He acknowledges to some people who are posing as potential investors to the mine we're going to

be discussing today. He acknowledges not that this would be a 20-year project, but that phase one of this project would be a 180 to 200-year project. And he discusses certain politicians by name who he says, sure, they'll pay lip service to opponents of the mind and they'll act like they care about having this mind done right. But at the end of the day, I'm friends with them. I know them and they'll just rubber stamp the thing. That's in essence. I'm paraphrasing them.

That's an essence of what this guy says on these secretly recorded tapes. And Tim Collier, who we're going to discuss quite a bit in this show, had to promptly resign. So understand that this episode happened in the minutes before this major twist in the story occurred. So dig in and you will walk away, eh, borderline expert on Pebble Mine. And hopefully, like me, you'll come to the decision that this is the wrong mine in the wrong place. And we need to fix this problem once and for all all right we're joined by a super special guest out of homer alaska tim bristol how predictable is it that i bring up that you know you know i'm gonna bring up like about your name yeah how'd that work out but either chance or fate you know take your pick so what I'm going to bring up? Like about your name? Yeah. How'd that work out? Either chance or fate.

You know, take your pick. What I'm getting at here, his name's Tim Bristol. Yeah. You've dedicated how many years to fighting Pebble Mine on Bristol Bay? 15. Did you change your name to Bristol? I did not. No.

I was born with that name. At what point were you like, wow, huh? My name is the name of that place. I think the best thing about it was when I started going out to these communities, these native villages, a lot of us white people are all the same, kind of go out there in baseball hats and rain gear and have some kind of scruffy beard. Some kind of Patagonian shirt on. They remembered me because they're like, Tim Bristol, we remember your last name. It's so good.

It's great. So it worked out, you know, it worked out really well. It was advantageous. Yes. Can you, man, like explain to people as though they're five years old. Yeah. As though they're five years old. Yeah. As though they're 20 years old.

Explain to people like they're 20 years old. What? When someone says Pebble Mine. Okay. What is Pebble Mine? Considering that it's at this point, it's nothing. But what are we talking about when we talk about pebble mine pebble mine is a proposal to build either the second largest or

the largest open pit gold and copper mine in the world at the headwaters of the most productive wild salmon fishery left on the planet and it's a a choice for Alaska. You know, we're at a crossroads. We got to decide whether we're going to allow everything everywhere, or are we just going to say some places are just too important for renewable resources, for thousands of American jobs, for America's, you know, natural heritage, and we're not going to allow this to go forward. The superlative largest or second largest, what does that hinge on? Well, it's all about the habitat when you're talking about sockeye salmon production, right? No, I'm talking about the mine size. Like it would be the largest or like, you mean there's varying proposals or like it's unclear how to measure them well that there's there's

this is where it gets really confusing for the public and incredibly irritating for us that are trying to you know punch through and tell the truth on this thing it is the largest known gold resource and the second largest known copper resource in North America. And when the head of the company, Pebble Limited Partnership, this guy named Ron Thiessen, goes and talks to investors at World Gold Forum and things like that, he talks in those terms, those superlatives, that this is a world-class resource that we may be able to mine it for 100 years or more. But then when Pebble comes

back to the public, when Pebble gives a proposal to the Army Corps of Engineers, they say, oh, we're going to be there for 20 years and then we're going to go away. And, you know, there's really no way to sugarcoat it. It's a flat out lie. And the government right now is swallowing it hook, line, and sinker. It makes it incredibly frustrating because I just, you know, if you talk to people that don't have skin in the game, that are experts in the mining world, they'll tell you that they're not going to make any money in the first 20 years, and there's no way they're going to stop after 20 years. The shareholders wouldn't let them. Everybody who was part of the company would get sued, and they would just put a whole new set of leadership in there

and apply for a little additional permit and just keep going would it somehow make it better if they did stop after 20 years yeah would that would that ease your mind not really no and the other damage will be done as far as like the all the infrastructure and the what it takes to open the mine right yeah yeah i i i would i would point i would try to find, you know, a place in the world where that's happened, right, where you spend billions on infrastructure, roads, a port, getting a natural gas pipeline out there,

and then just quitting after 20 years, right, when you may have not turned a profit by that point. So I just, you know, that's not going to happen. And then you have a whole bunch of other mineral claims staked around the Pebble prospect. The thing that people don't realize is you're looking at 1,000 square miles of mining claims at the headwaters of Bristol Bay. And that would make it one of the largest mining districts, if not the largest mining district in the world. And you start thinking about the implications for wild salmon production and you look at wild salmon runs all the all throughout the pacific rim and you pretty much know how the story is going to end you know uh have you ever heard this that

all of the gold that's ever that's in existence above ground so all of the gold that's ever been hauled out of the earth since the Egyptians, there's only enough to fill three Olympic-sized swimming pools. Huh. Really? All of that gold. I'm going to start using that. Forbes estimates that it would take,

that all the gold since 2000 BC, including the Egyptians, that all of that gold would fill 3.27 Olympic swimming pools. That's what's ever been dragged out of the earth. Isn't that one Die Hard movie? They had so many trucks full that you would think that would have been 10 pools. Yeah, but I mean, Olympic swimming pools, no joke though either. Yeah, it's a lot of volume.

Okay. Put your mining engineer hat on for a minute. I don't have one of those, but I'll try. Okay. I mean, mining engineers are smart people. We should have brought one in. Explain, because it's the process, right? Part of what pisses people off about Pebble Mine,

it's not like a bunch of old dudes dressed up like Hatchet Jack out there with gold pans pulling nuggets. Right. Yeah. Explain leech, cyanide leech mining. Yeah. So with Pebble, to get back to speaking to the 20-year-old, it's size type location, right? It's the size of the mine. We've already talked about that.

It'd be one of the biggest excavations in the history of mankind. Really? When you include the pit and the infrastructure. So Pebble, to go to full build out, would use more energy on a daily basis in the city of Anchorage. And you've been through there a bunch of times. It's not a small town. It's 260,000 people there. It would suck up that amount of electricity. Yeah.

And use. Or fuel. And water. Would use more than twice as much water that is used by a city of 260,000 people on a daily basis. You're kidding me. And, you know, I don't know if you've ever flown over the mine site area. There's nothing there. I mean, it's just, it's just wilderness.

Yeah. It's, it's just, it's just wilderness. Yeah. It's, it's an amazing spot. And it drains two ways towards two river systems up towards the Neuschigach, Melchatna, and then down towards Lake Iliamna and the Kwejak River. And those are the two major drivers of the, of the salmon fishery that I think we'll probably talk about a little bit. But so from an engineering standpoint, you're talking something, you know, the biggest development project in Alaska since

they discovered oil on the North Slope and built the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and, you know, Dead Horse and Prudhoe Bay and all that kind of stuff. And then, so you got a size and then you have the type of a mine. So there's a lot of gold and copper in the ground, but it's not a very rich ore body.

It sits in a big sulfide deposit. And you basically, so a friend of ours who's worked for a long time with us, who has some background in mining, and he used to be the state Senate president, guy named Rick Halford, lifelong Republican, big game guy, retired big game guy. He calls it a sulfur mine with a gold and copper component. You have to get through a whole bunch of waste rock to get to the gold and the copper. And then the big problem, the engineering problem, the one that's chased away, Anglo-American and Rio Tinto

and Mitsubishi and Quantum Minerals, some of the heavy hitters, has been, what the hell are they going to do with all that waste? Because you have- Those are other mining companies that you just named. Those are like the contractors. There's like the developer and then the contractor. There's the developer-

Or is that analogy not accurate? There's the developer, sort of the hype machine, which is Pebble Limited Partnership, the snake oil salesman yeah if i may and then there's the the majors who actually design and operate mines and we should get to the fact that that pebble part like the sort of brain the the the sort of uh brains behind this i'd like to get to this because i don't understand as well they're having a hard time sort of finding the contractor right like they're like, here's this crazy house we're going to build. And contractors keep coming in and being like, eh, that's not for us. I like that analogy. Yeah. So you get Anglo-American, Rio Tinto, Mitsubishi,

Quantum all walked away. Anglo walked away from a $570 million investment. And I think it really comes down to, and what we've heard through the grapevine and lots of experts that have just kind of been around the proposal throughout the years have said, we just don't know how you're going to manage that kind of waste over time. It'll be like a Berkeley pit beyond comprehension.

I think that's another piece from the 20-year-old standpoint that needs to get explained. When you're talking about that waste about that sulfur what what are we talking about specifically in terms of containment and the potential for if it gets out are we being condescending to 20 year olds yes yeah probably but i mean yeah actually we are because my co-worker she's 22 and she's way smarter than me so way smarter okay so i heard the talk about explain it as though talking to a 46 year old um yeah i want to get it like why okay let me just throw this out real quick we have a thing nearby to where we're sitting right now an hour and a half drive from here called berkeley pit right and it at a time was the like golden copper mine yeah it's in butte montana you always i don't know what this means you always

hear it thrown out that like once upon a time butte had per capita more millionaires than anywhere in the country but i was thinking too if you had a community of 100 people and there happened to be a millionaire there you would have more millionaires per capita. So I don't know really. People like to throw that out there. There's a great history of Butte and the Berkeley Pit. There's just an article. There's all these books,

but there's an article called Pennies from Hell, and it gets into what exactly happened there. And they tunnel mined it, right? Just like pulling out chunks. But over time, technology's improved. The quality of the ore decreased in different areas, and they eventually got to this thing where they pull the shit out of the ground, and the ore contains what you're after,

copper, gold, silver, and you leach it out by, you pour acid on it. Cyanide. Yeah, cyanide. You pull it up, crush it up, dump a bunch of cyanide on it, and then it dissolves, correct?

Right. And there's some way that you then harvest it, but then you wind up with all of this contaminated liquid that then has to go live in a lake. And Berkeley Pit is a problem that will never go away. Right. It's an enormous... A hundred snow geese once landed there and died on the water in that pit.

And it'll be a problem into, you know, I don't want to over conflate Berkeley pit with this, but I do want to talk about like what they mean when they say, because I think people think of mining and think you're going to dig a hole and all of a sudden all this gold starts flying out of the hole. And then you load it on airplanes and fly it somewhere. Right. Yeah. They're talking 10 billion tons of waste

associated with full build out of pebble. A percentage of that would be highly reactive sulfide-bearing rock. And when that sulfide-bearing rock is exposed to air and water, it creates dilute sulfuric acid, which has a half-life of never. It just has to sit in a pit and be treated in perpetuity. That's the part I didn't get. So it's like,

it's something that when you pull it up and allow it to oxidize or expose the water, then it creates the problem. Right. And you put that shit into a lake. That's right. And build a dam

to keep it from going anywhere. An earthen dam in an area that's one of the more seismically active places in the world. You know, it's on the Pacific Rim of Fire. They had an earthquake out there last year that really shook our house. It was high sevens.

So, you know, and they talk about, oh, we got dams designed. Nothing can ever go wrong. But you're seeing more and more of that of these modern mines, you know, that they have such huge amounts of waste that they have to contain that it becomes a real problem. And Pebble makes, you know, Berkeley Pit look like, you know, just a dot. It's way bigger.

You know, you just mentioned the earthquake in the sevens. I was just reading this book about the what year did the big earthquake hit anchorage 64 i read a book about the john muallum who's been on this show just wrote a book called this is chance and it's about the 64 earthquake in anchorage and richter at the time was just developing his scale and it's an exponential scale so a seven is 10 times worse than a six right he he was a nudist richter he was down in california um listening to a con he built the rick he built the seismograph that he installed in his living room and drove his

wife crazy this giant seismograph and he was working on his scale and he he installed in his living room and drove his wife crazy, this giant seismograph. And he was working on his scale and he was sitting in his living room listening to a concert with his wife when the 64 earthquake hit in Alaska. And he looked over at his seismograph and said, that was a big one. And lo and behold, biggest earthquake to ever strike the continent. Yeah.

Yeah. It could happen again. You know, that's not that long ago. No. No. No, a lot of these people are still around. Yep. Swallowed streets.

Right. 60-foot tsunami hit Kodiak. Yeah. Yeah. When people point out the seismic part of the area, I think people are like, oh, you're just being alarmist. But I mean, it's like, it's an actual thing,

man. Right. I think, you know, we have a tough time grasping these timeframes, right? I mean, the acid mine waste doesn't go away. Someone's going to have to store it. And, you know, companies rise and fall and someone's gonna have to pay for all that monitoring if you were to you know take all these steps and actually build the

thing and over time you never know who's gonna get stuck with the bill probably the people of alaska and the people of the united states explain a little bit about what's to be what's to be lost like besides just the actual destruction or you can take it both ways the actual destruction of the footprint okay which is not insignificant but i think that that is something that people probably would become comfortable with maybe yeah like okay there's this like part of the earth that will cease to function as it now it will like not be wildlife habitat anymore it'll be the opposite but then there's this sort of like ticking time bomb element right that all this shit would just

downstream yeah like what's that look like like like what is the resource that would be the resource resources that could be compromised if the worst in the worst case scenario yeah and then i want to know too if in the best case scenario are there still compromises to the wildlife habitat yes so the third part size type and then location so the pebble prospect sits in the saddle between the two largest salmon-producing watersheds in Bristol Bay, which makes them two of the biggest salmon-producing watersheds in the world.

Because Bristol Bay being the biggest salmon run left. Right. It's the biggest sockeye salmon run in the world. It's probably going to be close to 60% of the world's global sockeye salmon supply this year because... You're shitting me, really?

Yeah. So the total run this year was you're shitting me really yeah so the total run this year was 57 million fish and the commercial fleet harvested about 40 million sockeye and hit me with that again 57 million was the total run and the harvest was 40 million and you know that's amazing that you can harvest that level and still get the return i know salmon are amazing that you can harvest that level and still get the returns. I know. Salmon are incredible.

If you take care of habitat and you're really on it management wise, you know, fish and game can turn the run on and off like a, like a faucet. You know, they can, they can take 2,500, you know, hardcore gill netters and say, you're done for the day. And they all stop. Can you imagine if you did that kind of trim off on a deer population, dude? It'd take decades to recover. Yeah.

No, they're incredible. So it's that location sitting in the saddle between the two rivers. And, you know, up to this point. And that's them coming in. Yeah. That's the fish coming in. Yeah, that's the return. And that 17 million then cranks out enough

returners to pull another 40 million fish out in the future for, for human consumption. Yep. Yep. We're probably at peak abundance right now. Bristol Bay probably has more salmon coming back now than it ever has because they can go down into the bottom of these lakes and do

these samples, you know know these of just where the layers of decayed matter have settled in the bottom of the sediment of these lakes over time and kind of reconstruct runs from 100 200 years ago and they think the researchers think that we're probably having productivity that is as strong or exceeds what you had before, before white people showed up. So is that just because the habitats in, in great shape? It's,

it's the theory overwhelmingly about super high quality habitat that hasn't been disturbed. And then, you know, pretty, pretty solid management by Alaska fish and game. So, so yeah, so that's, that's, so even if, and then pretty solid management by Alaska Fish and Game. So yeah, so that's, so even if the mine never had something go wrong,

you're still going to have a destruction of wetlands. You're going to have the elimination of, you know, several dozen miles of salmon stream. And then Pebble will point out, well, that's only like one small percentage of the overall, you know, area of productive salmon habitat in the region. What's the problem?

Then you have to start looking at what happens if something does go wrong, if there's a catastrophic tailing stamp failure. But let's visit that. Let's visit Yanni's question for a minute. So best case scenario is you lose several dozen miles of salmon stream yeah yeah it's it's more than that that gets into whether they're going to operate for 20 years they're going to operate for 100 right that gets back to the thing that

drives us crazy where there's a bait and switch going on right now that's all there is to it so if you had full build out you'd you'd destroy hundreds of miles of salmon stream and you'd have this huge excavation and then you got to remember the pit serves as a sump so all the water in and around there that's charging all these these systems that have these very complex um interchanges of surface and subsurface water it all just sucks towards the pit that will be holding the tailings. How big is the pit? We don't know as of yet because we don't know what the proposal that's going to possibly get approved by the federal government is, but it would be 1,970 feet deep.

How big? 1,970 feet deep. How big? 1,970 feet deep. That's going to be a good episode of Deep Drop Boys. And then I'd have to, you know, I can't remember exactly how many miles by how many miles, but we're talking miles. Huh. I've kind of lost some of those details. Full of stuff you couldn't drink. No.

No. Like no amount of like SteriPen. No. Huh. All right, so let's cover off on worst case. Yeah. So we hired an expert to look at what would happen if you had a tailing stand failure

because the Army Corps of Engineers did not require Pebble to do that during the EIS process, which seems, that doesn't seem to be looking at all the things that could or could not happen, right? So we hired an expert and he showed if, you know, a tailings dam let go, you would have waste that would reach Bristol Bay. So the Pebble prospect is a long way from Bristol Bay. It's about 100 miles upriver and up the watershed. It's an enormous watershed. It's like the Bristol Bay itself, Saltwater, and would essentially wipe out a whole system for a period of years. And we started going to the public with this presentation. We were going to the commercial fishing fleet because, you know, you have to have the commercial

fishing fleet on your side out there if you're going to, if you're going to actually make a difference politically. And started to do a presentation for all these guys and women. As a matter of fact, one of my coworkers is a commercial fishing boat captain. And Pebble hated the information so much that they sued us. So there's a bunch of details there. But yeah, they just wanted to kind of squelch public debate. They didn't want anybody covering this part of the issue because, you know, it's really problematic.

They didn't want to talk about the failure. Right. They didn't want to talk about dam. And they didn't want us to talk about it either. Because it'll just sit there for thousands and thousands of years fine. Or an earth entailings dam collapses, you know, like happened in Brazil. Their argument would be like, no, it'll just always be there, but it'll always be fine. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, the evidence is starting to really come in, right? So you had that catastrophe down in Brazil a couple of years ago where, and that was a modern mine run by a modern company, you know, a well-capitalized company that really knew what they were doing. And Tailing's Dam let go go went to destroy the river and killed people and then you had the case of the mount poly um uh mine in british columbia on a tributary of the fraser which is a sockeye salmon producer in british columbia and they had a catastrophic tailings dam failure and you know it's just it's a mess or five years later and

productivity at quesnel lake which the waste went out into is way down and, you know, these things can fail. In the recent years, I've read about mass fish die-offs from things ranging from a farmer putting a bunch of hog shit in a pile next to a trout stream yeah bourbon spilling out of a distillery during a

fire milk killing miles of fish out of a river it's like these things happen all the time yeah and we're talking about things that most of us sit in like regard as like fairly benign milk yeah you can you can you can drink two of those things versus sulfuric acid yeah i know it's like it's like it's like what's the big deal it's like well i'll tell you the big deal 10 miles of fish are dead and when we're talking about where this is, right? Like going toward Iliamna and this is one

thing, just having guided in that area for years, primarily as, as a trout guide, but also for salmon, that is one, there's a reason why people spend tens of thousands of dollars to go there just to fish for a week or two. There, I don't know of a trout fishery like that Iliamna system that produces just massive, massive, super healthy rainbows and it's all

based on the salmon. Bringing the energy back up through that. Everything about that, everything about that whole area, flora, fauna, everything is based on the nutrient return from the salmon coming from the ocean and dragging them hundred some odd miles upstream none of that stuff would exist without that nutrient return yeah and so if you're talking about losing this particular place and and you

know when i was up there i have to admit i hated sockeye guiding sockeye guiding is probably the most boring type of fishing you could imagine but so there's like the the two levels of of reasons why i oppose this one is the super personal level which is that i love the place and i love those trout probably as much as any fish i've ever fished for but then the bigger picture of what the sockeye represent to the economy and to the whole area like i may not have wanted to fish more personally but what they do for alaska and what they do for the planet is massive and to lose all that it's just it's it's not the same as like your backyard creek yeah not to say you

shouldn't love your background backyard creek but lake iliamna and that whole system and the new shagak those places are incredible yeah miles brings up a good point that people need to think about you talk about salmon is it um well first off so when a sockeye gets born walk me through this tim like a sockeye gets hatched okay he goes down and spend they drop down to a lake, correct? They usually spawn in inlet streams coming into lakes. Okay. But there's all these different genetic subgroups out in Bristol Bay, this really diverse portfolio of different salmon stocks.

So it's really amazing. You have beach spawners and you have some lake spawners, but usually it's a smaller stream coming into a big lake. And then those juveniles hang out for how long in that? A couple of years, year to year, two years. And they're roughly how big when they finally go and hit the ocean? Yeah. Like a finger, right? Yeah.

And then they're how big when they come back? Probably averaging around five, six, seven pounds. So when Miles mentions this sort of like exchange, you have an area where you have an extraordinarily rich marine environment and a somewhat sterile land environment. And just in terms of like, in terms of biodiversity,

like it's stunning in the Marine environment and, and stunning, but like limited in the land environment, meaning you don't have like, you have like a great wealth of like large land mammals that are very inspiring and stuff. But when you get down to like, just like the species count relative to the Marine environment,

it's kind of low. So if you have 57 million sockeyes that are going to go up this river, and even if humans then consume 40 million of them, 17 million five to six pound fish basically transport marine resource back up into feed the land. That's right millions and millions of pounds of like carbon based life right go up and it gets eaten by everything and shat out by everything everywhere and decomposes and feeds the plants feeds the the fish, feeds the bears, the birds.

It's like that's where it's kind of like life comes from. That's right, from caddisflies to brown bears. So if you talk about, oh, yeah, so the salmon are gone. My kids always like to ask, why do we have mosquitoes? I'm like, I don't know, man, but I bet you in a weird way if we didn't, things would go to shit. And you remove that. It's like you're removing more than. I'm like, I don't know, man, but I bet you in a weird way, if we didn't, things would go to shit. You know? Yeah.

And you remove that. It's like you're removing more than, it's not like, oh, 40 million people have to find a different thing for supper. It's just different than that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they've even done studies in British Columbia now where, you know, the salmon runs have been greatly diminished. and the ecosystem's just not the same. There isn't as much wildlife. There aren't as many insects.

I mean, these systems are just completely dependent on salmon. There wouldn't be anything in these rivers, really. Maybe some grayling. Some small grayling, right? But you wouldn't have the rainbow trout either, which we haven't talked about. You wouldn't have this incredibly huge vicious rainbow trout fishery either you know everything's just keyed in on on the salmon life cycle my boy jimmy i went to my

first pebble mine event when he was an infant he's 10 years old but he was a baby he's 10 years old, but he was a baby. He's now 10. It was an event in New York and it was being put on by, it was partially being put on by Tiffany's, the jewelry company. And Tiffany's was saying, even at that time, sure, we sell all kinds of gold and shit,

but we're making a promise that we will not carry these people's gold. How could, why were we talking about it 10 years ago, and we're still talking about it now? Like, what was happening then? Like, how did it even come up to something? I'm not asking very clear question let's start with this question when did someone first say holy shit we should

mine some gold out there on those rivers probably probably 20 years ago and the pep the name pebble comes from a geologist flew over the mine site and reminded him of the pebble beach golf course so because all the water holes you know so the history is really is that really what it comes from yeah yeah i didn't know that i never i just yeah it's like sometimes with names you never think to ask like why it has a name yeah yeah the history is a little bit uh i'd like to smack that guy in the face i know what a jerk it's like a golf course except it's the opposite of a golf course but the history is a little bit tragic right so you had all these lands that were set aside by the alaska national interest lands conservation act in 1980

and there were all these lands that were over selection and then they whittled it down oh explain that i never heard of that you never heard of that. You never heard of Anoka? Oh, yeah. Okay. So Anoka. Yeah. And there was a huge selection pool, and then it got whittled down. That was around the Native Claims Settlement Act. It was the Settlement Act, and then they decided something needed to be done

to set aside a bunch of Alaska's lands for the national interest, for creating Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. I didn't know that that component of that era had a name. Yeah, so it added 100 million acres to the conservation system in the United States, so it was unbelievable. Now it's part of this elaborate deal brokered around what we're going to do with this new state. That's right.

And then how we're going to get away from the reservation system that we used in the U.S. and how we're going to settle with Native Alaskans. That was the first piece of legislation. then there was sort of lands conservation legislation and there were more lands that were part of the selection pool that ended up in passing in the legislation and one piece was called the iliamna game refuge and it's the area that now includes a pebble prospect okay and if you look at the rest of the land use patterns management patterns out there they're all set aside for salmon production and conservation right you got lake clark national park you have cat my national park and then you have the biggest state park in the united states wood tick check that's two million acre state park and all of them have huge salmon production

all these you know low gradient streams and these big lakes that are really productive and then this ilion the game refuge would have been the last piece of the wild salmon puzzle and all these low gradient streams and these big lakes that are really productive. And then this Ileana game refuge would have been the last piece of the wild salmon puzzle right out there. You would have the greatest salmon production zone in the world, and it would all be safeguarded in perpetuity. And I mean, I think that's something

to be really proud of as an American citizen. And the state actually managed that area for a long time for fishing game, mostly for salmon production, but also for car different direction. There had been all these rumors that there was a huge gold and copper deposit out there. There was all this breathless talk of one of the world's great claims. And they took a management plan that was based on, you know, renewable resources and had been deeply vetted with the local people out there. And they almost overnight turned it into this area that was going to be open to mineral claim staking. And that's when you started to see, you know, big mining companies and junior mining companies all start to take a hard look at, you know, can we make a ton of money out here? And we've been fighting it ever since. So, you know, I was working for Trout Unlimited and we were working

on some watershed restoration projects and some forest conservation work in Southeast Alaska and Pacific Salmon Treaty. And I got a call from this lodge owner, a guy named Brian Kraft, watershed restoration projects and some forest conservation work in southeast alaska and pacific salmon treaty and i got a call from this lodge owner a guy named brian craft who has uh two lodges out there and he said hey you're the you're the trout sky and i'm like yeah because i got a i got an issue for you and the rest has been history that's that was seriously yeah it's been 2005 and he had two um two uh guys at his lodge from Newmont Gold. And he showed them the preliminary propaganda from Pebble. And Brian was like, hey, there's going to be more people out here. It'll be good for my lodge. There'll be more customers. And these Newmont guys, they were two experts.

They were getting close to retirement. They said, fly us over the mine site. And so he did. And they came back and they looked at what was proposed and they said, you can't let this happen. There's so much water here. There's so much habitat that's going to be destroyed. There's no way you can do this and allow it to happen. And that put the fear of God in Brian and Brian started calling me and I've been lucky enough to have a whole bunch of great people I've worked with throughout the years. And, you know, we spent a lot of time out in the region with the people who live there who hate the idea of the mine at a tune of about 85% opposition. So it's been, it's been a long grind. We're still in it. Get back to your question from a long time ago. We're still in it because politics, right? The pendulum keeps swinging back and forth as to what we're going to do with our, with our, you know, best wild places. And here we are. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. You mentioned the locals there. It's predominantly native Alaskan. 85% Alaska native. And what's their take on it? I mean, just for full clarity here, we had arranged to have a colleague of yours,

a Native Alaskan colleague of yours come down, but just because of the landscape with COVID and everything, she wasn't able to come down. Yeah. But what has been that community's, in the history of this thing since 2005, what has been that community's just asking you to step in and articulate, as much as you're comfortable articulating their viewpoint on it,

what has been that community's response to this? Yeah, I mean, they've led the effort from the beginning. Even before Brian called me, there were a lot of local people, some of the elders out there, and some of the younger people that just said, we don't want this. You know, this is, this goes contrary to everything we believe in and everything that we've,

you know, our entire culture. So there's been a bunch of polling done by the regional native corporation out there and about 85% of their shareholders opposed development of the mine. And that's pretty exceptional in Alaska. Usually the closer you get to a development project, the more support you have for it. You know, it's still a rural place. We're still heavily dependent on natural resource development for income and, you know, wealth and paying for state government. And the locals hate the idea. And they've been the leaders since the beginning. You know, I think one of the things that's been unique is we showed up and we had a lot of ideas and a lot of opinions as to how a campaign should work. And we realized pretty quickly that we needed to go to these communities. We needed to go talk to locals and kind of let them display leadership. And I think that's why we've been

so successful of holding back mine development for so long. You know, you're talking one of the richest gold and copper deposits in the world, and you've had politics that to a certain degree have been in favor of doing that, that kind of stuff. But having that local opposition has just been amazing. Yeah. It's too bad. It's too bad bad Alana Hurley couldn't come down and, and join us. She's, she's been, she's been working on Pebble her entire adult life. You know, she started working on it when she was in high school, before she was like grade

school. So. And that's coming from the perspective of someone whose family and, and community members live a subsistence lifestyle. Yeah. It's kind of a blend. Based on the resource.

Yeah. It's kind of a blend out there. You know, you have, you have a lot of Alaska natives who are commercial fishermen as well. So they, they gill net and Trout Unlimited's had this amazing program for the last 10 years now where they're trying to build up a stable of, of local guides, getting more Alaska native

kids from the region to become sport fishing guides. And the regional native corporation out there, Bristol Bay Native Corporation, just bought one of the big lodge concessions and they run three lodges now. They've got Katmai Land and they have Mission Lodge and they're trying to get more

of their people working at the lodges. So I think, you know, I think you're going to see more local ownership and operation of the sport fishing industry as well. yeah so which is good i mean in terms of like the diversified revenue you know yeah what what has been some of the i think there's like an issue fatigue that takes place yeah with pebble tell me about it because like i was saying i haven't mapped every twist and turn,

but I've been hearing about this thing all the time. And I've been alarmed about it and concerned about it all along. And we're always often being invited to talk about it. And it's always like, this is the turning point. But it was a turning point a decade ago like why why are there so many you know i remember the thing you know you remember paul wolf with remember someone saying like you could put a wooden stake in paul wolf with his heart and he would turn up in the next administration being like uh why is it that it won't go away but it always seems like this is the turning point how many turning points are there or like tell me about

some turning i mean i don't know i mean you know i stopped trying it's like politics you can't predict it anymore right i So big turning points. Give me a turning point from a decade ago. Yeah. So when Rio Tinto and Anglo American, two of the largest mining companies in the world, decided to walk away from the Pebble Prospect, that was huge. And honestly, I wish we would have had a little bigger party. You know, we kind of, we knew that the saga wasn't over,

but to see two of the major mining companies in the world walk away from a, you know, half a billion dollar investment, that was really significant. I don't, for those of us that were just kind of working day in and day out, I think we didn't really totally understand the significance of that, right? I mean, you know. And what did they publicly say? And what is the rumor mill

about why they walked? Publicly, I think they said that they were, it was during, you know, we were coming up on the big, you know, global economic downturn and they decided to focus

their work on mines that were closer to operation, closer to coming to fruition. You know, they still knew they had a big permitting process and huge infrastructure costs. They were like, we're going to shrink a little bit here and focus on a few other prospects in other places around the world.

That's what they said publicly. And then we heard internally that there was a real tug-of-war between the two companies. One wanted to try to do it in a way that wouldn't have the huge negative impacts that we've been talking about and the other one said there's no way you can make any money doing that because the ore grade the ore body is a low grade and you need a massive excavation to get to the point where you're going to make any money so that tug of war you know they just they walked away and then um then first quantum was the next big operator, they just, they walked away. And then, um, then first quantum was the

next big operator that came in and they walked away. And those are really significant events. Um, the other really big significant event was when at the tail end of the Obama administration, they use clean water act authority to say, um, essentially that we're not going to grant you the dredge and fill permit, the 404 permit, because we have looked at the proposed mine and it's going to have negative, serious negative impacts on wetlands and waterways of the United States. And we got really close to a, to a, a victory, I think. Through that process, it went into the courts. Pebble challenged it in the courts,

and it kind of languished in the courts for a couple years. And then the Trump administration came in, and they settled the outstanding lawsuits with Pebble Limited Partnership to the favor of Pebble Limited Partnership and started kind of restarted the permitting clock again. So that's where we're at. Who actually owns the land where the, whose land is where the actual thing is going to sit?

State of Alaska. But it becomes federal because there's just implications for all the stuff. Yeah, because there's federal waters. So the Clean Water Act comes into play and the But it becomes federal because there's just implications for all the stuff. Yeah, because there's federal waters. So the Clean Water Act comes into play, and the Army Corps of Engineers is the permittee of record. What's the state's general groove about this?

The current governor. He's gung-ho. He likes it. Yeah, he likes it. What's he like about it? I think he sees it as the next big thing, right? We're getting a lot less money for our oil. There's less oil going through the Alaska pipeline. There's lots of people talking about how we're going to be using less oil in the future.

I'm not sure I think that this governor is looking for that next big resource development play that's going to fill the Alaskan coffers again, because we don't pay any state income tax or any state sales tax, and we're heavily dependent on oil revenue for all our budget. Yeah, you're also heavily there's some interesting things about

Alaska's economy that I think people should understand is that one, it's a federal spending a little bit of a sink federal wise yeah meaning the federal government spends far more in alaska than they get in tax revenue yeah way more it's the states that people love to hate i think new jersey pays in better than any like like the feds pull more money out of new jersey than they put in and i think that's the strongest performing state right alaska is one of the weakest yeah yeah yeah i want to change our license plate from last frontier to give me my money and leave me alone. Then instead of paying state taxes in Alaska,

the state pays you. Right. So they have a thing called the permanent fund and they take, the state has all these lucrative oil leases on state land. They generate so much money that they cut you a check.

And the check that you get cut as a citizen of alaska and your members of your household uh isn't tied directly to the price of oil right it's tied to the health of the fund but the health of the fund is definitely influenced by the price of oil right so you could go up. Let's say you're a particularly fecund individual. You and your wife could move up there and produce six, seven, eight, nine, ten kids and make quite a tidy little sum. What did the fund pay last year?

It was only like $1,000 last year. So it's actually, we're coming to the end of the road. But it's hit highs. Oh, yeah to the end of the road of you know but it's it's hit highs oh yeah it's like three grand yeah yeah so you could go up there and have like two people go up there have six kids and pull 24k just in uh payments it's been known to happen and you only have to be a resident for a year yeah i got friends who view it as blood money i got one buddy who he every year takes his check and puts it into his kid's college fund because he thinks he thinks it's blood money i

mean it's actually a really cool concept but it gets to the fact that you know oil is not going to happen again you know the amount we get per barrel produced is way higher than you get from minerals it's like 12 you know on each on each barrel of oil and for minerals our royalties regime is the same as on federal lands right it's like less than one percent return so it it's not gonna do what our governor dunleavy wants it to do yeah let me i forgot i was let me finish the point about the economy there is that when oil goes south everything goes south everything goes south school education goes south like university spending public school spending like they get hit man yeah and they're kind of living in a separate

like just because there's a something could happen in the lower 48 like whatever housing thing whatever like different blips they're living a different reality like their shit is driven by a completely different set of factors so you could see a like if oil is going the way you're saying you could see that someone who's charged by voters with looking at the long-term financial prospects for his state could be excused for thinking like we gotta do something yeah yeah and we have other minds you know and you don't you don't see the big, huge controversy around some of these other mines, whether it's Fort Knox or Red Dog, you know, some of the bigger operating mines in the United States.

And it's definitely a part of the economy. And we all, you know, use all these materials that are coming out of the ground for, you know, our modern lifestyle. So we're not saying that this is an anti-mining campaign, but size type location again. And then you look at what's at stake and, you know, you have about 10,000 American jobs that are depending on, depending on that fishery. So, you know, in a good year, this was not a good year because of COVID salmon prices were in the toilet and, you know, the export market was non-existent, but if, you know, you're a good gillnet captain in a good year, you can make a hundred thousand

bucks in six weeks. And you have a whole, whole host of sport fishing lodges out there that are charging upwards of 12 grand a week. And you have guides and you have pilots and all kinds of, you know, different segments of that economy are based on, on that fishery and that thing's renewable salmon prices were low this year yeah they were way down the show i didn't know that

yeah attributed to covid yeah demand was down i got you know and then there was the the trade stuff with china because the chinese buy a lot of bristol bay sockeye so oh do they yeah huh yeah i know that chinese stuff's messing with some of the logging projects, too. I think that point you bring up is one that I've dealt with. Having written in the past a lot about mining issues, and Pebble among others, primarily for fishing-focused publications, I've definitely taken some scrutiny saying, well, you're just anti-mining. And to be fair to some of those points, my interests lie in the fish, right? I don't make my living off of mines. But I try to be, as I look at these issues,

as objective as I can be. And when you talk about pebble mining, you talk about some of the other sulfide-type mines. And as I learned more about this in doing some of that reporting and understood the process by which these byproducts come about in these mines and how toxic they can be. lines on well this is a place we shouldn't have this type of mind and this not to say we can't have sulfide mines elsewhere where there will still be risk but it's not located right next to a place that i really want to go fishing and a lot of other people want to make their living off

of i don't think it's bad necessarily to come out and claim like your personal stake on something no it's like it's better than the opposite and i but have to be honest about that. Yeah, no, it's better than when people don't lay out their personal investment in an issue and act like they're just acting completely altruistically. Yeah. That drives me nuts. I would rather someone be like, I support these policies, and I'll be frank with you, it's good for me financially. Yeah. Yeah i like it aesthetically i like it financially whatever so to be like you know i i just try to like clear up that all the time by saying

my view in terms of when i pursue like my sort of like professional work and the the media products that i produce and things like i try to be that i won't belabor you with my opinions about things that don't impact like the world of like sort of like what's good for hunters and anglers yeah right and i think this is just really shitty for hunters and anglers like i think people mine was like shitty for hunters and anglers so i'll come out and tell you like where where i'm coming from on it. And I also think that it's – I don't like the country to make big mistakes where you confuse short-term – where you pursue short-term gain and do things that later we will sit and look at in 100 years

when we're being analyzed by that generation. It will be like, idiots yeah i mean we talk about a sulfide mine much smaller but similar to this in the third episode of dos boat right and and it's the same principle and it's about deciding like this particular kind of mine right next to this watershed could be problematic for those of us who really like these fish and maybe depend on them i do think though like when again going back to the writing that i was doing i felt like i had a responsibility not just to be honest about my inclinations but also to say like i don't think i'm just anti-mining i'm not i don't have this pie in the sky vision where we can survive a modern society without mining for minerals it's just deciding which places we can do that and then figuring out how to price them accordingly yeah that's good that's a good point

and so that's going to cost you more it's going to cost you more if we if we mine less of it things are going to be more expensive right and and i recognize that that that is a sacrifice that i'm able to make and willing to make and other people don't agree on. But to me, losing these fisheries just isn't worth it. Can we get into a minute, like who are these dudes? Like who are the constant dudes here? I know that we have sort of the big mining companies that actually like come in and do the work, right? They come in and do the work.

They got the capital like who who's the constant presence through this idea it's just uh northern dynasty minerals they're out of vancouver and the pebble limited partnership is the subsidiary from from northern dynasty and what's their story they're a they're a they're a minor you know they are they're a non-major so they're kind of the setup people right they they go out and they do the exploration they provide uh all the background on on the geology and the and the and the mineralization and then they try to attract a major that would come in and invest billions of dollars and actually operate the mine how many people we talk about this This, this outfit, you know,

I don't know at this point, maybe. Yeah, I wouldn't know. There's been a couple of figures that have been prominent throughout the years. There's a guy named Bruce Jenkins, you know,

that was profiled by Travis Rummel and Ben Knight and red gold. And we, that guy was great. He was like right out of central casting. I mean, everybody hated him immediately. And then, and then there's a guy named John Shively who used to work for the Alaska department of central casting. I mean, everybody hated him immediately. And then there's a guy named John Shively

who used to work for the Alaska Department of Natural Resources and he had to resign under a veil of disgrace years ago. And, you know, he's just kind of like old Alaskan. It's like, trust me, you know, I would never do anything that wouldn't be for the benefit of the public. And he sold a couple hundred thousand dollars of pebble stock just a couple months ago. And then.

Like dumped or sold? He sold it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was, you know, it was at a moment when it, you know, probably looked like their stock was going to go down. Yeah.

I should, I should explain the reference you just dropped for folks. Red Gold was a film, it was 2007, I believe. Yeah. That was profiled. I saw that movie was 2007, I believe, that was profiled as early, early on. I saw it in Anchorage. Yeah, I was guiding

when it came out and it's worth, if you want to get some historical perspective on how this has looked and how long it's been going on, you should check that one out. What year was that?

2007. Oh, so I went to my first Pebble event way before my kid was born. Because I'd already been to a Pebble event way before my kid was born because i'd already been to a pebble event way before red gold huh yeah i mean it was it was 2005 was when i first heard about i was guiding up there then and that was like everybody was talking about this proposal okay sort of lines

were getting drawn at that point. Someone told me recently, is it someone at the Northern Dynasty, is that what it's called? Yeah. It's like a name you pick to be like, it's like a name you pick to be an asshole. Be the bad guy. The villain. Totally.

Northern Dynasty. Sorry, I've dealt with these guys for too long. I heard a rumor recently that someone involved there, someone, if they can get this thing across the finish line, they get some absurd amount of money. Yeah, a guy named Tom Collier, and he worked for the Department of Interior under Clinton. And he took this on, and he's good at what he does.

You know, he's a Washington, D.C. insider. And what's the carrot in front of his nose? Well, you know, if this thing gets to operation, it gets $12.5 million. I'll get the guy out in the morning. Yeah, if they get a record of decisions signed, it's $4.5 million. So, yeah, we actually ran a little website for a while.

They're called Cash Grab Collier, and it was pretty fun. So that's what he's got to do. He's motivated. He gets like, ka-ching. Yeah. Yeah, and if you look at some of the handicappers out there that really understand the mining industry and that world, they think that there's a lot of incentive for the executives

of Pebble Limited Partnership to just continue to hype this thing for as long as they possibly can. Because as long as people are willing to give them money, willing to invest in their company, they can skim off profits for themselves. Whether they get any closer to a mine or not doesn't really matter, I think, to some of them. There's incentivized along the way to keep bumping. Yeah. And they've spent so much money on lobbyists for the last few years. They're, they have actually spent more money on lobbyists in Washington,

DC than any other mining company. And that includes, you know, mining companies that are actually running mines. Five years ago, five or six years ago, I bet my sister-in-law $1,000. I heard about this.

It was a 10-year bet. She lives in Alaska. It was a 10-year bet where if they hadn't, we framed it this way. If a decade went by and they hadn't begun to pull minerals out of the ground in production, we framed it up in some way. It's more than just testing and stuff. In full production, like making gold, she's got to give me $1,000.

When did you make the bet? Five or six years ago. You're going to win. Sweet. That's the only reason I'm into this. That's the only reason we're sitting here right now i don't care what your motivation is it takes an army what is going okay we just hit like a new there was a new let's get let's get real detailed now let's get real granular about what's happened over the last month. There was some Army Corps shit.

There was some EPA shit. Like, what was happening over the last month or two? So we saw the final environmental impact statement for the Pebble Mine. Made by who? The Army Corps of Engineers. Why is it their deal? They are the permit agency.

They are the agency that issues the permit, and then they go into a consultation with the Environmental Protection Agency about anything that has to do with excavating wetlands and impacting waterways. So it makes it the Army Corps of Engineers business because it involves digging stuff and making dams and whatnot. Yes.

Okay. Because you always hear Army Corps of Engineers around like the big dams. Exactly. On the snake and, you know. Yep. Okay. So it's their deal because it's engineering. Yeah.

So they did a final environmental impact statement, which we thought was terrible. You know, it was just filled with holes. There are all these scientific gaps. There's, you know, we spent a huge amount of time and energy just analyzing what they put out there and it was it's terrible but were you motivated to think it was terrible because it didn't come up with the answer you wanted or was it like legitimately poorly done well we hired a bunch of people way smarter than me that would stake their reputations on the fact that it was one of the worst, if not the worst, environmental impact statement they've ever seen.

Why was it shoddy? It was done really quickly, one. And it didn't look at all these projected impacts out over the time horizon. It didn't look at catastrophic tailing stand failure. In the EIS, they were talking about a wastewater treatment facility that had never been operated before. They were trying to figure out how to build the port out there on the west side of Cook Inlet, which is not an easy place to build a port.

And there were just huge gaps. It was just like, we say we're going to do this, and then there would just be a big gap as to how they were going to actually achieve that and then build a port yeah right because you just gotta land all this equipment and build roads to get it there yeah yeah yeah yeah and then you know you're dealing with cook inlet which is the second highest tide fluctuation in the world and starting about now the weather really gets bad on a very consistent basis. So, lots of gaps, lots of holes, lots of technical details that we think needed to be figured out.

Was someone leaning on them to get it done in a hurry? Yeah. Because they were just driving toward resolution. Yeah. Yeah, so massive development projects. You know, scale and scope is unprecedented in Alaska since they discovered oil on the North Slope and they're going to get an EIS done in two years. massive development projects you know scale and scope has unprecedented in alaska since they discovered oil in the north slope and you're going to get an eis done in two years

so we're the the final environmental impact statement came out and then they have to wait 30 days before they can issue a record of decision who does the army corps so there's like this 30 day waiting period after the environmental impact statement comes out and we were expecting to see it pretty quickly and then uh we started to see concern expressed by donald trump jr and nick ayers who was the chief of staff to back up because i'm confused the army corps of engineers does like the assessment they're like here's what it's going to look like here's's risks, blah, blah, blah. And then they deliver the final environmental impact statement to the public. And then there's a 30-day period between the issuance of that final

and what's called the record of decision. That's the minimum. The record of decision is made by the Corps of Engineers. Right. So they make the report. Right. Then they wait 30 days and pretend to not know what the decision is?

Yeah. But I don't get, like, because they're making room for public input. There's no more public input. I don't really know what that 30-day period is about. You'd have to ask a lawyer.

Is it like you lay out all the pages and you got one that you don't flip? And you're like, and I'll flip this one that you don't flip and you're like and i'll flip this one in 30 days yeah sort of like that at least that's what it felt like to us you know this thing seemed rigged is it that part of the core is doing putting together that that report and then there are other oversight committees or bodies within the core that are looking at that yeah well there's usually probably's usually probably a little bit of a paperwork exercise between that final and the record of decision.

There's probably something they have to craft that justifies the record of decision, right? And then it would go to the Army Corps for this consultation about whether they were going to issue or whether the Army Corps was going to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to that dredge and fill permit. And we thought it felt like a fait accompli that the record of decision was going to hit the streets, that the Environmental Protection Agency was just going to not really weigh in one way or another,

or they would say it was fine and then we're going to be going into court. Because that's the thing. Whatever the Army Corps, now we're getting into future alternate reality, but the Army Corps does this. They do the record decision. They say, we're on. This is good. No problem. At that point, if no one challenged it, at that

point, it's off to the races we're making a mind if no one said if there was no one around to say no yeah yeah that would be like that that's the last hurdle if the environmental protection agency decided not to weigh in via the clean water act okay and no one sued challenging the record of decision. Yeah. That would be it. Yeah.

It's not like the other person you got to go ask permission from. Right. Because the state's on board. Well, then the state, there are a bunch of state permits, but to be perfectly honest, those gears are greased. I mean, it's the 404 dredge and fill permit, which is the permit. And that's the one that's been the source

of this tug of war for, you know, back to the last presidential administration. Like that's the big win. That's the prize. Okay. So they finished the report and they issued the report. You look at the report, you're like, this report is kind of shoddy.

And then also everywhere in the news is people weighing in on. Yeah. Including, you know, folks we didn't expect to weigh in, you know, Donald Trump Jr.

And Nick Ayers, who was chief of staff to vice president Pence and Tucker Carlson on his show. And what's these guys gripe with it? Well, I think, you know, from what I understand, Vice President Pence and Tucker Carlson on his show. What's these guys gripe with it? Well, I think from what I understand, both Trump Jr. and Harris have been out there quite a few times. And it's a one-of-a-kind place.

They're just like, yeah. That's my sense of it. It's like, you know, the kind of the, the, the slogan of wrong mind, wrong place. Yeah. Yeah. Seems to have been like, it was just as clean as that. I think so. You know, and I, I think for them, they probably heard about it for years because it does attract a lot of hunters and anglers and, you know, people that don't self-identify as, you know,

lefty environmentalists, you know, it's, itists. It's a source of a bunch of jobs. And it's this great hunting and fishing destination. It's one of those things that actually brings people together. And I think they just identified it. One, I think they actually really care. And two, they saw it as good politics. And so then what happened? I mean, now we're talking like within the last few weeks.

Yeah, so then the Army Corps of Engineers came back and said, you know what, we're not going to sign the record of decision right now because we need Pebble to go back and provide some more detail about how they're going to mitigate the destruction of wetlands associated with the development. So that's where we're at right now. They are saying that they will have that mitigation plan done within a month. Oh, really?

Yeah. And that could, okay, go, sorry. I was going to say that I think that's where I personally got sucked into thinking we had another one of those moments of like turning point. I did a whole thing on on bent about this saying like hey look at this great decision that came through and i got flooded with emails from folks who know more than me and said like no no no hold on the the permit as written was kicked back this is this is gonna keep going there will be a revision and another process this

is this is not at all over and i think a lot of a lot of folks had a moment like hey we got it oh i had one of those about 30 seconds and then i saw that people like it's just another punt yeah and and i got sucked into it i and and had to then make a slight retraction on the next episode say i didn't get all the all the facts straight on this one 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 a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love and on x 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 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. Does the president have authority to just kill it yeah by what mechanism because they don't just you don't need somebody president just run around like ending things and i mean it's like you do things through processes right it would be telling the head of the epa region that is in charge of alaska saying like you're allowed to use your authority under the clean water act to reject the dredge and fill permit to use your veto authority and that's what the last administrator did under

obama so yeah because you see how things work like that like i was amused recently to see that um that like attorney general bar right Like in a call with attorneys general gives kind of like guidance. Like we would like to see, you know, we would like to see action taken in these areas. Yeah. And then people were like, oh, okay, so cool. Yeah. I can do that.

So I can imagine there could be presidential sort of, you know, even him just saying it's not going to happen. It will never let it happen. Right. If you were to say that it would require like steps. Right. You know, it's not like you can't just like, you know, say that on Twitter and have that be the end of it. Right.

It would have to be that it would flow that way. Right. Yeah. And, and, you know, and then some, some of our cohorts think that short of using that EPA veto, the, the army corps could just reject the permit. That doesn't reject it forever. Right.

And it, it kind of kicks the can down the road, but it would be significant. There's no doubt. But now there's been another tweet that came from the president where he... Very hard to interpret. Yeah, he borrowed directly from an ad that was running on television that evening that had been put up by the Pebble Limited Partnership saying, keep politics out of this. And then they flashed you a picture of Barack Obama in a tan suit.

Obama didn't like the mind? And then they flashed you a picture of Barack Obama in a tan suit. It's just like, you know. Obama didn't like the mind? Obama's EPA, you know, said we won't permit it. I mean, Obama went to, he went to Dillingham, he went to Bristol Bay near the end of his term. So they're keeping politics out of it. I don don't know i read like i read and analyzed that tweet but i don't know what that tweet meant no that's the thing is no one knows now right and for those of us have been working on it for so long and i've seen all these twists and he said like oh don't alaska is a beautiful place great place yeah we'll keep politics out of it yeah

i guess it depends on whose politics, right? I don't know how you can keep, I don't know how anyone could promise to keep politics. Politics is the means by which the public's voices hurt. When people say that, keep politics. It's as annoying as when people say, follow the science. I was like, okay, whose science? Right.

The ones that say it's a sweet damn? Or the ones that this greatest damn ever made? Or the ones that say your damn won't work? It's like a non, people say they keep politics out, but it's like a non-statement. It's like, it's empty air. I never understand what that means.

I know. Yep. air i never understand what that means i know yep does that include my opinion in that i vote like i don't i don't yeah i so i don't know what the hell that meant i mean into to your point from earlier steve if you like were to plot out a timeline on this right there was the some major moments of the the big big mining company pulling out of it and say it's not worth it oh it looked like it was gone okay great and then there was the moment when the epa under the last administration said we're not going to permit this okay it's done and it just it's like the zombie issue yeah right and then there was that a couple weeks ago when when people like me who got sucked in momentarily thought oh i think

we made another nope no we haven't made another step forward we're just stuck in the same limbo i thought the watershed moment was when you had a rare circumstance where hippies native alaskans commercial fishermen and brown bear guides all agreed on something. Yeah. I was like, dude, no way. That doesn't happen. Let's make a bet. I'll bet you $1,000.

Well, that's still going on, right? The opposition is as high as it's ever been. We actually did a poll not that long ago, and on a development issue in Alaska, 62% of the population opposes PEDL. And I don't remember, like a% of the population opposes pebble. And like, I don't remember like a quarter of the population supports it. That never happens. You know, whether it's you're talking about drilling for oil on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and I don't know where we are in like

logging in the Tongass anymore, you know, I think that that's kind of moved more towards opposition and support. But pebble, Alaskans don't want pebble and the closer you get to the pebble prospect, other than a couple of small communities that have a huge pebble presence, they don't want it. Yeah. When you get guys like, I would like to have

permission to kill any marine mammal that comes near my salmon. Oh, and stop pebble mine. Yeah. Like that to me feels like, you know, it to me feels like they'll never be able to do this. Yeah. I want to shoot sea lions,

but I hate pebble. So what, is there any, there's no real death for this. Like there's no way, like you can't. Yeah. Cause they tried the state referendum and that didn't work.

You remember this one? There was a state vote to, to like basically took it to the voters through something that kind of would have been deathly to Pebble Mine. Sort of. But it was too far reaching, right? It was like, you couldn't get on board.

People couldn't get on board with it because it had uncertain implications for the future. There's two things. So there was a referendum that passed and it passed in every precinct in Alaska and that was bankrolled by the late, great Bob Gillum, who was the rich guy who actually went to Wharton with Donald Trump. And it essentially said that the state legislature would have final say

over the permitting of Pebble. If it ever got to the point where they got to the final state permit, then the legislature would have to vote up or down on it. Pebble claims it's unconstitutional, and they said they'll sue at a later date if need be. But that doesn't stop it because under our state constitution, the public can't appropriate land, so you had to do this bureaucratic thing.

Then there was another initiative that would have updated safeguards for development in salmon habitat, and I was a big part of that, and we just got outspent, like 10 or 12 to 1 and you know it was it was not an easy read for the public and and we went down to defeat um what could happen is the right thing is done through the federal government via the clean water act pebble decides to walk away um and then the state of alaska does not allow another mining company to come in and you know top file on those claims and then you know ultimately you would have to get a governor and a legislature and public will in alaska to say that we're going to take this land and we're going to put it in a protected status.

And we could, we could do that. Like that's the way you'd seal the coffin. That's right. And then, you know, probably going to be another 15 years, but if that's what it takes. Yeah. You ever hear this thing called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?

Yeah. I know. Giving something a cool name doesn't necessarily. No, no, you know, but, but, you know, I have No. Giving something a cool name doesn't necessarily. No. No, you know, but, you know, I have a lot of friends, people I've known for a long time, worked on that issue. But pebble is different because so many people use it. So many people depend upon it for their livelihood. And, you know, even by Alaska standards, it's not a pedestal, right? Very few people are lucky enough to go to the arctic

national wildlife refuge but a lot of people go to bristol bay like where i live in homer there's a whole fleet you know every every june they get their gill netters and head across cook inlet and take the road over to lake iliamna and out the queejack to go fish and then see them eight weeks later and tell me how shitty their season was but they all seem to have nice houses and nice trucks and things like that so when i made my bet with my sister-in-law i also told her that there would be um resistance there would be what's it called um you know, like, not vigilante, but social disobedience. Is that the term?

I think that fits. The people go out and chain themselves to bulldozers and shit like that. I'm going to chain my daughter to something or another. Landing strip or something. Civil disobedience. Civil disobedience. I was like, landing strip or something civil disobedience civil disobedience i was like they're probably civil disobedience because it means so much to people i you know you got a handful of people that like you got a handful of people they're gonna make a bunch of money but then you got a bunch of people spend a decade a decade of a decade's worth of emotion being like you can't just

there's some things you can't shit up like there's some things that are too precious and beautiful and you just have to be comfortable leaving it and i feel like yeah that some people are so impassioned about that, that in the end, when all the legal stuff was done, there'd be like one last push where people got nasty. Monkey wrench gang. Yeah. I would never advocate for something like that. But I'm not saying that you need to advocate for it. I'm saying, like, don't you imagine? You know, I have heard, you know, people kind of looking at this issue from not, you know, the perspective, the narrow, too close perspective, too close to the screen perspective of me saying, like, yeah, you could see how this, if everything went wrong from the regulatory and legal framework, you know, you could see this being like Keystone XL, you know, where you have people

laying down in front of things. And, you know, you start thinking about the people in that region, how long they've been fighting against this thing. They can trace their history back there, 10,000 years, and they really don't want it. That's what I'm getting at, man. Yeah, there's that whole concept of social license

in the development industry and mining in particular. there's that whole concept of social license in the development industry and mining in particular. Pebble does not have social license. I don't think they'll ever, ever get it. No matter how much money they spend, how much propaganda they put out there, it's just never going to happen. Where's it going to sit

if, let's say, old Biden wins? I still haven't seen anybody flying a Biden flag. If Biden wins, I don't imagine Pebble's going to move for four years.

No. Or however long. No, he did tweet on it saying that if he was elected president, Pebble doesn't move forward. That's four years. Yeah, that doesn't that

doesn't kill anything that just means it would probably just stall out right then you'd get into future administration i mean you fire it back up or do you think that they would actually like do you think that biden's team would just be like not cooperative and it would just be quiet or do you think biden's team would come in and like try wrap it up? We would try to convince them to do that. To do some things that would make it extra hard for the next people. Yep. To try to fire them. But honestly, we're going to try, and some of our cohorts are going to try,

no matter who's the president. But Biden did tweet saying that Pebbles is a non-starter if he's president. I was having a conversation one time with some people close to the current administration, and I was like, man, I don't see, like, why not just take a conservation win

that isn't going to cost you? You guys aren't going to lose. You're not going to lose Alaska. How many delegates does Alaska have? Well, we've got one rep. You know, and our electoral votes don't matter. Yeah. Sorry, not delegates.

You're the electoral college. You're not going to lose Alaska. No. If you did lose Alaska, it's like you're not going to lose it anyway. No. They won't lose it. Trump's not going to lose Alaska. If you did lose Alaska, you're not going to lose it anyway. Trump's not going to lose Alaska. If you did lose Alaska, it's not that many electoral votes.

You're going to piss off Alaska's governor who's under recall. Is he still under recall? No. Okay, he survived that? Yeah. You're going to piss off Alaska's governor. That got kicked down the road.

Oh, it did? Okay. You're going to piss off their governor, but you're still going to carry the state. Right. It's like, I don't see... The mining company isn't even a US company. I don't see why not just take the conservation win.

Yeah. It's a big, high-profile thing. You can then go and... Certainly, they'll do all the things they're going to piss off hunters and anglers and other places. And it's just like part of life. They might even do it.

A cynic might be like, oh yeah, they could kill pebble and it'll be, it'll provide air cover to be able to do more work in ANWR. There's all these like, you know, there's all these like cynical perspectives, but why not just take the win? And then whatever you do down in the the future you could look and be like but but we helped you guys out on pebbles

so shut up what was the response that you got to that they weren't like okay we're on it it wasn't like that it was just a conversation yeah i i agree with you it seems like just a way to if nothing else man just accept it as cover for cover for what you got to do down the road yeah no one's gonna punish no one's gonna punish you no no one's gonna punish you you know maybe like the american mining association but they'll get over it i mean there's there's all kinds of talk even in the mining industry that this is you know this drags us all down you know the optics around it the human rights issue the fishery the economics it makes us all look bad yeah they'd be

like next time we do something just keep your mouth shut yeah you know i just keep i keep yeah exactly i just keep coming back to the quality of the environmental impact statement right that it's so bad that it's just gonna it's just to make people take a harder look at every other environmental impact statement for every other mine elsewhere in the United States. It's like, is this a new standard? If this is a new standard, you're just going to be in court forever. And that's what I just keep trying to, you know, pound away. the size, type, and location of Pebble and the diversity of opinion against it, the economic concerns that are pushing back, just

do the right thing. It's one place. You know what would be an interesting activity in the future? Would be to come in and take a look at how much money was spent on lawyers through this process.

Lawyers. Like that industry has to be like, I don't care what they decide in the end, but this has been quite good for us. Yeah, I mean, lawyers, public relations firms, advertising, things like that. I don't know. It's like debating Pebble as an economic driver.

Yeah. You know, it's funny because you hear that. It's like, well, you know, you only work on this, Tim, because it makes you money. Like you can, I would- You getting rich as shit, Tim? No. I would love if tomorrow I didn't have to talk about this ever again. Do you get $4 million when the program gets rejected?

Yeah, if the program gets rejected, I am not getting a $4.5 million nor a $12.5 million bonus. It's not happening. I would love to have no other role to play in this than to go visit some friends and go catch some trout. We haven't talked about what banner you fly under. The name of the outfit I am sort of in control of, in charge of, is called Salmon State.

The whole idea of we want to make sure that Alaska remains a place where salmon thrive. And, you know, Alaska is kind of the last remaining salmon state and we promote laws and policies and practices that ensure Alaska remains the home of the greatest wild salmon resource on the planet and the source of food and income and culture for people across the political spectrum. My brother had a good point. We were talking about the conservation movement in the lower 48 and what i was saying to him is i was complaining to him about

um alaskans and their conservation battles are always coming to the lower 48 right so i was like you like people down there need to hear about this issue we have now, right? But it's a one-way flow. I'm like, how come I never get, how come people in Alaska are never fired up about the conservation battles that are being waged down here?

Like, I know all kinds of people that live in Michigan, Utah, Montana, right? Yeah. And we're fired up about you guys issues we're fired up about pebble mine we'd like to protect anwar but i never hear from you sons of bitches on anything we're doing down here yeah i think you know with and well with like you know say like tongas national forest or the arctic national wildlife refuge those are federal lands so they're owned by every American. So there's always that concept of you're just as important to the debate

as someone who lives in Fairbanks. And it's true. Yeah. This conversation brought up an observation, though. It led to an observation where we were trying to say, like, why is it different? And he was saying that conservation in the lower 48

is a lot about recovery. And it's a lot about land management. Conservation in Alaska is more about wildlife management. Meaning that they're not trying to repair habitat. Like down here, we're always trying to fix everything. How do we fix the Columbia River? How do we fix the meadowlands in New Jersey?

What could ever be like, it's ruined or mostly ruined. What could we do to hang on to some vestige and make things a little better? The conversation there is like, dude, sitting pretty, things look solid. And it's just kind of like,

it's a different fight. Yeah, it's different. It's like holding on to perfect things. Yep. Can we just keep the perfect things perfect? Yeah. It's not like these elaborate plans to try to fix some massive mistake we made 100 years ago.

Right. And those things are really hard to do, and they're really expensive. I mean, that's salmon in a nutshell, right? And that's sort of the premise for why we're doing what we're doing at Salmon State is you just look at recovery efforts all around the Pacific Northwest and in British Columbia when it comes to wild salmon, and it's not working. You know? What? No, because it's too complicated. Yeah.

There's no way, like, even if you had all the money and all the willpower, right? Yeah. It'd still be like, there's still like a sort of component to recovering salmon in the Columbia or whatever. There's still like a component of just like brain power and thought that isn't there. Or like engineering that's you know i mean

it's too hard even with all kinds of money it's hard yeah there's too many parts to it yeah there's a lot of movie but something like pebbly like it's already perfect yeah it's so easy just don't ruin it yep and i think or else you'd be sitting there talking about in 100 years how are we gonna fix it and people be like you can't right you know and lower 48 a lot of us there's still the mythology of alaska and i think that there's an investment for for us down here just knowing that it's there right like there's there's a different relationship that we have with the idea of alaska and wanting to get there i know that was the case for me as a kid, having read all the stories that I read and magazine articles

and everything else. That was the place I wanted to go. That was my goal. And just the value of knowing that it exists in the form that it does brings, I think, those of us in the lower 48, significant positive feelings. Yeah, I would sign a deal. I would sign a deal. If someone said, okay, okay we'll kill pebble mine but here's the deal you can't step ever again in your life within 200

miles of the epicenter of that mine or anything that that water flows into or any of the streams you can't go there okay it's fine i'd sign that i'd be bummed about it but i'd be like all right sure well i'd take that deal it's like it's not like i need to you know like never go back again but i know it it stays protected yeah that's cool yep i'd even sign away my kids ability ability to go there. You nor your children were ever, yeah, no, seriously. No, I take that. Not only you, your children and your children's children cannot fish those rivers.

You know, but that's the thing about that pebble is a little bit different than, say, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where you're talking about, you know, that is like, that is out there, and you're either going to develop it, or it's just going to be left alone for caribou and mosquitoes and a few intrepid people. Right. I mean, Bristol Bay is highly utilized. It just works. You know, you have tens of thousands of people make their,

make their living off that resource and it's proven that it's sustainable and it's renewable. So it's been that weird. It's a good, it's a good distinction. Yeah. I don't think you're trying, I don't think you're trying to sell a, I don't think you're trying to sell Anwar short, but it's a reasonable distinction. Definitely not. I'm, you know, it's not like a, it's a good it's a good distinction yeah i don't think you're trying i don't think you're trying to sell uh i don't think you're trying to sell anwar short but it's a reasonable distinction definitely not i'm you know it's not like it's not elitist yeah i yeah whether it's it's not a museum you know it's not a park i mean there are parks yeah but those get heavily yeah they do well by the lodges you know it's a place that works it shows that there's actually something between you can't go there at all and that works. It shows that there's actually something between you can't go there at all and you have to destroy

it, that there's something in between. And I think that's kind of what, you know, your stuff's all about, right? I mean, getting out there and doing things, just don't ruin it. That's why I, with that, you know, I came to Alaska in 91 and worked in a, on a same boat and in a cannery and.

Oh, you did? Yeah. It was miserable. Oh, you did? Yeah. It was miserable. But I just was captivated. You know, I just like, I got to go back because of what it represented. You know, I lived in Southeast for a long time and.

You went up, worked on a cannery? Yeah, in Ketchikan. You got how many fingers you got? I got all my fingers. Yeah. You must not have stayed long. I'm joking. Yeah. So, but you know that whole idea i've just been able to you know go out in all these public lands and essentially do whatever you want except screw it up no it's

amazing how well how well it works and how heavily it's utilized like that that is still mind-blowing to me think talk about the number of salmon that are taken out of that system it's still self-perpetuating the number of lodges and boats and planes, you know, you feel like you're out in the middle of nowhere, but when you're on those rivers, you're not by yourself. There are people fishing all around you. And yet it still maintains that character of wilderness incredibly well.

It's like a really resilient space to, as long as you don't do anything overtly terrible. Right. Those fish keep coming back. Those nutrients work. The bears are there. The moose are there.

It's holding on. It's a good point I hadn't considered, man. I think there are those places that should be just left alone. But it's a working landscape. Yeah. Miles, you good? I have one other one that maybe fits as my own

personal desire. And I know you're not a sockeye expert. No. But maybe you have the answer this maybe you don't i was told when i was working up there and i took this as gospel without digging into it sockeye only reproducing systems with lakes correct pretty much yeah yeah is it true that they are therefore like microinvertebrate feeders only and they they do not eat other fish or creatures. As far as I know, they do not.

Okay. But you're not coming out as like the solid definitive expert on this. Because I have the same belief that you are. I know it's a weird thing too, but yeah, my bro would be able to answer that one. But the other day we were floating a river up there and they were well-colored fish, but my God, they just

aggressively chased down spoons and spinners. Only when they're there though. Yeah. Like, so here's the thing, and this is why I hated guiding for them because you wanted to get them when they were fresh and they don't, unlike the other species of Pacific salmon, they do not attack generally.

Right. Your offerings. They just swim right by it. So 95, 99% of sockeye that you catch that are fresh, if you're doing it on rod and reel, you're snagging them in the face. You're flossing them. You're just flossing them.

Right. And I was always told that the reason they don't attack lures or spinners or flies or anything is because they're not accustomed to hunting down prey. Yeah, they're eating like krill and like open mouth feeding through. Filter feeding.

Yeah. Exactly. That was my understanding. These old played out, half spawned out fish. Oh, they attack anything. It's so weird. They're like pissed. Yeah. Like a. Filter feeding. Yeah. Exactly. That was my understanding. These old played out, half spawned out fish. Oh, they attack anything. It's so weird. They're like pissed. Yeah, like a big angry male.

Yeah. Yeah, you catch predominantly males, but man, they're pissed. Yeah. Defending the spawning rates. That's my guess. Yeah, we put some of the guys that we work, some of our crew guys that just can't fish.

It's like now's your chance to shine. Here you go. I bet you catch one. One of these guys, he caught five. And when he cast, generally, he'd cast,

and his cast generally goes like far overhead. And kind of lands at his toes. I was like, I don't understand what you're doing. But he cast and like point the rod skyward. The thing would sort of go up and then kind of land by his feet. But then the sockeye would swim over and grab it.

Doesn't matter where you put it, they're going to find it. I was like, dude, it's your time. He wanted a picture to show his kids. They're cool looking fish when they get all colored up. They are pretty cool. They're real pretty.

All right, well, I kind of exactly ended that where I started thinking that was the case, but I'd love to get definitive answer on that if I'm right about what I've been told. I'll find out for sure. All right, Tim, thanks for making the trip down. Yeah down yeah it was my pleasure did you go back to where you came from now yep appreciate it yeah yeah keep slugging away man we will well we should ask the question

what can people do if they if they're interested in helping yeah continue stop the uh i got two more questions though for that one. Do you get death threats and stuff like that? I haven't in a long time. I think other people have taken on leadership roles, and I'm kind of faded into the background a little bit, so that's nice. Like Alana, who would have been great to get down here, she just can't with everything going on in her community.

But, you know, people are in her face all the time. I mean, the people in, like, those communities, the Alaska Native people in those communities, they're super tough and really brave. But, you know, we've all had our moments where we've been harassed by the powers that be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then for Yanni's question, right now it's just sit and wait or is there stuff people should be doing? Well, you know, you can always weigh in with your elected officials, right?

You know, because I think there could be a congressional play at some point. You know, there's been talk of, well, the House of Representatives actually passed a spending bill. Jared Huffman out of California, that no money can be spent on the processing of the pebble project environmental impact statement in fiscal year 2021.

And the Senate will take up a companion spending bill, and then they'll do some sausage making in theory before the year's out. And right into your senators asking them to, you know, support efforts not to fund the EIS. Look, no matter where you are on the issue, you know, there's a lot of debate out there about the quality of this thing, and maybe we just take a time out for a year. So that's one thing you could do in the immediate term.

And then we've got a website that's a consortium of a lot of different groups now, stoppebblenow.org, and it's got a ton of good information and ways you can weigh in. I'm working on a philosophy, a political philosophy. It's called environmental nationalism. Part of this would be this. If it really is the biggest pile of gold in the world, isn't it sweet that we own it and it's just sitting there waiting for us? Right? Yep.

Let everybody else. Copper. Let everybody else screw their area up. It's not going anywhere. It's been there for millions of years, maybe billions of years. Just leave it there. It's not like strike now

or we'll never be able to get it. If it really comes down to something where America will end, America will end, we'll all die, and the American dream will be over. The American experiment will collapse if we can't get some gold. There it is.

Until then. And there's nothing to say that in 50 or 100 years, we won't have the mining technology to take it out of there without scarring the surface and possibly killing. Yeah, probably not. No, some do the crazy witching rod, and it just sucks gold out of the ground.

I mean, that's the problem with pebble, right? There's a lot of it there, but it's low grade. It's a huge excavation. You're saying that we're not smart enough to eventually figure out how to get it out? I'm hoping that we're smart enough that we realize we don't really need gold for anything. A majority of it goes to jewelry at Walmart and to dowries for marriages in other cultures and countries.

It's not like it's a critical mineral. Copper is a totally different story, but who knows what we'll figure out as far as renewables go in the future. There's some rare earth minerals there too, right? And they talk about that. We're going to need that for the for the renewable economy um but you know the thing that always stops these guys dead in their tracks is kind of just the exact opposite of that it's like okay this is in the national interest because you know the chinese have all these rare earth minerals are you telling me you're never going to sell any of the material that comes out of pebble on the international market and that just stops the

conversation right there it's just like oil you know there is no there is no like national market for oil it's all traded on the on the global market that's how commodities work yeah i got you but i like that you know and i've heard that from a lot of people it's like why wouldn't we just you know invest against the fact that we actually have this resource in the ground you know speculate on it it's a different kind of speculation but it's one that you have to get you have your cake and eat it too you have wild salmon run and you get to you know do weird shit with the stock market that most people don't understand when i uh first went on a date with my wife i bet my buddy 100 bucks that uh i'd end up marrying her after our first date and he's like bullshit we bet 100 and i had

two years to do it and he he sent me my $100, and we also wrote our bet up in a little contract when we were drinking. And so I framed the $100 in the contract, right? It's not lost on me that there could be a situation in which I would bust that glass and get that $100 out. It would take a lot.

We're not there yet. We haven't been there in the last 10 years. Is there a way in which some way I would break the glass and get the 100 bucks out? No river so long that there's not a bend, right?

Like, I don't know. But right now, I like it where it is. Yeah. I don't want to break the glass. And so do a lot of people and that's the thing you know they all depend on it hopefully never but i'm just saying think about it's like it's not going anywhere there's not like a thing where like it's like if you it's not like get it now or it's gone right we can afford not to like we're rich enough and lucky enough as a

country i don't want to say rich and lucky because it might be like we're fortunate enough and we've done enough things right as a country that we can have pristine places right it is a tremendous not a lot not like a luxury like we just fell onto it. People have done things. We have made sacrifices to have places that we can afford to leave and have cities and have a great economy and do all this and have perfect places. Yep. Perfect places like God put them there.

Yep. So we should be jumping up and down with joy. Agreed. We can pull it off. We can have $100 in a picture frame hanging on our wall. Well, I'm going to work really hard to make sure you get your $1,000. Please. I want you to be two for $200.

I'm $1,100. Nice. You going to frame up 10 of them? I'm not framing this $1,000, man. This $1,000 is going into the family pile. Thank you. All right. not framing this thousand, man. This thousand is going into the family pile. But thank you. All right. Thanks for coming down, man.

My pleasure. Good luck. Thanks. You know, not for your own sake, but for ours, good luck. Yeah, for everybody. It's like when they say good luck to someone in Star Wars, right? Right. For the Force.

That's right. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Wars right right for the force that's right all right thank 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. On-ax x hunt is now in canada it is now at your fingertips you canadians the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season now the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with

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