The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 560: RFK Jr. on Polluters, Falconry, and Assassinations

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with independent presidential candidate for the 2024 election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  Topics discussed: Brain worms and bonding over parasites; getting mercury poisoning from eating all the fish you harvest; raising homing pigeons at age 7; being a master falconer; fighting polluters to keep water clean; making a list of every bad thing you ever did; focusing on what matters to people; government-subsidized vs. free market energy sources; Secret Service security; and more.  Connect with Steve, MeatEater, and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com. apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. What you guys are about to hear and watch in some cases is an interview with a politician, or at least an aspiring politician. It's Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who's making a bid for the White House. We do not have a hell of a lot of politicians on the show, but it does happen now and then.

By the best of our recollection, and Corinne and I texted about this, we've done over 500 episodes and had on seven elected officials. That list includes five Republicans and two Democrats, as well as a politician's kid. And don't go looking back. It wasn't Chelsea Clinton. Now, Kennedy here is an independent. So that's a third party category. So our first third party category, independent category. And I'll point out, I think it is a welcome category because I get a little fed up with the two party system that has enjoyed a monopoly on the office of the president of the United States of America since get this 1856. Now, I understand we've got a hotly contested presidential race coming up here and we have candidates who have entirely different worldviews, entirely different priorities, entirely different personalities. Um, and I don't want anyone to get their panties in a bunch

about us having on one candidate and not the others. All right. So I'm telling you this, if you don't hear from Trump or Biden on the meat eater podcast, it ain't our fault. I would love to have them on. If they come on, if you come on, I promise a friendly conversation. All you got to do is reach out to our producer, Corinne, which is what RFK Junior's people did, and we will have you on. We'll have a friendly conversation that sticks to personal background,

the outdoors, and natural resources issues. If you jam some other stuff in there, you'll probably be okay, but we're going to try to focus on those three things um now let's get out the show and learn some stuff right about pollution assassination and the ways in which our future let me put it this way, the ways in which decisions we make now are going to impact the future of natural resources and the management of the lands and waters where you hunt and fish. That's what we're going to talk about now. And we will be looking for our emails from the Trump and Biden campaign. And when they reach out, they will come on the show. It'll be all kinds of fun. Thank you. Hey, everybody. Today, we're joined by independent presidential candidate

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been... Every morning morning i read the wall street journal in the new york times and um and i've been admiring how much heat you get from the left and the right that's got to feel good so it comes it comes like an equal it comes with equal intensity from from each side yeah now it is i was getting it much worse from the left until about, I'd say, three weeks ago. And at that point, I think Trump organization was looking at some of the polls which showed that I was taking more votes away from conservatives than it was from liberals. And I think then, you know, they turned on me. But, you know, I think you're right. It's, you know, when I staked out a position in the middle, I said that when I announced a year ago, I said I'm not, I said, you know, we have this toxic polarization in the country that is more dangerous than at any time since the American Civil War.

It's amplified by the social media algorithms, which have learned the way to keep eyeballs on the site is to fortify people's worldviews. And that feeds into this polarization. Because if you're a Republican and you live next door to a Democrat and you ask the same question of Google, you're likely to get a different answer. Because they know that if they reinforce what you already believe, you're going to stay on that site longer. So they're feeding you, they're manipulating us all with these algorithms. And those algorithms, which are now no longer even under the control of Google or any of these other sites are feeding this polarization.

And to me, it's very, very dangerous because you can't see any good end to it. And so what I said is when I announced is that I was not going to feed into the polarization. I was not going to vilify and marginalize my opponents. I was going to, instead of focusing on these sort of cultural issues that were used to keep us all apart, and I was going to try to identify the shared values that unite Americans and make people forget that they're either Democrat or Republican and make us all remember that we're all Americans. And I think I've been pretty

successful at doing that. My favorability ratings are better than President Trump's or President Biden's. I have the best, highest favorability of any political leader in the country than anybody else they measured. And Zogby just did this huge poll that's 26,000 people. It's 10 times the size of any other poll done. It has a margin of error of practically zero. And it shows that in a head-to-head race, I beat President Trump narrowly by about three electoral votes. In a head-to-head race, I beat President Biden by a landslide.

I win 39 states. He wins 11. And so I think there's a lot of Americans who would like to vote for me. But the strategy of the Trump campaign and the Biden campaign is to make you hate the other guy, make you fear that if Biden gets elected, it's going to be the end of the republic. If Trump gets elected, it's going to be the end of the republic. So you can't vote for anybody else except for the Democratic or Republican nominee. And that's, you know, that's something I have to, over the next five and a half months, I have to persuade Americans that they can vote for hope instead of voting out of fear. One of the things I had read and, and just as I was kind of following your campaign in preparation of having a chance to talk to you and trust me, I want to, I'd love

to get into, and we will get into a lot of the areas that are of particular interest to our listeners which is uh habitat issues environmental issues outdoor adventure um i'd love to talk about all that but one of the things i noticed that the times had these sort of back-to-back pieces and one was about signature gathering which seemed like very far removed from uh that seemed like personal decisions made by people out in the field rather than like very far removed from any direction from the campaign around a signature gathering issue and the other was this uh this health issue about a parasite and i thought that was very funny because i'm riddled with parasites and um one of my colleagues who i was with today we both had trichinosis and um when i heard that i felt like it made me like you more uh because it just makes me feel like someone

makes me feel like someone from the from the trenches man like like you know it's like outside of a coddled existence like when you travel and stuff you just expose the thing so when i saw that i didn't have any i didn't have any sense of uh i didn't have any sense of alarm and i saw the nighttime comedy whatever you call them the nighttime tv host having a field day with it and i just felt like uh i don't know man i reminded me of my own things that my own stuff i've encountered from traveling in the developing world, man. Yeah. Anybody who travels in Latin America or Africa particularly or South Asia is going to end up with parasites.

And I, like you, I'm riddled with parasites. But I had this, you know, this is 13 years ago. The Times found out about my so-called brain worm. Yeah. Because it came up somehow in a deposition that I was doing during my divorce 13 years ago. And, I mean, briefly, it's not an interesting story, but I was getting severe brain fog. And I was having trouble with word retrieval and short-term memory and even long-term memory. And a friend of mine, I was in prison for the summer of 2001 in maximum security prison in Puerto Rico.

Well, that was around Vieques, right? Vieques. Yeah, yeah. Ice Elmate was the head of the biggest labor union in North America, which was SEIU, and he was a hospital worker. It was a hospital workers' union. And I happened to be with him when I was worried about this issue, and I started talking to him about it. And he was deeply concerned. And he immediately got me down to Columbia Presbyterian. And they did an MRI on me. And they found this black spot in my brain. And my uncle had just died from glioblastoma.

And he had had surgery on the glia, which is a brain tumor. And because my Uncle Teddy was the chairman of the Health Committee in the United States Senate for 50 years, my family knew every doctor, every great doctor, at least in North America and really all around the world. And Teddy had had, when he got his glioblastoma it was a very complex tumor it looks like a spider web in your brain and he got a list of these you know the best neurosurgeons in the world and they were all on speed dial and then he passed away

and this was a few months after his death and I found out about this thing and so we had all of these great neurosurgeons on speed dial This was a few months after his death. And I found out about this thing. And so we had all of these great neurosurgeons on speed dial. And we sent the films to all of them. And they all said, yeah, it's a tumor. You have to have surgery. So I was going to use Teddy's surgeon who was down at Duke in North Carolina.

And I was not, believe me, looking forward to it. And, you know, when Teddy got his surgery, he was awake during the whole thing, and they just took off the top of his skull, and they would, the doctor would press the flat part of the scalpel against certain parts of his brain where the tumor was, and then he'd ask him a series of mathematical and language questions. And if he could answer those questions, he'd cut out that little piece of brain. Yeah, and if he couldn't, it was like Silence of the Lambs. Did you ever see that? It was very much like a reminiscent of that, and that's how they do it.

So I was going to go to that same guy. And I went down. I was supposed to get my surgery on a Tuesday morning. And I went down to Columbia Presbyterian to pick up my films. It was a young Irish doctor. Remember, every great doctor in the world said that's definitely a tumor. You need to get surgery. And it was a young Irish doctor in the office. And I struck up a conversation with him because he was from Ireland and we were talking about all that. And then he said, what are you

doing here? And I said, I've got to go get brain surgery. I've got a tumor. I'm here picking up my films. He said, do you mind if I take a look at them? I said, not at all. And there was a light box in the room, and he put one of the pictures up on the light box. And he looked at it a long time, and then he turned to me and he said, I don't think you've earned surgery. And I said, tell me more. And he said, I don't think there's a tumor. And he said, what you ought to do is we ought to take very precise measurements of it and then come back in six weeks and see if it's grown at all. And I did that in six weeks. It was exactly the same size.

And he said, come back in another six weeks. We did it again. It was exactly the same size. And that's when he said, this is a parasite. It's eaten part of your brain and then died. So – and I remember seeing that twilight zone when I was a kid about the earwig that crawls in the guy's ear. Oh, yeah. And then it – and they finally get it out. But then they discovered it was a female and it laid eggs in there.

So that was one of those classic you know, classic Twilight zones. But anyway, it's gone. And then what I found out after that is that my mercury levels were off the chart. They're 10 times what EPA considered safe because I eat a lot of freshwater fish and a lot of saltwater fish. I had mercury off the charts. And I fish, you know, in the summer almost every day. Oh, and I eat the fish. And, you know, I just had, and they're predatory fish.

Freshwater fish in this country are having huge, huge mercury levels. Yeah, yeah. And so I get the mercury chelated out. My brain fog went away. So I don't think it had anything to do with the brain worm. But anyway, it was good copy for a couple of days. rain fog went away so i don't think it had anything to do with the brain worm but anyway it was good copy for a couple days and the one of our colleagues upstairs he had that a couple years ago because he ran into that he had we had been spearfishing in hawaii but he also had a

bunch of halibut and stuff from alaska and he eats a ton of walleye water fish and him and he got and he said i think what he i think he said something like um he thought he had eaten about 20 meals in a row of like passivorous fish yeah and and developed that and it started with some dexterity yeah some dexterity stuff and that yeah and he had some he had some he'd call people forget why he called him but it went away pretty quick but that's one of the that's one of the earliest like that's one of those areas where you know you've spent a whole career on water quality issues and spend a career defending fishermen and natural resources that was one of the first one of my first introductions to how uh water quality issues impact people is growing up in the great lakes and um

becoming aware of the the consumption advisories and we ate tons of fish out of the great lakes and uh becoming aware of that and then one of my childhood mentors and one of my dad's best friends going into uh university of michigan for these batteries of tests because he had been consuming freshwater fish his whole life and he was part of some broad study of memory loss in people who had consumed whatever threshold of great lakes fish yeah and it which and that is funny because in that area it's just not a thing people discussed i lived in seattle for a while and we would fish lake washington and there were people that people were there just kind of more aware different time whatever and there'd be people who um wouldn't eat you know they wouldn't eat the fish that we

were fixing for them because of concerns about um you know concerns about mercury in the water and then it's been explained to me too that even though we've reduced how much mercury we're putting in the water the shit never gets out of the system or it's very slow to get out of the system it's slow to get out i mean it it doesn't there's no half-life on mercury there's a half-life in your body and your blood there's a half-life of 64 days in your blood from you know the from methyl mercury which is the kind of mercury in fish. There was a National Academy of Sciences, and the FDA did a study in 2003, and they looked at every freshwater fish in North America.

Every fish that they sampled had dangerous levels of mercury in its flesh, every single fish. And, you know, of course, the predatory fish like walleye and, you know, trout, lake trout, those kind of fish that are eating, that are high-end predators, have just, you know, have what they call bolus doses. They're really, you know, just very, very high doses. And it occurred to me when that

study came out that we're now living in the science fiction nightmare where my children and the children of every other American can now no longer engage in the seminal primal activity of American youth, which is to go fishing with their father and mother in the local fishing hole and then come home and safely eat the fish. And, you know, that is, it's just, when you think, when I thought about it at that age, I was breathtaking. I see the same thing today with Lyme disease. Lyme disease is, you know, I spend, I go, I'm in the woods every day, right? And my whole life I've done that. You know, training hawks and stuff, I'm in the woods every day, right? And my whole life I've done that.

You know, training hawks and stuff. You have to fly them every day. So I go, you know, I lived in Malekisco, New York when the deer ticks began appearing. evidence is that those that that disease came from Plum Island from the military you know the USDA slash DOD Department of Defense bioweapons labs on Plum Island and the story of how it actually got to the mainland is you know is another one of these incredible stories. You had them developing a military weapon there and then just poisoning everybody in America and ruining it.

There's not a single falconer that I know that does not have Lyme disease. And you can't think of any. I remember coming home one day, standing in the bathtub and taking 29 deer ticks off of myself. And, you know, in the springtime, I'd get them every single day. And it's just, you know, the woods used to be, for me, were a safe place to go. And now, you know, you have to think twice before you go in the woods.

My boy got, he contracted Lyme when he was three in Hudson Valley, New York. We were fishing bluegills. So there you get like, you know, like you said, you get the double, I guess you get the double hit of heavy metals and Lyme, fishing bluegills in Hudson. But he developed the facial paralysis. You know, I went through Lyme disease. My son got that too. Did he? Yeah, Bell's palsy.

Yeah, yeah. For six months, and we didn't know if he – and you look at your kid when he's got that, and he goes from a very handsome kid to not a very handsome kid, and they have this. And we didn't know every day whether he was ever going to recover from it. Yeah, he would sip milk. It was just kind of the thing that scarred us is a little bit. He would sip milk and it would run out in the corner of his mouth. And it was,

it was so that air that was so scary. And I got, I got infected as well and had to do the intravenous treatment, but it was so that period was so scary that my wife and would put him to bed and we would routinely at night just cry. I mean, like, embarrassing to say it, but like we would cry at night. How old was he? He was three. Jeez.

But he got, he responded very quickly to treatment. But man, it was a horrifying deal. Yeah. 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, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there,

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Speaking of kids, there's a thing I wanted to ask you as well. And I didn't know this about you until yesterday. What was the... I didn't know that you went and met with and talked to the... Met with and talked to the man that was involved in your father's death. In a prison?

Yes, sir. What was that meeting? I mean, what was that like for you? I always, listen, from when I was a little kid, my uncle, the story about his assassination was always strange to me. In fact, I was in the White House when my uncle, when I was in the White House with my uncle's casket in the East Room, and my whole family was in there, and I was, you know, a nine-year-old kid. And I remember President Johnson coming in, and I was standing next to my aunt Jackie and my mother and my dad. And President Johnson told them that a man had just shot Lee Harvey Oswald. And I said to my mom when the conversation ended, I said to my mom, why did he shoot the man who killed Uncle Jack?

Did he love our family? Because even then, my mind was like, this is a bizarre story. And that story, of course, was never adequately explained. And Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, was an associate of the Chicago Outfit, Sam Giancana's mob. But he was directly associated with Carlos Marzello, who was involved in the Kennedy assassination. And he was one of the three big mob bosses. There were three mob bosses who were recruited by the CIA to kill Castro, Santos Traficante in Tampa, Carlos Marcella in Dallas and New Orleans, and then Sam Giancana in Chicago. And the reason they targeted these three is they all had casinos in Havana. And so then the CIA basically became one organization with these mob families.

And there's so much evidence now on the agency involvement in my uncle's death. There's hundreds of books written about it, and there's millions of pages of evidence, and there's probably over 30 confessions by people who were involved. So I always assumed that my uncle was, that his death and Congress, when they actually looked at it, of course the Warren Commission was run by Alan Dulles,

who was the head of the CIA, who my uncle had fired. So they said, yeah, it's just one shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald. But then five years later, Congress reinvestigated it. And the congressional committee, the House Select Committee on Assassination, said no, his death was from a conspiracy. And most Americans believe that. And the evidence is now overwhelming. But I always believed, I always believed that my father had been killed by Sirhan. And then a man who, one of my dad's best friends, a guy called Paul Schrade, he was a United Auto Workers deputy director.

And he had recruited Cesar Chavez to the labor movement. And he had introduced my father to Cesar Chavez. And that had become one of the most important political relationships and personal friendships that my father had. All charade was walking next to my father when my father was shot. And they were walking into the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel. All charade was walking beside him, about a foot behind him. And Sirhan, and they were being led to the ambush site to where Sirhan was standing in front of a steam table. Sirhan fired two shots at my father. And one of those shots hit Paul Schrade in the head.

He said that he felt like he was being electrocuted. He didn't know what it was. He just felt like he had stepped on electric wire, and he went down. But he lived to be almost 90 years old. He died about two years ago. And then the other shot that Saran fired at my father went past my father and hit a doorjamb, a wooden doorjamb behind him,

and it was later removed. The bullet was later removed by the LAPD. Then Saran was grabbed by five men, by Rosie Greer. The writer George Plimpton, too, wasn't it? George Plimpton was on that dog pile. Rafer Johnson, who was in 1960 the Catalan champion, was very close to my father, was kind of acting as my father's bodyguard.

Back then, the candidates did not get the Secret Service protection until you got a nomination. So my father wasn't entitled to it. And J. Edgar Hoover had offered to protect him, but he knew J. Edgar Hoover would be spying on him. So he said, no thanks. And then the LAPD had a very bad reputation at that time for racism.

And so they were not part of it. So he was being protected essentially by football players, by the fearsome force, guys from the Dallas Cowboys and from the Oakland Raiders. And they chased down or they immediately grabbed Sirhan after the second shot. And they took his hand and they bent him over the steam table on his back. And they took his gun hand and they pointed it in the opposite direction, away from my father. And Rafer Johnson later told me that he, you know, Rafer was a big guy. He was like six foot four and he'd been the best athlete in the world. And he said he was, and Sirhan is this tiny, tiny little guy.

But he said he had superhuman strength and that he could not get that gun out of his hand. Sirhan was able to, it was a revolver,.22 revolver. And there were eight shots in it. And Surhan was able to squeeze off six more shots and empty the barrel. And

those shots all hit people. So one person, I think an ABC reporter got hit twice. Once through his pants leg and another time in his stomach. And all those shots hit people. So we know what happened to every single shot in Sir Hans Gunn, and he never had a chance to reload. My father was killed by four shots from behind. And the reason I know this is because Paul Schrade, 10 years ago, told me you got to come to my house in Pasadena and read the autopsy report, which was Thomas Noguchi, the most important coroner in American history. And he did the – and so – and I did – it's not something I wanted to do, to read the autopsy report from my dad.

But Paul Schrade, I couldn't really say no to him. He'd been shot with my dad. He was a loyal friend. So I sat down and read it. And if you read it, you're like, the inescapable conclusion is that Saran could not have killed my father, which is what Noguchi concluded. Noguchi, when he did the autopsy, he knew what had happened in Dallas with the autopsy. The critique of that autopsy is notorious. He wanted to make sure that he did an autopsy that nobody would ever criticize. So he called the chief coroners of all the five branches of the armed services

and had them sitting in the theater observing him. And in the medical literature, his autopsy, my dad, is called the perfect autopsy. And what he found is my father was shot four times from behind. And all of them, one of the shots passed harmlessly through the shoulder pad of his suit jacket. The two of them hit him in the back, and then one of them was fired from directly behind his ear into his head. And all of them were contact shots. Were all those 22? Those are all 22 calibers. They're 22, but the bullets don't match.

And the police efforts to fix the ballistics are very well documented. The deception that they tried, you know, one of the ballistics experts in the police department was involved in a deception. So the – and if you listen, there's two audio tapes of what happened that night and they show that there were 13 shots fired. There were 13 distinct booms on that. And all of the shots were contact shots, meaning that the barrel of the gun was either touching my father's skin or less than a half inch or quarter inch from the skin

because they all left carbon tattoos on his body. And they were all fired at an upward angle. In other words, somebody was standing right behind him concealing a gun and holding it, you know, against him but slightly upward. And all of them were fired at that. And then the guy who almost certainly fired those shots was a guy called Eugene Thane Cesar, who was a, he worked for a security agency called Ace Security. And he had gotten the job only two or three days before, after my father's schedule was already known. And he was the one who grabbed my father by the elbow and then walked him toward the ambush where Sirhan was waiting. And the supposition is that when Sirhan was firing those

shots and all eyes were upon him, there were 77 people in the room. And he drew his gun and was actually firing the kill shots. And when my father fell, he fell backwards onto Cesar. But he must have known that he was being shot from behind. Because he twisted around and he grabbed Cesar's tie. And it was a clip-on tie. And if you see the pictures of my father, the initial pictures of him lying on the ground, he has that clip-on tie in his hand.

Cesar got up, pushed my father off him, got up from under him with his gun visible. There's a dozen eyewitnesses that showed his gun was drawn, say his gun was drawn, which Cesar never denied. And the police asked him weeks later, why was your gun drawn? He changes his story many times. He said he was firing at my father,

I mean firing at Sirhan, which of course he wasn't. And as it turns out, there's a woman, an historian called Lisa Pease who's done a deep dive on Cesar. And his employer was Hughes Aircraft, which is a defense contractor, which was owned by Howard Hughes, which is deeply involved with the Las Vegas mob. And then Boeing or Lockheed, he worked at a Lockheed plant in LA, and he had top secret clearance,

and he identifies himself as a CIA employee. And he openly hated my father. He thought that my father was going to turn the country over to black people, which he complained about a lot. So I actually tried to interview him. I tried to go meet with him. He left the country after that, and he went to live in the Philippines. And I contacted him and said, you know,

would you be willing to sit down and talk to me? And he initially said, I'll do it for $ for ten thousand dollars and then he raised it to when i said okay he said fifteen thousand and then when i was you know planning my trip he said 25 000 i i realized that he was um that dude this was an analyst game that he was going to play. And then he died during the pandemic. Did he? Yeah. I mean, I don't know why he died. I don't mean to imply that he died of COVID, but he died during lockdowns.

When you – we can move on after this. Just one clarification. When you met Serhan, how long did you talk to him for? I was there probably about four hours. Was he, what was his attitude toward you? He was deeply, deeply grateful. He cried. He apologized to me for, he now no longer believes that he killed my father.

He has no memory of that night um his history is very interesting because he was working at a racetrack that was owned by one of the top mobsters in la mickey cohen and johnny rizelli and you know the the story is his lawyer was Johnny Roselli's attorney who suddenly appeared the night he killed my father and said I'm representing him and he was the one who persuaded who would not look at the list of evidence and then persuaded sir and to plead guilty sir and is when they were when he was working at that they they got him to go on a horse one time, which is crazy. He'd never been on a horse and they asked him to put him on a horse.

He's like five feet tall, right? He's tiny. 130 pounds or something. He's a tiny guy. If you see him, he's a very sweet old man and he just kept crying

telling me every time I saw a picture of your mother and with all of you kids. And, you know, I realized my part in the death of her husband. It, you know, broke my heart. So he just, you know, he was, I feel like he was being honest with me. I feel like he doesn't really have any guile. You know, he kind of, by then I think he was almost 80 years old, 77 or something. And he's been in prison for 60 years. And the story of, you know, his story is interesting,

but I know we got other things to talk about. But anyway, it's how he, you know, his road is a really interesting road. Yeah, it is. But I just couldn't, when I was reading reading about that i just couldn't picture from your perspective what it'd be like to sit across the room with someone who had whatever happened that night was there with the intention yeah he was killing your father and the desire to reach across and strangle that guy you know would be strong for me you uh you've done all kinds of first descents like you're you you became a you're like you're a whitewater enthusiast yeah

did you're and then you've worked like i said you worked on behalf of fishermen against polluters who are polluting waterways destroying fisheries were you did you come into that love of water through environmental work or did you come into that level water through outdoor experience outdoors i was when i was again i think i was probably adhd because i would go into a classroom. It was like they were talking a different language. I went to school for the first grade at five years old. I'd never been in nursery school. And I just, I didn't know what they were.

You know, I had no clue. I was like non-composimentous. And all I was doing was thinking of the woods, how I was going to get, you know, what I was going to do after school. I was going to go in the woods. I was going to check my traps. I was going to, you know, turn over rocks, climb trees, take a baby crow, all this kind of stuff that I was doing, catching snakes. My room was filled with aquariums with animals that I caught, and from when I was little, that's what I wanted to do. So, and then my father,

you know, was, brought us, taught us how to kayak, how to ask him a row when we were very, very young kids. We went on all the big Western whitewater rivers at a time when, you know, that's pretty common now. But I think we were told that we were among the first two or three hundred people to go down the Colorado River. We went with Hatch Brothers Expeditions, which was the first whitewater company. And we did

the Colorado. We did the Little Colorado. We did the Middle Fork, the salmon. My dad took us on the Yampa. Like big multi-day trips. Yeah, yeah. Week-long trips. Camping on gravel bars. Yeah. We did theampa, the green. Like big multi-day trips. Yeah, yeah, week-long trips. Camping on gravel bars. Yeah. Huh. We did a salmon, the snake.

Did you really? The Upper Hudson, which we did. I did the Upper Hudson with my dad in March during a blizzard, and that was the coldest up to that time that I'd ever been in my life. And we swam. You know, there was ice in the river. And my brother and I tipped our, we had a topo duo kayak, and we tipped it over, and, you know, and swam, it was really cold, and so, you know, he got us into that whitewater from when we were

really young, and then we did a lot of backcountry skiing. My dad really loved the wilderness. And then I started training hawks. I was raising homing pigeons from when I was seven years old. And that was like a serious hobby or sport where I lived. And then when I was nine, I got my first hawk. I got a red-tailed hawk, and I had read a book. My uncle was president, and there was books around about Camelot, and there was a book by T.H. White called The Once and Future King,

and I read it. T.H. White was a brilliant author, but he was also a falconer, and he was a British falconer, and he has a chapter in the Once and Future King. It's about the young King Arthur. There was a chapter in it about Arthur apprenticing as a falconer when he was a little boy. And I read that, and I said, this is what I've got to do. And I told my dad. My dad knew of a falconer

who lived about a mile from my house. It was a guy called Alvin I. He was one of the pioneers of American falconry. And he had been an all-American football player at Penn State. He had then gone to work

designing jets for the Pentagon. But the State Department knew about him because whenever there was visiting Arab dignitaries, they'd always send them over to fly birds with them because the Arabs are crazy for falconry. And so my dad knew about him, and my dad took me over there, and then I apprenticed under him, and I became a master falconer at a young age.

I actually wrote the exam that people take. Seriously? Yeah. What was your first bird that you had? My first was a red-tailed hawk. But I'll tell you what, I got, I think, probably one of the first Harris hawks that anybody ever trained. A Harris hawk is now the preferred hawk globally for ground quarry. If you train hawks, which is what I actually prefer, you're taking ground quarry or, you know,

they can catch a pheasant on the rise or, you know, occasionally if they're really lucky, a duck on the rise. But they could never catch it in a tail chase. A duck flies 90 miles an hour. They can't. Nothing can take it in a tail chase. Like once that thing miles an hour. They can't, nothing can take it in a tail chase. Like once that thing's off the water, he's gone. No, once they're like a bullet.

Once they get off the water. And they usually won't get off the water if there's a hawk in the air. So you have to have a dog, and it has to be a very small pond, like a golf course or something. But Harris hawks are now the preferred. The people who train hawks are called ostringers,

and the preferred bird for them nowadays in every country in the world are Harris hawks because they're the only hawk that fly, that hunts communally. And, in fact, when Audubon first saw them in the desert southwest and he named them after his friend who is an orthologist named Harris,

he assumed they were carrion eaters because there's no other predatory bird that eats in packs. I didn't know this about Harris hogs. And, and, and so he'd see six of them down on a quarry, like a jackrabbit or something. And he assumed they were, you know, look like a bunch of vultures on there.

Exactly. And, and that, but now, you know, we know they actually hunt in packs like wolves and because they're communal, they are, they're very, very good companions for human beings. They understand the relationship between the human and the dog. And the whole interaction comes very naturally to them because they understand the dynamics of hunting in a pack and hunting cooperatively and with kind of communicated strategies to each other.

If you're hunting squirrels, you'll see them ladder up. One will ladder up from the bottom, up the branches, and the other one will ladder down and squeeze the squirrel. They can't catch the squirrel when it's on the tree because they don't have a tight enough turning radius. And the squirrel will hug the bark, look behind them, and keep an eye on where the hawk is. And right before the hawk hits them,

they'll go to the other side of the tree. And there's no hawk that has that kind of turning radius. They can dodge hawks all day just by staying on that trunk. So for a hawk to catch the squirrel, it has to get it off the trunk and onto a branch. And so that's what they'll do. You'll see them do it. And also the Harris hawks are so smart. I've hunted red-tailed hawks my whole life.

And if a red-tailed hawk sees a squirrel, go into a squirrel tray, right, the nest. What do you call them, trays? A tray. Oh, a tray. Yeah, okay. A squirrel tray. Yeah, okay. A squirrel dray. So he sees him go into the dray

for the red-tailed hawk which has been here for, you know, at least since the Pleistocene Ice Age probably a million years before that. But that squirrel

in the mind of red-tailed hawk, that squirrel just disappeared. And that's the end of it. But a Harris hawk, if he ever sees a squirrel go into a squirrel

tray, he knows that animal is still in there. And highly vulnerable. And he'll go jump on the top of it like a trampoline to try to get it to come out. And then from then on, anytime he sees a squirrel tray,

he'll go jump on it to see if there's a squirrel in it. So they're very enjoyable. But I got one in a pet store when I was a kid at a pet store in southeast Washington. And I brought him home, and he got untethered. And I had a pheasant run, and I had some exotic pheasants in there, like golden pheasants, silver pheasants, those kind of things. And the pheasants would eat all the grass inside the run, and they'd stick their head out.

I had turkey wire, which is about the diameter of a pheasant's head. So they could squeeze their head through that turkey wire to get the tall grass that you couldn't get with the mower that was tight up against the side of the pheasant run. They'd eat that deep green grass and they'd stick their head through there to get it. But because it was a tight fit, they couldn't pull their head right out immediately. They had to kind of, you know, work it out. An angle of backward, yeah.

And that harrow's hawk went to the end and sat in a tree above that pheasant run. And one at a time, he took the head off of every one of my pheasants. And I came home from school and all my pheasants were dead in the pheasant run. And I realized what had happened. And I was like, I got to catch that hawk and train it because this is like a really smart bird yeah yeah hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada and boy

my goodness we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there 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 zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can

be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the on X hunt team. Some of our favorites are first light, Schnee's vortex federalortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com. onxmaps.com.

Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. How do you catch something like that? I mean, it probably wasn't that regulated then. No, in fact, until 1972, hawks, raptors were vermin species in 21 states. And they paid bounties on them. And they, you know, there were annual hawk shoots that were sponsored by the Audubon Society. People would go up on the radio.

By the Audubon Society. Yeah, because they thought they were killing songbirds. And people didn't understand ecology at that point. They just thought, okay, hawks are the enemies of chickens, so exterminating them is a good thing. And they didn't realize the hawks were also controlling the rodents

and controlling, you know. They just didn't understand the complexity of ecosystems. And they still don't, by the way. Otherwise, we wouldn't be using so many pesticides, but yeah, the Audubon Society and the game clubs and hunting clubs, the conservation apartments would sponsor these hawkshoots every year, so we could go out and just trap hogs and fly them. And then the Eastern peregrine went extinct in 1963.

And people started worrying about them then. And in 1972, they pass the Migratory Birds Treaty Act. Tom, I didn't realize this. The peregrines that are in the East now, there was an Eastern- There was an Eastern. Form or variety? realize this the peregrines that are in the east now there was an eastern there was an eastern eastern adam's peregrine it was that one extinct that one extinct oh so so peregrines that have repopulated have come from different regions you know what if they're mainly there were some peregrines in captivity and we learned around 1969 we learned to breed them. And before that, they had never been bred in captivity. And so, and then, you know, falconers were the only ones

breeding them. And there was a guy called Heinz Meng, who was one of my mentors, who was the first scientist to breed a raptor in captivity. And then we figured out how to double clutch them, which is you get the bird to lay a clutch of eggs, three eggs, take that away from them. She'll, she'll recycle, lay three more, take those away and she'll recycle a third time. And then, so you have nine eggs from the same bird every year, and you can then incubate those and you can get the mother to raise them because

you're you're you know handling handing her unlimited food so she can take care of nine offspring and um and we started mass producing them and then releasing them to the wild so the peregrines that you see now on the east coast are they're a little bit hybridized from some of the other subspecies but you know there are still there's a lot of them are you know purebred eastern atoms um that were bred in captivity and then released if uh walk through how you got how you transitioned into um environmental law and focused on the Hudson and then focused on a widening bunch of rivers and then became aligned with fishermen and fisheries restoration yeah so I got I was a heroin addict for 14 years I got sober in 1983 and then I rethought my life and I I had gone into the DA's office and I

kind of had this you know life that was almost tried kind of trying to follow my father's footsteps I'd gone to the same law school the same college I had gone into prosecution the way that he and I I realized that I was not authentic for me that I really belonged doing something in the woods and in the waterways. And, you know, that that's where I was happy and that's what I wanted to do with my life. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a scientist or a vet or to do, you know, something like a field biologist, somebody who was outside all the time. And so I decided to take, you know, my legal education and meld it with, you know, in some way with doing environmental protection, environmental advocacy. And I ended up working for a blue-collar coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen

on the Hudson River and who were trying to reclaim the Hudson from its polluters. We have on the Hudson the oldest commercial fishery in North America. It's 350 years old. Many of the people that I represent come from families that have been fishing the river continuously since Dutch colonial times. It's a traditional gear fishery. So they use the same fishing methods that were taught by the Algonquin Indians

to the original Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam and then passed down through the generations. And one of the enclaves of the commercial fishery is a little village called Crotonville, New York. Oh, yeah, I've been there. Yeah, it's 30 miles north of New York City on the east bank of the river. And the people who lived there in 1966 were not your kind of prototypical affluent environmentalists. They were factory workers, carpenters, lathers, electricians. Half the people in Crotonville made their living or at least some part of their living fishing or crabbing the river. You have a big, beautiful picture of a basket of blue crabs here.

Chesapeake Bay right there. Yeah, Chesapeake Bay. But we have the same fishery in the Hudson. You know, the blue crabs come up the Hudson as well. We have a lot of the anadromous fish come up the Hudson, including shad. Historic sturgeon run. Sturgeon, yeah. We have sturgeon in the river that are 12 feet long,

200 pounds of caviar in them. It's a very, very big fishery, a very lucrative fishery for a lot of people, striped bass. Yeah. And then the smaller fisheries, herring, alewives, blue crab.

There's a little bit of shrimp in the river. And then there's some odd fisheries, herring, alewives, blue crab. There's a little bit of shrimp in the river. And then there's some odd fisheries like shrimp and goldfish, you know. And there's carp. There used to be a big carp fishery for gefilte fish, the Jewish population. During certain Jewish holidays, it's a popular fish. So we have a mixture of freshwater fish, saltwater fish, and anadromous fish. Anadromous fish, of course, is a fish that evolved in freshwater, but they figured out how to go to the saltwater to feed themselves and fatten.

But their eggs will not survive in saltwater. They have to come back up into the freshwater, their natal stream, to spawn because the eggs would die if they were in saltwater. And those are called anadromous fish. And there are also catadromous fish in the Hudson. Those are the fish. The American eel.

American eel, of course. And they have the oddest life cycle because they go out to the middle of the North Atlantic to the Sargasso Sea. And they meet their European cousins there. And then they breed and they all go back to their natal streams. And, you know, of course, an eel can breathe air as well as water. That's why you find them in ponds when there's rainy weather. They go across the landscapes, you know, at night during the rain and get in isolated ponds and places.

Incidentally, carp can also breed air. And catfish can. You know, the bullheads can. If you ever, if you leave a bullhead or a catfish in two inches of water or four inches of water in the bottom of your, you know, bait bucket, it will drown. It will die, asphyxiate, because it will use up the oxygen. But if you leave it and if you just take all the water out and throw it in there, it will live because it can breathe air.

Dope, yeah. Yeah, it's like a lot of carp can do that, too. But anyway, that's a real serious digression. I went in 1966. Penn Central Railroad began vomiting oil from a four and a half foot pipe in the Croton-Horman rail yard. And the oil went up the river and the tides and blackened the beaches. And it made the shad taste of diesel. The fishermen couldn't sell them in New York City at the Fulton Fish Market.

And all of the people in Crotonville came together in the only public building in the town, which was the American Legion Hall. This was a very patriotic community. It speaks to the blue-collar nature of what you're talking about, that form of blue-collar environmentalism. Exactly. And they – Almost all the original members and founders and board members of River Keeper were former Marines. They were combat veterans from World War II, mainly from Korea, also some from Vietnam. And they came back to the river, you know, to fish again, and they found it was polluted. They came together that night in March of 1966,

and there were 300 people in the Parker Bale American Legion all leaning against the rifle racks, hanging from the rafters, men and women, furious about what was being stolen from them because the Hudson was everything. It was not just their recreation. It was their livelihoods. It was their livelihoods. It was their property values. It was their backyard. And it was being stolen from them by these large corporate

entities over whom they had no control. And they had been to the government agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution, to the Corps of Engineers, the State Conservation Department, and the Coast Guard. And they were given the bomb's rush. Richie Garrett, who was the first president of what was then called the Hudson River Fish and Men's Association, later became Riverkeeper. He was a gravedigger from Austin in New York, and he was a combat veteran from Korea.

Really? Yeah, and he used to say to his new followers, I'll be the last to let you down. Because he was a gravedigger. But he was also, he went with another Marine named Art Glauca, who was at that point an Eastern Airlines pilot. He went to the Corps of Engineers a dozen times, begging the Corps colonel to do his job and shut down the Penn Central pipe. And the Corps colonel finally told them in exasperation, these are important people.

We can't treat them that way. Speaking of the Penn Central Board of Directors, by this evening in March of 1966, virtually everybody in Crotonville had come to the conclusion the government was in cahoots with the polluters, and the only way they were going to reclaim the river for themselves is if they confronted the polluters directly. Somebody suggested that they put a match to the oil slick coming out of the Penn Central pipe and burn up the pipe. Somebody else said they should roll a mattress up and jam it up the pipe

and flood the rail yard with its own waste. And then somebody else said they should float a raft of dynamite into the intake of the Indian Point Power Plant, which at that time was killing a million fish a day on its intake screens and taking food off their family tables. And a guy stood up whose name was Bob Boyle, and he was a famous fly fisherman and spin fisherman. He'd written dozens of books on flies. He had a bunch of flies named after him. He was the outdoor editor of Sports Illustrated for 65 years. He was a combat veteran from Vietnam. He actually was at the training camp. He was a roommate of Robert Bork, the federal judge.

But he had been – he was a first lieutenant at 80 percent mortality in Korea, and he had come back from Korea. And he wrote about sports, mainly outdoor sports, for Sports Illustrated for 65 years. Two years earlier, he had written an article about angling in the Hudson. There's some real oddballs who fish in the Hudson. There's these sewer fishing clubs in Manhattan, you know, that fish through the grates. And he was writing about all these weird sort of cultures of people who found, you know, wilderness experience in the Hudson, you know, walked off a pavement in New York and were renewing themselves spiritually and in all these other ways through this contact with the water. And it was a beautiful article.

And in researching that article article he came across an ancient navigational statute called the 1888 rivers and harbors act that statute said it was illegal to pollute any waterway in the united states you had to pay a big penalty if you got caught but also there was a bounty provision that said that anybody who turned in the polluter got to keep half the fine. And Boyle was stunned when he read this, and he sent a copy of it to the libel lawyers at Time Magazine, Time Inc., which owns Sports Illustrated. And he knew those guys. They were the only lawyers he knew. And he said, is this still good law?

And they sent him a memo back saying it's still good law, but in 80 years, it's never been enforced. And that evening, when all these men and women were talking about violence, he stood up in front of them with a copy of that memo, and he said, we shouldn't be talking about breaking the law. We should be talking about enforcing it. And they resolved that night.

They were going to start a group that was then called the Hudson River Fishermen's Association, later became Riverkeeper. And they were going to go out and track down and prosecute every polluter on the Hudson. 18 months later, they shut down the Penn Central Pipe. They collected the first bounty in United States history against a corporate polluter. They got to keep $2,000, which was a huge amount of money in Crotonville, New York in 1968. There were two weeks of wild celebration in the town, and they used the money that was left over to go after Seba Geigy, Tuck Tape, Standard Brand, American Cyanamid,

the biggest corporations in the country, and winning, collecting tens of thousands of dollars in bounties. And in 1973, they collected the highest penalty in the United States history against a corporate polluter. They got $200,000 from Anaconda Wire and Cable for dumping toxics at Hastings, New York. They used that money to build a boat, which they called the Riverkeeper. And they began patrolling the Hudson, tracking down polluters

and litigating against them. And then they hired, using bounty money in 1983, they hired their first full-time river keeper, a commercial fisherman named John Cronin. And he hired me a year later using bounty money as the first attorney and a full-time attorney for them. And I started a clinic at a local law school called Pace where my students were allowed to practice law under my supervision. I got a special court order and we just started litigating against hundreds of polluters. We brought over 500 lawsuits against Hudson River polluters. We forced polluters to spend $5.5 billion remediating the Hudson. Today, the Hudson River is an international model for ecosystem protection. This is a river, when I started working on it, it was dead water for 20-mile stretches,

zero dissolved oxygen, from New York City north and 20 miles from New York City south. I mean, from Albany south. It was dead water. No oxygen. Essentially no oxygen breathing life. And it caught fire. It turned color every week, depending on what colors they were painting the trucks at the GM plant in Tarrytown. And today the Hudson is the richest waterway in the North Atlantic.

It produces more pounds of fish per acre, more biomass per gallon than any other waterway in the Atlantic Ocean, North Equator, on both sides of the Atlantic. It's the last major river system left on both sides of the Atlantic and all thrown in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Marmorite Sea, all these other waterways. There's only one river left that still has strong spawning stocks of all of its historical species of migratory fish and that's the Hudson. It's Noah's Ark. It's a species warehouse. It's the last refuge for many of these animals that are going extinct elsewhere. The miraculous resurrection of the Hudson inspired the creation of river keepers elsewhere. So we had a bunch of commercial fishermen come down and ask me to sue all of the sewer plants in Connecticut

that were destroying the oyster fisheries. And I sued every city. I sued Greenwich, Norwalk, Brantford, Stanford, and all the way up and down the rail line. I sued every city on the coast of Connecticut. And we started collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars from them. We started Long Island Soundkeeper, the commercial fisherman there. We had surfers coming from the West Coast with the same thing. Within a few years, we had a couple of hundred river keepers.

We started a new group called Waterkeeper Alliance to manage the licensing of these new groups to make sure we could protect the brand. Today, we have 500. We're the biggest water protection group in the world. We have 500 water keepers from 46 countries. And, you know, it's a law enforcement group. Most countries have laws that forbid water pollution. The water belongs to people. It doesn't belong to the government.

It doesn't belong to, you know, corporations or big ag or, you know, mining companies. It belongs to the government. It doesn't belong to corporations or big ag or mining companies. It belongs to the people. Everybody has a right to use it. Nobody can use it in a way that diminishes or injures its use and enjoyment by others. This is an ancient law. It goes back to Roman times. It's in the Code of Justinian. It's in the Magna Carta, and it's in the laws of most countries.

The problem is those laws are almost never enforced and what we do the function we serve and waterkeeper is you know is to enforce those laws on behalf of of people who are injured by pollution when you look at if if you were in the white house and you looked at, let's start with, we can start with priorities for EPA. If you have opinions on what you do around Interior Department, priorities for the Interior Department, who you'd like to see as Secretary of Interior. How would you like that job? Would you seriously, would you look at taking a job no i would i would love to take it i have some people i would consult with and i was telling

you our day if i ever got into politics i would do and i heard you do it earlier um i would first make a list of every bad thing i ever did and make it a google drive doc and hit share with the country and then i would press it. That's what I did. I couldn't remember. I was addicted to heroin for 14 years. No one's going to dig that up on you.

I said when I announced, I said, you know, I didn't expect to run for president. And if I did, I would have lived a very, very different life. I led a very reckless life and a high-risk individual. And I said – I told Cheryl. I said, I've got so many skeletons in my closet that if they could vote, I could get elected king of the world. 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 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 in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.

onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Which one of those do you want to start with? If you were to look at, like, what would be a set of priorities for you with the EPA or what would be a set of priorities for you with Interior or any of these areas? I have been working on environmental issues for 40 years. And I found out from the beginning that you need to be able to talk to people. You know, my whole thing was bringing hunters and fish, hook and bullet people into the environmental movement who were left out.

Because in the 80s when I was doing this, hook and bullet people felt that, you know, they felt alienated from, you know, from the mainstream environmentalists. They felt they didn't, you know, there was a lot of antagonism. There was a lot of antagonism over public lands issues in the West and, you know, whether, you know, public lands should be managed exclusively for game or should they be managed for hunting and fishing and, and you know and these

were all farming or or ranching these were all areas of conflicts and then there was you know a lot of environmentalists were kind of liberal and you know and and maybe leaned a little bit towards anti-gun and so you had that conflict you had those areas of antagonism. I think that's why you wound up. These words have their own etymology and their own use case. But I think that's why you wound up eventually with people who would identify as environmentalists. And you have people that would identify as a conservationist. Right? So there's like.

Yeah. Within each of these, whether you describe yourself as one or the other i often describe myself as a conservationist um there's a i don't know but 80 overlap right between those views you know but maybe 80 yeah they just they just became comfortable with different terms, even though they're largely talking about the same things. Yeah. But I think it's that to avoid that. I mean, you know, like Ducks Unlimited did not consider itself part of the environmental movement at all. Right.

And they should have. And that, you know. They are a leader of the environmental movement. Of course. Of course. Of course. But they weren't talking to NRDC and EDF and the Sierra Club. They were not. It was very – and what I wanted to do – They weren't litigating as much, right?

They were less litigious, but they were just – I don't know why, but there was – they didn't – they felt alienated. And a lot of my kind of mission was to bring those groups in. And I started – I always tried to talk in a way that was inclusive of those groups. And today, you know, if you want to, I think one of the big mistakes the environmental movement has made, the biggest mistake, is to become the kind of carbon fundamentalists and to forget about the issues that made us all environmentalists, which is, you know, saving the oceans and saving the soils

and saving habitat and keeping our kids safe from toxins. And if you talk about climate today, you're going to cause a fistfight. And because, you know, and with good reason. One is because it's a, it's an issue, You know, I found this with a fisherman very early on. They didn't really want to talk about it. Because if you're being asked to give up something because of a line that somebody shows you on a graph that says you're going to be dead here. And they're asking you to give up income, you know, that's going to help your family. You're going to push back against that. But if you ask somebody to make a sacrifice to keep toxins out of their food, to keep their

water clean so there's no mercury in the fish, they will pay anything to do that. And, you know, when we were fighting the lead contamination in the water in Flint, Michigan, we had Hells Angels standing shoulder to shoulder with urban blacks. When we went to, you know, at Standing Rock, we had business people, Republicans, union people, Democrats. Every kind of person was at Standing Rock for the Keystone Pipeline because we didn't market it as a climate issue. We marketed it as protecting sacred places and, you know, purple mountains, majesties, and Americans will do anything to protect their sacred places. You know, I've been fighting the coal industry for 40 years, but I don't focus on climate. I focus on things that are tangible to people.

I focus on the destruction of the Appalachian Mountains. The Appalachians are the richest ecosystem, terrestrial ecosystem in North America. And the reason for that is during the Pleistocene Ice Age, when there were two and a half miles of ice over where my house was in Mount Kisco, New York, the forest disappeared. America, North American continent turned into a tundra. And the forest disappeared almost altogether, except in a couple of tiny refugiums. And the biggest one of those was Appalachia.

Oh, and then when the ice melted and withdrew, all of North America was reseeded from the Appalachian Mountains. So that's why, you know, if you go up to a forest in, you know, in upstate New York or the Hudson Valley or New England, there's typically three dominant species. But in Appalachia, there's 86 dominant species. The diversity is extraordinary. We're exploding, I think, 2,800 tons of ammonia nitrate explosives a week. It's the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb once a week by these big companies, Peabody, Consul, Massey Coal. They're blowing the tops off the mountains to get at the coal seams beneath. They've leveled 1.4 million acres. It's bigger than the state of Delaware.

If you drive in West Virginia today, you drive on a road, and you'll see these beautiful mountain sides on either side. But if you fly over it in a helicopter, they're just Hollywood sets. Behind them, there's just 100 square miles of devastation. It looks like an open quarry. And they can never refill them. They can never rebuild them. And if Americans knew what was happening, there would be a revolution about it because people don't want to see that these are the landscapes where, you know,

Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett came out of bluegrass music, came out of a NASCAR racing. So much of our culture is tied up in this Purple Mountains majesty. They filled 2,200 miles of rivers and streams with mining tailings and destroyed the water, destroyed the fisheries, destroyed the health of the population. That's the sickest people in our country. And you don't need to ever talk about climate.

You talk about as it rained. As it rained, it's destroyed the forest cover on the Appalachians from Georgia to northern Quebec. I grew up in the Adirondacks, which is the oldest protected wilderness on Earth. It was protected since 1880s. Lincoln protected it. Since the 1880s, it's been protected.

I'm thinking of Yosemite with Lincoln, but Adirondacks since the 1880s, when Roosevelt was governor, it got protected. We had an expectation and a right to believe that the Appalachian Mountains would be unspoiled forever. It's called forever wild. That's the act.

And, you know, I grew up believing my children and their children and their children would be able to enjoy it. But today, 20% of the lakes in the Adirondacks is sterilized from acid rain. And nobody wants that, right? And, you know, we're losing the oyster fisheries in Washington where you've lived and Oregon because the oceans are now becoming so acidic that the bivalves like oysters can't mobilize calcium out of the water column to build their shells. And this is terrifying. And then we have mercury and all the fish in our country,

and nobody wants that. And that, so if you, all you're going to talk about is carbon, and then, you know, we just went through COVID, a lot of Americans, and they saw how totalitarian elements within our society, kind of elites, use these crises to clamp down totalitarian, top down totalitarian controls and to shift wealth upward. And, you know, the with what Biden's done in the Inflation Reduction Act, which is this big climate act, that the money is going to carbon capture projects, hundreds of billions of dollars, which are just a scam. It's a boondoggle for the oil industry, for the methane industry. And then to offshore wind farms, which are producing energy at five times the cost of

onshore wind farms. And they were exterminating the whales and the marine mammals that, you know, we all, we were drawn to the environmental movement out of love, not out of fear, out of love for these creatures. And, you know, and we're now sacrificing those on the altar of carbon fundamentalism. And the real way to deal with the carbon is to deal with soils, is to restore our soils. Because if we do regenerative agriculture across this country, we absorb 100% of our carbon budget. That's what we ought to be focusing on. And so I'm not, you know, I think climate change is existential. I think it's linked to carbon.

But I, you know, I don't insist you believe that. And I think the approach should be more towards habitat protection, reducing toxics, restoring our soils, and then using markets to regulate our, you know, using markets to regulate energy use. So instead of top-down controls, we get rid of the subsidies. We're giving $5.2 trillion in subsidies to carbon every year. We should get rid of all subsidies to mature industries and then let different energy sources,

generation sources compete in the marketplace and we'll get the cheapest energy and we'll get the most environmentally sound energy policy. People think free market capitalism is the enemy of the environment. It's not. We don't have free market capitalism. We have corporate crony capitalism. We have capitalism for the rich and this very kind of,

or socialism for the rich and this very brutal kind of barbaric capitalism for the poor. In a true free market, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. A true free market would promote efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste and pollution as waste. In a true free market, we would be required to properly value our natural resources, and

it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. And like I said, in a true free market, if you want to make yourself rich, you're going to make your neighbors rich too and your community rich. What polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else. And they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay its production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always somebody who's getting a subsidy. You know,

when General Electric dumped its PCBs into the Hudson, it was escaping the discipline of the market. The market, a true free market, every actor in the marketplace should pay 100% of the cost of bringing his product to market. And that includes the cost of cleaning up your mess, which was a lesson we were all supposed to have learned in kindergarten. What polluters do is they figure out a way to externalize those costs and get the public to shoulder their costs.

So General Electric dumped its PCBs in the river. It, you know, when the state of New York said, we don't want you to do that anymore, the G.E. said to the governor, Governor Kerry and Governor Rockefeller, if you don't let us do that, we're going to move our plant to New Jersey. It'll get the taxes, it'll get the employment, and you're still going to get the pollution because we're going to do it from that side of the river. And so they caved in to them.

And then, you know, 20 years later, General Electric left the Hudson Valley, left New York. They don't have a single employee left in New York. They're not paying any tax revenues. They left behind a $4.5 billion cleanup problem that nobody can afford to clean up. And, you know, everybody in the Hudson Valley has General Electric's PCBs in our flesh and our organs. They put out of business all of my clients. When I started, we had 2,500 fishing families in the river today. There's one left.

And the Hudson, the abundance of the Hudson has never been better. You can't eat the fish because they've got PCBs in them. And so they stole those fish from us. We paid to clean up the river. And General Electric privatized the Hudson. And now, you know, the Constitution of New York says the people that stayed on the Hudson, they own all the fish in the Hudson,

but we don't own them anymore. The General Electric Company owns them because they privatized them. And that's what all pollution is. It's somebody making a grab to privatize them and that's what all pollution is it's somebody making a grab to privatize part of the commons you know part of the commonwealth part of the public trust and privatize it and and that's a subsidy i want to get rid of the subsidies and that if you talk about pollution that way everybody nods their head you know if you oh yeah imagine yeah it's it it

frames in the way like you said earlier frames it said earlier, it frames environmentalism in a way where people understand the implication for the battle for rural people, the implication of the battle for people who live closer to the land, rather than viewing it as some mechanism that is desirous to end their way of life right or rather elites are grabbing control of your your freedoms and your property yeah and not seeing it as in some ways a way to defend your way of life defending your access to clean water defending your access to a stable fishery clean fish that you can eat you know clean water you can enjoy we talked i'd mentioned the interior department um recently sitting in the same seat you're in we had an individual on who um was with the nature conservancy and we were talking about offshore wind on the episode when we talked about offshore wind i'd shared a fear of mine and it's a fear of a lot of my friends and associates who are who are involved in the conservation movement

who are public lands advocates um and it's a growing fear that in the pursuit of alternatives alternative energy there we could have some hasty maneuvers that takes some of our last vestiges of of grassland you know grassland ecosystems sagebrush ecosystems move it to alternative move it to solar arrays wind farms and then a fear that we're going to do this we're going to make these compromises everybody's going to do because i think it's the right thing we're going to exploit a bunch of bureau of land management properties and then 10 years down the road 20 years down the road 30 years down the road we will see that we have not moved the needle on carbon and we will have developed

and industrialized portions of our landscape uh that's a roundabout way of asking that how if we pursue moving away from coal if we pursue moving away from oil how do you picture doing it where we don't need to have a net new or a radically net new usage of landscape to generate let me ask you this i i presume the nature conservancy guy that you were talking to was shared your point of view and values, or was he saying, no, we need to do, you know, untethered wind, offshore wind? I don't want to miss, Corinne, help me out. I don't want to misstate his perspective, but his perspective was this is the best, the offshore being the best option we have.

Okay, well, that's just not true. I mean, the offshore is a cataclysm. And I've been fighting offshore wind for probably 30 years. You know, the first big one was in Nantucket Sound, and I was representing the commercial fishermen there. And, you know, the problems, it destroys the commercial fishery. And we have a sustainable commercial fishery in Nantucket Sound. We have small business people

who are the heart and soul of America who've been the oldest industry in our country, 350-year-old industry. And you put up these turbines, and first of all, it kills the whales. It kills the seals. There's no doubt that that's what's happening. And, you know, we're seeing these groundings.

It sure seems like it. I think that there's ways you can obfuscate that or ways you can act like there's a little bit of a question. Yeah, but if there's a question, there's a precautionary principle. There's only a couple hundred right whales left in the world, you know, so, and, and, you know, there's such a precise time correlation between them doing the, you know, the hammering for the, to put these turbines into the, or into the, you know, with these giant pneumatic hammers, which make these these reverberations and then the whales all beach with their ears bleeding.

And it's happening so reliably and so consistently around all the places where there's this construction. It's just a cataclysm. And then the other thing is it's not market-based. It's all subsidy-based. Nobody would be buying it. Nobody would be building these if they actually had a market, if we had a free market.

They're buying them because, you know, President Biden is giving them hundreds of billions of dollars of free money. They've built these very lucrative towers. And then they're charging a minimum three times the price of onshore wind and usually six times the price. So it's going to turn the whole public against green power because they're going to be paying more for electricity than they are today. None of it makes any sense. And I, by the way, I know a lot about this. I know because I built power plants. I was on the board of, or I was a partner in the biggest green tech venture capital firm in the country for a decade. And we built the Ivanpah plant, which is the biggest solar panel plant in North America.

And I've participated in wind power and all kinds. My brother sells wind power for a living. I know what the costs are and the price of wind power, onshore wind power, right now is about 11 cents a kilowatt hour. And these offshore plants are, you know, are getting 40 or more, 40 cents a kilowatt hour or more. And nobody wants to pay that for energy it's destructive 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!

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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. So, you know, what I think is everything should be market-based. I think coal should have to internalize its costs, and if it did, it'd be the most— Meaning internalize its cleanup and mitigation.

Yeah, that, you know, you can't have these big piles of, you know, of— At every stage, coal is getting subsidized. You know, the roads in West Virginia are 22 inches of asphalt that we pay for because the coal trucks weigh 90,000 pounds, but they're not paying for that. If that was affected, you know, they can sell coal, or, you know, 10 or 12 cents a kilowatt hour in North Carolina, coal energy, and everybody thinks this is really cheap. But if it actually had to internalize the cost,

it wouldn't be cheap. It would be the most catastrophically expensive way to boil a pot of water that's ever been devised. Because if they actually had to pay the real cost of the acid rain, of the mercury in our fish, of half a trillion dollars a year in respiratory injuries from ozone or particulates, destruction of the Appalach account. You know, coal-burning energy costs 40 or 50 cents a kilowatt hour. Nobody would be using it. There's no single solution to this. The mining that's associated with these new technologies is extremely destructive.

And, you know, with the rare earth minerals, et cetera, it's extremely disruptive to some of the most beautiful habitat, places like the Congo, places like Alaska, which are going to get devastated by rare earth mining. And those costs have to be assessed, and they have to be internalized. And then if you do that, and that's the way to do it, and what we'll get is we'll get a lot of localized power production.

We'll get not one big bullet solution, but we'll get a lot of smaller solutions. And then there's new – listen, I'm not – I've always said about nuclear power that. This is good because this is my next question. Yeah. I'm not a subject matter expert. Yeah. But I just, I'm so far from a subject matter expert. I just can't help though with thinking that we need to be reinvesting there.

In terms of footprint, right? In terms of footprint. Let me tell you, first of all, what I think, you know, my thinking about nuclear power, and I no longer consider myself a subject matter expert because I'm told that there are technological improvements that have happened since I was litigating against nuclear power plants, which I've done a lot of. But what I've always said is I am for nuclear power if they ever make it safe and if they ever make it economical. Is that heavily subsidized? Yeah, it economical is that heavily subsidized yeah it

is the most heavily subsidized so that but no one can put the seed money up to get that going there's not a single utility in the world that will build a nuclear power plant unless it's fully subsidized but they also they have a bill called the price anderson act because you know they say they're safe, but they can't get an insurance policy. The insurance industry won't write them a policy. And so it's not a bunch of hippies in tie-dyed T-shirts who are saying you're unsafe. It's guys in suits on Wall Street who say we're not going to insure you.

And, you know, until they can buy an insurance. So they had to go to Congress and get this act passed called the Price-Anderson Act, and a sleazy legislative maneuver in the middle of the night to give them immunity from liabilities. So if their plan blows up, yeah. And you go look at your homeowner's policy. It'll have a line in it. And this policy does not protect you from nuclear radiation, from power plant. I lived 18 miles from Indian Point,

so I saw that, and it was a possibility this is going to happen, and I lose everything, and I'm self-insured for that. The insurance company is not going to pay me. So that's what I would say to them. Show us that you can get an insurance policy like other industries, and then we'll believe you're safe.

Because nobody wants to argue it with you. Just get the insurance policy like everybody else does. And then, you know, I mean, the other problem is they don't really know what to do with the ways as they keep, when they first said it, they said, we'll figure that out by the time we need to, but they never have. And there's, you know, you have to store this stuff now for 30,000 years, which is five times the length of recorded human history. So how could that be economical, right? You're just shifting the cost to a future generation.

And, but I understand there's new technologies that are promising. And if that happens, what I would say to you, what I will do as president, is the big problem in our country is we don't have markets for energy, real markets. So in North Dakota, North Dakota is one of the windiest places on Earth at sea level. There's enough. A scientific American did a study that showed there's enough harnessable wind in North Dakota, Montana, and Texas to provide 100% of the North American energy grid. Now, there is enough solar energy in an area 75 miles by 75 miles in the desert southwest to provide 100% of the energy. You wouldn't do that.

Because if a cloud passed over Arizona, you'd black out the country, right? But it shows you that it's out there and available. If you have the technology to store it and deliver it. Really, you don't even need so much storage technology if you have transportation technology. So if you have a grid that is a national grid with DC grid that can do long-haul transportation of electrons, it reduces your need to store because you can manage the whole system like a orchestra conductor manages an orchestra because the wind in our country tends to blow at night and the sun of course shines during the day so and and the sun shines the period you want it to sun but you know the 12 o'clock is peak energy use and that's the time you're getting peak sunshine so it actually

and then if you throw in a lot of rooftop solar and everybody is feeding into a marketplace, you have abundance of energy to manage the system. And let me just, you know, finish this kind of thought. In North Dakota, I think the revenue, typical revenue from an acre of corn is about maybe $200 a year that you're going to get revenue. If you have a winter turbine on that acre of corn. I got to interrupt you here to point out for people too that when we're talking about corn there, we're also talking about corn that goes, a lot of that corn goes to energy. Yeah, of course.

Yeah, so I just want people to be clear. It's not necessarily moving food to energy because you're doing ethanol production. It's not food in any case. It's a commodity. It's not even, you know, it's now all the GMO months after. Food, energy, yeah.

Yeah, so, but if you have a wind turbine on that property, that farmer is making $8,000 a year, right? So, every farmer in North Dakota wants to build wind farms on his property. He can't do it because there's not an energy grid that can get those electrons to markets in Cleveland, Cincinnati, New Orleans, New York, et cetera. Because the current system is antiquated, it's underbuilt, it's underextended, and it's incapable, it's an AC grid that's incapable

of doing long-haul transportation of electrons. If you had the grid there, there are huge amounts of capital from, you know, General Electric, Siemens, Vestas, all these giant companies that want to pour money, capital into building, into renting, building turbines on those farmers' lands. The capital is there to do it. And it would provide a huge source of revenue for American farm families, which we want to keep on the farm. We want to keep them on the land and make sure that they're prosperous and that Main Street is prosperous, et cetera. So we have three different energy grids in our

country. They're not unified. And none of them are capable of doing these things that we need them to do. We need to build that energy grid. And that, you know, the same way that we built a canal system in this country, we built a canal system in 1825. And, you know, within a few years, New York went from a backwater to being the biggest port in the world. Because you could, the Erie allowed midwestern farmers to put their produce on a barge and it would never get off a boat until it went to europe so all of a sudden you didn't have to haul stuff over the appellations the government built that canal system the government built the highway system yeah that's the i was gonna before you mentioned

i was gonna bring up people people i think kind of feel like the interstate system sort of fell from the sky. No. It was like in the post, you know, not just the advent of the car, but realizations we had during World War II. It was like a very deliberately constructed system. Yeah, and it was for national security reasons and for commercial reasons and to bring us together as a country, et cetera. And it was, you know, I watched it build when I was a kid.

It was horrifying to me because they, you know, plowed over the farm, the pond where, you know, I went fishing every day and, you know, but they did it and it's brought tremendous prosperity to our country. And so we need to invest in building this grid system. with these Byzantine rules, this very Bulk and High system that operates under rules that were written by the incumbents by coal and oil to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most toxic, warmongering fuels from hell rather than the cheap, clean, green, wholesome, and patriotic fuels from heaven. We need to create a market.

Now, I'll give you an example. I had a house in Mount Kiscon, New York, and I had a state-of-the-art solar system on the roof, and I had a geothermal system in the basement. Every day of the year, at home was producing more energy than I was using. Why can't I sell that excess back onto the grid and get the same price the utilities are getting, right? Why can't every American do that? Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that when this subject first came up. Is that, when you see those little bits of legislation come up, basically saying if you do a solar array on your house it's a you can't sell back is that is is there any argument for that other than them protecting a monopoly there's no

there's no like monopolies that's what they're doing there's no other reason why okay no and we want to do that and it would it would democratize our country because you turn every american into a into an energy entrepreneur you turn every American into a, into an energy entrepreneur. You turn every home into a power plant. You give people a chance to get revenue from their homes to help pay their mortgage, et cetera. And why do they, why do they ever get, why do they ever get legislative assistance on those bills that prevent

people from those, those bills are all the all state lawmakers who are passing them, and they're all owned by the utilities. The utilities are giving all the money, and you can buy a state legislature very, very cheap in this country, and you can get that stuff passed. And most citizens, it's just not on their radar. No, it's not on their radar. And, you know, it's so important for democracy because the political systems of

countries tend to reflect their economic organization. And if you have the economy controlled by a few large energy producers, oil, coal, utilities, the political system will tend also towards sort of a more totalitarian model, whereas if the energy system is controlled by 200 million American homeowners, if they're your generators, you're going to democratize the country as well. And, you know, we have such abundant energy resources. We have some of the best solar in the world in this country. We have the best wind of any big nation in the world. And we ought to be exploiting that, but we can't do it until we build an energy grid. Now, let me give you an example of what's going to happen. We built an ARPANET grid for the internet, and the Defense

Department, DARPA, built the ARPANET grid, which was the beginning of the internet in this country in 1979. A year after we built it, in 1980, the CEO of IBM said that IBM was getting out of their personal computers because he said it was a dead-end technology. Okay, Dell did that. There's a lot of other companies that got out of the business then because they didn't see what was about to happen. Within a few years, virtually every American has a personal computer. And what happened, because we built a grid, we built a marketplace, and what happened to the cost of information? It went to zero. Imagine you asked me, it was important for some reason for me to find out the answer to this obscure question like, you know, what was Mao Zedong's typical lunchtime – favorite lunchtime meal? Let's say I had to get that. Free internet?

Yeah. Good luck. Okay. Yeah, you'd have to go to Washington, spend a week going through the Library of Congress and the stacks to dig that out. And you may or may not find it. Today, you can probably type it into Google and it'll come right up. I used to joke as a writer, and I got going before, definitely not pre-internet, but before widespread internet use. And I used to joke that I was very anti-internet because I had a competitive advantage, that I was good at finding shit out

with the card catalog at the library, you know? And then all of a sudden I was like, no, any idiot can find out whatever they want. Yeah, exactly. And I used to say I liked it better when you had to work for that. You're irrelevant now. So your skills are irrelevant.

You're a big gift. So the cost of information went to zero. And that's what's going to happen to electrons if we build an energy grid. The same thing happened with telecommunications. In 1996, President Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act, and he forced all the baby bells to consolidate their grid system and create a marketplace where the lowest cost provider would prevail in the marketplace. You couldn't exclude people anymore. And that created a telecom revolution, and all these little devices that we now have, like cell phones,

are the offspring of that revolution. But what happened to the cost of of phone calls they went to zero i worked in a university you know at law school and i've tried i've tried to explain to my kids yeah the thing that would happen of that your parents would present you with a phone bill yeah and you would need to go through circling you would need to go through circling you know and you're like really that was seven dollars when i called that guy oh i remember making a five minute call to england that was 74 dollars and at my university which a law school there was only one professor in the law school that

was allowed to have a phone that made international calls. His name was William Vese and he was the international law professor. Any of the other professors who wanted to call internationally had to go knock on his door and say, can I use your phone? That's what it was like, right? And now that call is free and it's because we built a marketplace and that's what's going to happen to electrons as soon as we do this. My solution is a bigger solution

rather than handpicking, you know, wind, solar, hydro, nuke. What we do is we create a market and let the market pick it and we get rid of the subsidies. We enforce, we make sure you can't pollute the environment because that's a subsidy.

And then we take the lowest cost form of energy in each district. And that is going to create an economic boom the way that the internet did. But we got to invest in that marketplace. place it's funny you're you're articulated concept to me that I I'm almost embarrassed that it hadn't occurred to me before the way you're putting it would be these this idea of looking at polluters as the subsidy being like oh no we gave you that River and all of the fish in it you use that you just privatized it right use that up yeah exactly and putting a value and be like and since you use that up yeah here's the bill oh i had it hadn't occurred to me uh you yeah i know you uh you've mentioned

hydro i know you've worked on projects around um protecting rivers from hydro development and damming you spent a bunch of time you know as you laid out with your work on the hudson river uh let's jump over for a minute to the pacific northwest based on your expertise there is well let me put it a different way if i came to you and said you have all the power in the world within all the power in the country within practical consideration is there any hope for pacific salmon in you know south of alaska yeah like you mean the snake river runs yeah let's just talk about the columbia so let's talk about the columbia snake salmon right like the columbia waterway yeah i mean there's with all the damming like yeah well i mean there is you know there is

but it's a conservation it's become a a conservation-dependent resource. Yeah. Like we have salmon now because we spend a lot of money to have salmon. Right, because we put them in elevators and lift them up to the top of the dam. So, you know, I'm at a big dam. You know, I've seen a lot of headwaters dams actually work with minimal environmental damage and, you know, provide really good local sources of energy. People, if you put them, you know, these smaller dams that you put up in the headwater before there's any, you know, complex ecosystems in that waterway and it really, it, and they're very, very functional and, you know, I think really efficient.

The big dams, I, you know, I, my inclination is to take dams down but i'm also mindful of you know competing interests so i would i i i don't know enough about all of the columbia river dams to see which ones should be removed which ones you know can and then what happens when you remove them because now they've got all this sediment that's you, 40 or 50 feet high behind them. And what does that do to the river when you just, when you blow the dam and release all that? Yeah, there's a bit of a ripping off the Band-Aid effect on some of that stuff. Yeah.

So I don't know. I'd have to look and see. My inclination would be to try to figure out ways to take all those dams apart, you know, without causing economic cataclysms to you know to other stakeholders yeah it's a crin you remember who we have on the representative from idaho talking about his his uh if you're ever in the white house you're gonna want to look this guy up he's a guy mike uh damn it an idaho representative he had that very complicated, not complicated, I don't want to discredit it.

He had a proposal on the Columbia about dam removal. Oh, did he want the dams removed? Yeah. But, like you said, you have everything from the Western breadbasket, right?

We had Mike Simpson on, Tom. But I mean, you mentioned things as shipping. You have all that wheat production, which is going out. So you'd have to move stuff, barge traffic down to convert to rail. It's a, you know, it'd it takes three days to talk to that one um well you know what they say about western water that you know um whiskey's for drinking and water's for fighting and uh and anytime you start talking about western water, people want to kill you. Sure.

Because there's so much economic equity built into perverse economic systems, systems that are encouraging people to do bad things with resources. Just because of the way the West was settled. It was first in use, first in time, first in right, and all these other rules that, and then use it or lose it. So, you know, if you're an agricultural interest and you don't use your entire water allocation, you use it. So it encourages you to use the most wasteful, water wasteful, you know,

grow cotton and alfalfa in the desert. Because so, you know, I mean, if you had to design it from the start, you would not design those rules. And now, you know, now you've got 150 years of development that's based upon these perverse incentives. And you have entire municipalities and, you know, like Scottsdale and Phoenix and that are all essentially unsustainable. Yeah. You know. 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.

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OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. The thing I've tried to follow, and the amount of time i have to devote to reading to it i can't come to an understanding of it is uh where are you on getting on all the state ballots and what are the hurdles you have to get on state ballots i i keep you know i read like small lists of states but then signature gathering efforts. Is there a pathway to all 50? Is that not possible?

They designed it to be insurmountable. For a third party ticket. For a third party. The other guys don't have to do it, right? They don't have to do it. They're already on. The Democrat and Republican already have automatic ballot lines. So if you get on their ballots, you're in.

But I have to do it, and then I also have to pay for my own security because they won't let me have a secret service. And that's a big cost. And so I don't want to – This is probably maybe of only marginal interest to our listeners, so maybe there's a quick way of doing it. What's with the security thing? Well, I'm the first. So a third party is ineligible for security? No, no, no. I would? Well, I'm the first candidate. So a third party is ineligible for security?

No, no, no. I would be eligible. I'm the first candidate. And before my dad was killed, there was no Secret Service until you got a party nomination. Okay. Then at that year, they started giving it to everybody. So they gave it. George Wallace was running that year as an independent.

You know, George McGovern. I mean, Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy all got it immediately as soon as my father was shot. And Congress passed a law saying everybody is entitled to it who gets certain poll numbers 120 days outside of the election, from the election. In other words, 120 days. We're now five months and 18 days. 120 days is what? That's four months, right? No. Yeah, four months. I'm five months and 18 days out. So in a month and 18 days, I should be entitled. But it's discretionary. So the president can give it to anybody. And they've never refused it to anybody.

And they've given it to 33 candidates prior to the 120 days. And I've had a lot of, you know know sort of dangerous things happen during my campaign I've had four house break-ins on occasion you know the intruder got to my second floor with my family all home and on another occasion

a guy showed up at my at one of my rallies in Los Angeles, and he was covered with concealed weapons. He had two shoulder holsters with loaded magazines. He had a backpack filled with guns, including a laser, a sighted pistol that was fully loaded.

He had a couple dozen extra ammunition clips and a lot of other weapons, knives and all this other stuff. He had a- He was like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the end of that movie Commando when he's got the duffel bags. Exactly.

Full of guns. That's how he's outfitted. And he had a federal ID, so he had a federal U.S. Marshal badge. He had federal ID on his belt. What was his grade? Photo ID. What was his motive?

Before he left home that day, he made a TikTok tape saying, I'm going out on a mission now. If I don't come back from this, report to your commander-in donald j trump oh you know and he was kind of like a he uh he looked like a motorcycle bandit kind of it and i was that's the only tiktok he's ever made and then um you know luckily one of my security took a close look at his his u.s marshal badge and just said something looks wrong with it. It looks too shiny. He was demanding to see me in the green room. And so my guys thought his U.S. Marshal badge looked too shiny,

and they detained him, and then they found all these other weapons on him, and they called the police. The police came in and arrested him and released him, you know, the next day. So despite the fact he had all this fake ID on him. And so there's been a number of things like that that have happened. And, you know, President Biden has made a decision not to give me Secret Service protection. And I'm pretty sure the reason, although I don't like to look into other people's minds, is that they know this is, you know,

my security team is costing our campaign a million dollars a month. And they'd rather me be spending that on security than on, you know, advertising and on ballot access. At the answer to your original question, they've tried to make it insurmountable. We have an amazing team, and we have now 100,000 volunteers. We have more volunteers out there than any other campaign,

and people are very, very, very happy about signing my signatures. In fact, the professional ballot, the professional signature gatherers, and there's a whole industry that that's all they do, they charge typically about 10 bucks to 15 bucks a signature. And it's a big industry. And they're all saying that this is the easiest campaign that they've ever done for any purpose, commercial campaigns, referendums, that people are, you know, that there's an enthusiasm for signing to get me on the ballot. Whether people want to vote for me or not, I don't know, but people want to see me on the ballot.

So we've done the two hardest states. We've done California, the three hardest. We've done Texas, which is the hardest of all. We only have 46 states to get 100 and I think 113,000 signatures in 46 days. And we got a quarter million. And then – It's helpful to overshoot it so that they go through it. You have to because the DNC, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party are going to come in and go through every signature and try to find a problem with it. Yep. And so we need to get, you know, at least a 60% cushion.

We try to get two and a half times. But we're going to get on every ballot. All right. Uh-oh. If Trump or Biden came on the show, what would be the number one question you think I should ask them? I mean, I'm curious about the lockdowns, about how they feel about that right now. You know, shutting down every business in this country for a year with no due process, no scientific citation, no public hearings, no environmental impact statement, and how they're going to make sure that never happens again. They destroyed the middle class in our country.

They shifted $4 trillion upward to this new oligarchy of billionaires. They created a billionaire a day in 500 days, you know, and they just devastated a lot of these small businesses that they, with the heart and soul of our country, you know, are gone and they're never coming back. 41% of black-owned businesses, you know, will never reopen. Many of them had three generations of equity in them. And, you know, we're turning now from an ownership society into a rental society.

And, you know, when we do that, we're going from being citizens to being subjects. People don't have homes, they don't have equity, access to equity where they can pursue their entrepreneurial impulses. You know, our country is then on a feudal model. It's a colonial model, not, you know,

not American democracy anymore. And, you know, I would really, I would love to, if I was on a debating stage with them, you know, I would drill down on that issue. And, you know, why in the world would they close the business? President Trump knew that it was wrong.

He said it. He said, I'll never do that. And then, you know, he went ahead and did it for a year. And they did it for 500 days, the two of them. And it was just agony for small business people. So, you know, that's, I guess, I mean, there's a million other things that, you know, I think the issue with President Trump, President Biden is that they're very different people, have different dispositions, they have different personalities, they have different ideologies.

Their rhetoric, the whole way they interact with the public, with the world is, you know, it couldn't be more different. The actual issues that they're disputing each other on is a really narrow Overton window. It's like guns, abortion, border security, trans rights, et cetera. It's all, you know, they're all important issues, but they're kind of marginal, you know, with acceptance of the border, which I think is really a big, big issue. But the existential issues, the issues that are critical to our survival as a nation,

they never talk about. You know, we have a $34 trillion debt now. And we're spending more on our national, we spend more servicing that debt every year than our defense budget. Within five years, 50 cents out of every dollar that's collected in taxes will go to servicing the debt. Within 10 years, 100%.

This is existential. And nobody, you'll never hear President Biden or President Trump talk about what they're going to do. Why is that? Because they ran up the debt. In each of them, four years in office, half of that debt belongs to them. But I mean, that problem too has become, talking about solving that problem is almost like talking about trying to stop the sun from rising.

I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true. I think, you know, look, we've got to wind down the military. We've got to cut the military budget in half. We can't be the policemen of the world anymore. We're not, you know, doing global hegemony. We need to armor ourselves with the teeth at home. We need to protect the sea lanes and, you know, the neutral areas and have it.

And we need to be able to fight the wars of the future. We're right now spending $9.5 trillion, $9.5 billion, $950 billion a year preparing for wars that will never be fought again. And, you know, the whole, and it's wrong, and we need, it's existential if we don't solve the debt. We have the biggest area that we can have savings of the chronic disease epidemic. It's costing us $4.3 trillion. We can end that very, very quickly. $4.3 trillion is five times our military budget. When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans had chronic disease.

Today, 60% do. Why is that? Why did autism go from one in 10,000 in my generation today, one in every 10,000 70-year-old men has autism, and my kids' generation, one in every 22 boys. Why did that happen? And why did obesity go from 13% when my uncle was president to 50% of our kids today? Why is diabetes, when I was a kid, a typical pediatrician saw one case of diabetes in a 50 year career. Today, one out of every three kids who walks through his office door is pre-diabetic or diabetic.

Why is that happening? Nobody's answering those questions. Why did food allergies suddenly appear in 1989? I have 11 brothers and sisters. I had 70 first cousins. Nobody, nobody I knew had a peanut allergy. Why do five of my seven kids have food allergies? Something happened. And we know the year it happened because EPA answered that question, 1989. Something happened that year that ruined our health.

And we have the highest chronic disease burden in the world today. Nobody else has this happening like us. We had 16% of the COVID deaths in our country, the highest body count on earth. We only have 4.2% of the world's population. What were we doing wrong? Whatever we did was wrong. And CDC says, well, it's just because Americans are so sick. Well, that's, you know, why aren't they telling us why? CDC said the average American who died from COVID

had 3.8 chronic diseases. They had obesity, they had diabetes, they had asthma, and one other thing. Why do we have that and nobody else in the world has that? And, you know, we know it was something that happened in 1989 or thereabouts. And there's a very famous toxicologist in New York who I've used as an expert in many of my cases. His name is Phil Landrigan. He's looked at this issue and he said there's only about 13 things it could be. It has to be an environmental toxin because genes don't cause epidemics. They can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental exposure.

And he said, here's what it could be. It could be glyphosate from Roundup, which follows that timeline. Neonicotinoid pesticides follow that timeline. Atrazine, which is another pesticide on all of our water, 70% of our water now, it follows that timeline. PFOAs and PFAS is a class of what they call forever chemicals. I've litigated on them. They made a movie out of my case called Dark Waters starring Mark Ruffalo. Those chemicals are in all of our furniture. They're in our child pajamas, you know, and again, around that timeline.

High fructose corn syrup, okay, follows that term. And nobody else allows that. It became the leading ingredient for everything. Yeah, for everything, right? Cell phone radiation. And then the vaccine schedule, of course, which went from in 1989, it was a big change here, but we went from the three vaccines I got as a kid

to the 72 vaccines my kids got. And if you look at the manufacturer's inserts for those products, all of those diseases are listed. The neurological diseases, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, autism, autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile diabetes, lupus, Crohn's disease, all these exotic autoimmune diseases suddenly appeared. And then the allergic disease, peanut allergies, food allergies, eczema.

I never knew anybody with eczema. Every classroom has kids with eczema. Asthma and anaphylaxis and obesity. All of those are listed as side effects. So you have to look at those. Probably what's happening is all of those exposures. Our kids are swimming around in a toxic soup today, and their immune systems are constantly being challenged and re-challenged because a lot of these toxics operate along those same biological pathways. And it's the kids probably who have poor mitochondrial function to start off with.

The mitochondria is the energy systems for a cell. And if you target them enough, it paralyzes them, and you go into a cascading effect where you end up with brain damage or with autoimmune disease or whatever. So we're probably challenging and re-challenge them. And the kids who just have a weaker system, who are born with mitochondrial dysfunctions, which would never show in typically human, but if you challenge them enough, assault their immune system enough, that's going to happen. And so, you know, I know how to fix it. And I'm going to fix it very, very quickly.

And, you know, you fix it by doing real science at NIH, by doing good science. NIH, when I was a kid, was the premier scientific agency in the world. It was gold standard. There's premier scientific agency in the world. It was gold standard. There's no other country in the world that has anything like it. And they were doing groundbreaking on every issue. And in 1980, we passed a law that said, called the Buy Dole Act, that allowed NIH scientists to collect royalties on any product that they regulated, if you can imagine that. So, for example, and NIH itself,

the Moderna vaccine was created by NIH, and they own half of it. So they're making billions of dollars on sales of a product that they're promoting, that they're mandating. They're telling you, you can't go to work unless you take this product, and they're not telling you they're making billions of dollars on it. The six top scientists at NIH are making $150,000 a year personally on that product.

So they're paying for their mortgages, their boats, their schools, their kids' education, their alimonies. And, you know, these are the guys who are supposed to be finding problems in those products and protecting us from them. Instead, you know, they're getting rich on them. And when you have those kind of conflicts of interest, those perverse incentives, it makes people turn a blind eye to some of the problems. So I'm going to go into NIH my first week in office.

I'm going to get all of it. And what happened after they passed that act, NIH went from doing this cutting-edge science of tell us how to keep ourselves well. And they became an incubator for new pharmaceutical products. I think it was in 2016, there was 220 new drugs or something like that approved by FDA. And 100% of them came, were incubated through NIH. So NIH is now just a drug development company. And what I'm going to do is go over there and say, we're going to give drug development a break. They have a budget of $42 billion. They distribute that to 56,000 scientists at universities who also collect royalties on new drugs.

And I'm going to say, from now on, we're not going to do anything until we figure out why we have the sickest kids on Earth. And what are the products that are causing that. And then, you know, I'm going to generate enough science on those to make sure that we can put an end to those exposures. Now, you're going to say to yourself, Steve, that even if you figured out that high fructose corn syrup was the culprit. And you still could never get rid of it because the forces behind it are so powerful. It's Monsanto, it's Cargill. A million farmers who are tied up in its production

and entire industries. And all that's true. But the way that you do it is you produce enough science, and different kinds enough science, and different kinds of science, epidemiological studies, clinical studies, observational animal studies, and pediatric studies. All of those, once you get enough science, then the lawyers come in, and they do the work for you because then they come in. If you prove high fructose corn syrup is behind the childhood diabetes epidemic,

and the lawyers round up 10,000 kids with childhood diabetes and sue the company, and that's the end of the show. That's what I did with Monsanto. Everybody said, you'll never get rid of glyphosate. But we had 40,000 clients, all of them home gardeners, almost all home gardeners who had gotten non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from using Roundup. I remember in my adult life individuals uh from ars agricultural research services yeah the division of the usda individuals from there telling me that roundup had the toxicity of coffee yeah well that's what in my adult life well that's what monsanto was telling the public and we got 40 000 people who who said, I got cancer.

Don Johnson's from this particular kind of cancer from spraying Roundup. We sued Roundup, and the way that multi-district litigation works is you get 40,000 cases. You try each one individually, one after the other, back to back, until somebody says uncle and comes to the negotiating table. The first case, we won $289 million for Monsanto. The second case, we won $89 million. The third case, we asked the jury for a billion, and they came back with $2.2 billion.

At that point, Monsanto came to the negotiating table and said, we want to end this. They settled the case for $13 billion for all of the cases, and they agreed to take glyphosate out of home gardening products. So you can stop them. You just need the right science, because once you get the right science, the courts will allow that to be, you know, you go to front of the jury, and that's what I'm going to do do with all of these different exposures there's only 13 of them you know thanks for coming on today I'm getting the I'm getting the time's up symbol I appreciate the conversation man it was really fun talking to you appreciate you coming on I hope maybe if you get a if you get a chance in the autumn when the falconry seasons opens and maybe you'll

come oh yeah I would like to do that i think it'd be fun do you have uh one last question do you ever uh fix up the if you get do you ever like cook rabbits and stuff do you get it you always give it to the bird i used to but my wife cheryl that's what i was going to start the show by telling you how much i'm in love with your wife but i don't want to get off on the wrong foot no she's very lovable dude that that that uh you know i know she's done many things but um i'll tell you one thing if i was going to measure like like uh the highest laughs per minute thing in my life is is curb curb yeah oh that's just like that and she plays such a um she does such a quiet show stealing job on that show yeah she plays common sense oh it's yeah and it makes everything it's like it's it's it's so quietly her like it's so quietly brilliant how she plays that role.

Yeah. I mean, Larry, I lived with Larry for two years during the summer times, and then we vacationed together, and that's how I met Cheryl. When he was still doing Seinfeld, but there was one season when he got divorced from Cheryl, and the next season he shot in New York, and that was the season when he got divorced from Cheryl. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the next season, he shot in New York. And that was the season when they shot the producers. And Cheryl was not on that season.

Yeah. And then the next season, she came back. And I asked Larry about it. And he said, I couldn't do it. She makes me funny. And I'll tell you one thing. She will not allow, which is a dead rabbit in the house or a dead, dead squirrel. Oh, no, I don't love her anymore. Tell her it's over between us. All right. Well, thank you very much for coming on. I appreciate it.

Thank you very much for coming on. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. OnXH is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.