The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 428: Mike Albrecht—Got Wood?

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

As a logger and forester, Mike Albrecht knows a lot about wood. He is the two-time president of the American Loggers Council, and he's on a mission to reintroduce America to one of its most abundant and reliable renewable resources—wood. Mike also speaks to how we can better manage our forests to prevent wildfires.

Hello, friends. It's me again, joined by the ever-popular and I'm the present, Chuck Klaus Meyer. Ever popular, is that right? You're just making shit up, aren't you? I was just saying things, you know? Just making sounds. I wanted to say nice things in the preamble because it occurs to me that I may have been mildly disparaging during the actual episode that's about to unfold. But it was said with love.

It's just sitting here face-to-face or really, whatever, somewhat oblique, you have two laptops open. Yeah. brand new switcher. You have a dedicated GoPro pointing at you and you've got a whole separate monitor. Yeah. And we had a guest sitting next to you the whole time. It was. There was a lot going on. And amusing if I'm being candid. I don't know how amusing you'll find it, folks, at home. But I certainly enjoyed watching Chuck out of the corner of my eye, try and make sense of this podcast, which is a really good one. I'm just going to say. My guest is Mike Albrecht. I'm so glad you found him. Was it Will Swain? Yeah, Will Swain. Basically, we had on Ed Ring and, you know, to talk about the wild fire management. Exactly, right after the fires. And he came from Will because he's also at the California Policy Center. And he said, you know, if you want a good follow up, you should talk to this guy because he is the president of the American Loggers Council.

And I wound up talking to him for the better part of 45 minutes. I told you, you might as well have just recorded it and called that the podcast. because you really did talk to the guy at length. But I see how you got sucked in. He's a wealth of information. He's just warm and funny and real. And really on the cusp of something that, look, this is a big deal, guys.

I'll just spoiler alert. We're calling the episode God Wood. It's because it amuses me. But there are so many things that I learned about our relationship with timber. Part of this is forest management. part of this is fire prevention, but mostly this is a conversation about our dysfunctional relationship with a precious resource. And if you start finding parallels in our energy policy, well, then you're just like us because I'm sitting here thinking, my God, how can we be the largest,

we have more wood in this country. We have more forest in this country per capita than a place in the world. And yet we're the world's largest importer of wood. Yes. Yes. We're the largest importer of lumber, I think, is what we are. And we're the largest creator of lumber in the world. Right. And one third of the nation is forest. Is forest land. Yeah. I mean, there are no new revelations in the energy space, but the fact that all of them translate into the lumber and timber space is, super interesting. Your relationship and your reliance on wood and lumber is more keen than you think. This guy is the tip of the spear. As Chuck said, he's the president of the American Loggers Council, and he's joined by his wife, who is also delightful. Vicky is super sweet, and we throw a mic

near her because she is the first lady logger of the year. Yes, right. And he's so proud of her, and you'll see why. These guys are on a mission. It's an important mission. It rhymes with a lot of what we try and do at MicroWorks, but just super happy to give him a platform and really hopeful that some of the swamp creatures are listening because there's a big, I think it's the FFA,

the Forest First, what's the law? What's the thing that's pending? It's a big bill coming up in front. You know what it doesn't matter? He mentions it. Yeah, because we're about to talk about it. The name of the bill doesn't matter, but its import and its intent is really critical. The question is, got wood?

The answer is provided by Mike Albrecht right after this. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA, making a. a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before, with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider

being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't. just teaching trades, they're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode, join the skilled trades movement, support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town, or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself and see too how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle.

The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S. Skills.S. So Mike Albrecht, you're here with your lovely wife, Vicki, who has taken a position next to the lovely Chuck, who continues to impersonate a producer. As I sit here impersonating a host, it's all coming together.

You're good, Vicky? Yeah. You're happy? Yep. All right. Fantastic. Is she telling the truth? She is, yeah.

She's very truthful. Is she? Oh, yeah. Is that what most attracted you to your wife, her honesty or her good looks or just her personality? What was it? The first time I saw her, she got out of her van, and she had on a. tool belt and she's carrying a tool bucket and she had a 50 foot cord, electrical cord kind of slung over it and I said that is going to be my wife. Wait a minute. So she's wearing

nothing but a tool belt and an electrical cord? This is unbelievable. This is amazing. Vicki. That's all I saw. Maybe. I'm so glad you guys made the time to come down and talk. Full disclosure, I don't have a specific agenda. I'm just overwhelmed with a new level of certainty, having just kind of gone through these fires. I've been talking about forest management and water management and land management with various experts for a long time and it's all been very, what is it,

sort of ethereal or academic or abstract. And then all of a sudden, there's this event. And I suspect you can talk about the Rim Fire and you can talk about the Palisades Fire and you can talk, I mean, you've had a front row seat to so much of this. But as the newly elected, president or have you been in this role for a while? This is my second year of, yeah, last year.

So you're in charge of the... The American Loggers Council. Where does that rank in the pantheon of acronyms in charge? Well, the American Loggers Council represents the nation, if you will, from Nation's Loggers. So every state, actually 45 states have state organizations that represent logging. All those states together combined are the American Loggers Council. So we're looking at about 10,000 companies and about 50 or 60,000 loggers that do the heavy lifting every day to get products to America. I won't lie to you. I'm looking at your notes. There's a yellow legal pad with a lot of really handsome, well, I mean, your penmanship is terrific. You seem very organized. Can we start maybe with myths and misperceptions and, you know, the beliefs, mistaken beliefs that

that people hold about our timber industry in general that have led to this myasm of misunderstanding. Yeah. When people think of loggers, what I would like them to think of is ranchers, miners, farmers, those folks take God's given natural resources that were blessed with and turn them into products that we use. That's what loggers do. We're the same as those folks, only we're working with timber. So our job is to take timber resources and turn them into something that America wants and needs. And that is usually lumber or certainly wood energy,

which we can talk about. But if I can digress a minute, I'll just take, loggers started out, not very well understood, I'll tell you that. When our country was formed, Mike, loggers were some of the first people that went to work. And in fact, back in the early 1800s, Bangor, Maine was not the leading lumber shipping exporter in America.

It was a leading lumber exporter in the world. And this is a colonist, man. They went to work. They said, we can make something out of these woods and started logging. They said the canopy went from Bangor all the way down to like Sarasota. The whole east coast was essentially a forest. Right. You know, I wonder sometimes if people hear that and think,

my God, look, we took it all. People have no sense of how much is left. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and I'll speak to that. So, loggers, pretty soon, five presidents bought up 1.5 billion acres over about 100 years. Lincoln, Pierce, Polk, Adams, different presidents. They bought 1.5 billion acres in the Louisiana purchase to Alaska, and this is interesting, for 3.5 cents an acre. That's what America was purchased for that kind of price from Spain. and Russia and Mexico in different countries. And so one of the first things the government said is go west, folks. They wanted to move, in fact, 11 million people west,

and they couldn't get over the Allegheny Mountains. They finally say, get over there and get going. Well, loggers went out ahead of them. In the 1800s, the Department of Interior managed 80% of America. So their first rule, as a government agency, was you will not cut timber on public land. This is back in the 1800s. So loggers are going, okay, well, there's no boundaries, there's no roads, there's no fences.

We've got to cut timber somewhere. We've got to build the Transcontinental Railroad, and it got off to a very chaotic start. And loggers started getting arrested. They were viewed as thieves and bad people. But that's a terrific place to start. We need to go west. You can't go west. There's no roads.

There's no railroad. There's no path. So the loggers go in first and catch hell for it. Yeah. And you guys have been catching hell ever since. Yeah. It's taken a while to redeem ourselves, I guess, or change that image. But now we're essential to America.

I guess really our image is most tarnished by big environmental groups anymore. That's who we are disliked by. And most of the public doesn't understand us, Mike. But loggers, they get up in the morning between one and four in the morning, and they go to work in the woods, and they do good, honest, hard work, come home at night, support the soccer teams, all the different things in the community. They're just great honest people, just like ranchers and minors and the ones I mentioned. And we're really proud of what we do. So maybe it's PR. Maybe it's how much of your job is involved with crafting an image or perpetuating an image, debunking these perceptions that we're talking about.

Because I think on the one hand, most rational people wouldn't disagree with anything you've said. It's just that we've been presented. I say we, the 330 million people who depend on your industry, frankly, for so much. I mean, ever since Joyce Kilmer, right? I think that I've never seen a poem as lovely as a tree. We like trees. I love trees. People fight over the trees here, trees there, take the tree, don't take the tree.

It gets very emotional, you know. So that's kind of what I want to dig into. What do you do to balance? What we do, part of that is we take people out and tour. We've got to get people out of the cities and out of our schools actually and come out to the woods and see what we do. And it's very interesting when we do that, Mike. We take kids from all over the state and we'll have a tour. And we've got machines that cut down trees that are really neat.

They can grab a tree and cut it down and pick it up and lay it down very safely, very good for the environment. I've seen those. They're mind-boggling. Yeah. They're called Feller Bunchers. So they can cut trees and they put them in bunches. And so we'll do some of that. And when the kids are watching, and this does, I don't, whether it's third graders up through high school,

they'll watch this and then we'll shut the machine off and I'll say, okay, how many of you kids thought when the saw went through the tree, the tree felt that? Over half, whether they're third graders or high school, will raise their hand. Yeah, I think the tree felt that. And I'll say, okay, well, how many of you think when your mom or dad mow the lawn, the grass feels a lawnmower? Never has a kid raised it. And so we are still dealing with an entertainment industry and school teachers that don't know.

They don't know how to teach biology to kids. We've got a generation that's come up and think trees are not only beautiful, but they have something spiritual or different about them. So cutting a tree makes a logger not real popular. It's a kind of anthropomorphism, right? Yeah. Projecting a human quality onto a non-human thing. Chuck, see if you can find a feller buncher there on Google in action.

It is worth looking at. I remember the first time that I saw one. I think it might have been on. a show that I don't want the credit or the blame for, but Axeman was a thing, you know. And I remember the first season that aired. People were taking a position almost that the, that the chainsaw had once upon a time really presented an unfair advantage. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Like Chuck's working it out. I told you, Vicki, feel free to jump in if it gets awkward or whatever. I could use the help, yeah, for sure. That looks like dirty stuff going on there, Chuck. I don't think we can put that up there. Nobody's looking at that now. I am now, the Tiger Cat LX-830D Feller Buncher in Oregon. I want to see that.

I don't know about the girl taking a shower. All right. This is YouTube. What can I tell you? I know. It's a bold new world. Oh, my God. Did that just say it gets men rock hard?

I believe that. Honestly, this is a G-rated podcast. This is the last time you're ever going to ask me to pull anything up on the interwebs is what I'm thinking. She's like, I probably should have just taken the sofa. I probably should be, I didn't have to sit next to him. All right, look, here you go. Yeah, we don't need any audio. I just want to show people what this is.

Just try not to get any audio. There we go. Look at this thing. Yeah, so that's what kids think when they see that happening, they're going, ouch. About half of them are. Yeah, that's a great machine. So you see my point, though, right?

I mean, people think that back in the 1800s, okay, the lumberjacks went into the woods with their double-sided blades and their feathers and their wedges and they started taking trees and okay, okay, right? And then come to chainsawls and then comes this thing. And I guess, you know, if there's some parallel, I think, not justified necessarily, but in the way of thinking with maybe, you know, drag net fishing. like it's just like wait a second you're taking too many it's too easy to get too many fish and now you've overfished the fishery yeah and people are thinking oh you know it's too easy to take too many trees and now you've denuded yeah the forests what people don't know mike is the enormity and the blessing of the forest we have so america has uh one third of the country is covered in forest 800 million acres that's worth repeating just say it again yeah people might have been

zoning out yeah i'll say okay so one third of the United States of America is covered in forests. 800 million acres, our country is covered in forest. And we manage that extremely well with really sophisticated equipment that's very easy on the ground, good for the environment. But in spite of everything we're doing correctly, America is now the number one importer. And I'm going to say that again, number one importer of lumber in the world. And so folks, that means we, compared to India, China, any other country you want to, we buy and

purchase and bring in more wood than any other country in the world, even though we have this vast resource that we could be using and exporting wood. That's really one of the goals of the American Loggers Council is to talk to Congress and say, folks, why are we importing lumber into this country? Why aren't we exporting lumber using our resources wisely? and instead we're seeing so many millions of acres burn up every year. What are the financial realities of doing that? Like, what's the dollars attached to this industry?

And what could it be worth? Like, I liken it to energy independence. Yeah. Why would we import natural gas or oil when we're sitting on a mother load of it? I think the knee-jerk answer is, well, because we don't want to take it. We don't want to wreck our land. We'll let you wreck yours. or some such argument, right?

Yeah, and that is such a backward, that's really a false argument if you're looking at the global environment because nobody, no other country, manages their forests like America. Nobody manages their forest with the rules that we have in America and still get the things done that we do in America.

So we keep track as an industry of how much is grown and harvested every year. And then we do it kind of in five-year increments, taking a look at what's going on. In the last 75 years, we've always grown more timber in our forests than it harvested. In our national forests, I'm speaking up here specifically. I'm sorry, but again, when you look at the feller bunchers on mass, full steam ahead, that claim still holds up. We still grow more than we take?

Yes. In fact, right now, our forests are burning. and rotting twice as fast as they're growing. And we are not able to go out and salvage the products that we need to salvage because of tremendous environmental pressures from groups like the Sierra Club who do not want us into the forest cutting down burned dead trees. And if I were to point to one of our biggest problems, that would be it, our inability to get in and use the dead and dying wood.

Mike, if we just cut one third more of our growth, and one-third of our dead and dying timber, we would be wood independent. We could start to export products. But our industry, I'll just talk about California for a minute, but it's a good example for the nation. California in 1990s had about 150 sawmills. We were doing a lot of milling.

We have 27 now. So we've reduced our capacity from then to California, now imports 80% of our wood products. So America is the leading importer of lumber in the world. California imports 80% of its wood products, and we see our forests rotting and dying, our national forest, our public land, at rates we've never seen before.

It's scandalous. Yeah, it is. It's taken, personally, I've been on this bandwagon for quite a while with Congress. They are now talking about it in Congress. Like some of them are going, wow, we are the leading importer of lumber. Really? And they're starting to do some things about it. But it's taken years to get that, just that simple message. Why aren't we not lumber and wood independent, just like we're trying to get to be energy independent? We can do it. We've got... And what would it save us? That's the number I'm still flailing about for. It must be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

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We import about 25% of our lumber right now, a lot of it from Canada. So we're talking hundreds of billions we could make for American jobs, build new sawmills. So I'm optimistic, Mike, that the change is coming, and some of it is driven by the catastrophes we've seen. And the palisades fired, although I'm not burning in a four-mills. really energized Congress. Congressman Westerman out of Arkansas has put together a bill called the Fix Our Forest Act, which is a good title because it's broken. Let's fix it. Yeah. And he tried to get it passed in Congress last year, and nobody on the Democratic side, sorry folks, I'm not trying to make this partisan, but that's just a fact. Nobody on the

Democratic side voted for it. He reintroduced it about a month ago after the Palisades fire, 64 Democrats instantly jumped on it, past Congress instantly. Nancy Pelosi voted for it, because they've seen the horror of catastrophic fires up close. I do love to say I told you so from time to time, especially to the listeners of this podcast. But I've often said that in conversations like this, things simply have to go splat. Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah.

A splat is never pretty. Sometimes it's downright catastrophic. Was the Palisades a splat? Was Al-Tadena a splat? Is that the kind of, I mean, literally, people need to be slapped upside the head to see it? What was so frustrating to foresters and loggers is we've been slapped up in Northern California

10 times in the last 15 years. The Dixie Fire, a million acres. That was old growth, too. Yeah, that was a lot of nice forest up there. prior to that, the one that really got attention for a while was called the Paradise Fire, the Campfire. That fire, this was horrible. And I don't want to minimize this at all. It's horrible down here.

But that fire, folks burned 18,000 homes. It killed 35 people and burned 150,000 acres. This was just six or seven years ago. Yeah, that was up north. That was in Malibu. Yeah, it's exactly right. So this one got the headlines. And I think, okay, wow, the Fixer Force Act suddenly got through Congress, just like that.

Who was it? Rahm Emanuel said, don't let any crisis go to waste. And I guess here we go. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, it's just another version of people are looking around and waiting for the splat. You know, sometimes maybe it's $8, $9 a gallon. We can always find, you know, a corollary for all of this. But, man, it's a steep price to pay.

Do you think the Dixie fire was preventable? Would it have been preventable had the forest been better managed? So these horrific fires share three things. High wind, drought, and low humidity. You can look at every big fire we've ever had. They share those three things. If we were to thin out trees on our landscape, the chances of them moving from a ground fire to a crown fire,

are definitely reduced. Explain? So people understand. And I will. Let me just say, before I explain that, when you have a hundred mile an hour wind, there's nothing you can do. So there's no sense of blaming anybody or forest management. But under normal conditions, kind of normal wind conditions, you can hold fires down.

Okay, so how do you do that? If you thin out our forests, what you're really looking at is, okay, we've got this very thick, overgrown forest. And we have ground fuel, we have intermediate fuels that go up to the crown. So what we do is we thin out the ground fuel in an intermediate fuel. We call it a fuel ladder. It's like each one's a rung on a ladder climbing up. If we can take out that first couple rungs, a lot of times fire will then just stay on the ground. It won't carry to the crowns of the trees and destroy the forest. So that's our goal when we're logging is to try to thin the forest out, break that fuel ladder down, fuel ladder, so folks are known L-A-D-E-R, and then have fires stay on the ground.

Often then we can follow a thinning project with prescribed fire and actually burn some of the fuel out in a prescriptive manner under good conditions and really make the fire, the forest fire safe. So that's what we're about. And in the meantime, doing all that thinning makes products we need. We can make wood energy out of it, biomass. We're making electrical energy, Mike, in our hometown, out of wood chips. We can power our whole town on this power plant we've got burning wood chips to make electricity. How do you do that? Well, I would love to see Chuck look for some of that video.

It's called Ultra Power to find that if you can. It's wood-powered power plant. Vicki's like, oh, God. Don't make him do this. No, I'm super interested in this because I've done shows around biochar. Yeah. And I'm just continually beset by these examples of that. I don't even know if I can call it recycling.

You're using your own product to basically power your own product to make more of the product that you need to power the product that you want. It's been around for several decades. It's an exciting business. We're very much pushing, or American Loggers, Culture pushes biomass energy. It's simple, Mike, because power plants share this common thing. They got to heat water to steam with something, and then the steam runs a turbine generator set. That's what spins and make things happen.

You can use coal, you can use electrical, you can use electrical, but natural gas, nuclear. In this case, we just use wood to heat the water to steam to power the plant. So it shares a commonality with those plants, but we're using wood that has no other real market. These are the small trees that don't make lumber. So it's a tremendous natural resource that instead of burning it up in a wildfire, if we thin it out ahead of time, we can make a product and make the forest safer. Store it, make the product. Right.

Incredible. Okay, so do people understand that? Is this biochar thing that the average person? No, the biochar is making, and that's another good thing, you can make biochar, which is an additive to agricultural ground, which actually is you're making a charcoal product that you can put into the ground. It'll help it retain moisture.

But that's kind of a minor industry right now, a growing industry. But mainly we make lumber and we make different types of pulp and paper products and we make biomass products to make energy. And biomass is becoming something more important for even liquid fuels. They're starting to look at ways to power aircraft. I'm not sure I'd get in. I'm not if it'd be the first one in an aircraft being...

Powered by wood burning material? Yeah, by actually a fuel that can... Chemicals that come out of the wood, mainly methane. Point being, wood is a tremendous resource that we're finding so many more uses for, but basically we need it for lumber. This is what my prop is right here. Okay, I'm going to bring this...

Yeah, bring in the prop. Here's the prop. So how much lumber do we use every year? This is a board foot. We use about 60 billion of these every year in America to build homes. Why do they call it a board foot? It looks longer than a foot. Yeah, I know.

Well, this one's actually two feet long and six inches wide, but it's 144 square inches, if it's 12 by 12 or however you want to configure it. So actually, this is a board foot, even though it's two feet long. To give folks an example, how much is 60 billion of these? If you start stacking these end-to-end to the moon, which is, 240,000 miles away, if I remember right, I think that's right. 60 billion of these, go back and forth the moon about 40 times. If you can wrap your head around that.

That's how much lumber we use in America every year. Most of which is imported. Well, actually, we do make most of it domestically, but we import about 25% of what we need, and that's ridiculous. We don't need to import anything. We should be making our own. This one shares an interesting sticker on it, says, made in New Zealand. I got this at Lowe's in Sonora. This board came from New Zealand. I cannot

explain to you how this board can be cut and milled and shipped to America cheaper than we can do it ourselves. Don't ask me that question because it's maddening and I don't know the answer to it. But those are the kind of things we've got to look at and go, why is that happening? Why are we not doing this ourselves? Being as fair as you can. Okay. What would the head of the Sierra Club say if he or she were sitting here. And the accusation was, look, you're affirmatively keeping us from going into forest to clean them out. You're affirmatively saying no to all of the things that have been demonstrably shown to improve the environment, which, assumably, purportedly, is your stated goal anyway.

Where's the disconnect? Yeah. If the head of the Share Club was sitting here, they'd be sitting here. they'd be sitting here in this wooden chair with this wooden table in front of them talking into this microphone powered by electricity that's probably very possibly powered by biomass energy by wood you would expose the hypocrisy of the Sierra Club

which their take on this whole thing is we should not be harvesting anything in our national forests period and so I would think that would be an interesting guest to have on some time but I can't speak for them other than their policy are against what we do. I get the policy.

I just don't get the argument. Yeah. I'm missing the part where they're saying, the best thing for the forest is to leave it alone. Are there any facts to support that that you're aware of? No, in fact, the opposite is, the reality is leaving the forest alone is bad for that, for that whole environment.

We've left our forests alone and our national forest now for decades, and they're burning and rotting. We've shut things down. I mean, the parallels between how much we've reduced our timber harvest through forest management, good logging, and how much is now burning up. It's an inverse. We've shut it down to use it, and now the rotting and burning has climbed dramatically. And it's as clear as the nose on a person's face.

And honestly, Mike, I put environmental groups into three categories. The first category would be environmentalists that really care about things, but they're willing to talk to you and think about it. And when they see a tour, they go, you know what, maybe we're wrong about this. The second group are kind of like, I call them cave people. Citizens against virtually everything. That's kind of where they are. They're just, that's how they are. And then the third group.

I'm opposed. Yeah, I'm just opposed to, yeah. And then the third group are really the deep extreme, and it's an industry. It's an environmental industry. I'm going to ramble on here too much, maybe, but I got it, how big it is now, Mike. So environmental groups have to register in America to be a 501C3 to get their nonprofit status. There are 30,471 environmental groups registered in the United States of America. They have 138,000 not members, employees.

they have an annual income of over $28 billion. They have a war chest of about $80 billion. I shouldn't say a war chest. I'll say a balance sheet because we're not at war with a lot of these people. We can work with some of them. But we're up against... They're at war with you. Yeah, they're an extreme group.

Why some of them want to stop things, I really think they want to see a lot of the world depopulated, but I'm not going to get into that kind of thing. Well, that's a Malthusian, right? Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, I mean, even with all the headlines around population collapse, I mean, it really looks to be a very serious thing, but you still hear guys from some big egg heads all the way to Bill Maher, who are just saying, look, the resources aren't here to support the people we have. And here we are. I'm still trying to get my head around the earlier claim that a third of our country is forest. And I'm reminded of like the blind guy and the elephant, right? He doesn't know what he's touching. And he just is. assumes that the whole of the thing is, whether it's the tail or the trunk or the tusk, right?

And I think, you know, I flew across the country yesterday at a window seat. I didn't see any forest. Flew across the whole country. What I saw was a vast wasteland. Right. You know, and I get it. That's, you know, that's where the flight paths are. But most people who stay in their lane and in the flight path, they don't see the forest.

And if we can't see it, if we can't touch it, then it just becomes unwelcome. real to us. It's just worth belaboring a third of the country is forest. It's incredible. Right. And it's managed by really good people that we call loggers. And that's what we're about. And, you know, one of the things I think, Mike, that folks need to know is loggers are trained. They're certified. They're licensed. They have to take tests to even become a logger in California. You have to have 3,000 hours of experience before you can even get a licensed timber grader's certificate. So, you know, one guy, I had an interesting talk one time, loggers are just those knuckle-draggers that walk around and they, you know, like cavemen.

That image is gone, I think, or it should be gone. We are professional people, really proud of what we do. It's gone in the church that you attend. It's gone into the choir you preach to. Yeah. But I tell you, man, this is a great transition because we could talk about the macro for hours, but it's the micro. It's the individual loggers that I really want to pick your brain on because I do think those guys are still subject to the same sorts of stereotypes that have been around since Paul Bunyan. I think farmers are still subject to, you know, Billy Bob and the overall is clear in the South 40. You know, eight hayseeds. Mechanics are still relegated to knuckle dragon grease monkeys and so forth. These are very powerful images.

Right. You know, in fact, I remember the future Farmers of America telling me right before I addressed 30,000 of their members back in 2008 that were now officially referred to as the FFA. Because the word farmer itself had become an impediment to their ability to recruit. Right. So, yeah, I'm always fascinated by these images and by these stereotypes and the impact they have, not just, just on your industry, but on our country. Do do do do do do do.

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We're proud of that word. It has a connotation that folks, I don't know where it comes from, maybe all our history, but for a while they've tried to change what we do. Let's call it timber harvesting. Let's call it forest thinning. Let's call it vegetation management. Let's call it post-traumatic stress disorder, not shell shock anymore. Forest health workers.

No, we're loggers. And that's what the American Loggers Council is all about, is trying to educate folks on what we do, why we do it. And we're making tremendous progress. In fact, what's coming, Mike, is wood is now being viewed by the world, as the premier building product. You may have heard of mass timber or cross-laminated timber. We're seeing around the world skyscrapers being built out of wood.

Whoa. Yeah. Where? 30, 40. Denver, Colorado to Denmark. All over the world. It's something worth maybe doing a show on sometime. It's called mass timber or cross-laminated timber.

God help me, Chuck, but can we find a wooden skyscraper? Probably not. Probably not. But there's some beautiful... It's not all the porn hub, by the way. There's some beautiful examples of wooden structures being built all over the world. So one of the leading architects in the world was saying, and I'll get this sort of right,

but he said something to the effect of the 17th century was the century of rock. The 18th century was the century of steel. The 19th century was a century of brick. The 20th century was a century of rock. the 20th century was a century of concrete. The 21st century is a century of wood. We're going to go back. We're headed in the right direction. Is that? Yeah, there you go. That's wood. Even though that's been painted, it looks like. That's a good job, Chuck. That looks good. Chuck, we're going to keep you around for another week, man, I feel so good. Look at that. Tiki, you've got to be proud to be sitting next to a guy that's so close to being a producer.

That's amazing. This is what's going to bring us around is when the world starts to see how, important wooden structures and how beautiful they are and how they can replace other types of building materials. And hey, folks, wood is a renewable resource. All this other stuff we dig up. And I'm not against any of them. The cement and all I hope. Don't get me wrong. I mean, it literally grows on trees. Am I right? Easy, Sparky. Yeah. Okay, please. Can you do something? Well, can I just ask the screamingly obvious question about the risk of wooden structure might pose, especially in its high-risiness? I mean, does the cross lamination, is that some sort of fire retardant?

So there's a couple things. Will they fall over, you know, in an earthquake? So to build this stuff, you've got to pass all these tests. So wood, wooden structures, high-rise, when they put them on shaker platforms and shake them. And they hold together better than concrete brick. steel, they kind of compete with steel. Fire-wise, they're absolutely, they're not fireproof by any means,

but it's like holding a matchup against the log. It won't start on fire. And so these wooden beams are just solid superstructures that, you know, if a fire got going in somebody's bedroom and that got going, maybe it would. But no, they've passed all the fire tests and they're extremely safe from a structural integrity and from fire.

As safe as brick? Yeah, safer than brick when it comes to earthquake. I'll give it to you, brick won't burn. But I'm going to Google up sometime as a cross-laminated timber skyscraper burned yet. I haven't heard of one. As a cross-laminated. Or mass timber, yeah. Mass-timbered skyscraper burned yet.

Yeah. I mean, look, again, that's just one of those things that creates enough cognitive dissonance in the average person's brain. hand, that they, all they can do is stare at you like a cow looking at a new gate. You know, it's like, so you're telling me the wooden, I live up in San Francisco, God help me. And, you know, that was a wooden town once upon a time. And after that earthquake, that thing went up like flashpaper. Yeah. And that's seared into my sort of, you know, imaginary reptilian repta, god, you know, it wouldn't have been that bad if everything had been brick.

You know, these beams are often two feet by two feet. I mean, they're just huge. They're the strength of steel, and they, I guess I'm not prepared to convince you that. No, I'm just trying to be, look. Yeah, I know what people would think. You and I are in such violent agreement. It would be boring. I just sit here and just nod my head and go, yeah, but I mean, look, first of all, you're telling me this country is a third forest.

Yeah. Secondly, you're telling me that the future of building materials is wood. Yep. Okay. Yep. I can't wait to your number three. Well, and the number three is the still is the, problem is we're the leading importer of wood in the world. That's the one that doesn't resonate

in there. And that's what the American Loggers Council is working hard on. So you're back to, yeah, loggers, how are we viewed by people? I just, I'm sorry, I just got to happen real quick. Yeah. We're the leading importer. Right. Of wood. But we basically use 75% as a country. So even though we're only importing 25% of all the wood we use, we are the overall, in the aggregate, the leading importer of wood. California, on the other hand, is importing 80% of its timber products. Of its timber products. And California, by way of comparison, state by state, who has more wood than California? Maybe Alaska. Okay. Yeah, maybe Alaska. Well, they don't really count though. Yeah, well, what's going on in Alaska. Yeah, yeah. Russia wants that back,

I'm sure. So on chat GPT, it says here that as of February 2025, there have been no reports of cross-laminated timber, CLT skyscrapers, burning. In fact, CLT has been extensively tested and is recognized for its fire resistant properties. When exposed to fire, CLT forms a protective charred layer that insulates the inner wood, allowing the structure to maintain its integrity for extended periods. This charring process enables CLT buildings to withstand fire. often outperforming traditional materials like steel in certain fire scenarios. Okay. No, that's interesting. And the charring is interesting. Yeah. Yeah, that is interesting. So, yeah, there you go.

It forms a protective layer that, oh, now it won't burn. So you use fire to char the wood, so it won't burn. Yeah. That's what I meant to say, Chuck, all that stuff. Yeah, yeah. That's good. Yeah. I'll tell you what's unfortunate.

It's CLT. Also the airport designation for Charlotte, which leads me to the next question. question. Wooden planes? Are they coming? That's how we started, right? Right. Was it the spruce goose basically a wooden plane? It did not do well. No. Yeah. It was a wooden plane, but it didn't spruce very well. Well, any, or goose. When you force rhymes like that into technology, the spruce goose, you were attempting fate. Let me speak real quick, Chuck to another, excuse me, Mike, to another problem that we have with these forest fires.

and that's the smoke, which you saw from the top of the building looking across huge, huge volumes of smoke. So there's smoke and there's the watershed effects, and I want to hit them both real quick. How bad is this smoke problem? When we're breathing, it's horrible. Drifting smoke, they call it. Yeah, yeah. So a UCLA study just came out, and it looked at the fires in California, the 2020 fires, which was a bad year. Here was their conclusion.

I'll read one sentence. Wildfire emissions in 2020 essentially negated 18 years of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, all our electric cars, all this stuff we've been doing to ourselves, and not in a bad way, but we're trying to improve. That one wildfire season negated. It offset 18 years of all of that. So smoke is worse than just a noxious. said we don't like breathing it. This thing really wipes out our greenhouse gas advances that we make.

So really something for folks to be aware of that another reason burning up our forest is really, really bad. Watershed. Our forests supply about 75% of the water in California comes, when I say supply, it sheds the water, it comes out of the mountains, 75% of California's water. and we're often short on water. If we were to thin our forests and take out what, it's a good example. If you look at a bunch of a drinking cup with straws in it, each one of those trees is like a straw taking water out of the ground.

It's called evaportranspiration. An average-sized pine tree, Mike, takes about 200 gallons, not per week, per day, out of, the ground, 200 gallons a day. So that much water, and so when you've got millions of trees more than you need, we're losing millions of gallons. Hundreds of millions of gallons a day. A day, yeah. Just being like a straw sucked right out of the coast. So if we could thin some of those trees out, make them into products, reduce the fire danger. We also will improve our water supply and get rid of this smoke problem. I mean, it's such a win, win, win. So yeah,

if you have the Sierra Club guy sitting here and go, why aren't we doing this? I don't know the answer to that. But we ask politicians why we're not doing this. And we're making some good traction now. We go back to Washington, D.C. every year, the American Loggers Council. We used to meet with staffers, which we loved meeting with the staff. Now we meet with the Speaker of the House. We meet with the Speaker of the Senate, the head of the Senate.

We meet with the head people. They're like, hey, we want to hear from you guys. What do we need to do different? Fix our Forest Act is coming. It's a new day coming, Mike. And I'm optimistic about that. the future, even though it's been a tough go. Well, we've been watching a lot of splats happen here and there.

Before I really ask you about the daily life of a logger and ask you to make a case for a man or woman who might want to enter that industry, and before we talk about some of the recruiting challenges therein, I'm still stuck a little bit on the anthropomorphism that you alluded to earlier, you know, when half of the kids and all of those surveys, indicate that they believe the tree felt pain when it was being cut. Right. You know, I don't know that you outgrow that. I think from what I've seen, that's a belief structure that metastasizes, like most beliefs do,

and it gets, you know, firmly held. And you see it in, you know, Gaia and Mother Earth and so many examples. Wizard of Oz. Yeah. And so suddenly, I mean, I'll get, I'll catch all sorts of hell for saying it. if somehow the species doesn't see itself at the very top of the food chain and as the proximate cause of all the environmental trouble in the world, then that's when people start to push. They're like, no, no, it is up to us. We are in charge as if we were in charge of Pangaea or Tambora

or Krakatawa or the last earthquake or the next earthquake. I just marvel when I think about how quickly the earth will revert to whatever just fine means for the earth. Right. It'll shrug and will be gone. Well, we can, you know, when you talk about we're in charge, we can only be in charge of what we can really be in charge of. Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, crack atoa, those are acts of God. We can start a forest fire and we can put out a forest fire.

That is what's different about fires and we can be in charge of that dynamic when a fire starts in a hundred mile an hour wind no I'm not talking about that but we can do a lot as a society to prevent forest fires like Smokey the Bear said and that's where we need to go

and we need to do it in spades we need to get serious about it and the crisis that we've seen is driving it and it's finally yeah maybe we've been slapped finally the time that we're going to to get it. Maybe. But, you know, back to kids and teaching and stuff and how do they get this idea. Vicky can tell this story better than me, but we often have the teachers come and we'll teach Forest Institute for teachers, and we'll teach the teachers. And one time we had that, and this lady

came up to Vicky later, and she's in tears almost, and Vicki goes, what's the matter? She says, I've been teaching these kids wrong my whole life about everything you do and about trees. And so she said, man, I'm going to start teaching the truth. Okay, well, we need to do a lot more... That's a parapetia. That's a peripatetic moment in the narrative when the protagonist realizes everything he or she thought she knew is wrong.

Yeah, yeah. That's a very, very hard thing to get your head around. But would you give Vicki your mic for a sec? Because I'm going to hear from her in a moment after I make this next salient and unforgettable point. it's really just repeating what you said. We have to focus on the things we can do, but we also have to be very realistic about the things we can't control.

And when you call Krakatoa an act of God, that's a tough sell today. In the same way you don't want to make this political, I don't want to make it religious. But what would have happened back when Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein? That was that famous summer. Was it Krakatoa or was it Tambora? I don't remember which one.

Timbora, right? So giant volcano, huge cloud. Talk about the impact of smoke. Goes around the world, basically, blocks out the sun. Right. Wound up changing migratory patterns for humans in this country. Indiana wouldn't be where it is, but for the changing patterns of migration as a result of this volcano. It plunged the world into this preternatural gloom.

darkness, it screwed up the farming cycles, the seasons. Poor Mary Shelley's right in Frankenstein locked up in Switzerland in some crazy hotel. My question is, what would we do today in the wake of that? Would the next 30,000-plus environmental agency to emerge be the agency committed to somehow putting an end to volcanoes? That is so great. You mentioned that because I think of that same thing, only I think of it in terms of the dust bowl. What would we do today if that occurred were, and I remember reading interesting in religion for a minute. So I remember reading about it and some pastors saw this first black, they thought it was the apocalypse. They thought it was the end of the world. That went on for four or five years. People didn't sweep things off. They

shoveled their houses out. What would happen if that happened today? Who would we blame? How would we view something like that. Same example. We would look for a cause. We'd look for a cause. Because we would fundamentally believe that because we're at the absolute top of the food chain, it must be within our control. Right. So we either caused it or it's incumbent upon us to prevent it. Right. Right? So that... But you can't prevent Crackatoa and you can't produce, but the, but forest management, you can

prevent a lot of things. And you can't cure all the ails. You can't stop every fire, but you can certainly make things safer. People can do things with forest management around fire that you can't do on any of these other things we're talking about, earthquakes or those are going to happen. And that's what makes forest management, firefighting, and all that an interrelated, very important thing for people to get. And by thinning and preventing, we're making products. For goodness sakes, you know, it's like how simple can this possibly get? Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my

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dot com slash row pure talk it's complicated because it's neither fish or foul right it's not crackatoa but because it's going to happen to your point when the winds are blowing and the humidity's low and there's drought yeah there's not much you can do yeah but during all these other times there are things you can do so you can mitigate it yeah you can't mitigate a volcano you can't mitigate an earthquake. That's why the fire is so vexing because it feels like we ought to be able to do more to stop it. Yeah. And surely we can. We can. But we can't necessarily eliminate them.

Right. And so we have to, I don't know, there's a humility in this, right? Yeah. He used the elephant thing a little while ago. It's like eating an elephant. You got to get started and we are well started at it. We are doing great things. Hey man, I don't want to make any trouble for you, but you start to talking about eating elephants. You have any idea that mail you're going to get? I'm sure that's on the naughty list somewhere. Yeah, okay. Yeah, we're not going to eat any.

Pita's going to get me. Dude, they got a file on me. They can thick as a brick. We'll come back to you in a second, but your beautiful wife, the lady logger of the year. Yeah. Say something smart, Vicki, about education. And what's a nice girl like you doing out there with a bunch of feller bunchers?

And tell everybody, the first thing you said about logging when you met me. Oh, well, Mike loves this story because when I first met him, one of the things I said was that I really, really did not like logging trucks. No, she said hated. That's a form of intense dislike. Sure. And the reason behind that was because I was a single mom at the time and would drive to

town on a little two-lane road and logging trucks would pass me. I'd be going 55 and they would pass me on these windy roads. And the ones that were doing it, it was pretty unsafe. They'd throw up gravel and break my windshield and I didn't have the money to pay for it. And so people know we're talking about these a possibly long flatbeds with these giant trees, a dozen of them, chained. You do look at that and go, boy, I don't want to be behind it when that chain snaps. Well, most logging trucks drive really well and have great drivers. I just happened to get behind a couple of wild ones.

So that's where my impression came from that I didn't like logging trucks. And then you learned he was a logger? What, you guys are dating at this point? Or about to date or what? Well, we actually, we met at Thanksgiving and he proposed January 4th. So we didn't have a few, however many weeks later. So logging didn't really play into it except. that I didn't really want to meet someone from out of state.

I was living in Oregon at the time, although I'm a native Californian. And so my sister asked if I wanted to meet him, and I said, well, if he's from California, no, not really. And she lied. Well, just because I wasn't going to move. And she lied, and she said, well, actually, you know, he has a logging company, and I think he's planning on moving his company to Oregon.

And there was zero truth in that. That's the big lie. That's what got us together. But there was purpose behind that because we've been married now for 26 years. Oh, logging. A love story. So you meet on Thanksgiving and December goes by and then you're halfway into January and you propose. Over the phone from California.

Over the phone because nothing says romance. Like, yeah, like, honey, trust me. I'm down on one knee and I'm holding this amazing ring for you. Well, here's how the conversation went. So I, so we're talking. I said, Vicki, will you marry me? And there's this long pause.

And so I go, well, do you need more time to think about it? And she goes, no. And I go, well, no, you won't marry me or no, you don't need more time to think about it. And she said. And I said. And I laughed and I said, no, I don't need more time to think about it. And yes, I'll marry. What in the world did he do in six weeks?

I mean, was this good timing all around? What kind of game does this longer have? People want to know. You know, I was not looking to get married. I had two young boys. And truly, God brought us together. I could tell a 15-minute story, which I won't. that just every single step of the way, that's what it was.

So it just felt like something bigger than you. Yeah. Well, what I realized probably about 10 years later is the reason that Mike's sister intuitively knew that we should be together is because we are so much alike. And I think that we tuned into that pretty instantly. Yeah. So from I hate logging trucks to Lady Logger of the Year, I knew.

I knew what was coming. What did she do to get Lady Longer of the Year? How does this happen? And has there ever been a Lady Longer of Year? No, she's the first one. And the president of our association said, we're going to start doing this, and Vicki's going to be the one.

And actually, what she does, she works behind the scene. She does all sorts of work for our associations. That's how she got to be Lady Longer of the Year. We put on the National Convention in Sonora, California, in last October, and she pretty well put that whole thing together. She believes in what we do, and she believes in the people, loves the logging community.

And all the things you've written about, all the different jobs and all that, I don't know if you've ever written about loggers, but they would be right in your wheelhouse. You would love us, too. We're just great, honest, hardworking people. And that's, Vicki, you saw that, and she's part of it. But she's always behind the scenes doing things. She never had to do a, she never won the axe throw or anything like that. So it's just always hard, hard work supporting our industry. And that's how got her that recognition, and it was well deserved. With his double-bladed accent, his hobnail bootie goes where the timbers tall. Hey, Paul, Paul Bunyan.

Wow. Okay, so I'll start to land the plane somewhat. Okay. Around work, you know, what kind of people today? who you're looking for in your industry? What kind of person who really doesn't know much about your industry ought to consider it? And why? That's a really good question because the industry is rapidly changing right now, Mike,

in terms of the equipment we use and the technology that we employ. And kids really are into technology and joysticks and different things. So the reason to get into logging not is to because you like joysticks and stuff, or electronics, but it's not setting chokers and chainsaws. It's a job, I think, that kids can be attracted to because it uses a lot of technology for sure. But it still takes kids that get up in the morning and want to get to work at two or three in the morning and work hard and make a good living. And there's a lot of those kids out there.

There's a lot of kids that are in college right now. They come out of college with debt, and they're like really don't know what to do. So what we're trying to do right now is to get into high schools and show young people that there's an honest, good living out there doing logging. And probably in 15 years, Mike, 20 years, that feller buncher you just saw,

you'll be able to operate it right here from L.A. in Sonora. We're working with a company right now that is teleoperating equipment. There's a machine called a skitter that drags the logs after the Felder Buncher puts it down. He's operated that skitter from a thousand miles away with teleoperating electronics with cameras on the machine and sensors and GPS. So the Tesla type stuff on the highway is coming to the logging industry. That's not the reason to get in it necessarily, but I think it attracts the young folks that go. this is kind of cool. Same thing with farming.

The miracle of modern agriculture has been hidden from view from a whole generation. There's so much big science. There's so much incredible tech in all of it. But what happened to you? What was it about the industry that got you and how did you start working in it? Oh, that's so we're going to go back about 55 years for that. At about 15 years old, a lot of young guys that logging that age back to, then we started firewood cutting. And so we started a firewood business, and Mark and Wayne and I

started this firewood business together, and we cut trees and made firewood and did all sorts of great things. And we weren't driving yet. We were just kind of stacking it up. But as soon as one day we were working and had ropes and stuff and dragging stuff up, and we thought, okay, let's figure out how to yard this stuff up a hill. So our pastor was a log or two. He came up, put a block and tackle in the tree, rope, okay, and we started dragging stuff up. So we had a truck pulling stuff up, and we were all working together,

and we'd load and unload firewood, and we started a business, and it was really great. And the difference in our little business was Mark was blind and was blind from birth. He would be a great person for you to write about in your book. He's a kind of guy that you would write. and... Mark was a logger. Mike was a logger, and he was blind.

He could load and unload the truck with firewood. This was back when they're kids. He didn't go into logging as a profession. And we could teach him how to drive the truck to pull logs and say, hey, Mark, stop and go and back up. And it just was a great way for us to get started because it... Vicki, am I hearing this right? He just told me the blind guys driving the truck?

Yeah. That's what I heard. Well, let me tell you what we used to... As soon as we got our driver's license, what I did with Mark, the blind guy. He had a Model A, his dad got, so we got in the model, and I said, hey, Mark, let's go take that out on the highway.

So I said, you get behind the wheel. I'll sit in the passenger side and I'll steer, and off we went, out onto the highway. Because Mark knew how to drive. He knew how to shift and do all that stuff because he practiced around on his ranch. And so Mark was a, it taught me that handicapped is only in the eyes of us beholders. Mark wasn't handicapped. He knew what to do. But anyway, that's how I got started in logging.

I went from that to, actually went to school, got my Forrester degree. I'm a registered forester also. Duke, right? Duke, yeah. And we got a kick-ass basketball team. You know that. That's what we're... And then we went on a wooden floor.

Yeah, we play on a wooden floor, yeah. Now I'm president of the American Loggers Council, and it's been a great ride all in between. What's the YSS all about? Oh, that's a reason that we've got in our little community. It's a group, a consensus group. collaborative group where we get these environmentalists that I say want to work with us, we all get together and we say, okay, we had the rim fire, we don't want that anymore, what are we going to do? And so, yeah, we got together and we're going to thin the forest,

we're going to get things replanted, we're going to, no litigation. We said, nobody show up here to sue it because we're against that. And we salvaged 300 million board feet after the rim fire because we kept any litigants out because we all got along. So it's a local group of folks that get together and make things. happen. Do you think that's what's going to, is that the way forward? Yes. For everything maybe? Yes. Absolutely. Things locally are where you can make things happen. If you wait for Washington, if we wait for Sacramento and all their bureaucratic, we're going to wait a long time. But if we can get together locally, we can make things happen. So in Toalamy County, which is in kind of the center of

the Sierras, we're building our seventh wood processing facility in that county. We've got two sawmills still. We've two biomass plants, we've got a wood shavings plant, we're building things because our community gets it and we get together. I'm going to digress if I can take a little more time of how this can work the other way. And when an environmental, a big extreme group gets in the way, there was a project called Tukuya Ridge down on the Los Padres National Forest, Santa Antoan Wind Country, and they said this little community of about 3,000 called Mount Pino said, we want to build a fuel break around our community. We want to clear so we don't burn up. We got about 3,800 homes here. We want to be safe. How big is a fuel break, by the way, so people understand how wide.

Yeah, and by the way, usually they're shaded, so it's not just a clear cut. You thin it out pretty aggressively. In this case, I think this was a 300-foot fuel break, which is going to work in most things, not a hundred mile an hour wind. You can't, okay. So the Mount Pino's community group got together, says, we want to do this. The Forest Service said, yep, let's do it. The Kern County Fire Department supported them. They put it out for scoping it's called so everybody could weigh in on it. Let's move it forward. Gets ready to go. In comes the Center for Biological Diversity out of Tucson, Arizona, and says, no, no, no, you're not going to do that because you're going to endanger the Condor, and it's in a roadless area. Really? Okay. We'll go to court. Two years later,

district court says, yep, you're good to go. Now, Center for Biologic Diversity, we're going to take it to the Ninth Circuit. They sued again. It took six years to get this fuel break built. Luckily, there wasn't a fire. I don't know what would have happened, but it would have burned a place down is what would have happened. That's an example of how it doesn't work when an extreme group that doesn't live in the community comes and says, we don't like that for whatever reason.

I'll tell you what, it's not good for the condor. Yeah, yeah. It's a windmill. Yeah. Have you seen that? Have you seen these, the condors and the kites? Big birds just flying straight into them all at the time. Yeah, there's lots of documented bird kills.

The spotted owl is probably known more than the condor. After lots of studying, really took a lot of studying, they figured out the scientists, what's killing the spotted owl is wildfire, killing their nest, and the barred owl. which is a bigger owl that actually kills a spotted owl, eats their eggs. It's not logging. It's the lack of logging that's killing these animals off because our forests are burning up. So these are all the kind of things the American Loggers Council and others try to get up to Congress. We're going in another month and we bring these facts to people and they go, you know what? We're starting to hear you here.

And Westerman heard us and he's now got to fix our forest act. And I'll tell you, listeners, it's through the House. We've got to get the Senate to pass it. It's at the Senate doorstep right now. Fix our Forest Act. When's the vote? Do you know? Got to schedule a vote.

The Senate, they have a few committees. And so we just need to call our senator. We've got two senators here and say, folks, this is a good thing. Push it through. I know that you've obviously got a clear and present bias, but do you liken this and this? and the importance of this topic to energy independence. Oh, what a great comparison. Okay, I'll just, we don't want to talk politics, I know, but the Trump, I don't care either.

It was a Trump administration that said, look, we can be energy independent, and he got us there at about four years. We started a keystone pipeline and did things that said, made sense. We have more energy in this country than any other country. same thing with wood products. Yes, we just need the administration to go, this is really important. We can be wood independent. I don't want to be wood independent.

I want to export wood, Mike. I want us to export our wood and our technology. I'll tell you this is an interesting fact. Half the wood in the world is still used for heating and cooking. You know, you've seen it in National Geographic, these ladies that carry wood on their back for five miles because they've denuded Cambodia or Ethiopia or wherever. We need to be helping those countries with wood products and technology

on how to get things going. They've got to get through their own industrial. Yeah. Right? I mean, they're burning dung and wood. They've got to get to coal and oil and then gas. And then maybe we can talk about hydro or solar or wind or fusion. Yeah.

We're fishing. Yeah. But we need to be able to show up to those countries, say, hey, folks, He said, we've got wood for sale. We've got pellets, wood, biomass, whatever. But no, we're importing it because we are shutting our industry down. And that's, we're making a big push on that, and it's working. But it's going to take a while.

It's like turning the aircraft carrier. Vicki, did he forget anything? Are you sitting there going, gosh, if only you would have mentioned, blah, blah, blah? That's a good question, because you usually is your last chance. I'm about to look into this bag of swag you brought me and unwrap the treats. You know, I got a question, though. Sorry. Oh, dear.

My question is, you know, I know that you said, like, it all grows on trees, right? This wood grows on trees. The biomass can help us with energy. We can build more with wood. And I've seen cross-cutting, like in Washington State. I've driven past a section where they take out of, like, an acre here, and it's like a checkerboard. It's like, how long does it take from the time you clear that piece of a checkerboard till it grows high enough, big enough, that you can clear it again.

Yeah, that's a great question. It takes a little longer in the west than it does in the south. So in the southern United States, you can have a new crop of trees ready for harvest in about 25 to 30 years. It grows quicker. Here it's about 50 years. In the meantime, you can do some intermediate cutting, thinning it out, getting some products as you thin that, and then it's ready to harvest, say, in 50 or 60 years.

And it has to be replanted. we don't cut anything and not replant it. That's a law, but it's, of course, we want to because that's our business. That's our livelihood. So that get the answer. Yeah, yeah, that answers my question. Well, it's a slightly different analogy than the energy one. It's more like fisheries.

You know, you can overfish. And if you don't take care to not do that, if you don't let fish in game do what they do, well, then you're just shooting your own feet off. Right. So obviously it's right. you guys are motivated. I would think. Yeah.

My same self-preservation, would you bring me? My favorite thing's in the front, and it's a challenge coin, right? Right in the very, if you turn it around in the front pouch, it's way in the front. Yeah, you're going to. Can I say something while you're working with zippers? I can't stand it. Okay. I want to say that we've got some good things going with the Forest Service, too, even though, you know,

Forest Service has been, we've had some problems over the last couple decades. The American Loggers Council just signed a memorandum. of understanding with the Forest Service that's promoting our timber industry, new markets, and logging. That's a big deal. It's a big deal. And it's exciting. And it's showing, I think, where the future is.

People are getting it. Nice. So that's the, whatever that is. That's a lapel pin. And that's your challenge going down there. That's a lapel pin? Yeah. Yeah.

How big a lapel you think I have? Well, that's what we really want you to see what's, we want to be noticed. That's great. That's great. While you're looking through that, Vicki's got a question. now. Go ahead, Vicki. Well, actually, just a statement that if we were really wisely managing our forests and

getting our timber off of our forests, one thing I think that's important for people to realize is that doesn't cost the Treasury, our government money. That will bring in a lot of money to the Treasury as well as making the industry healthier and providing jobs. Well, that's a great point. I was just at CPAC. I was just in the belly of the beast in D.C. And I saw Elon on stage with a giant chainsaw. The metaphor is not lost.

You know, this is not the time to ask the taxpayers to step up to do a thing. Yeah. Or the feds. Whatever you're on about, it has to be self-funding. It has to be self-perpetuating, right? Yeah, yeah. It feels like that anyway. And I'm so glad you mentioned that because that's a really good point.

This can make money as we're doing the work. Right. Right. It's the greatest bag of swag I've ever got on the podcast. It's like, I got, this is playing cards? Yeah, yeah. Chicken Ranch, playing cards? Yeah, yeah.

You don't explain that? Well, that's where we had our convention at the Chicken Ranch Casino. In Nevada? In Sonora. Sonora, California, yeah. Oh, that's a really good book to. Why would anyone cut a tree down, right? Yeah, this is the, yeah.

Look that. But it answers the question in a very positive way when it's over. Yeah, it starts out like really. All right, terrific, too. Chuck is one for you, too. No, I got a box. I got a bag as well. Well, that's right. You already interviewed him for the podcast. This is great, huh? Good. This stuff all comes in handy. Nuts. Good.

Yeah, the best ones there. All right. Final thoughts. Why is chopping wood so satisfying? What is it? I've thought a lot about it and read a lot of poetry about it. Got my own thoughts, but I'm just wondering. Yeah.

I think because you see instant results. You see something made quickly. And that's why I think it's satisfying. That's what Einstein said. People love cutting wood because they like to see instant results. Yeah. And Henry Ford said, uh, oh, that makes me feel really good because I, I made that at myself. You just went off Einstein.

Yeah, I didn't even know it. Yeah, I mean, I'm not quite there, but. Your husband had a brain the size of a redwood. It's amazing. Yes, he is incredible. Anyway, sorry. Ford said, a, oh, chop of your own wood. it'll warm you twice.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. I'll leave the listener with this. My earliest memories are of block and tackle and feathers and wedges

and watching, for a while watching and then accompanying my dad and my pop back into the woods behind our little house. We were about 50 acres. We didn't own it. It was the states,

but nobody could develop it. And our house was heated by wood stoves. Yeah. I'm watching those two men go back there and pick a tree and then fell. it. They played it like it was a game show, right? It was like, here, the thrill they got from watching a fall where they wanted it. Right. And then the chainsawls, and then the cutting,

and then back to the woodpile, and then the splitting. It was just something primal and practical. Yeah. And there's some artistry about it. Oh, my God. Yeah. Such a right way to, you know, go with the grain and how to, it gets in your blood. I can see how it happened. Yeah. Well, it's in, and so in the American Loggers Council, it's in the blood of about, 60,000 of us, and I think the timber industry is going to grow, and we're going to have more loggers. We're getting younger loggers in, and we've been through some tough stuff, but better times ahead. You watch. Let's get together in 10 years, and we'll talk about mass timber. All right. I do have one.

Yeah. Poor Chuck. I know, I'm sorry. We're over. I'll be all right. Go ahead. Is there a school, an academy, a learning type of situation that people enroll in in order to get into your industry. If so, what and where? Very good. They're just starting up. So Shasta College in California has logging equipment, and they're working with Sierra Pacific Industries. Sierra Pacific's giving them 30,000 acres. They have the equipment, state-of-the-art stuff, filler bunchers, and they said, kids come on, get into our program. It's a school-certified program. Not a four-year school. No, it's a weeks, a few weeks or say a couple months of training. What's a cost?

I don't even know if there is a cost. Hilo. It's a junior college. No, there isn't a cost, but it's Hilo is the name of the program. Yeah, heavy equipment logging operation. Well, it's a junior college. I don't know if there's a college. It's very inexpensive.

Well, Google it, guys. Hilo, if this sounds like it's interesting. Shasta College. Shasta College. And, you know, my foundation is all about work ethic scholarships for vocations that don't require a four-year degree. This is such an important. space. And I'll make sure that it's indicated on our, we're currently in the midst of an enrollment

period now. So, I mean, I'm happy to do what I can to call some attention to this. I mean, where's the need right now in terms of manpower and labor? How many loggers could be hired if they showed up, ready to work and good to go? I don't know the number for sure, but everybody coming out of that school gets placed instantly. Let me put it that way. Jobs are waiting for these folks. It's not just logging. It can be sawmilling like at the sawmills. They're looking for people. I know our local sawmills, the guys that hold for pizza signs and say they had for log, we need people. They were holding signs up in the corner. Like we'll pay $25 an hour apply here. It's interesting. There's a lot of need in the timber industry, not only in logging, but all the way through power plants,

sawmills, it's a great, we can get into it. Look, it's everywhere. Yeah. It's our submarine base. It's our automotive industry. Every major industry that I know of is just staring, recruiting right in the face and pulling out the stops. Yeah. I'll tell you this, man, if there's peanuts and ball caps and notepads and books and everything else in the way of, you know, inducements.

You're in. Okay. Thank you so much for make the time. Vicki, congratulations, you lady lugger of the year. Thank you both for coming by. Good luck. Our pleasure. Thank you, Mike.

Really fun. Thanks. Thanks. If you like what you heard. And even if you don't. Won't you please? Won't you please? Well, I hate he is pretty.

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