Ep. 769: Can Conservation Be Non-Partisan?

00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underware. Listening past, you can’t predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T l I t E dot com. We’re joined today by Benji Backer of Nature Is Nonpartisan, and we’re gonna talk about can it be? You’re just saying it is?

00:00:51
Speaker 2: It is?

00:00:52
Speaker 1: You just that’s the title.

00:00:53
Speaker 2: I’m gonna will it to existence, and we’re gonna.

00:00:55
Speaker 1: Say, is it how? How can can it be? How does it become? How does nature become nonpartisan? Meaning wildlife conservation, wildlands conservation? Can it? Can it rise above.

00:01:11
Speaker 2: The vitriol, the culture wars.

00:01:16
Speaker 1: In the in the cycles, Yeah, I mean and off again.

00:01:21
Speaker 2: It has to. Uh, That’s why I created Nature’s non parson.

00:01:24
Speaker 1: I mean, because you just you’re saying it is.

00:01:26
Speaker 2: It is because people, Yes, exactly.

00:01:29
Speaker 3: We got to get out of our algorithms here and realize that it actually once was non partisan. Right, you look at history, the biggest environmental achievements, conservation achievements throughout history were immensely by partisan non parson. I’ve spent the last ten years of my career. I’m twenty seven. So I started when I was a freshman in college. I started a nonprofit by freshman year of college, like a normal freshman does, and went around the country and saw that people actually wanted a lot.

00:01:55
Speaker 2: Of the same things.

00:01:56
Speaker 3: They want clean air, they want clean water, they want wildlife habitat to be concerned. They want to be able to hunt and fish. They also want to be able to hike and ski. They just want to be able to spend time outdoors. And you could be the trumpiest voter in the world, or you could be an AOC lover and anything in between, and you want those same things. And yet that’s not reflected in our politics today. So we have to get this right. So by saying I could say nature should be nonpartisan, that’s a less compelling organization. There’s four four words there instead of three uh ought to be ought to be.

00:02:26
Speaker 4: Un could be The NSBN is not a really compelling acronym.

00:02:31
Speaker 2: It’s just ESPN two similar too. Similar.

00:02:34
Speaker 3: Uh, but yeah, I mean we we feel like it should be, and so we’re going to make sure that it is.

00:02:39
Speaker 2: That’s the whole goal.

00:02:40
Speaker 1: When we get into this, I want to talk about some of my favorite little facts that uh the e p A all the stuff that came in under Nixon, dude. And not only that, this guy, yeah yeah, and not only that, my other little favorite thing. Cal might remember the numbers on it when they passed the Wilderness Act. Wasn’t like ninety nine to one in the Senate or like it was like not that so much. She looked that up, Phil, Yeah, I mean it, Phil, that’s not something. Phil’s trying to memorize. His line.

00:03:18
Speaker 5: I’m also switching cameras, making you look good taking notes.

00:03:21
Speaker 1: I can look this up. He’s back there a farw.

00:03:25
Speaker 5: Thing thrilled when Steve learns another form of English currency.

00:03:32
Speaker 1: Phil, you ever hear of a fella named Bob scratch it? Nope, Bob cratch it yep. I like that.

00:03:42
Speaker 6: You didn’t play along there.

00:03:45
Speaker 1: You showed up in town at the wrong time. If you just showed up in town months from now, you’d be like, go see Phil and Christmas, Carol. Oh is he in it doing Little Dickens. Yeah, right now is it? He’s playing do.

00:03:57
Speaker 2: A couple of the halftime you know what? What what?

00:04:00
Speaker 1: Like this this is my name.

00:04:03
Speaker 7: It’s not technically a one man show, but he makes it seem as if it is.

00:04:07
Speaker 2: That’s he plays all the roles.

00:04:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like in movies, there’s like a big line that the actor is excited about, Like when you think of Bob cratch in your role, what line are you like? What line are you most excited to?

00:04:25
Speaker 5: Just he’s got a very emphatic yeah here when when When when Fred is trying to convince convince Scrooge of the joys of Christmas, I’ll be watching for that.

00:04:40
Speaker 7: And the only reason I bring it up is because that’s the only line I have memorized so far.

00:04:45
Speaker 1: When I went to film some time a couple months when I went to fill more of a sound effect than a line.

00:04:50
Speaker 6: But go ahead, and Phil’s last play.

00:04:54
Speaker 4: He I didn’t really know what his role was, and I was reading the bill, you know, and and he’s like all the way at the end of the bill, and then as the play goes on, I’m like, God, he’s got all the lines, Like he’s got all the laughs he’s.

00:05:05
Speaker 1: The main kid.

00:05:07
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I’m like, I was like growing as I realized how central his role was. I was growing more and more offended at Phil’s placement in the bill. And it wasn’t until two days later and I told him this and they said it was alphabetized.

00:05:20
Speaker 1: Filled the engineer.

00:05:21
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, so he was under tea. But I thought it was like this Grave Injustice. Uh yeah, I’m excited for this one.

00:05:31
Speaker 1: Thank you. I’ll tell you what. It’s watched this segu you know what, you know what? It ain’t gonna be as good ass film, let’s hear it. Mm. The Christmas Tour, Ah should have guessed.

00:05:43
Speaker 2: You like that?

00:05:44
Speaker 1: That was good. I don’t know they gonna be as good as the Christmas Tour.

00:05:49
Speaker 7: Uh.

00:05:49
Speaker 1: Me Eater Live the Christmas Tour coming to the American South. I wish I had all the cities in front.

00:05:55
Speaker 6: Of Birmingham, Memphis, Nashville.

00:06:00
Speaker 1: I want to do the dates and everything. Got you how do I find that chack chatting?

00:06:06
Speaker 6: You go to the meat eater dot com slash tour.

00:06:08
Speaker 1: No, you can see all the day tight tang tight here it is. We’re coming out. We’re coming on the road. Uh. Brent Reeves will be there. He’s in for the full tour. Clay nukeomb there, Doctor Randall will be there. Yanni Full Tour Special guests at every stop. December seventeenth, They’re going to be in Birmingham, Alabama, at the Lyric. At that event, I will tell my story about taking a a very paranoid two days I spent where I took a shotgun apart. And I was going from on a Greyhound bus from Missoula, Montana, to Auburn, Alabama to duck Hunt, very nervous about if they found out I had that gun mhm. And we went into and I’ll tell my story about Birmingham. People are gonna think they found the gun. They never found it.

00:07:10
Speaker 7: Wait and see, wait and see.

00:07:12
Speaker 1: But the drama is but yeah, it’s just worth it. At the Lyric December seventeenth, Birmingham, Alabama. At the Lyric December eighteenth, Nashville, Tennessee Marathon Music Works, December nineteenth. You’ll know if these all are just these are all this every night fills up here, Scrooge and we’re down in these places. What’s that line? Here here here, here, you got it? December nineteenth. Did I do that yet. Eighteenth, Nashville, Tennessee at Marathon Music Works. December nineteenth, Memphis, Tennessee, Minglewood Hall. I’ve been texting with Will Primos. I believe that Will Primos is gonna be He’s gonna come to the the show and he’s going to give life advice that’s delightful. That will be the top pieces of life advice from a man that has earned a position of giving that advice. December. We’ve been kicking around a couple of things, like Clay wants Brent Reeves to hold a fish fry on stage every night, but the minute you tell the venue then they then they’re gonna have to be like, well, now we gotta get a fire marshal. That’s hard. You know, we do the casting contest. We kind of want to do a blowgun contest, but not tell the venue, yeah, because then they’ll have to get a cop or you know, you just said it right now so they might get it. There’ll be a fire marshal and the cop.

00:08:40
Speaker 7: Wait, we should just find out if the beauty of our show is there’s like zero percent of stage hands that listen to it, so except.

00:08:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, no one from the venue Oh yeah, Phil’s friends. Do your friends listen just to catch you on the show?

00:08:57
Speaker 7: Phil, definitely not No.

00:09:01
Speaker 1: December twenty Fayetteville, Arkansas at Ozark Music Hall, which I believe is sold out. December twenty one, Dallas, Texas, Texas Theater December twenty two, and I believe we’ve got Jesse Griffis coming out. Hang out with this one too, December twenty two, Austin, Texas at the Paramount. Tickets are all in sale.

00:09:23
Speaker 2: Now that’s a good week night, dude.

00:09:27
Speaker 1: I know.

00:09:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, you’re gonna need to have some Christmas after that.

00:09:30
Speaker 1: I’m gonna go see my mam.

00:09:32
Speaker 2: Where’s she at?

00:09:33
Speaker 1: Michigan?

00:09:34
Speaker 2: Hey, I’m a Midwestern by myself. What state Wisconsin?

00:09:37
Speaker 1: Oh?

00:09:37
Speaker 3: Okay, we’ll part of two of the three best Midwest states covered well Partiscani Ohio.

00:09:43
Speaker 1: It’s also at the table.

00:09:45
Speaker 7: Builds kind of similar to Chester. When we said Wisconsin, I was like, huh.

00:09:50
Speaker 1: Do look like Chester?

00:09:51
Speaker 2: Little Chester?

00:09:52
Speaker 7: Yeah?

00:09:53
Speaker 1: Big ches, big Chess I met little Chester.

00:09:57
Speaker 2: You look like a big Chester, like if.

00:09:59
Speaker 1: Chess had had better eate his wheaties and better like pre natal. I don’t know, yeah exactly, I’m just thinking because we had that guy on the Monteeth about deers Mom’s.

00:10:12
Speaker 6: Full expression, the full expression of his jeans.

00:10:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m gonna take this as a comment. I’m not quite sure yet, but.

00:10:18
Speaker 1: Like everybody here, Love Bodies on Montana say, I look like a big gesture and I don’t know.

00:10:23
Speaker 2: What that means.

00:10:24
Speaker 1: Uh, near Green Bay es great? Okay, So we’re just we’re just like right across the lake. Yeah, I could have shot. I could have shot over and we used to cross and we’d land over at exactly God, God knows his great lakes. Steve.

00:10:39
Speaker 5: The Wilderness Act passed seventy three to twelve in the Senate.

00:10:42
Speaker 1: But then that’s why I like to say ninety nine to one.

00:10:44
Speaker 5: Well sounds it passed the House three seventy four to one.

00:10:50
Speaker 2: See that’s what you’re thinking.

00:10:52
Speaker 1: That seems I was combining them. Yeah, it was combining the legislative bodies in the one and finding a sort of average.

00:10:58
Speaker 5: The only name being Joe Pool from Texas. And I can’t figure out why I’ve been looking up, but.

00:11:04
Speaker 1: I feel that it might be this is Lower. I feel that he didn’t feel it went far enough.

00:11:13
Speaker 7: Of the spiel.

00:11:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, Lower. Yeah, I’ve talked about this a handful of times. I don’t know if I have on the show or not. This is fitting because me and Randall been working on our The Hide Hunters, Our Meat Eaters audio original or sorry, Meeter’s American History The Hide Hunters, which tells the story of the begin Okay, let me back up. Meeter’s American History. The Hide Hunters tells the story of the Buffalo hide Hunters. It covers from eighteen sixty five, so the year the Civil War ended. We explained why that’s of significance up to eighteen eighty three, and it tells about the men, the motivations, the skills, the justifications, the dangers, the dangers, the bloodshed, the untimely deaths involved in the men who killed the last fifteen million buffalo off the American Great planes ran that number from fifteen million down to less than a thousand. In the US today we have about there’s about a half million in existence. Ninety four percent are privately owned. That really needs to change. Maybe we’ll touch on that that’s a non that should be a non part is an issue, but even that is partisan.

00:12:35
Speaker 2: Buffalo covering buffalo buffalo and non partisan.

00:12:38
Speaker 1: The should be but Recovering Buffalo organization. Recovering the buffalo is a part is an issue, and it’s not fair because it’s one of the few conservation achievements we could have by not It’s like, it’s not by doing something, it’s by not doing something getting out of the way. Like a lot of times you’re like, oh, that’s a lot of work, but with this, it’s like it’s kind of like not doing something would help the animals. Anyhow, it’s a long winded way of saying, we’ve been talking about this. So we have a new jerky out. We take our own jerky. So if you guys bought our cookbooks, we always have jerky recipes in our cookbooks, and we have a new jerky out. Here’s a package right here where we take our own recipes from our cookbooks and use them on American buffalo So bison jerky. You can get it. You can go to you can get it right now. There’s been a lot of fun working on it. You can get it. You can you can order your own at meat Eatersnacks dot com. One hundred percent buffalo fuel in the country for a long time, and then you can go read about do.

00:13:41
Speaker 2: You taste tests on set here.

00:13:44
Speaker 1: Well, do you want some we do mega taste tests on set. You want classic pepper?

00:13:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think pepper, classic pepper, Yeah, classic, sorry, class.

00:13:54
Speaker 1: That new fangled pepper. Try it out.

00:13:57
Speaker 2: It’s not normal pepper.

00:13:59
Speaker 1: But you know, when you start you on jerky, then you got to talk gets hard.

00:14:02
Speaker 7: Just do it right into the microphone.

00:14:05
Speaker 1: You enjoy them, You enjoy them. It’s a good morning jerky. You regret taking that. It’s a good early morning.

00:14:14
Speaker 3: I just want this part to be clipped and that’s it. You guys can end it now. Yeah, that’s actually really good though, No, it is good.

00:14:22
Speaker 1: It’s great.

00:14:22
Speaker 2: That is solid.

00:14:23
Speaker 1: No, I think it’s fantastic. It turned out really well.

00:14:25
Speaker 2: Really really good.

00:14:25
Speaker 3: That’s not that’s not regular pepper. Right there, that is classic pepper right there.

00:14:28
Speaker 1: We had a lot of back and forth. We finally got one that we love. One last little thing. Uh. Whitetail Week is here right now. September twenty nine through October fifth, First Lights run their white tail sale up to forty off all kinds of gear. Oh look at this, here’s a kicker. If you pick up a new white tail jacket and bibbs. First Light. We’ll throw in a Moultrie trail camera for free shopping out first light dot com. How could you say no to that?

00:15:01
Speaker 7: So, yeah, it’s not just a Moultie trail camera, it’s the first Light cameo multie trail camera.

00:15:08
Speaker 1: That’s what I got. I got one cheeping an eye on my fish shack right now.

00:15:14
Speaker 7: That that’s an interesting thing, is like the Moultie folks really just want you talking about hunting, and I’m like, the hunting stuff I don’t worry about nearly as much as people, uh breaking into stuff. Yeah, and that’s a great, great use of those trail cameras.

00:15:33
Speaker 1: Doug has a sign coming into the buckshack the farmhouse. It reminds it’s like a sign telling you that if you’re breaking in, he already has your picture on his phone.

00:15:47
Speaker 7: Yeah, he’s got in typical Doug form. There’s some cutesiness about it too, like like there’s nothing in here worth the trouble.

00:15:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, nothing in here worth the trouble you’re gonna have. Yeah, you know, I’d argue that because he’s got this. He’s got this twelve pound uh sledge hammer head no handling it that he uses to hold the bathroom door. Yeah, and I kind of want that sledgehammer head. How much trouble do you get in for taking something like that? It can’t be like a lot.

00:16:22
Speaker 4: So when you enter a window, is it to the left or right? As long as they’re putting this out there, go in, go in and.

00:16:31
Speaker 1: Go like go in? Is it just like like just to the right? Gotcha’s a bathroom door. There’s a twelve pound sledgehammer head there propping the door. That is just a waste of a beautiful sledgehammer head antique. I would tell people, dog’s gonna have your picture. Yeah, don’t start in the kitchen.

00:16:50
Speaker 8: The kitchens like the table bypass the kitchen, and it is so chocked fully junk from you know, decades of people thinking, oh, you could use an extra sauce pan, but there’s already nine different saucepans jammed in the back of this thing.

00:17:09
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:17:09
Speaker 7: Anytime you go to put something away, there’s just like this cascade of old aluminum and nonstick pans and tin and.

00:17:17
Speaker 1: People are like they’re holding it over their garbage can and they’re like, dah, I’ll brand the ducks.

00:17:23
Speaker 7: Exactly. Oh, it’s infuriating.

00:17:27
Speaker 1: Uh, here’s here’s the interesting little fight, bruin. We’re only gonna do like one or two. I think we got one newsy thing we’re gonna do. One’s just funny. I’m gonna do the funny one first. So, oh, did you guys see damn it the Mississippi Black Panther. Yeah, that’s funny, And then you can get into it. A news story broke out in Maryland. I only caught it after it happened. But a woman got approached by a bear in Maryland. Okay, she from the bear and fell and got hurt. The bear never touched her, but she fell and got hurt. So there was like a bear and an injury. So the news cycle, I guess very quickly was like attack and then it was well self inflicted she here’s a self inflicted bear injury related So you could go and find if you felt like you can go and kind of track the sort of evolution.

00:18:27
Speaker 6: Of of like what exell phone game?

00:18:29
Speaker 2: But what exactly went down that phantom bear attack?

00:18:34
Speaker 1: Here’s one it’s more interesting. I’m bringing the sucks. We’ve covered this bunch over the years, and our very own Jordan Sillers just wrote a piece about it. Florida is my favorite story in the in the world. Years ago, Florida ran a bear hunt. Florida had many bears. If you go back historically, they over hunted them, they over poisoned them, they over predator controlled them to the point where they had very few bears. Bears have really recovered in Florida, I think now, like you know, over fifty percent of the state has good bear populations. Years ago they ran a bear hunt, and they ran a bear hunt in Florida. You might pulling up what year that was Randall’s I was bragging bot how fast he is that researching? Well, I turned my WiFi. Years ago they opened a bear hunt and they did the management strategy of using a quota. And when you use a quota hunt, what it is is you’d go and say, I’m trying to do the best way to the simplest way to put this. You say to your you say to the people in your state. You’re like, hey, we’re gonna have a bear hunt. And the quota is one hundred bears, so everybody could go the whole state. You all go hunting. As soon as you get one, call our hotline. And then when we get to like ninety eight, we’re gonna turn it off, okay, And that’s a quote. That’s how a quota said some functions. So everybody goes and you just count, count, count, count, count, and then bank. Many things are managed by quota. There’s caribou herds in Alaska that are quota hunts where they like, you hit two hundred in the region closes in the state. I’m in Montana right now. Montana runs quota’s on mountain lions. They run quota sheet bighorn sheep where anyone, anybody that wants can participate. It turns off when you hit the quota, and there’s a little bit of a there’s a lag. There’s a little art and science to it, like you sort of watch your quota. It’s speed and then and then you usually have a little bit of a buffer to turn it off. Meaning if some guy is like drawn back on a on a big horn sheep and all of a sudden his phone dings and the quota is full, right, but he doesn’t look at his phone and shoots the big orn sheep, he’s not trouble because they give a forty eight hour buffer. So they go like they the numbers climb and you’re sort of watching the trajectory and you’re watching your quota cap and you call it and you’re like, okay, it’s full. So in forty eight hours, season’s over. When Florida years ago tried this bear hunt twenty fifteen, twenty fifteen, they tried a bear hunt, and they in some of their areas they shot past the quota very very fast, blew everybody away. How fast a quota like, they had some units where they blew past the quota, And.

00:21:30
Speaker 7: I just bring the speed up because I do think that’s like a factor in the general reaction.

00:21:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don’t think they had any idea.

00:21:36
Speaker 4: In two days the state wide quota because this doesn’t really this distorts like what actually happened. But the state wide quota was three twenty and in two days they’d killed three hundred. But because of the regional distribution of that, like some areas were way shot past.

00:21:53
Speaker 1: And then you call it. And then I think that what happened in some of those areas is they called it, but there’s a twenty four hour window, and then during the twenty four hours over the they shot over the quota, not enough to be of like biological significance, but plenty enough to be of social significance because it was a very contentious issue. It like, if you look at if there’s a theme in wildlife management, it would be that when you have a species that becomes imperiled and you stop hunting for that species because it comes imperiled, and then over time you recover it, you will naturally like you’re gonna have friction when you want to reinstate a hunt because people in their minds, for as far as they can remember, back the bears there are not around, Like, how can we be hunting? I thought bears are imperiled and like they’re not recovered. And also now you’re telling me we’re gonna hunt them. I’ve known my whole life that that you can’t hunt them because right so you’re gonna have friction, And that created a lot of friction, so much so that they just it was the agency was beat up on the whole thing. Again, biologically insigt significant, but it was socially very significant that in some areas they went over the quota and then Florida just said, okay, we’re done with bear hunting. They’re trying again now, which I fully support. They’re trying again, and this time they’re using the other way you do this. The other way you do this is you say you say, Okay, everybody can’t go. We’re not going to do that. Everybody goes thing, and the quota we’re going to do where only some of you get to go. And I think they’re probably doing a quota too right on top of that, Yeah, they have it. They have a mount they want. They’re issuing one hundred and eighty seven bear permits, So now they know how many people are going to be a field. They’re going to issue one hundred and eighty seven bear permits. And what are they look at that? I know they have some quotas in place. I can’t find it here.

00:23:57
Speaker 7: It’s right, So what is it provide like tons of opportunity for with the expectation that there’s it’s theoretical opportunity, the expectation of actual opportunity is much much lower. In that twenty fifteen hunt, the state didn’t properly estimate the actual opportunity in the field, meaning that a lot more people who in theory wouldn’t be successful were in a very short amount of time. And it’s a great fundraising mechanism, right, because you get to sell a ton of permets. And this is just exactly how like wolf tags in the state of Montana function. Everybody buys a wolf tag, very very very few people put in any actual effort to target wolves. Specifically. It’s like a animal of opportunity versus strict pursuit.

00:25:00
Speaker 1: I buy them sons of bitches every year and never do anything different.

00:25:02
Speaker 7: Exactly, yeah, exactly, yes.

00:25:04
Speaker 1: This will this will impact my behavior zero.

00:25:07
Speaker 7: But then there’s that other group of people who are like I am specifically dedicating time in the pursuit of wolves. Corey Calvin’s right, yep, he’s happy either way.

00:25:21
Speaker 1: He knows what you mean. So they’re they’re saying to one hundred and eighty seven people, hey, instead of letting everybody go, you one hundred and eighty seven going, it’s gonna be easier to monitor this whole thing. And they have a thing. So you buy a They’re doing it through a lottery democratic allocation five dollars lottery ticket. You buy as many chances as you want five bucks. If you draw, though, then you got to buy the permit. So if you’re so like you win, well, then to actually get your permit, then you got to come up with more money. So it’s five bucks to get in. And if you draw, if you’re a resident, your permit is one hundred bucks. Your non resident, your permit is three hundred bucks. Great deal. Now here’s where it gets Here’s where it gets saucy. The uh uh Sierra Club is pushing its members, Hey, save a bear. Buy all these lottery tickets and then don’t use them if you win, Okay, And they’re like, that’s how we’re gonna save bears. Florida’s attitude about this is you guys can buy all the tickets you want. That’s great for you’re generating all this thing.

00:26:40
Speaker 2: So they are a conservation organization again.

00:26:42
Speaker 1: And if we don’t hit the quota, then we know next year we’re just gonna release a lot more.

00:26:47
Speaker 7: Yeah.

00:26:47
Speaker 1: Right, So it’s like, you know, okay, this is the thing that’s been tried before. Like I don’t know if you remember Wyoming Grizzlies. Yeah, and the catch there, you’re ago when they moved to dlist grizzly bears in Wyoming, they were gonna do you remember twenty four They were gonna issue twenty four permits.

00:27:06
Speaker 7: Yeah, I was an Idaho resident at the time, so I actually was in the drawing.

00:27:11
Speaker 1: Oh, you were in the draw for the one tag, for the one tag. Yeah. And then in Wyoming some guys went out and there was a big push to get none hunters to try to get the permit, but they never did the draw, so you never could wind up seeing. Uh, it’ll be it’ll be interesting to it’ll be interesting to see. I could picture that what they might do. Like if I was in Florida fishing games shoes the agency shoes for Florida Wildlife Commission. I guess is who approved the bear hunt rule. I would be wondering should we should we make it a greater hurdle to enter, meaning you got to go and let’s say you gotta be licensed, fully licensed, you got to go and take an online bear identification class so you learn how to tell a female with cubs, or like what I like money, Would I make it more of a.

00:28:03
Speaker 2: Pain in the ass to filter out the preservationists.

00:28:05
Speaker 1: To filter out anti hunters, or would I just really be like, no, I want all those five dollars.

00:28:11
Speaker 4: So they’ve sold they’ve sold more than one hundred and sixty thousand chances have they Yeah, Florida for one hundred and eighty seven tags.

00:28:21
Speaker 2: Good for them, good for conservation.

00:28:23
Speaker 1: Someone could tell me a lot of times five dollars is.

00:28:28
Speaker 2: It’s about a million?

00:28:30
Speaker 7: I would you can grow anything in Florida. Literally, if I was one of those bear tag holders, That’s what I would be concentrated. I’d be like, what mix of food do I want in the black Bear? I’m going to target apple region right like where? Yeah, that’d be exciting, Yeah, exactly.

00:28:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s yeah to have.

00:29:02
Speaker 7: Or even have to. Yeah.

00:29:03
Speaker 1: My favorite word lately is it’s a it’s a situation that’s gotten frothy. I heard that in the market, like in the markets listening to markets about the new frothy like a lot of M and a a lot of M and a activity out there. He’d be like, it’s a frothy.

00:29:19
Speaker 2: Can you snacks? You should have be a frothy something.

00:29:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, frothy classic, Yeah, I would say, yeah.

00:29:32
Speaker 1: What a final point on this, it’s like a little bit sticky. I feel for Sierra Club. It’s like, how is it cool for like is it cool for Sierra Club to be? Is it cool for Sierra Club to be? Like not only do we not support the State agency, right, the state biologists and the State Agency is doing this. Not only do we not support their mission, we’re we’re promoting the idea that you try to like thwart right. Yeah, the effort, which seems to me like that’s a that’s an aggressive play.

00:30:07
Speaker 2: They’re always aggressive.

00:30:08
Speaker 1: That’s an aggressive play.

00:30:09
Speaker 3: Their whole thing is being aggressive. Oh yeah, I mean they only raise money off of being aggressive. They’re almost a billion dollar annual organization every year because they raise money off of being anti whatever the other groups are for. That’s they actually want sort of this this coverage even because the conflict.

00:30:27
Speaker 1: This fill the conflict.

00:30:30
Speaker 3: They love that Donald Trump’s president because they can raise all the money in the world of being against everything that he does. And when things are good and you’re solving problems, it’s harder to rile people up. They love riling people up. They’re the problem in my opinion.

00:30:45
Speaker 1: It’s funny bring it up because Randall and I were talking you have today about I don’t even want to kind of get into this, but we were talking about please I’m glad that I’m just gonna be real quick about it. We’re talking about tail and all ah.

00:31:03
Speaker 6: As one does on.

00:31:04
Speaker 1: A Wednesday, trying to explain and Randall is trying to capture. If I go on to social media and I want to find out what people how people feel about Tailano, I will come away with a different impression of what people feel about Tylanh the thing I would if I was just going about my existence in life.

00:31:27
Speaker 4: If you hold up a newspaper and start eavesdropping, there are people pounding the table about Thailand.

00:31:34
Speaker 3: I mean, at this point we should start creating like pro tail and all anti thailandolf swag.

00:31:38
Speaker 1: I feel that a lot of people are actually out there thinking like, huh, that was kind of weird.

00:31:46
Speaker 2: What side are you on your pick?

00:31:48
Speaker 7: Fighter Ye when.

00:31:50
Speaker 1: He takes the national temperature, he feels the national temperature in spite of what was happening in the news. The national temperature was huh.

00:32:02
Speaker 6: I guess I’ll go to work today.

00:32:05
Speaker 3: Well, our leaders are fighting about what silent Yeah, I followed it autism, and I.

00:32:14
Speaker 7: Will point out the tag buying strategy I know back to the bears, the buddy of mine drew the Upper Rock Creek big Horned Sheep tag when it was still good, and the jackasses who locked out all the public access and Upper Rock Creek weren’t there. The UH ran into two guys, father’s son who had drawn the Lower Rock Creek a couple of the U tags.

00:32:52
Speaker 1: And this is back in the days. They’re just standing along the road.

00:32:55
Speaker 7: Yes exactly, ye, And we’re chatting with them and they’re like, oh, we’re non hunters, we just bought we apply for tags, and then we come out like wildlife Watch and this is how we save animals. And that was back in probably I bet like four five.

00:33:15
Speaker 1: They were pioneers, early adopters.

00:33:18
Speaker 7: Yeah, so, I mean it was, it has been a strategy in the past.

00:33:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes I mean it seems like you could take everyone on the planet and have them all forget everything, and then have new people come and I think those new people would quickly oh hit on the idea that this could be a thing one could do.

00:33:37
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, for sure.

00:33:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, you’re like, uh huh.

00:33:40
Speaker 7: Yeah, well, I mean we were just talking about this. I missed the big party last night because I was at the public land water access.

00:33:47
Speaker 1: I was able to track your movements through a way that you would never anticipate. Oh, your next door, my neighbor is on the board. Yeah, so I knew where you were before you knew where you were.

00:33:59
Speaker 7: That was great. Yeah, we chatted for a little bit, but you could. I brought up in my talk last night. I’m like, you know this public Lands fight. You know, these people fought this in the thirties, forties, fifties, and people were like where I thought, we just won that, right.

00:34:25
Speaker 2: Like this does happened before? Thought, Yeah, it will happen again sooner than we’d like.

00:34:32
Speaker 1: Kel it sound ten year cycle, I think, thanks, Yeah, well that’s tens like snow hairs plus three years.

00:34:39
Speaker 2: And it’s going to happen sooner again.

00:34:42
Speaker 7: Oh I know.

00:34:42
Speaker 1: So unfortunately, first off, man, give us some background. You’re from Green Bay, yep, go pack Yeah is it Benjamin? Benjamin Packer Benjamin? But so will you shortened? Most guys go all the way down to bed then?

00:34:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, nobody.

00:34:55
Speaker 3: I wanted to kept some Yeah, yeah, I had kept a little extra little tail there called Benji.

00:35:01
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:35:02
Speaker 3: I second grade woke up and said I don’t want to have been Benjamin’s too long, So Benji it is.

00:35:06
Speaker 2: But thanks.

00:35:08
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:35:08
Speaker 3: I grew up in Green Bay and I watched John McCain and Barack Obama debate in two thousand and eight and said, I want to be part of that for.

00:35:16
Speaker 2: The whole ten.

00:35:19
Speaker 1: You were like, I want to be a detective, right, or a.

00:35:21
Speaker 3: Sports announcer or an NFL player. I’m five nine, There’s no way I’m becoming an NFL player. But yeah, I was like, I really want to be part of the civic process, and so I started. I asked my parents, who were not political at all, can we go? Can I go door knocking for John McCain? And they were like, that is the weirdest thing that you could ask us to do. And my parents were not political at all, and they did not want to have signs in their yard or bumper stickers in their cars or any of that stuff. And I just was like allured by the process. And so I became super active in high school in conservative politics and spoke at Seapack. My freshman year of high school was on Fox News for the first time. My freshman year of high school, I had a really good biber haircut. My Wisconsin accent was really intense, and I knew nothing about what I was doing, obviously, but I cared a lot about America was really what it came down to and like I wanted to be a part of solving complex problems. But I have since grown more and more disillusioned with politics and I hate the two party system. I hate the political system that we’re working within, and I hate how it’s impacted the environment and conservation. Because at the same time that I was strangely volunteering for John McCay and Meant Romney, I also was an avid hiker avid skier, was fishing every weekend in the summer with my grandpa. My parents were vegan, so oh yeah, So I was the only meat eater in my family. So I’m like the as I didn’t meat eater in my family, so it’s nice to be another. My parents were just, I think, like most people were just like whoever has the best ideas they’re going to vote for. Like they they’re conservatives, practical fiscal conservatives. They voted for McCain and Romney, but like they were definitely like independent voters. And my sisters are liberal. And I grew up in a very like politically diverse family, but we all got along and we all loved each other, and so I was frustrated politics. I loved the environment, and I also realized that people could actually get along and that the country that I was seeing crumble politically and it’s still getting worse, was not representative of the people itself. Like the people themselves don’t want that to happen, and they’re not as polarized, they’re not putting each other in such boxes. And so that’s kind of how I got to being more of, you know, trying to bridge the divide on conservation in the environment, because if there’s one issue that should transcend party lines that should get action regardless of who wins, it should be conservation in the environment like it used to. So I transitioned to that my freshman year of college, tweeted out that I was going to start a nonprofit to get this going.

00:38:11
Speaker 1: As a freshman in college. Yeah, yeah, I knew. I knew when you did it that you were young, but I hadn’t thought about the fact that you’re like, like also being in college eighteen. Yeah, because normally it’s like, well, I’m a freshman college and I have to drink a lot, and then that’s kind of my schedule.

00:38:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, girls, drinking time.

00:38:31
Speaker 1: To hang out, standard smoking weed. I have a hard time finding a hangout time.

00:38:37
Speaker 3: I was starting environmental policy nonprofits instead, Well, where were you at school?

00:38:42
Speaker 2: University of Washington.

00:38:43
Speaker 3: So I searched the best business school, best business schools in America and went down the list to the first one that was in a place that I could hike and ski on the weekends. And the University of Washington was like probably like fortieth on the list of best business schools, but it was the closest to where I wanted to recreate. So the Cascades obviously beautiful national parks out there, and that’s really why I went there. So then I started it out there, and I started, you know.

00:39:09
Speaker 1: And like registered a nonprofit.

00:39:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, I first started a pack because I had know what I was doing and I.

00:39:16
Speaker 2: Was all done that, just me eighteen looking up.

00:39:20
Speaker 3: So what’s the quickest way to start a nonprofit? Well, a pack gets approved right away.

00:39:24
Speaker 6: Classic freshman you’re a mistake.

00:39:25
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, you look wake up and you look at all the texts that you sent out that you don’t remember, and then you’re like, oh my god, one.

00:39:35
Speaker 1: Of those I was you.

00:39:43
Speaker 3: I highly recommend because there’s basically zero barriers of entry.

00:39:48
Speaker 1: I know this, I mean, I know I know what it is, but I didn’t know that is it designed to be fast?

00:39:53
Speaker 2: It shouldn’t be.

00:39:54
Speaker 3: But like if you want to start, if you want an eighteen year old accidentally starts a pack and then suddenly is the owner of a pack, and then there’s no like the I R. S checks five to one C three’s traditional nonprofits. It takes like a year to approve that a packets approved literally overnight.

00:40:10
Speaker 1: To help people. I mostly know what you’re talking about, but just help people understand, like what you mean. So there’s different designations, political actual committee.

00:40:17
Speaker 2: There’s diferent designations.

00:40:18
Speaker 1: They’re ephemeral, right, because you can they’re very responsive to I mean, like like a race heats up, you get a nominee, and then all of a sudden, there’s all these packs, right, and some of them are meant to dissolve.

00:40:30
Speaker 2: That’s because there’s a lot of eighteen year olds starting packs.

00:40:32
Speaker 7: The most visibility right for the normal person is that fine print that says paid for by right Concerned Citizens for Montana.

00:40:41
Speaker 6: Factory twenty four.

00:40:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no one knows who it is.

00:40:45
Speaker 3: In this case, it was me, but you know it’s it’s basically a political action committee. There’s a super pack in a pack, but it’s it’s a government designation of what you can do with the money when someone donates it. And so, uh, like a five to one C three, which is like the Red Cross, and like all the big nonprofits they you’re aware of that’s tax deductible to a donor, they can’t do any political activity at all. A pack you do not get a tax deduction when you donate, and it strictly is going to be to support candidates, like you’re supporting political candidates. There’s no educational part of it. It’s it’s it’s a political organization. And so I was like, wait a second, I’m trying to like bridge the divide on the environment. I’m not trying to like donate to candidates. So then I quickly shuddered the weekend mistake.

00:41:24
Speaker 7: But a pack is it would be is a five to one C four, right, So.

00:41:29
Speaker 2: That’s very complicated.

00:41:30
Speaker 3: But no, because if I on C four, this is like, this is like zero point one hundred of the things that you don’t wish you new at age twenty seven the difference between the C four and the pack. But a C four is a non tax deductible organization that can lobby, but they don’t really donate. You can donate to candidates, but it’s like a certain percentage. A pack is strictly to get people elected, and.

00:41:50
Speaker 2: That was not my goal.

00:41:51
Speaker 6: It’s a money funnel.

00:41:53
Speaker 3: It’s a money funnel, and it’s basically so people can’t trace the money to dark money. It is honestly dark money, and it’s like anyone can donate and then it’s not traced back to them and no one knows where the money came from. So the whole nonprofit space is very complicated, and I think it probably designed partially that way. The money in politics thing is its own really big issue.

00:42:16
Speaker 1: But what was your pack?

00:42:18
Speaker 3: Conservatives for Environmental Reform? And basically my original goal was to get conservatives back to the table on the environment because I watched Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton debate, and Hillary Clinton had a radical plan for the environment that I didn’t agree with that was like shut down industry, very preservationist. Wasn’t about hunting or fishing or anything with the outdoors. It was largely just climate, climate, climate, but on the extreme end. And then Donald Trump was like, none of these problems exist and we shouldn’t do anything about them, and he had no plan. I was like, what the hell am I supposed to do? And I leaned right, So I was like, I got to get conservatives back to the table. So that’s kind of the origin story of what became the American Conservation Coalition, which I still started my freshman year just after.

00:43:02
Speaker 6: The pack mistake second semester.

00:43:05
Speaker 1: You always.

00:43:07
Speaker 3: Turn it to the five to one C three, and that organization now is one hundred thousand members across the country, has big staff, does a lot of work in DC. It is strictly focused on getting conservatives active on the environment. But to me, that wasn’t far enough because to me, it’s not about the labels. Like the rational majority of Americans across the political spectrum, as I opened saying, want the same things, and I don’t care if it’s Martin Heinrich or Tim Sheehey or Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. We got to figure out how to get shit done no matter who’s in office and what the political wins are in that moment, and we have to show politicians that Americans want this, not just conservatives and not just liberals. We need to show them that Americans across the spectrum want action. So I thought getting conservative to the table was helpful. But there’s no organization in this country right now that hasn’t impact no matter who wins. The Sierra Club, even the Nature Conservancy, any of these traditional environmental groups, They’re only relevant when democrats win. And the organization I started in college is only relevant when Republicans win. What about an organization that’s just trying to move consistent conservation through no matter what, and no matter who you are politically, you want to be a part of that movement. And that’s the vision of nature as nonpartisans. So it kind of went from a pack mistake to a conservative group to now building upon that to try to build a nonpartisan movement in America.

00:44:32
Speaker 1: Again, let’s start with the let’s start with the polar opposite. So what year was it, twenty sixteen? I guess twenty fifteen. Yep.

00:44:43
Speaker 2: That was my senior high school freshman year of Colusus.

00:44:45
Speaker 1: Where you had two visions yep. One one being a vision of denial, YEP one being a vision of offering a fix that isn’t going to get wide spread buy in. Yeah, I could picture that if you were like a picture that if you were a staunch Democrat, because of all their other planks in their platform that you might say, Man, I need to go get my party to start getting more.

00:45:15
Speaker 7: In line.

00:45:17
Speaker 1: With Middle America so that we can win and I can get my other policy pieces in that play right, Like we’re losing on the same way you might say in twenty in the last election cycle, like if you were, if you were, if you’re sitting there thinking, man, the tax structure in America is whacked. Corporations should be paying way more taxes, the poor should be paying way less taxes. But that’s never going to happen because our party is going to continue to get slammed on DEI issues. I need them to stop it about that so we can stick to the things that most of the country like. That’s our Achilles heel right, right, Like I can picture that, But what’s hard for me to picture is the process of saying that, like to be like, I’m a conservative, I want bigger environmental presence within my party. I want them to come around in my way of thinking. I feel that that would be like very private.

00:46:25
Speaker 2: For the politicians.

00:46:26
Speaker 1: For you, oh for me, I feel like that’s you having meetings with politicians, Yeah, because you can’t burn them you feel that you like, you can’t publicly burn them. Well. Now, the same way, if I was doing my whole thing, I might go and say, hey, listen, tone it down, tone it down. I’m like athletes, like who plays on what team?

00:46:49
Speaker 3: But I could do I could do that. I could do that, but that’s not morally right to me. I could be in the Trump administration right now, or have some really high position if I just played the game. I don’t care about playing the game. I want to get conservation outcomes. And so I’m willing to be bolder because of that, and I’m willing to take on both sides because a spotlight like, hey, you guys are freaking weak here, and you’re losing people. And by the way, I’m not afraid to say, you should lose people because you don’t have an environmental plan. You should lose people because you don’t care about conservation. You should lose people because you don’t have any plan for clean air clean water. But yet you use those terms in your speeches, right Like, you say you want clean air and clean water, but yet you’re rolling back some of the most important regulations and policies in American history. I’m not afraid to say that because I don’t care about who. I actually don’t care about who wins. In high school, I might have cared I expose a seatback and stuff, but I do not care who wins. I’m an environmentalist, conservationist, nature lover person who wants to protect wild places and allow people to go hunt, fish recreate in them so that we can also have a healthy livelihood more than I care about any political identity. And I think most people when they think about this issue, do you think about it that way? So people think I mean. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve this famous EPA transition guy for Trump just wrote a big hit piece on me that I was like this trojan horse at Climate Week, just trying to promote the Green New Deal, and I get told that I’m all the time some like maga guy.

00:48:19
Speaker 2: It’s because I don’t really care.

00:48:21
Speaker 1: Like we’re quite familiar with it.

00:48:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, you guys definitely get that.

00:48:25
Speaker 1: We’re quite clear that you’re like everyone.

00:48:29
Speaker 2: Like you get in the box, and I don’t want to be in the box.

00:48:35
Speaker 6: Yeah, so don’t you say anything. Just get in the box.

00:48:40
Speaker 2: And just say what we want you to say.

00:48:42
Speaker 3: But that would work I mean, so I’ve been starting to talk about this a little bit more because of the light of recent events. I co founded, and I’ve never said this in a podcast for but I’ve I co founded Turning Point us say, with Charlie kirk Oh in twenty twelve. I was fourteen years old, so just it was a lot long time ago. The organization was supposed to be about young people standing up to the government to prevent the national debt from getting worse.

00:49:08
Speaker 1: That was the turning point.

00:49:09
Speaker 2: Yes, that was the founding origin of Turning Point.

00:49:13
Speaker 1: Like, you guys are gonna really stick it to You’re really sticking it to us, right our generation. Yeah, later, Like at some point we’re gonna have to tackle this. Yeah, at some point, you’re creating a real headache for us. So please make my future not so tenuous exactly.

00:49:29
Speaker 3: So Charlie and I had this vision for that. Charlie, that was a very tragic event, and it was a very perfect opportunity to see how divided our country is becoming, which is a huge problem. But what Charlie saw was that there was an opportunity in playing into the political culture war. Right, if I wanted to be a part of the culture War. For the sake of telling people how to win voters or or how to get people a part of our team or box, I’d be doing things so much differently than I am. And again I could have many times. But it is ruining our country and it’s ruining conservation as well. And so for me, when I wake up every morning, I think of how much progress can I make given the political shit that we’re in, Because for the first time in a long time, our environment is getting worse in America. Again, we actually solved a lot of big problems for a very long time. We funded public lands, We had the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act take care of really bad problems in our cities and in our rivers. We had the Endangered Species Act, which was effective for a couple of years. There is sorely in effective. Wildfires are getting worse, public lands are getting worse, the management of our ecosystems is getting so much worse. Our water quality is getting worse. And you know what the byproduct of all that is is, because it is the byproduct of the division that we’re saying. Because no one actually has an incentive to solve problems. They have an incentive to feed the culture wars. And until we change that incentive, at least on this I can’t promise that we can change it on every issue. But until we create a movement that just says we expect you to get shit done and we’re not going to vote for you if you don’t prioritize conservation, that’s actually the part that we should be saying out loud. That’s the part that we should be saying out loud, because it’s not just about killing animals for recreation and hiking and skiing and all the things.

00:51:31
Speaker 2: That we all love, right It’s not just about that.

00:51:33
Speaker 3: The health of our environment is about the health of us too, and right now we are failing miserably, and the left doesn’t care, and the right doesn’t care. They care about winning the next election, and that is where the root of our environmental problems comes from. And so I say that to say, I could go down this path of playing into the culture wars, but I wouldn’t be sitting at this table right now, and I absolutely wouldn’t be fighting for our environment because it’s way easier to make a name for yourself and get power and get you know, influence right now off of doing things completely differently. But at some point, at some point, Americans are going to wake up and realize that the system right now is screwing us all and it’s also screwing up our environment. Uh.

00:52:17
Speaker 1: That’s what I’m backup common on the thing you brought up with, just how hot like how he did the how he did the online I always want to point this out, how he did the online experiences right, Oh, totally. Now for Charlie Kirk, Yeah, it wasn’t an online experience. No, that was a way that online like became a bullet in real life. Yeah, and like killed a man. Right, Do you know what I’m saying. I have this thing, and I’ve brought it up. I brought up to ten guests talking about various things. I think I was most recently talking about with Sebastian Younger, where I’m like, there’s what I under stand to be true about the climate in America from social media, the news, and then there’s what I understand to be true about America from being an American, Yes, from going about my business and I had I met someone for breakfast this morning. Yeah, the conversations we had on the street with people, the interactions we had with the people that were working there, like the whole picture. I would never come out of my morning being like, good lord, everyone’s the country’s falling apart. I’d be like, this seems like a wonderful country. This is this America. This is awesome being an American. But then I go and look about what it is and it’s red hot, and and and with with Charlie Kirk, like I was like, man, and many other examples, this is this was because it’s fresh. With Charlie Kirk was like, Man, they collide, they are they collide.

00:54:04
Speaker 3: And then we’re manifesting it to become It used to just be an online thing I used to get. I got death threats in high school for what I was doing politically, I had.

00:54:13
Speaker 1: Because people don’t like because it’s it’s too unexpected, right, it’s too unexpected to see a woman that killed a lion in Afta that.

00:54:21
Speaker 3: That’s gonna go viral off more than more than making phone calls. And my voice hadn’t even changed yet. Okay, I was just a little boy, But yeah, I mean that they’re the chronically online world, which is so disconnected from reality. I mean, I had breakfast with Van Jones yesterday in New York City, the big social justice liberal commentator see an guy I don’t recognize that name, CNN host. Yeah, but he’s black social justice guy.

00:54:49
Speaker 2: We don’t.

00:54:50
Speaker 3: He’s one of my best friends. I don’t talk to him about politics. I just love him as a human, you know. Like, and my mom’s like, oh, what, you know, what what issues did you guys talk about? I’m like, we literally didn’t. He just give me advice and how to be a better leader. And we were just talking about life and his girl, his fiance and all that stuff. That is how most of America actually operates on a day to day basis. But then you look online and you see what But we’re becoming a chronically online nation. I mean, you look at the average screen time in this country, and it’s not people looking at candy crush, right, it’s people looking at Twitter and Instagram and feeding themselves the worst information. And we are convincing ourselves that everyone else is actually evil, like Hitler level evil for both sides to think about the other side. So it is colliding now. For a while, it was just like, oh yeah, just turn off the social media. It’s just it’s not that bad in real life. Well, it’s becoming that bat in real life because we’re manifesting.

00:55:39
Speaker 1: You, because it’s some dude on a roof of the gun, right, and people takes one.

00:55:43
Speaker 6: It only takes one to.

00:55:46
Speaker 1: Bring it out of the yeah right, and man it has a yeah. It’s like it’s been I look. I brought that up as a preamble to say I got a fifteen year old. The insanity that he comes home and he’s you know, he comes home and it’s just.

00:56:10
Speaker 7: Like and then it was like, Dad, here’s some solid facts.

00:56:14
Speaker 1: I know. It’s not even that, it’s more like a what do you He kind of comes home with like what do I make of this? Right? And just the insane things, the insane things that are being spun out of that it’s just this A long preamble led me to like I hit a point a week like some time ago. A week ago, I hit a point where I’m like, dude, I am like, I was like, I am ready at my age, I’m ready to just I’m going to step away from discourse. I mean I’m not, but for a minute, I for the first time in my life, I was like, I just don’t want to talk to anybody. Anymore. Like I don’t want to participate in the discourse anymore. I just want to be the guy that only knows about who he runs into at the hardware store. It’s like, I’ll go to the Harvard store because that’s going to be cool.

00:57:09
Speaker 2: We have to bring that back.

00:57:11
Speaker 1: I’ll go wherever. I’ll go to my buddies party because that’s going to be cool. But I can’t do anything. It didn’t last and it’s not for real. But I just had a point where I’m like, I’m just done. Man, Like I’m done because that style of that style of uh debating or that style of like exploring ideas is like it’s rational conversation. Hey, like I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t agree. Is pass a?

00:57:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s it’s absolutely not the norm anymore. And I feel, so do you give up?

00:57:46
Speaker 4: No?

00:57:47
Speaker 2: I think we got to play the game.

00:57:49
Speaker 1: Okay, what’s the game?

00:57:50
Speaker 2: The game is, let’s let’s talk about the environment.

00:57:53
Speaker 1: How do you play the game?

00:57:54
Speaker 3: We have to create a similar movement around culture shifting for conservation that that is in people’s social media networks, it’s it’s in their communities, it’s around them, because we are not going to beat the algorithm. We’re not going to change people’s tendencies to log on to social media whenever there’s a break in their day, at least not anytime soon and see the worst news imaginable. We have to figure out how to meet people where they’re at and help people understand that there’s something they can advocate for right instead of just being like, oh my god, I hate this person, I hate this person, I hate this person.

00:58:37
Speaker 2: As a song, you have a little tune to that.

00:58:41
Speaker 1: Sometimes, you know what, I guarantee, I guarantee he goes in and takes that out of the show.

00:58:47
Speaker 5: Just to prove you it’s not going to happen. I’m not disturb but my one person I left through is my wife, and.

00:58:53
Speaker 1: So just breaks the whole flow during the show.

00:59:01
Speaker 7: Yeah, kind of piggyback a little bit off of what Steve said, but also just the the there isn’t a need I see, Well, it’s going to be complicated. I push back on the fact that like established conservation groups aren’t making stuff happen under every administration. I mean they are, maybe like the is the win that we’re getting not an actual win. A lot of times I believe that for sure. Like I think if we are looking in terms of like, oh my gosh, the Democrats did this, that’s such a win, that’s not a win. If we’re looking in terms of like, Okay, the Republicans did this, that’s a win, that’s not a win. Agree. The win is when it’s there’s certain things like the health of are an natural resources are just this non starter for every political party, Like it’s assumed that these things have got to have a certain level of health and management because it does tie into national defense, the health of individuals within our country, mental and physical, and our food production and all the things like it does.

01:00:28
Speaker 3: But I would say the groups that are currently out there, there are so many good organizations, many of whom we both work with, but it’s not getting the job done. And what I mean by that is there is no cultural movement in America that’s telling politicians they should take the environment seriously as America, like as Americans, like the Human Rights Campaign, for example, you might disagree with gay marriage or you might love gay marriage. They showed politicians they had a national campaign. Their bumper stickers are still on people’s cars all over the country that it was an expectation for almost all Americans that equality was important. That’s how they got it done. And obviously this is a different issue because it’s not just like one landmark thing that we need to get accomplished. We need continuous But there was a national unified expectation of conservation thirty years ago that does not exist right now. So and that is not the failure of these organizations, but it’s not working. The current movement is not working. And the vast majority of people who do reach out for conservation in the environment are left of center people, whether we want to admit that or not. And until we make it left center and right, until we show no matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, this was an expectation of Americans that we’re going to continue going down this trajectory where we don’t get the policies that we need, and actually, even worse, we get the policies that none of us want, which is what we’ve been getting over the last year. And it’s because there’s not an expectation of pushback. The only time that I’ve seen it since I became active in this space where it’s actually worked is this public land selloff where you had people from across the political spectrum saying, no, over my dead body, you’re going to sell this land. Right, But we haven’t had a unified front like that on the environment for decades. And we can try to push behind the scenes. And you know, like I love TRCP and t you and I know you know Chris and Joel and all these are great people running great organizations, but there’s no national movement that represents what they believe is your.

01:02:31
Speaker 6: As far as like what you’re doing.

01:02:33
Speaker 4: That’s not that groups like TIERSCP aren’t aren’t doing currently, You’re talking about a coalition that expands beyond the Hunter because I think the Hunter angler space has is unique in that it’s it has that bipartisan.

01:02:53
Speaker 1: Angle.

01:02:54
Speaker 6: It’s expanding that if I think beyond the hook and bullet I am.

01:02:57
Speaker 4: I am having a hard time thinking beyond the hook and at groups what like environmental policy groups have that same bipartisan influence because.

01:03:09
Speaker 7: Like I’ll give you an example, right, Like I believe very strongly in the work that Pheasants Forever Quail Forever does, right and and it’s like not super sexy working on the farm bill right.

01:03:22
Speaker 3: Right, those groups are already there right, and they do great stuff, but the culture in America is not there.

01:03:27
Speaker 7: And and here’s the example, right, is like, uh, it’s getting late in the election cycle, yea, all of a sudden, it’s announced all over media that both parties need hunters. Hunters are underrepresented in their demographics, their research, we need hunters at the polls. And here’s this push from the Biden campaign at that point. It was it was the Biden campaign at that point.

01:03:56
Speaker 1: Yeah. And and then.

01:03:59
Speaker 7: So it was like Byden Harris for hunters, and then and then the Trump campaign was pushing out hunter specific language as well.

01:04:08
Speaker 1: And then.

01:04:10
Speaker 7: There’s the annual Governor’s hunt ye in Minnesota that pheasants forever is always a part of, doesn’t matter what uh political affiliation the standing governor or current governor has, And that got kind of turned into like a Biden Harris hunter moment that had nothing to do with pheasants forever, and they just got absolutely shellact. They still are and still are, yeah, and they’re they’re made to like swallow this right rhetoric in order to quote unquote be in the room when it’s like our history, our track record says we will work with anybody in order to fulfill the mission, and the mission benefits everybody by the way, yep. And the pushbacks on the organization that has this established track record of nonpartisanship, the pushbacks not on the politicians that manifested all this bs.

01:05:20
Speaker 3: Right, that’s true, But the political tenor of the conversation hitching your wagon to anybody politically right now is risky, right. I mean, Pheasans forever saw that, and they shouldn’t have been taken, you know, to the to the court for that. They should have had Tim Waltz there. And that’s not a big deal, like it shouldn’t be seen that way. But I go back to the fact that like this public land sell off was almost a godsend in terms of giving an example of what I’m trying to build, which is, you had millions of people for the first time in years, like you did win there’s smog in the cities across the country, like we did when there were rivers on fire in Ohio. Right, you had millions of people saying I don’t give a shit with my political belief is, and honestly I don’t. I voted for you, Mike Lee, but I’m not for this. That’s the cultural movement that we need, and so I don’t know how to change that peasants forever situation, because that’s very unfortunate and they don’t deserve that.

01:06:17
Speaker 7: I guess succinctly, right, I’m like the the issues with the politicians.

01:06:20
Speaker 2: Right, the issue is with the politicians, but there’s also are.

01:06:22
Speaker 7: The ones who are hitting the clickbait button.

01:06:26
Speaker 3: We’re also falling for that right as a populace. Yeah, and that’s part of the problem too, And so how them, Well, the issue is like tim the environment right now, if you ask the average person on the street who owns the environmental issue, almost everyone would say Democrats. Oh yeah, everyone, So we like that, right, but even conservation people associate We’ve done pulling and focus grouping. People associate these words conservation, environmentalist, environment wordship, anything related to the environment as liberal coded as Democrat coded words.

01:07:06
Speaker 1: And so yes, some more than others, right, I completely agree.

01:07:11
Speaker 3: But we’ve got to change that because like all these words are being weaponized intentionally and unintentionally for people’s gains, whether that be clickbait or for campaigning. And you know, in the same way that like stand up for cancer or stand up to cancer or the Human Rights Campaign or the gott Milk Campaign, Like, we need to show politicians that there is a cultural movement to help create space for the Pheasants Forever and the ducks and limiteds and the trcps and the great organizations that are out there to do the work that they need to do because right now it’s basically Republicans are fearful of associating with any conservation group as they are scared of being seen as liberal, and the left is scared of the far left coming at them for not going far enough on like climate stuff. And so again, it’s creating the cultural space. And we and there’s so many great local organizations out there already there. They’re already there. There’s so many great topical based organizations out there, they’re already there. But in the way that like the Sierra Club or NRDC or these groups could have been like the face of America’s environmental movement, conservation movement, rally people together for common sense conservation.

01:08:17
Speaker 2: But didn’t we need to create that.

01:08:19
Speaker 3: And and I would say, I don’t have every way of getting there yet, but someone’s got to try because the current environmental culture is not working for us, and there’s no space for politicians to see that they have to get something done except for the public. Land sell off as like literally the first example in like a decade.

01:08:40
Speaker 7: Yeah, I see, and I see this within the environmental space, within the nonprofit space of a real disconnect with the end consumer h just as I see it in the political realm.

01:08:56
Speaker 1: The week of.

01:08:58
Speaker 7: Land selloff language going in the house, right We’re up on Capitol Hill talking with everybody we could super back schedule, and it was like, hey, don’t worry, it’s not going to happen. But you heard over and over again the exact same lines from everybody. And by the way, we’re not going to sell national parks. Don’t worry, right, thank god?

01:09:20
Speaker 1: As just as just in it as I’ve ever heard that, like, oh, we’re not talking about national parks. Didn’t trust me. I didn’t think you were.

01:09:31
Speaker 2: Confirmed what I already knew.

01:09:33
Speaker 7: And the you know, it’s frustrating but eye opening too, where you’re like, Okay, something is going on, right because everybody seems to have the exact same talking points and they have no knowledge of the fact that the people that are starting to push back right now have no interest in the national parks or very little interest. Uh not because they don’t care. But the assumption is parks are going to be safe.

01:09:59
Speaker 3: I mean I had senior official in the total gistration tell me, hey, like Americans won’t get upset about this because Americans just care about national parks and national park health.

01:10:09
Speaker 2: And I was like, do you realize have you like a quick chat ebte? Quick? You know you’re gonna research it sounds like very quickly you’re gonna help. You could help them with this.

01:10:22
Speaker 3: You know, there’s more recreationists than US four service land and b L m N than there are national parks every year. So they were missing the boat. But there is again a real disconnect between the politics and the public on conservation right now. I mean it was but it was really uplifting to see like far right militia leaders and far left climate activists literally stand together and but the.

01:10:49
Speaker 2: With either one of those groups that’s replicable.

01:10:56
Speaker 3: That is replicable though, because it’s not just about public lands and hunting and fishing. It’s also about clean water and more efficient agriculture and forest health and wildlife conservation and like clean air, Like we could rally people in a similar diverse coalition and that’s what I’m saying hasn’t existed in a while.

01:11:15
Speaker 2: And so there’s it would create, it create.

01:11:19
Speaker 3: It created space to kill the bill or that part of the bill and it, but it also could create space to do the right thing too.

01:11:25
Speaker 2: And that’s the vision that I have.

01:11:30
Speaker 1: Let me hit you with one.

01:11:32
Speaker 3: Uh.

01:11:33
Speaker 1: I had three questions pop up my head, but I’m forgetting them as fast as I’m thinking. This was the first one that I wanted to ask you about. If what is the let’s say you what you’re you’re talking to a neighbor. Okay, yep, you’re taught new neighbor. And you know that you have your taught new neighbor who is my parents. Fiscally you’re taught to do a fiscally conservative neighbor. Sure, okay, single issue voter maybe a little bit like likes the fiscally conservative economy efficiency not like an idea logue, right, And he says to you, Benji, why should I give a shit about any of the stuff you’re talking about? Like, sell me on it.

01:12:18
Speaker 3: There is no country that we love without the resources and the beauty that we have, right, like the resources that we develop largely on public land in a lot of ways. The resources that we develop, the water that we have, the agricultural industry that we have. Our entire country relies on the environment to survive. So we could extract everything over the next five or ten years and probably break in a lot of money, but then we’d be destroyed after that. And you can’t take care of the economy if you don’t take care of the environment. You can’t take care of the country without taking care of conservation. And it is not only an economic driver to take care of our country. I mean recreation statistics. We have the most recreationists in American history, generating you know, billion, tens of billions of dollars of revenue for the government. It not only generates an economic value, but it also generates the value that our communities depend on to survive. And I’d argue, what is a more important issue? Like I live in Arizona right now, So if we’re talking to a neighbor in Arizona, what issue is more important than water quality in Arizona? I mean in water, in water availability, like, I can’t think of one because we have no water. We don’t have a city, right like, So this is this is all interconnected with people’s lives in a way that we’ve kind of forgotten about because we’ve just developed so many resources and we’re so technologically driven that we kind of forget about the natural world.

01:13:37
Speaker 1: But but we have to.

01:13:38
Speaker 3: We have a symbiotic relationship with the natural world that we’ve completely forgotten about. And we’re one of the last frontiers in the world that’s actually taking care of our land by and large, Like, yes we’ve got issues, and yes, this like public land self was a huge threat, but if you look around the world, Africa is getting destroyed by the Chinese government and other countries going in and saying we’re gonna just mine everything and destroy with slave labor. South America is getting deforested continually at a crazy rate, and its wildlife habitats continually being encroached upon. We are one of the last places in the world, Canada, a couple of other places where we actually are investing in this and it’s one of the best values and assets that our country has is our environment. So if we aren’t thinking about that from a national perspective, then we’re completely missing one of the most important parts of our country.

01:14:27
Speaker 1: Okay, I buy that.

01:14:30
Speaker 2: I would hope you do.

01:14:32
Speaker 3: Well my neighbor by it, I don’t know, but you know, I think the we have become so digitized that we’ve kind of forgotten about the natural world around us. And yes, that’s like, it’s not the I heard a quote the other day that was like so simple, but it’s so true. Like the environment isn’t ours to, you know, extract resources from the environment. Is ours to care for and develop and work with and conserve so that future generations can also exist. So yes, we need to develop resources, and yes we need to you know, manage these places, but we also have to care for them because we’re not the only people that are going to inherit this. And I think we’ve just become such a selfish society that that neighbor who’s worried about fiscal policy isn’t they’re not seeing the forest through the trees literally, right, They’re just literally thinking about their own vanguard account and the national debt, which.

01:15:28
Speaker 2: Of course is important.

01:15:29
Speaker 3: Both are important, but we’ve also got to think about, you know, our children and grandchildren. And you know, I’m twenty seven, I’ve got you know, I was working with Charlie on the National debt when I was twelve right, But I still got hopefully seventy more years on this planet, and then I’m gonna have kids someday, and then I’m gonna have grandkids someday, and I need to have a world that’s worth bringing them into, right, And it’s not about like kumbaya, like protect nature because we just care about the wildlife. It’s like it’s so much bigger than that, right, It’s literally about us, And that’s lost in a lot of this.

01:16:06
Speaker 1: If you look at there’s there’s a couple of movements that I’m that I’m always stunned by how effective they were. And so we’re gonna look at the push for the legalization of gay marriage and then the legalization of weed. Okay, now those are long running Those are long running disputes, but something happened, But something happened, and they hit like a they hit like a moment, and just like they hit a moment where it became kind of bipartisan.

01:16:39
Speaker 2: Yep, that’s what I’m hoping for.

01:16:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, but here’s the rup. I want to talk about those movements for a little bit. Then I want to tell you why I think that what you’re engaging is more complicated because these were these were like fairly simple asks. Right, Okay. The way the way gay marriage got over the threshold was it wasn’t like, this isn’t about special privilege, right, This isn’t about this isn’t like part of some zero something we’re going to take away something from someone to give it to somebody else. This isn’t like we’re not really asking the government to bend over backward on too much here. It’s just there’s a thing. It’s like this symbolic gesture that we feel should be kind of applied to all Americans and like and then to the right on the right, you’d say, and really, remember, what business is it of yours? What business is it of the government? Who I decide to marry? Like? Do you really think the government should tell you who to marry? And eventually got where you had. You had this kind of leftist idea, and the right merged onto it. They had an easy way to merge on because it was like if you’d gone back, my dad was very conservative, got back, asked my dad, he would have said, but it’s none of my business, right, what you know, what what that guy’s going to do in his house nothing to do with me, Right, I don’t have to love it. It’s not my business that that became a thing, and like, and that’s when that went legal. Weed a long running left issue and it eventually became it’s kind of even hard to get to it, but it kind of became like a little bit of a it’s a plant that goes out of the ground. I mean, can you really have a bunch of rules about a plant that grows into your garden? Right? And A, Hey, what that guy’s doing is you know what he’s doing in his own house? Is it really my business? And no one can really demonstrate to me that it’s more destructive than alcohol. It seems like when you look at the stats like domestic disputes, vehicle crashes, like booze ain’t the best thing in the world, now, is it really like there’s less that goes into making weed than booze?

01:18:55
Speaker 3: There’s also a safety argument, right, like wouldn’t you rather have it be monitored by the government not have it be e leg coming in? I mean, I had a friend in high school who had like fentanyl in the weed because it was illegal, and he died. So that that you know, that’s the argument that people make too. So yeah, there’s plenty of arguments to more of people together there.

01:19:15
Speaker 1: But these things, these things that I’ve marveled at, like in my lifetime, yep, in the end, were real clean and they were like an issue. Public lands becomes like a clean issue. But to call for a sort of expansive kind of umbrella of environmental concern is bigger because people would say like, well, what’s the ask, and you’d be like, it’s a lot of asks all the time.

01:19:48
Speaker 3: That’s a great way of putting in it, you know, And it’s harder, It is way harder, but I think it’s worth it because you’re gonna have different stakeholders engaging in different parts of it, like the water stakeholders might be different than the forest stakeholders, but but very similar to those issues. There is an easy on ramp for every political identity to care, whether that be for national security or for jobs, or for moral high ground, or for just carry about your local community, or for carrying about nationals. You know, our national identity and legacy and heritage, like protecting, conserving, taking care of our environment intersects with everyone’s political views in a very similar way to those issues. Because that’s not actually true on immigration as easily. It’s not as easy it on guns, right, Like those are core parts and what on ramp are you going to create between those issues from both sides. I don’t know how we solve those, right, But the environment might have more variables to it, because it’s not just one policy that you’re trying to get to legalize it.

01:20:49
Speaker 2: Legalize it.

01:20:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, It’s not like you can go like, okay, we did it in that state, that we’re going to do it in that state, right, and eventually it’ll be that we got like forty nine states.

01:20:56
Speaker 2: Right.

01:20:57
Speaker 3: This is not a one trick pony movement that we’re trying to create. And you look, this approach needs to be applied to situations. Applied to the public land sell off, and we were three months old and obviously so many great organizations worked on that. We showed that it was at least possible on that applied to that. But if you apply that same group of people to restore in Utah or restoring the Great Salt Lake, I think we do a lot better of a job at restoring the Great Salt Lake. But right now there’s no knowledge, but everyone in Salt Lake Vicinity wants to restore the Great Salt Lake. Yet nothing is really being done about it because everyone’s focused on other political culture war issues and there’s no mobilized cultural movement across the party lines to get something done. So you apply it to that, or you apply it to Oh my god, wildfires are getting worse and worse, mega fires are getting worse every summer, not only in the United States but around the world. Apply that to that issue, and so some stakeholders might drop off, some might come on. But it’s the same on ramp where people have different whys, different reasons for caring, but they care about the same end goal and they have the exact same end goal, less wildfires. Who wants to create a policy that creates more wildfires in this country, I don’t know anybody. So in the way of getting there, the vast majority of people actually would agree on if we actually had the chance to debate it, but right now we’re not. So I agree it’s way harder, but it’s worth it, and I think it’s worth it to pursue that rather than having a disjointed movement where the pendulum swings back and forth every four years on a subject like Biden puts in all these massive conservation preservation restrictions and public land deals and all this stuff, and then Trump undoes it. People are like, oh, it’s just a Trump problem. No, we need durable, durable conservation solutions in five years and ten years and fifteen years. No matter where the country heads.

01:22:52
Speaker 2: We don’t know.

01:22:52
Speaker 3: It could be advance, it could be a new sum, it could be nobody that we’ve even been talking about. Right, but at some point we have to have some consistency because the lack of consistency is killing our environment, and it’s and it’s refusing, it’s we are deferring any policy from getting done because of that disconnect.

01:23:14
Speaker 2: So it is harder, but I think it’s worth it.

01:23:17
Speaker 3: And I don’t have all the answers today, but hopefully in ten years we’ll have this conversation.

01:23:20
Speaker 2: We’ll have made a lot of progress there.

01:23:21
Speaker 7: Let me.

01:23:23
Speaker 1: Offer a.

01:23:26
Speaker 6: Probably a poor analogy, and you can tell me how accurate it is.

01:23:31
Speaker 1: Can I raid it too? Absolutely?

01:23:33
Speaker 2: Five stars?

01:23:34
Speaker 4: Absolutely, Like when you’re talking about building cultural momentum and having something where people on both sides can approach it from their own angle, I’m wondering if you’re and I don’t this might sound stupid and maybe dismissive, but you’re trying to like you’re essentially saying, I want to make caring for the environment, like support the troops.

01:23:55
Speaker 2: Yes, Like no, that is not dismissive.

01:23:58
Speaker 4: That is exactly because like five stars, there’s because every every politician is going to say that they support the troops, and they’re going to lean into it as as sort of part of their mantle of legitimacy. Democrat who supports the troops might vote for mental health counseling for veterans and and research on on you know, like PTSD things like that. Maybe they are pushing for greater equality in different like you know, combat roles whatever. A Republican who supports the troops might vote for funding for extra you know, like like make sure the troops have what they need to fight the wars.

01:24:39
Speaker 1: We send them to armored doors on their humbes, armored doors on their humbes, right, And like.

01:24:45
Speaker 4: Obviously, I mean I feel like there’s part of there’s part of me that when I hear someone say I support the troops, I’m kind of like, well, that’s brave of you, you know, like, but it’s good politics.

01:24:57
Speaker 2: And space where both sides are to support them.

01:25:01
Speaker 4: Because Nixon, I mean, Nixon has all this huge environmental legacy, and and you could read it one way and say, like, god, I didn’t know he cared so much about the environment. But really Nixon didn’t give He didn’t he didn’t care about the environment. He just was like, boy, this is a powerful horse to hitch to my wagon.

01:25:21
Speaker 2: Right.

01:25:22
Speaker 4: So that’s that’s that’s sort of the analogy that occurred to me as you’re talking. It’s it’s making this sort of a cultural plank of America that everybody’s got to have that feather in their hat if they want to throw their throw said hat into the arena.

01:25:39
Speaker 6: To make this a really messy metaphor.

01:25:42
Speaker 2: Five star.

01:25:42
Speaker 1: No, I like the metaphor, but I think that and I get the point supporting the troops. You could say, oh, no, I support the troops. We should bring them home, right, and some guys like, oh no, no, I support the troops. We should send them. Got to give them with they need to send them advanced munitions. Yeah, right, Like you both get the carried around.

01:26:01
Speaker 2: But I agree with that.

01:26:03
Speaker 3: But the troops are one of the few topics where both sides actually sit down and have a conversation now though, even though it’s not pretty and they don’t always agree, and I’m not expecting that this is not some kumbai a shit, but eighty percent of the time there’s actually a lot of agreement. So, but that’s not being facilitated. If there’s agreement on troops in our military, they’re at least having that conversation because they feel like it’s part of the American national identity. And of course there’s extraneous times where they totally see differently, right, and that’s going to happen, and that did happen when Richard Nixon was president.

01:26:35
Speaker 1: Right.

01:26:36
Speaker 3: There are people who thought Richard Nixon didn’t go far enough, and there are people who thought he’d went too far.

01:26:39
Speaker 2: Sure, but stuff got done, and that was.

01:26:43
Speaker 7: Farmers feed America. It would be the platform that I think is the most applicable, is like everybody loves farmers and that is the thing that feeds us and large part secures our country. We don’t have to import stuff from all these other countries if we really focused on farmers feeding America. But those ecosystems are the most rapidly disappearing ecosystems on the planet, let alone in the United States. Here in Montana, we lost a million acres of farm and ranch ground over the last year, sorry, over the last three years. And like, if you take a chunk of grazing ground in Oklahoma and look at the interests that want that grazing ground, yep, despite the fact that every fricking politician is like, farmers feed America, God bless the farmers. Right, it’s like the last week in uh Foot.

01:27:42
Speaker 6: Let me but let me rush back on that.

01:27:45
Speaker 4: There’s there’s probably elected officials from urban burrows in New York that don’t get questions about farmers.

01:27:52
Speaker 2: Totally, like yet they’re eating their food right.

01:27:56
Speaker 4: Like like it’s that’s something where people would be like, oh, sure, but that’s not really what my constituents set me here for. There’s nobody who’s like, do you support the troops, and they’re like, it’s not.

01:28:09
Speaker 7: Really name one.

01:28:10
Speaker 4: Yeah, I’m just not involved in that, you know, Like everybody’s like, yes, absolutely.

01:28:17
Speaker 1: Right, name one troop.

01:28:21
Speaker 4: Like like that that’s an issue I feel like where no one can, no politician can sort of step out of line and no one can ignore it or say like it’s I’m focused on this.

01:28:32
Speaker 6: I’m focused on this and they’re like, no one.

01:28:35
Speaker 4: Would respond to do you support the troops and be like, well, really, I’m focused on transportation an infrastructure.

01:28:42
Speaker 3: You can pivot easier with that. But I think it’s like if you’re AOC as an extreme example, there are serious environmental issues in New York City and with the Hudson River. You know, if you’re Wisconsin Senator, the water you know, aquifers sinking and having the Mississippi get destroyed by runoff is an issue, but that doesn’t really matter to New York. But like it’s I think that’s where we’ve lost it is. It’s like the environmental movement in general has also hurt the hunting and angling community because it’s always been about for the last twenty years, polar bears, climate change, energy, like things that don’t really impact the local community. That every local community has really their own environmental issue and they truly don’t care too much. Like in Arizona. In Scottsdale, where I live, they truly could not care less about farmers. Should they care, probably, but like they don’t. They care about water quality and access, and they care about the smog that’s getting worse. So as but as a country, we shit, we share a different reason for caring, but we all share the caring part because we know we rely on it. So I agree that like tagging farmers in is part of it, but it needs to be a part of like local community ownership. And people feel like there’s no way to get involved because it’s like this issue is too big, climate change, polar bears, that’s not like my thing. What if everyone was able to activate and advocate for the issues that they cared about in their own local community in a better way that felt more tangible, that felt more realistic. And the vision that I have is for if you live in the Great Salt Lake area, you can advocate for that across party lines and actually get something done for that, because that’s what’s affecting you. If you’re a big part of the country that has agriculture and farming and you’re worried about water quality and the lack of crops that you can get now because the substance in the soil is so bad, like then you can advocate for that, But right now there’s nothing kind of that holistic view like there would be on troops, Like troops is very complex too, actually, right there’s so many different variables there, but there’s a culture around it that kind of forces people to face You’re some sort of solution out and that’s that’s kind of the vision.

01:31:04
Speaker 1: A difference between you and me is that you thought about something and then did it and and and I thought about this and never did it. But I’ll share with you.

01:31:13
Speaker 2: I eat another piece of at.

01:31:15
Speaker 1: A point, please. At a point, I realized that there’s like a way I think about the environment that isn’t shared by the environmental movement. And I realized that this way I think about it is actually shared by a lot of friends of mine. Is that I have a sort of there’s there’s a bit of a like a nationalism and a patriotism yes to a view on the American landscape. You know, Like a friend of mine was like, whatever, he’s going fishing with his kid. He’s like, you think they’re doing this with Tyran, you know, just joking. Perhaps they are, but just joking meaning he like it’s like, uh, he kind of views it like America the beautiful Yes, yeah, do you follow me?

01:32:09
Speaker 7: Yes?

01:32:09
Speaker 1: And there was there was times I think it was like maybe like the last election cycle or whatever. There was times I was like, man, I should find some better way of articulating this thing that I think is kind of widely held where people have a sense of American pride about the American environment.

01:32:29
Speaker 3: That is exactly you know, and you look at like Yellowstone the show, Right, People didn’t watch that because this show is just good. It was because it evoked an emotional connection to Americana in a way where it’s like, I’m proud of the fact that we have places that look that beautiful. And every if you go into a Member of Congress’s office, no matter if it’s Marjorie Taylor Green or AOC, the first pictures on the walls are of their natural beauty in their districts, right, Like, there is an immense pride that Americans have in our environment. This fall, we’re going to launch a campaign called United by Nature? United by Nature?

01:33:07
Speaker 1: Can you call it? Don’t ship Up America.

01:33:10
Speaker 3: That’ll be our secondary That’ll be the secondary slogan, and we let people use which one they like more. But we have America’s two and fifty anniversary next year. I would argue that America, in our conservation legacy is the best in the world. I would also argue that it’s incredibly at risk right now for the first time at least to this severity in a very long time.

01:33:34
Speaker 1: Can you, when you get a minute, can you touch on a couple of those points about.

01:33:37
Speaker 2: What I’m worried about.

01:33:38
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:33:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, Americans are so proud of the natural environment. We have to tap into that. So what I’m worried about. National parks are in massive maintenance debt. We’re having conversations constantly about selling off public lands for development, which doesn’t solve affordability at all. And the people who are perpetuating that know that wildlife issues are becoming worse. Chronic wasting, disease, in ages species like these things are not getting better necessarily, especially invasive species. I mean, water quality is going down. Microplastics are a ninety four percent of tested water that we drink, and the water quality in our rivers is getting infinitely worse every single year. Megafires are on the rise in this country, and things like the Great Salt Lake, the watersheds, the aquifers below the farms, these are all problems that are getting infinitely worse too. And at some point we’re already starting to see the impacts of this.

01:34:44
Speaker 1: Right.

01:34:44
Speaker 3: Air quality issues in the summer with the fires, farmers having tons of issues, flooding getting worse, not just because of quote Unico climate change, but also because of the fact that the ecosystems that help prevent a lot of hurricanes and stuff the damage from the hurricane have now been destroyed, so there’s not these natural barriers. So we have massive problems. And yet the government, the Biden administration didn’t focus on this at all. They focused on them like climate and energy and infrastructure and evs, but until kind of the final hour, they didn’t even really talk about this conservation or preservation or anything with the natural landscape. Yeah, and Trump’s whole approaches. I will to undo everything because it’s gone too far and it’s wrong and whatever, but we’re not going to replace it with anything. I never liked that guy, because I never liked that guy. But he’s not just doing stuff that Biden did. He’s not just undoing some Biden did. He’s undoing stuff that Nixon did and George W. Bush did and Clinton did.

01:35:44
Speaker 7: What I point out to people often, right is I’m like, there’s always the other side right, participating in this, right, Like even when there’s a supermajority. Yeah, pick your supermajority. Right, but there’s right now, there’s Democrats in the room. They’re not going home. They’re not like, okay, well we’ll see you in four years.

01:36:07
Speaker 1: Right.

01:36:07
Speaker 7: There’s always that non partisan aspect in there. One side’s ultimately going to have like a final say.

01:36:14
Speaker 2: But you know, it’s like people are trying and on.

01:36:18
Speaker 7: The public lands issue too, it’s like, well, thanks for calling, but we defer to the eleven Western states, right. You know, they’re be a Democrat or Republican, they’re the ones that have the knowledge, and so we’re going to listen to them.

01:36:33
Speaker 3: Right.

01:36:35
Speaker 7: And that’s just like something that people need to be reminded of, right, because it all gets shackled onto, you know, kind of who’s in power at that time.

01:36:44
Speaker 3: Yes, but I think on a quick diversion, I just want to say thank you to you guys, because first of all, I think between you and me and a couple of others in the non elected space, we are blamed for killing that horrible idea to sell off the three million acres. It didn’t matter that Patagonia took a stance against the public lands at all. The sell off didn’t matter that Sierra Club did that didn’t move the needle at all. In fact, it probably hurt that they weren’t engaged. It mattered because center left, center and center right voters who were largely in your communities Joe Rogan’s community campaign’s community and in our community were saying no, hands off. Because that’s the broad coal that’s the power of a broad coalition, because no matter what the moment is, you’re meeting it. Then, right, you’re meeting the moment because you have the broad coalition. And it’s nice that the people in California were saying things, and it’s nice that the people in Washington didn’t like they should. But that didn’t move the needle on that one. But maybe it’ll move the needle on a different one.

01:37:45
Speaker 1: Right, Maybe if I tell my family something and my kids get real mad, and then also my wife’s mad, she’s mad.

01:37:57
Speaker 3: Exactly exactly, And so I want to thank you for that in the areas where you know, quote unquote didn’t make an impact, right, like the.

01:38:06
Speaker 7: Rosy picture of the idea, right is it’s building equity, yes, right, and there’s going to be this like alarm bells went off?

01:38:14
Speaker 1: Right, why is that?

01:38:15
Speaker 7: What’s the deal with this issue?

01:38:17
Speaker 1: No?

01:38:17
Speaker 2: And it’s all very important.

01:38:18
Speaker 7: I already said I support the troops. Right, people are still looking at me weird what’s going on.

01:38:25
Speaker 3: But that’s that’s the power of this broad coalition. So I just say that to say also, that’s how like in the future, it will be different states that are relevant for different environmental initiatives and will need those people there too. So but you know, there’s some really good people there like Martin Heinrich and Tim Sheehy and you know Crapo and Danes and who care about conservation and there’s overlap with this idea, but they also don’t have a lot of space to work within, like they they they all actually, whether they want to publicly acknowledge this or not, they really were happy about the pushback because it gave them the ability to do what they actually wanted to do, right like, especially for a Republican A lot of Republicans. I know for a fact that there were about sixteen other Republican senators who wanted to stand up against the public man sell Off, but they didn’t feel like it was politically helpful to do so. And until they feel like there’s that space to step out and say, actually, this is not only what I don’t want, but it’s also what my voters don’t want. They’re going to be more gun shy. And you look at the senators who spoke out. We all knew that they didn’t want this to happen from the get go, but because there were so many voters saying they didn’t want it too, then they’re like, well, now I can justify speaking out. That’s kind of American democracy at work in a time when people are just don’t really speaking out about things other than the radical extremes. So that’s where like the rational middle standing together to say, oh, we support the troops, Oh we support the environment and conservation. It gives space for not just the Heinrix and the ones who are always going to be willing to put their like Martin Heinrich, who we all love.

01:40:02
Speaker 2: I think maybe I don’t know.

01:40:03
Speaker 1: I love him. No, I like him. I like him personally, Yes, he’s a rare I like him personally, Yes. And I appreciate his constant advocacy on behalf of public lands. Yes. And I appreciate that he of many things I appreciate. I appreciate that he is willing to be like a very outspoken hunter right, and a yeah in a in a in a a in a political party where that’s not always the most uh, it’s not always the most welcome identity to have.

01:40:35
Speaker 3: And Tim Sheehy, when I’ve had conversations with him, will be like Montana cares more about conservation and the outdoors than you know any other place, you know, arguably, and so I I have to lead on this, but I also want to both of those two gentlemen go against the grain in a lot of ways of what they’re quote unquote supposed to do.

01:40:54
Speaker 2: There’s very few leaders like that in d C.

01:40:57
Speaker 3: Right, Like, that’s the world that I’m you know, really unfortunately familiar with, and we need to give space not just for those guys who are always going to try to stick their neck out as much as possible, but also the kind of the cowards. To be honest, they’re always going to be cowards and the Senate in the House who actually do want to do the right thing though, and they just don’t feel like they have a space to do it. And that’s the power of the movement that I think we could build, because there’s an underbelly there. If you talk to those sixteen Republican senators who wanted to speak out about it. I guarantee you if I said there’s gonna be a million people in your state right and left, we’re speaking out about this in your favor, they would have been like, Okay, than I can too, and that’s the power we.

01:41:34
Speaker 2: Need to build.

01:41:36
Speaker 1: Let’s change subject of teeny bit or change focus at teeny bit. If you’re sitting there as a guy that grew up and you had conservative principles, right, and you felt that like the party I kind of instinctively want to align myself with, Like they just are not representing my environmental concerns, right, I need them to. I want to change that position from your perspective, Like, what do you have to say if you had a private audience? So you have a private this is a private audience, right, Yeah. So so the houses, the Democrats in the House and Senate, they come to you and say what can we be what could we be doing different? What can we be doing different? What to them? Because it can’t be that like they got it just right now, and you just want you just want the Republicans have adopt their approach, like where are they missing? Where are they losing people? Where are they missing? Where could they be more effective? When I say, I mean like a big day like the Democrats on average, Ye, like the Party of the Democrats. Where do they miss?

01:42:46
Speaker 3: Well, I think I’ll reiterate, I think both sides are failing almost pretty equally on this issue. And the way that the Left has failed is it has been so much about climate and kind of this hysteria around Like I believe in climate change, and I you know, I’m not afraid to say that, but like when you’re just talking about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, like, climate change doesn’t matter if we destroy all the wild places that we have left, right, Like it’s like a distant priority. If you destroy the Amazon and you destroy all the wild places that we all love to recreate in, then we might as well just keep eating up the climate because we’re all screwed. So they’ve kind of forgotten to work on conservation because they’ve been so focused on this other.

01:43:27
Speaker 1: Issue technical solutions.

01:43:28
Speaker 3: Right.

01:43:29
Speaker 2: Green New Deal, you.

01:43:30
Speaker 3: Know, is an oversimplified way to give the analogy, but it’s basically, you know, that was their whole environmental platform, and you were like, well, if you look at the Green New Deal, it had nothing to do with public lands, private land conservation, sustainable ag forestry, water quality. It just only had to do with energy and EVS and technical infrastructure. So that’s where they’ve really failed. And it’s also been a race to the left. What’s the most that you can do to be as radical as you can out to say you care more than the other person. But it’s all about grand standing and it’s all about like these pledges and these goals, but there’s nothing behind them. Like I went to cop the UN Climate Conference for three years in a row, and it was the most abysmal time of my life because it was just like, well, if we have this pledge to be one hundred percent renewable by twenty thirty, that would be better than this company’s pledge, or this country’s pledge, or you know whoever the stakeholder was.

01:44:26
Speaker 2: And it was like, what are you actually gonna do?

01:44:29
Speaker 7: Right?

01:44:29
Speaker 3: Like there there’s no it’s all about the messaging and it’s not about the details. And the last thing that I think that they failed that is it has been you know this age old conservation versus preservation is like the debate, right, it’s been going on for centuries and in America specifically in the last century, they’ve been hinging very closely to just working on preservation rather than conservation and restricting access for hunting and angling and getting outdoors and like people are so scared of like resource development and using public lands for other and then just like the Zero Clubs saying they want to watch the bears or the wolves and not hunt, you know, hunt them, Like that’s kind of been the mindset has been the Zero Club mindset. And so in a similar way that the right has completely failed and is failing right now and we’re seeing it. It’s their turn to fail. The left has been failing too, and at some point one of the parties will get it right, or hopefully ideally both of them get it right, but right now that neither one of them is.

01:45:27
Speaker 7: Yeah, the use ray like we’re both in New York City. Yeah, And man, the riot that would ensue if somebody was like, yeah, we’re just gonna make Central Park off limits, right, just I was up with this Upper West Side array.

01:45:47
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean.

01:45:49
Speaker 6: We don’t want we you know, we don’t want people to interfere with the squirrel movement, right.

01:45:53
Speaker 2: The squirrel movements, squirrel migration.

01:45:55
Speaker 7: Yeah, a couple of like quick anecdotes for rip over their brutal travel and get on the island of Manhattan. As soon as he get into Manhattan, there’s this guy who does not look like me, probably has very different ideas about a lot of things, on an electric scooter, flying through traffic, and he’s got two fishing rods strapped to his back coming off the Hudson. And I was just like, Okay, this guy and I like, we can have a conversation, I guarantee you. I thought that was just super awesome to see. And then yeah, the conversations that I had about like the parks, because I was blown away by how many dogs are on the Upper West Side and people like they do whatever it takes to maintain a dog friendly lifestyle. And I thought that and it, you know, it obviously like connects to these park systems, right. And I thought that was just a good example of like, here’s this very this this group of people that I would put in a very nature disconnected category who have totally changed their lives in order to have that connection with that version of nature. Right. And they were like bird watchers, Holy, now.

01:47:23
Speaker 2: So many birdwatchers in New York.

01:47:25
Speaker 7: I was amazed. I was pretty pretty amazed with that.

01:47:27
Speaker 1: And then.

01:47:30
Speaker 7: But kind of to go back to the like the farm ranch community and where a lot of environmental groups have just like again lost connection with the end consumers. Another example, man, the majority of farmer rancher folks that I know address climate change every single day. It is part of their business as part as their their business plan. And they are so aware of the changes and the effects of climate change. Uh, the only way that they’re going to be viable is.

01:48:07
Speaker 2: By adapting, mitigating all the above.

01:48:10
Speaker 7: Yeah, and they are doing it.

01:48:12
Speaker 1: And they do not.

01:48:15
Speaker 7: Want to be associated with the climate change crowd, no, right, but they’re doing it every single day and they.

01:48:20
Speaker 2: Are the climate change ground.

01:48:22
Speaker 1: They don’t want anybody to think they’re a weirdo. Yeah, oh yeah, a liberal hit. Yeah. And it was like when my calves hit the ground, when I plant this, when I picked that, What I’m gonna do about water?

01:48:33
Speaker 7: How am I going to change what I plant?

01:48:35
Speaker 1: What?

01:48:35
Speaker 7: You know, what is worth it now versus was worth it ten years ago. As far as like field cultivation or non field cultivation, bringing what crops to market, the whole the whole thing. Water use, right, fertilizer, use all of it. And if you’re not doing these things like you’re you’re not going to be around, you’re not out of business.

01:48:57
Speaker 1: That’s an interesting point.

01:48:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, And and then they hate they get the lecture to them, the environmentalist lecture to them, even though they’re the ones doing in a lot.

01:49:07
Speaker 7: And some hook and bullet organizations too, like they use what I would call at this point like boiler plate conservation speak, right, and it’s ian. It’s the same version slightly tweaked for the last twenty years, right, that’s going out to everybody, and they’re like, well, this resonates. I’m like, well, it doesn’t resonate with people with the dirt under their fingernails doing it.

01:49:30
Speaker 2: But the problem is philanthropy, so that there’s money type, there’s so much money tied to it.

01:49:35
Speaker 3: And that’s that’s where I that’s another world that I have to work in, is the philanthropic world where you know, and probably shouldn’t even be talking about this because they probably don’t like that i’d be saying this, but it’s like they are so out of touch, but they have so much money and they’re funding these campaigns, they’re funding the zero clubs of the world. When they’re doing this anti bear thing, for sure, they’re also funding these very preachy, condescens Rural people are screwed up and dumb and like are doing the wrong thing all the time, and we need to take it back because farming an egg and industry, they are the bane of our existence and we have to basically ban them from society if we’re gonna keep going.

01:50:18
Speaker 7: And it’s it’s like, and don’t even get into the nuance of like the definition of rural if you’re standing in Manhattan, the definition of rural if you’re standing in cold Foot, Alaska.

01:50:28
Speaker 3: The philanthropists are only the philanthropists would not survive a literally ten minutes there. They live in San Francisco, they live in New York, and they live in Chicago. Those are kind of the and a little bit of la Those are the four places they don’t leave there and they are in the biggest bubble if you think, like DC, the swamp is a bubble which people want to drain.

01:50:48
Speaker 2: Philanthropy needs to be drained.

01:50:50
Speaker 3: Like it’s it’s crazy what I have to put up with with philanthropists and how disconnected they are, and they actually don’t understand what’s going on in America at all, and yet they are funding tens of billions of dollars of nonprofits to dominate the narrative. And so that’s also part of my plan right, is to represent in an environmental movement America. Actually, because the environmentalist groups can’t do that. They literally can’t. That’s why I have such an advantage here. They can’t even they can’t they can’t even try to do what we’re doing because they’re funded to not do that, and they are in philanthropy is so screwed up because a nonprofit only exists if they get the money, and you only raise money if there are problems, And so what’s the Is there an incentive to solve the problem. Then no, because if you solve the problem, you lose your job. So there’s there’s there’s you know, that’s where the disconnected messaging comes from because the people who are dominating that from a financial perspective, who are donating to these groups, have no idea how real America lives.

01:51:55
Speaker 1: I’m going to give you a very weird, petty example of what you’re talking about. I remember, uh when I remember watching Just in the News, when when Michael Bloomberg, No, not Bloomberg. Who’s the guy the tall guy kind of left in a little bit of a scandal. Mayor of New York City Blasio. I remember right away when de Blasio got elected, I haven’t thought about and scamd.

01:52:22
Speaker 7: I was like, still.

01:52:26
Speaker 1: Bloomberg shor.

01:52:29
Speaker 6: He pulled that up on the screen.

01:52:32
Speaker 2: Can you put up all the Michaels.

01:52:35
Speaker 1: I remember when he when he came in, like a thing he did very early was this like thing about we laughed about it on the show, but he came in and very early had this thing about the rules about the horses.

01:52:50
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.

01:52:53
Speaker 1: I remember being like, if that is not an example of someone giving that guy money and saying listen, you know, and he’s like, okay, got it. I’ll try to remember, like you give me a bunch of money and some about the horses. Got it? Like it was so transactional, Oh yeah, and that like I imagine, but why not that magic? I’ve seen it, Like you know, I’ve had exposure to the nonprofit space where I see where donors philanthropy can come in and manipulate a nonprofit agenda with a big carrot.

01:53:33
Speaker 2: That’s that’s really how this all works and they’re.

01:53:35
Speaker 4: Like advocate here though there because there’s also ways in which like a group the people as part of an NGO have issues that they care about, Like they want to work on wildlife, they want to work on public lands, they want to do this.

01:53:50
Speaker 1: And and they see.

01:53:53
Speaker 4: Grants available and they sort of go, oh, we can tie this to that by framing it this way. They’re still trying to solve that problem, you know, like like I don’t I don’t believe that people at BHA, uh don’t want I don’t believe that people at BHA want the public lands issue to still to just be a constant football because they actually care about it.

01:54:16
Speaker 1: No, that’s true. They yeah, they’re not. They’re not like they’re definitely not thinking, well, we want to win, not all the way.

01:54:23
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then like when they look at a I mean, the philanthropy thing is complicated, and I think that I think it exists on sort of like a spectrum er.

01:54:34
Speaker 1: It’s like a tug of war.

01:54:35
Speaker 4: It’s like, well, we could get into this pot of money if we sort of frame our work in this way, and we can use that money to do what we really want to do. And sometimes you can get too tugged too far outside of your core issues. But there’s also a lot of ways in which they’re using that money strategically to get to sort of pour more gas on the fire and what they really want to work.

01:55:00
Speaker 3: I agree, but I think I think a lot of it’s subconsciously going in the wrong direction. So what I mean by this is during the public lands sell off, the Senator Mike Lee, if you remember on Twitter, was going after me largely because of what I was saying on social media, and his whole conspiracy is that I was funded to go against him. I will be transparent. I raised fifty thousand dollars after it happened, fifty thousand dollars. I know that there are so many massive environmental NGOs who took this massive public stand, again not moving the needle at all, but they were like, you know, screw you, President Trump, screw you, Mike Lee, screw you whatever. They raised tens of millions of dollars off of that because they tried to make a name for themselves in a time where they weren’t actually doing anything.

01:55:47
Speaker 1: Probably were not impactful because they weren’t talking to anybody.

01:55:50
Speaker 3: Knew, right, So Mike Lee had actually in a strange way the right thought process there, which is like Benjie’s probably using this to raise a ton of money, and I didn’t because I didn’t even plan and get involved in that, because I didn’t know it was coming down the pike. Like there was like you couldn’t even plan for, right. We all found out pretty last minute, and we all just did what we needed to do, so there wasn’t some coordinated effort. But these groups are incentivized to make it seem like they are doing more than they actually are and to take harder stances than what actually would move the needle because they know that that’s where philanthropy is, like, oh thank god, you know this group is taking such a hard stand, but there’s not actually like an outcome thought of it. And so I think that you’re right. But a lot of groups raise money when they don’t actually do anything with it. And I’m not saying BHA specifically, I don’t know enough about that, but well, i’ll give you.

01:56:38
Speaker 7: An example to your point. So roadless rule, Right, I’m working with a bunch of different groups and talking about roadless rule, and this kind of ties in a couple of points I’ve been made today is right, Like, we’re not even at the actual conversation about roadless rule because it’s not about timber, it’s not about public access to these areas. It’s not, in my opinion, actually about wildfire mitigation. So just tell me what the reason is. Yeah, that you want to roll back protections on forty four million acres, that that would be like the chunk that is actually going to get affected.

01:57:18
Speaker 1: You’re not you mean, you’re not buying that. It’s just general, no, a thing.

01:57:23
Speaker 7: Like, just tell me the thing so we can talk about the thing.

01:57:26
Speaker 1: Right Earlier we talk about the debate, like the buffalo thing, and there’s all these red herrings, brucellosis whatever. In the end you’re like, oh, I get it. This is about who’s what animals eat? What grass? It’s about grass, Yeah, you know what I mean. And with the with the l it was about like, this is about increasing new lands for developers to develop.

01:57:50
Speaker 3: Right, and decreasing the federal state and trying to achieve for their goal of reducing the federal budget deficit.

01:57:59
Speaker 1: That thread hearing it might it might be one thing one thing.

01:58:04
Speaker 3: Well, either way, it’s definitely out in affordable housing. We can agree in that for housing.

01:58:08
Speaker 1: I don’t think they’re worry about the debt. There’s a lot better ways to figure out the debt totally.

01:58:12
Speaker 7: But on this road list deal, I’ve you know, I have a good, good idea. Come upper.

01:58:20
Speaker 1: Uh.

01:58:20
Speaker 7: And I was like, well, why don’t we all these groups that have resources, why don’t we spend some time get the list of the green groups that sue the most on some of these mitigation efforts that are that are technically included in the wording of the roadless rule, right, and we at least get them to a table where we can have a discussion on what they’re going to sue on and what they’re not.

01:58:56
Speaker 1: Right.

01:58:56
Speaker 7: And then we’re going to have this letter and this coalition that says, hey, all these including these ones that are screwing everything up for everybody because they just sue all the time. They just try to grind things to a halt. Say this is our line. If you guys outline where you need the work done, we will not sue on this. And if they don’t, we’ll just make this big, huge coalition out here say there is no working with these groups, and we’ll make it as public as possible. We’ll make them prize and that that’ll be the tactic here, right, And the response is like, man, it’s a great idea, ideas.

01:59:38
Speaker 2: We can’t do it.

01:59:40
Speaker 7: And they’re like are you I mean, are you going to go to these law firms and be like, uh, your business is going to be And they’re gonna be like, Hey, that’s a good idea.

01:59:51
Speaker 1: Go to those law firms, be like youre familiar with the whole like doge complex, that’s what you’re gonna have to apply something different because work’s drying up.

02:00:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, they’re not going to say yes to that.

02:00:01
Speaker 1: Right. When did Nature is non Partisan get founded? April twenty five? April twenty twenty five, layout for me, like, how do you think? How do you approach things? Do you approach things like quarters in your mind? Years in your mind, ten years in your mind?

02:00:21
Speaker 2: Quarters? Because the world changes every quarter?

02:00:23
Speaker 1: Right, a couple of quarters? What’s come? Like? What? Like?

02:00:27
Speaker 3: We’re going to launch a national narrative shifting campaign with a lot of the coalition partners that we’ve been working with, including a lot of the groups that you work with, you know, the trcps of the world. We’re gonna include everybody who’s in this broad coalition in a campaign called United by Nature. We’re gonna have concerts, We’re gonna have community events, We’re gonna have calls to action, We’re gonna have national ad campaigns. We’re going to try to make this United by Nature the calling card for support the troops. Right, we are united by nature, whether that nature is your salt lake or it’s your you know, Everglades, or it’s your you know, beartooth mountains.

02:00:57
Speaker 1: Right.

02:00:58
Speaker 3: So it’s it’s trying to create that national identity. We’re going to launch it in the in the next quarter. We’re also going to launch it bipartisan caucus in the Senate focused on conservation and try to create the space for that to get done.

02:01:12
Speaker 1: Is it gonna be called the level Headed Caucus?

02:01:14
Speaker 2: The level Headed cauca? What was the notion?

02:01:17
Speaker 3: What was your secondary slogan for you don’t show up America Caucus?

02:01:21
Speaker 2: I’ll ask.

02:01:24
Speaker 3: That’s great, and then you know, we’re really going to focus on tell people to Caucus caucus is like a little little family of senators that want to do the same action on the same topic. And so there are there’s like the Congressional Sportsman’s Caucus, which is a great group focus on you know, sportsmen’s issues and trying to build support in the Senate just on those issues.

02:01:47
Speaker 7: So we saw the public Lands Caucus in the House.

02:01:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and so it’ll be very complimentary to that in the Senate, but on more than just public lands. It’ll be about private land, wildlife, water, and a little bit of a wider.

02:01:59
Speaker 1: Sweet And you imagine pulling in you imagine this pulling in centrists from both parties.

02:02:05
Speaker 3: Or we actually want pretty hardcore Republicans and hardcore Democrats. But it’s gonna be one for one membership. So for every Republican, we get a Democrat.

02:02:12
Speaker 1: Is that normal for a caucus?

02:02:14
Speaker 2: No, there are a few that are modeled that way, but very rare.

02:02:17
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, because yeah, obviously.

02:02:19
Speaker 3: And our organization is structured part yeah, yeah, our organization is structured that way too. We have half our staff is liberal, half its conservative. Half our boards liberal half half its conservative. And we’re intentional for everybody that we add, we are making do you have non binary everyone’s got a leaning somewhere like put me down for both.

02:02:44
Speaker 6: We do.

02:02:45
Speaker 2: Actually, if you look at it from the box, you have to figure it out. No, we we we have out our board.

02:02:51
Speaker 3: We have got a few people who I actually have no idea, but if there’s a pretty active conservative person, we’re definitely gonna have an active understood so that that’s the vision that we see, because when you have it structured that way, and this is why, you know a lot of environmental organizations their staff is one hundred percent liberal or you know other boards one hundredercent liberal, and of course they’re going to lean that way, just like if it was the other way. So so we’re gonna launch this caucus. We’re gonna launch the National Narrative Shifting Campaign, United by Nature. We’re probably gonna do a big event at Yellowstone here in the spring to rally people around public lands and bring in like an A list celebrity, a list music. So we’re trying to make this a culturally relevant thing. And can you speak, no, just bring my kids want to hang out? What if they want to watch their dad on stage, they won’t.

02:03:38
Speaker 2: What if your wife wants to Yeah, we wanted to go, dad, but we’re actually gonna stay home this week.

02:03:50
Speaker 7: We heard this speech at dinner, part of it.

02:03:54
Speaker 3: But but yeah, that’s kind of what the next few months look like. And you know, we’re we’re really excited because we’re seeing, especially in the wake of just like the political division, people are wanting something positive in politics right now. And if there’s one issue that could help democracy kind of move forward and also bring our priorities to the table, the environment’s probably the best one in my opinion. So we’re seeing a lot of natural support, and you know, people from across the spectrum. I mean, we have drag queens and militant you know, militant activists who are all believing in this same model. And it’s it’s it’s really kind of incredible what people are looking for on this right now.

02:04:36
Speaker 1: How will you decide going forward? How will you decide Like where with the public land sell off, there’s like a specific thing. Yeah, there’s a known party that’s pushing it. There’s a no, not not even party, there’s a known individual who’s pushing it, yep, Right, and so you got to like create friction, Yeah, like you’re going to You’re like, whatever you do, however positive you keep it, you will create friction. Right. How how are you deciding on what issues where you’re like, I’m going to create friction on this one. I’m going to create friction on this one. I mean specific bills, right, specific measures do I mean like, is it just your moral compass? Like, like what goes into going like this is going to get ugly?

02:05:25
Speaker 3: I think it’s when we know that the vast majority that there’s a winning coalition that’s willing to be like active on something. Because we mostly want to be four things. So what I mean by that is like, we don’t want to always be the group that’s standing against whatever is bad. That’s what a lot of environmental groups do. We want to show that there is a political constituency to put forward funding for national parks, to put forward funding for wildlife conservation, right, like, like show that there’s an appetite for that in a positive way. Because I’m so sick of like politicians only being afraid of people instead of like being like, oh, I’m doing this because people actually want me to do it. So but when there’s this example, like the public land sell off, where we have to take a stance against it, we are going to be very intentional about picking and choosing. I’ve already gotten so much shit for not taking a stance against absolutely everything that’s been happening over the last eight months. And I’m like, I can’t die on every hill, right, and our organization can’t die on every hill, and no organization can die on every hill. But if there’s an overwhelming winning coalition of Americans where the politicians are so out of touch with America like they were on the public land sell off, we’re going to show them that they’re out of touch. And so it will depend on really, where’s the American populace at, where’s the winning coalition at? And can we actually mobilize them, because if we can’t, then we’re trying to stick a square peg into a round hole, and a lot of times that’s what happens and it doesn’t actually do anything. So if we’re going to really lean in and be against something, we better be damn sure that it’s going to be impactful before we do it.

02:06:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s that’s I like that appro Yeah, I’m at a loss for words. I love that approach. I like that approach because I think another way that groups would look and they’ll say this is we’re gonna lose bad, but this is gonna be good for fundraisings, and this is gonna be good for press. If Peta says, hey, we’re gonna have it be that you don’t say a whole hog anymore. You know, they’re like, we’re probably gonna lose. People are still gonna say a whole hog, but it’s gonna get a lot of media, exactly. But you know, I’m not gonna win this one.

02:07:30
Speaker 2: And that’s exactly.

02:07:31
Speaker 3: I mean what I’m at the point where it’s like, I care about the outcomes and if that, if that comes at the cost of fund fundraising, I’m willing to take that. If it comes at the cost of media, that’s fine. If it comes at the cost of people thinking that I have some ulterior motive because I’m not taking a stance on everything because I think that I’m like trying to shy away from every issue, then that’s fine too. But I think people have gotten so used to like, oh, you’re not taking a stance on absolutely everything that’s bad, therefore you must have some ulterior motive. It’s like, no, it’s actually the opposite, right, Like I could raise so much money opposing everything that Donald Trump does. I could raise so much money off of that, and if I wanted to, I would do it. Or if I wanted to defend everything he was doing, I could also raise a lot of money off of that. But I think over time people’s demand is going to be for trying to actually create good outcomes. At least that’s my optimistic view of the world, that people will actually want that, and over time people will see, man, this is if you want to take a legitimate stance on something that will actually move the needle, this is the organization to work with.

02:08:29
Speaker 2: That’s the goal.

02:08:30
Speaker 1: You know what good analogy could be for you, Like, think about how the military would look at battles. They’re not like, all the guys are gonna diem, but think about what this is gonna mean from a publicity stamp, right right. They’re kind of like, no, no, no, I think we should go on Wednesday night because we’re gonna win on Wednesday night, are you guys? Just you guys have we’re gonna go.

02:08:54
Speaker 7: We’re gonna go on too much time together, Steve. Steve and I were playing phone tag all day and I happened to be on a Gettysburg tour and we finally connected. While I’m sitting there looking at at Pickett’s charge from the viewpoint of the Union lines and seems like, well, what do you think I’m like, this is so stupid. I’m like, you cannot tell me, you cannot, Like, I’m at odds with our historical tour guide right now because I’m like, yeah, I’m not buying this.

02:09:26
Speaker 1: This is ego driven something being like can I get a quick word? Just kind of looking down, looking around here?

02:09:37
Speaker 3: And that is the perfect analogy, though, That is the perfect analogy. Yeah, and I think the conservation movement could really use that. But also, like there to your point earlier, there are so many incredible groups out there in the hunting you know, in the hook and bult crowd, but also in the conservation crowd, but they’re not trying to do what I’m trying to do, and so we can work really well together to get things done because they they do they do have science behind them, and they do have resources, they do have research, they do have some grassroots right, and they have a brand, and they have really good ideas. But we need to facilitate the space for those ideas and create the national identity around those ideas. And so you know, I think for most of America, like we hope to be the national movement, but then we want to help accelerate the priorities of all these other great groups that are out there that just haven’t had the space. Like TRCP has so many great policy ideas. All these groups have so many great policy ideas, but if the political space isn’t there to move them, then they’re just ideas right and the roadless rule or anything that we’re against, you know, being rescinded, Like we might be right about that, but if they still decide to go forward with it because Americans didn’t speak up enough about it, then then it doesn’t.

02:10:51
Speaker 2: Matter how right we were.

02:10:53
Speaker 1: So that I’m a big TRCP supporter. Cal does allow to work with BHA, but I think that I’m sure there are people that fall into a trap of being competitive. Yes, but I would say, like speaking for the people at this table, I would say, like we’ll take the wins. We can get them, yep, and we just need wins. Yeah, Like you know, I love to see the groups I love and the people I love thrive and do well. But I’m not I’d rather see environmental wins than organization wins.

02:11:24
Speaker 2: I agree with that.

02:11:25
Speaker 3: No, And honestly, I mean, if nature is not God speed, thank you God. And you know, it really doesn’t matter who gets the credit. We just need good conservation wins. Like people ask me all the time, why am I doing this? And I think you’ll find out in twenty years as we look back, forty years, as we look back, I just care about conservation wins. And if Nature’s non partisans isn’t needed, then that’s then that’s great. But if it’s also the most important culturally relevant organization, that’s great too. But like there is no motive other than getting wins on the board. So but I like that approach because it also means that we are being so collaborative with all these other groups that largely have seen each other as like competitive enemies in a lot of ways, but they could be moving together.

02:12:07
Speaker 2: And I do believe that it’s more powerful if they do.

02:12:10
Speaker 3: And I know that’s kind of breaking the mold of like the nonprofit model, it’s breaking the mold of like the political model. People want to be against each other to find competition. But like, this to me, is bigger than that. It’s bigger than politics. It’s bigger than who has the money. It’s bigger than who gets the money. It’s bigger than who gets the win. It’s who and how did we get the best outcomes for conservation because we need like a twenty first century infusion of conservation progress like Teddy Roosevelt created. We need to have that legacy recreated in this country, and we’re not going to do it with the typical political bullshit that we’ve been dealing with over the last few years.

02:12:49
Speaker 1: I appreciate it taking so much time to talk.

02:12:50
Speaker 3: Man, this is really fun. I even got to eat jerky on air. Get to look my chops a little bit frothee.

02:12:58
Speaker 2: Should we all do that and.

02:12:59
Speaker 1: Just go, oh, Phil, there’s some jerky where you feel like they should have put one of those old flossers in the bag with it. But that doesn’t give any problem. I mean, like threads when we when I was a kid, when we made we made jerky, my dad would just like take the shank and slice it thin, you know. I remember, like every piece of jerk you ate, you’d have like a cut. You’d have a cut, and after an hour jerky eat and you take this white ball it’s like a piece of chewing gum sinow and you’d eventually take that and flick it.

02:13:37
Speaker 2: It’s full of little jerky pieces.

02:13:41
Speaker 1: You just be like like, yeah, it’s probably and you open the window and off into the side of the road.

02:13:48
Speaker 2: This does not that I don’t need that, no connective.

02:13:51
Speaker 1: Tissue, there’s no cut, there’s no cut to choose, but.

02:13:55
Speaker 3: I do want to again, you guys have a lot of incredible influence and pact that you’ve made, both of you, specifically on getting people rallied around these ideas across party lines. So you’re living the Nature’s non partisan mantra every single day. And I look up to you guys a lot, and and just the way that you’ve LED’s.

02:14:13
Speaker 1: Cal’s tenacious man. You are.

02:14:16
Speaker 7: Well, it helps when you’re right, that’s the good thing.

02:14:23
Speaker 1: In the morning.

02:14:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, when it’s when it’s authentic, you fight harder, right, and and you can tell that you mean it, and you can tell you mean it, and hopefully you can tell that I mean it, And that just makes it easier because you wake up every day and you actually want to do it and you’re not trying to put someone in a box. Because the thing is the thing that we have against these these screw ups in politics today is that they are putting themselves in boxes that they don’t even think are authentically real. And at some point, this authenticity of fighting for what we actually believe in will win because we actually have the passion and we actually care, and that will win.

02:14:54
Speaker 7: I keep reminding people, I’m like, we are right. And if you don’t think you are, bring this, bring your viewpoint of public lands and the value of them to somebody who doesn’t have that viewpoint. And you can just watch the mental gymnastics happen exactly and how they have to like try to re center themselves on their argument.

02:15:16
Speaker 1: They’re like, well have you.

02:15:19
Speaker 7: It’s like, yeah, yeah, we got it.

02:15:23
Speaker 1: But I feel like you’re not feeling.

02:15:25
Speaker 2: That that’s not an authentic view you have, right, right, They’re like, well, I’ve never been but right, that’s true.

02:15:38
Speaker 3: I think some of those guys we could really they look like they’ve never been in the outdoors before, and they look like, you know, maybe we could help them. So yeah, that’s something we should think about at some point. Little sun, a little little mountain, little tree, little dirt, little dirt.

02:15:52
Speaker 6: Not to sidetrack it, but summer.

02:15:54
Speaker 1: I was going to wrap up.

02:15:56
Speaker 2: An allergy.

02:15:59
Speaker 4: Summer and yellowstone. You see all these people pouring through livingstone. They look like they’ve never spent a day outdoor in their lives, and there’s a lot of eye rolling about it. But when I see that, I actually think it’s really cool that somebody who lives in Florida or or New York or wherever is like, you know what.

02:16:18
Speaker 6: We need to do this year? We need to go see Montana and Wyoming because you’re a big hearted person.

02:16:23
Speaker 4: No, I mean the traffic gets old. I don’t like waiting for tables at restaurants, but like it’s I don’t.

02:16:30
Speaker 7: Want to peel the curtain back too much. But Randall and his wife have both told me that if they ever went on a murder spree, it would it would be to target people who do illegal things in national parks.

02:16:44
Speaker 2: Okay, that’s but that’s a different argument.

02:16:46
Speaker 6: Again, all of my darkest secrets are coming out.

02:16:49
Speaker 2: No, but those are those are not contradictory, Like, yeah.

02:16:54
Speaker 4: I think it’s I think it’s so cool that people are like that. The people in this country are like I have to see this.

02:16:59
Speaker 2: This is part of my Americans.

02:17:01
Speaker 4: This is part of being an adult as an American. Is like sharing this with my kids, even if they never come back like another day, or they don’t hunt, or they don’t fish. They’re like, you know what, We’re gonna load up the station wagon and go look at rocks and water.

02:17:16
Speaker 1: No, that’s true, Phil. You should take that clip and send that to Venmo and if they’ll let Randall back on. Yeah, I’m on it.

02:17:28
Speaker 7: This guy come on, such a bad guy him.

02:17:32
Speaker 1: Let him transact, let him buy what he needs to buy, Let him buy what he needs to buy from the state sales.

02:17:38
Speaker 2: This episode sponsored by then.

02:17:40
Speaker 1: Mountain man Benji Backer. Nature is nonpartisan. Thanks man, thanks for having me.

02:17:47
Speaker 2: This is a lot of fun. And come back to come back.

02:17:49
Speaker 1: No, I’d love to have you back on.

02:17:53
Speaker 2: And let’s get out there together at some point too. Would That’s why I’d rather.

02:17:55
Speaker 1: Be hit us up in a year. That’s kind of a year later we allowed. I have a lot of people to come back.

02:18:02
Speaker 2: I’ll put her well, hopefully we made a lot of progress. I’ll put it on my calendar one year.

02:18:05
Speaker 1: One year unless things change a whole bunch and that’s all of a sudden, you win all the environmental battles, then come back on.

02:18:12
Speaker 2: Is that that’s the incentive right there?

02:18:15
Speaker 1: All right, you do an update, we won them all.

02:18:20
Speaker 2: I’ll see in a year that’s no way, that’s happening.

02:18:23
Speaker 1: All right, Thanks man, thank you so much. Appreciate it. H M.