00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, we're gonna we're gonna do this an unorthodox fashion, and we're gonna start with intros. I feel like the day we were talking and never it doesn't matter, um as though, dealing cards with introductions, and then we've got like a bunch of housekeeping issues and I need to ask Michelle some questions. I need to get the female perspective on two things. Is that cool, Michelle, Ny, you can introduce yourself. Good morning, I'm be honest for tell us from the Meat Eater crew. Good morning, I'm Sam Longering from the Meat Eater, joining us for the first time the first day in the office, excited to be here. Get your email hooked up? Yet I do, I do, and it's already full. So I really enjoyed that brief twenty minutes before I had any sort of inbox. It was glorious. Yeah, because there's no responsibilities yet. Yeah. Yeah, I got like things and I have work you have to do, right, Yeah. I finished my last job Friday at five, So you do like most people, game it, so you get two weeks off? Yeah, well I gave you. I gave my last employer a month and a half notice, so I figured I better hustle on over here once I got done with that. That speaks well to your work ethic. Man. Oh thanks, I appreciate that. The Michelle Michelle Michelle Chandler from the Meat Eater Crew formally Michelle Jorgensen say, who's Michelle? Right? So you did the old switch? Uh? I did the switch? Yeah? Can you real quick why? I mean, I'm all for it, man, but as you know, I've I've complained about many times. My wife won't do it. She's mean, it's I think my perspective on it's a little old fashioned, but I kind of consider it. I think he's a great and and he's an honorable man, and I'm proud to take his name and yeah, and to be a part of his family. So I look at it in that, in that perspective of validation of yeah, yeah, absolutely, So I'm really on board with it. My wife just thinks it's annoying to go change all your stuff around. It's not easy. They don't make it easy, you know, first stop Social Security and every other agency after that kind of yeah, passport, Yeah, we did that the other day. For a long time, she's screwed with me by saying that when her passport expired, she would do it, and she made this so one of her many emails has uses my last name as like a little nod in my direction. But no, she's not. I'm an honorablewler. I don't know what. Well, yeah, viewpoint of it, Sean. I am Sean Gearty, and I'm a founder and managing director at American Perry Reserve. Right, Ryan Callahan, it's my second Monday here. As far as the Mediator crew, you're doing good. We get a lot of emails about you already. I mean we have always have gotten a lot of emails about you. But we get emails about you people curious. Do you have categories? No, No, just a lot of emails about you. People like here here you talk and you want to know more, um, real quick. Ye, honestly, you were wrong about some stuff. Uh, dudes rolled in. You were talking about if you were to hire a if you were to hire a dude to pack out your elk, you were ballparking it like a horseman a packer. No, that wasn't me bambarking it? Who ballparked it? Ed? He ballparked it. Yeah, well he was off by a factor of a couple hundred. Yeah. I thought he was on the light end even then when we're having the discussion. Felt it. At the time. I was shouting out at the radio and I was listening to I was like, that's a steel dude. A lot of people rolle in there like five hundred seven fifty, probably more like someone was throwing around two fifty depends on he get. Man. It's like Janice calls me and he's got this picture of this giant bowl on Instagram'd be like, you know what, man, this one's on me, send me the coordinates. Yeah, but you're not a you're not a packer for hire. You're just a dude guy. A lot of packers for higher also have a hunting license in their pocket. Oh, meaning like I would love to come up and give a hand. Yes, No, I don't. I don't. I don't agree at all, because there there's no guesswork. It's like, so this is where he was. I feel like pro packers are tight lipped. No, they're working. You've made that decision, you're working man during hunting season. If I was a pro packer and all I did was go up and visit places where people have had successful hunts, and then a buddy of mine said, hey, man, um, think about heading out this weekend. You got any What would you do if you were me and I was the pro packer? Would I then say, oh, you know what, you know where I've pulled three or four bulls out of in the last week right. I don't know that that individual would really have the self restraint to not just tell hebody to tell his buddies unless he's a real pro. Well, the real pro is getting real pro tip to keep that stuff under wraps, like you know what, really probably also pricey. Here's a little something for you. Let's not talk about where this bull came out of. Guy rode in about um Santa Claus, saying that with c W D and all the bands on captive, certain moving servants across straight state lines, he thinks that Santa Claus is like the mythology of Santa Claus. He's gonna come and looking like a grade A a hole for track, and he's deer all over the whole earth. I thought, what I'm saying, it's a cute point. It's cute, um, Michelle. Two questions from female perspective. One, did you feel that when we did the like, you know, the begging and like our episode begging and pleading, right, Okay, someone thought that it was I don't understand degrading to women. I did see that email. Yeah, she was, why can you help me with that? Well? First, what I interpreted from that email was she was saying, Hey, you're assuming that your audience is all men predominantly men. Right, That's it's not true. It's you know, our our numbers. Why was she saying we're assuming that. I think she was saying or saying that we're assuming, um, that sales pitch should only be directed towards men, and that by um pitching the you know you're gonna learn how to cook and treat your sweetheart well with this fancy meal, that that's perhaps all women care about. I don't know it. I think if she kind of missed the mark there do Yeah, Kelly, and I went on you the guy wrote in we were talking about I was talking one day about taking my daughter out and duck hunting, and her feet got cold and she was crying, and I, even though I had my wife made me when we had a daughter at the minute my wife found out we were having a daughter, but she made me vow to not treat our daughter any different than I would treat our boys. When it comes to the outdoor pursuits. There's no right. Expectations are the same, pressures are the same. However, my daughter laying in the marsh crying struck me as fundamentally different than my boy laying in the marsh crying, Like it just hit me differently. And a guy wrote in to say this very very anecdotal, but a guy wanted to talk about how he works. These two guys and the guys at the same age, they make the same amount of money. Very similar. Dudes. Uh, they you have daughters. One of them when they take the when he when he takes the girls out and they would cry, he would give in and bring him back home. The other one, when his daughters would cry, he'd make him tough about, give him a tough talking to and make him stick it out. Fast forward a couple of decades or whatever amount of time, and the ones who got to go home when they were cold, um all became drug addicts and pole dancers, he was explaining, and the ones who had the tough it out are assets to our country. What do you have anything? I'm just telling you what a guy wrote, right, I'm telling what a guy wrote in this is not nothing mean nothing. What do you when you hear that? What do you feel? I think that that's funny. I also think that that's one way of looking at it or creating like an upshot of a scenario. But I also think there's a lot of other factors at play there that no, can't be right, can't be nuance introduced. Um, you'll think it all stems to what happens in like a child's development course in life is all set in the dark, Marsh. I think life might be a little more enjoyable and simple. But I do think that you know, hard, difficult, challenging scenarios for kids are important and you know, like they say, it builds character and uh, I don't know. I think I think it's okay. We'll touch back with you when you have a bunch of parenting experienced a lot, right. No, I'm definitely gonna be, you know, seeking you out for some advice. Yeah, anything, all same. We needs to bring up before we talk about American Prairie Reserve. Speaking of kids being tough, I went skiing for the first day yesterday of the season with my kids, and my oldest ski all day with a bass layer and then her jacket just wide open, and it was fifteen twenty degrees up there no wind now. But I'm just like for all the times when we go through stuff like that, when they're just like in the blind or in the boat or wherever, cold and like miserable, and I just want to remember when you're up on the ski hill and you're just like open the winds blowing right through there, like you don't give a ship, like not even kind of cold, and I was chilly. I had two or three layers of wool on, plus a puffy jacket in my shell. That's what makes it hard when they're crying and cold, is you can't tell if they're leveraging because you want to be like that day. I want to be like I would love I would pay any amount of money to feel what your toes feel like right now to know if this is going on or if this is like an avenue you're taking. Yeah, a little manipulation to get into the next activity, because I would be my daughter would not have a difficult time manipulating me. My boy, I'm all over it. But again, as hard as you try, it's like it's just different, and I struggle with it being different. Oh one quick thing too, So speaking of speaking of the episode that we dedicated to the meat Eater, Fish and Game cookbook recipes and techniques for every hunter and Angler. Uh, we had a thing happened where um reception of the book we we didn't we meaning our publisher speaking grout random house like like we didn't anticipate the eager reception for that book. I mean we did, but I didn't know to what degree it would happened. And we ran into a little problem where it's a good problem to have, where the books were gone, like a like a nice good print run of books. We're gone the morning of pub day. So there's a lot of frustration out there with people who are trying to go on BNN dot com, Amazon dot com, and there's seeing long lead times on book delivery. All you know, if you're going to like make your order, the book will come. We are, They're they're making more books. Everything's gonna be taken care of. I know it's a little bit frustrating. You still see stuff on our end. It's like promoting buying the book even though it's a long lead time to get it going. But just trust bear with us, um the bookleship. It's just been it's been really exciting to see how fast um the book went and how popular it's become. But it's uh, you know, it's like a little bit of a pain in there of having run out. So it's coming Morril ship tons more around the way. If you place your order, your order will be honored and you will get the book. Um. And in the future too, we're gonna also through the meat eater dot com. You can go into the store and eventually not right now, but eventually will have we'll be selling uh signed copies there as well. That's the ways out. But it'll come good. Okay, Sean, you're ready, You're ready. How how annoying is it? How annoying is it when talking about the American Prayer Reserve? How much do you hate it? On a one to ten when people mention the Buffalo Commons, Is it totally different or do you see that there's a continuum of thought one being low. One is like that doesn't bother me at all. Ten is like, why would you bring that up? It's has nothing to do with this. I think I go for a negative too, because it's an exciting portal into talking about history and a trajectory of an idea over time. And that helps people realize because you know when they oftentimes they start off it's a negative connotation of Buffalo commons and you can actually connect dots to what I think is very positive for the public for this project. I like, I like the question. Okay, so then let's read it out again. I'm gonna give you another one ten rate all your expertise and breaking down like Frank Popper, Mary Popper, the idea of the buffalo comm and what precipitated it? Where are you at on that? Because I'll do it, but I'll do like a four. Uh say it again, like to tell the story of what the buffalo like that idea? Right? The sociologist Frank Popper, right, and Debora a Deva not Mary, not Mary, that's a British woman. And the Dick van Dyke and yeah, Mary Poppins, um, So so you know it better? You know what better mean? Do you want to tell the story? Uh, well, I can do it and you can correct me where I miss briefly you correct me. Um, very very condensed. Yeah, I just want to It's just an interesting idea. Debra and Frank who actually keep in touch with us because they're kind of watching this you have email a little bit and like this project. But there, and what's important is they're they're demographers from Rutgers University. They're just sociologists. They're interested in why do people move about with it, particularly within the United States, what causes people to move north to north to south to north in the eighteen hundreds, what caused people to move out of the northeas us down into the southwest, and just why why does that? How many people are moving when what was the impetus? When did the impetus go away? And they stopped moving? All that kind of stuff. So they just theorized, as they looked at patterns and themes, which sociologists should do, what was going on in rural areas all over the world, actually not just the US, but in rural are list, particularly where there's lots of agriculture. What they noticed was as agriculture like any industry, commercial fishing or logging or coal mining, whatever it is. Over time, because of increased efficiencies, it needs less and less people to get the same amount of things done. So as people found themselves hey, ten years ago as part of a threshing crew or whatever it might have been, as a cowboy, whatever it might have been. Uh, and we used to move the cows around and stay real close to them. Like now the rest rotation rausing, you don't need so many just the kind of take care of themselves whatever. But the need for people in an egg down and down and down every decade. So where do they go. They go to the city use because that's where the jobs are. So if they noticed the United States no different. Over time, particularly twenties and forties, people were beginning to drift towards urban areas where there's more job choice and you can do right by your family economically. And they said, okay, what happens and the vacuum that's left behind, and there's gonna be lots of eggs being done there. But perhaps some of this can would on its own without any projects like a pr Revert back to the more of the wildness that we heard from Catlan and Bodmer and Lewis and Clark and people like that, it may actually be revert back and take over some areas of that. And they said, even maybe it's the great buffalo will come back. Maybe not as many used to be, but we have big buffalo herds. And this is about a twenty page paper and page eighteen that one thing could there could be a buffalo commons out there, and that ignited the whole thing. People went nuts, obviously, because that's kind of how that's kind of how that happened. And they said, you guys were just demographers, just were just saying a potential theory. We're not starting a project to go do it. So I think you familar with the writer Bill Kittridge his book Hole in the Sky he um he he. He has you know, a great many environmental concerns and and uh, you know in his writing and writes from an environmental perspective, his ranching background. Um. But he had tried to articulate why some why some people felt that why some people were insulted back by that idea, And it would be that you had generations of people on a landscape who had dedicated their lives to say like making the desert bloom, or or to building communities and creating an economy and for someone to and not that the people who proposed the buffalo, not that the demographers of sociologists who proposed the Buffalo commons um they weren't making a value judgment, so to speak. They're just pointing out something that could eventually happen. But people did. Some people celebrated the idea, and it was and it was, and it was, as Kittridge explained, it's like a little bit could be taken to be insulting by people whose families father's, grandfather's great grandfathers had dedicated their lives to like making community, and then for people to be uh enthusiastic about the idea of that going away was an uneasy idea for some people. I think you're exactly right. And the interesting thing is that happened not too long ago. It was like thirty years ago that first paper came out, maybe the longer, but not much has changed in terms of phenomenon you just described. They are he Uh. Debra and Frank touched a nerve when they wrote that, innocuously, they thought, but it was the the excitement that you said of other people that hey, this could be something to watch and be excited about. More public eye says better hunting things like that wildness coming back. Um, people took offense, and it's I think it's justifiably human nature when something is going away that you cherish, that's precious to you, a a lifestyle and growing up in these towns and being proud of small town sports and things like that. And you've watched it diminished since World War One in many places like a northeastern Montana ten per decade decline in population. And then someone says this in the early eighties. Whenever that came out, you're primed to be highly offended because there's already an underlying sadness. Totally understandable. It's a human thing. These are not there's no bad actors in this situation. Understandable. And someone puts a fine point on it and others start to into a ranch or farmer pile on with enthusiasm. Yeah, and it hasn't changed. What is the American Prairie Reserve. We kind of missed that in a real clean way, like what is it? It's a project to create the largest wildlife reserve ever assembled. In the Condell, United States to be opened up for republic access for the public's enjoyment, with all the wildlife species that were there for roughly eleven to twelve thousand years up until about eighteen to about eighteen nine years. So UM put all that back, perhaps not in pure historic numbers, but a lot more than is there now and create a lot different ways for people to go out and enjoy it and save that phenomenon I just described for three or four hundred years into the future. And doing this requires the purchasing of privately owned land as a as a small aspect of the of the strategies that we're using. One unfortunate part of it is you have to buy the land. I say unfortunate because it's a horrendous lift to go find the money and then get the land deals done. And it's a really really big project. But it's a small part of the overall thing, which is putting in the visitor infrastructure, helping people understand how to move about without disrupting UM anything from lex to wildlife corridors to whatever else. How do we work with nature and all that. There's a lot to be done, and the land private land assembled which is a key component to make this whole thing work, takes just an extraordinary amount of time and effort and stress. So again, because you can have a roadblock of a relatively a quarter section of land that is absolutely necessary to open up a hundred thousand acres of land, I think the blocking, Oh, it happens over the place. So you know, the last two properties we got out there, you can see on the map the two crow on the p M. As people are now the instant people here, we get uh, some part of a property, they'll say can I go out on that? Say? Yes, this way, this way. We've got to fix this bridge. We don't want to falling off the bridge. Wait until we fix this bridge across the Judas. But you can come in here part here right across our private land, access all this public land on top of the big sag or whatever. We get maps we hand out to people you can download on events and maps or whatever you want to use um to show people how to move about and excess every single piece of public land that's on there. And so that's let me I think, let me, I think some people. I'm just gonna guess Steve that people are interested in our technique and our strategy and all that, but some of them behind it is why a lot of us quit our day job to do this. My life was going just fine on my early forties, a lot more lucrative than working for a nonprofit. I can tell you that why would you do this? And this is really really exciting to be a part of. I'll just speak personally. Don't look for the on the website. I'm not speaking holistically for a p R right now, but to me and I started thinking about this at the w w F. Guys that are going, how do you think we had to go about this? And there's a lot of it was really interesting time. But I started. I started hunting with my dad and probably first we first rather than leaving me home, you're talking about your little kids. He probably finally acquiesced and let me go when I was seven or eight, so that'll be in the mid nineteen sixties. In Montana. I grew up mostly in Great Falls. My dad had L camps. He guided a good bit. He had L camps in the high Woods, then west of Augusta, Soun River Canyon across Gibson Lake in that area, back behind sal L Flats, and all that stuff in the sixties. But even coming out onto the flats around hayst Apute, or we'd be down in the dear Born a lot from you old year, come out here in this country for prong worn whenever he'd fortunate enough to get a tag. That's pretty exotic to come out to the northeastern Montana from Great Falls looked like the end of the earth, it felt like. But we would go true ranches and he would have the name on a piece of paper. There's no electronics back then, knocking on the door, go in and sit down, have hot chocolate and sit there for an hour and a half and talk with the rancher. And we would have access and they'd say, well, here's my private section. You go in there. Please close the gate and go over here, and you can park in that corner. Just climb right over the top of it. You'll have all this public land, but you can if you see something on a private that's fine. How many tags you got? My dad, I got an a tag and a beat tag. Okay, you know, we just I watched this discussion from the time I was eight years old, Lots and lots and lots of times all over the state, not too much in the southwest, Dylan. We didn't honestly didn't get down there, but there was a way of operating at that time. And this just sounds trite and too simple, but I hope this can be a part of bringing that back. I hope when people look at a pr they go, that's how it kind of used to be. But you don't even have to sit in the kitchen. You don't have to take that step. So if you got to some prayer various other areas, you can see exactly where you go. We took down the gates and we put in cattle guards. That eliminates a lot of problems. Uh, put in cattle guards, and the idea of leaving gates open goes away that it's our it's at our expense, and we say we want you to be able to find this. We have some warnings about getting stuck. So you know, a gumbo is we we lose a lot of people out there, they eventually get out. Nobody has been lost forever, but a lot of surprises. People haven't seen gumboo before. But U I, if you look at just me personally, I'd like to take it back to how things were like fifty years ago and it was better because I've been here, I've I know this. I've been around hunting all big game hunting all my life, and bird hunting is a part of culture in our family. My mom hunted with her at six um. It's things have changed and all this to me. I've listened to your thing on Public Access. You should I can't Hember when it was, but I listened to your show on Public Access and people are you guys are getting into the details on corner hopping. I just thought, how dumb is it that we've gotten to this place that you know, do you own the airspace above that corner? It just seems can use a pole vault. No, I guess people in airspace And it's just something's happened and I'd like to just I think it's become silly. And what I'd like is a three and a half three three and a half million acre area that's well taken care of, you don't wreck it and a lot of yeah, who's running around on motorcycles and tear it up that people can go this makes sense. We've we've we've we've rejected some of the silliness. It doesn't mean you can do anything you want, because people wreck things quickly if there's not rules and parameters and sideboards. Anyway, just so I wanted to know what's behind this. It's not it's not a wonky technical business thing. There's personal motivation behind it by me. And now we got over forty employees, our new CEO. She's terrific, Alison Fox. It's put together a group of people that have really really fired up about what I'm I've just described. So when are you, like, is it fair to say that you're the architect, like the original architect of a pr um architect would be a push maybe general contractor yeah, I guess the idea. Explain how the idea came about, and if you're real good, tied into what we just talked about with the buffalo. If I'm real good, help me out, Michelle. Remind me if I space this out, um the idea. If you had a number of historians here in the room, we would all probably argue about which decade it came about. But let's just get back in the relative early eighteen hundreds, after the French fur trappers from Hudson Bay had come out and started describing this incredible wildlife phenomenon that they saw ten fifteen years for Lewis and Clark out here. Lewis and Clark chronicled that because the President said, you shall write down every single thing you see, so inadvertently we got these great journals, particularly the three hundred mile right spot that we're seeing, we're working in that they didn't see anywhere on their four thousand mile round trip walking from St. Louis to the coast and back. But later on other people came to and corroborated what was there. George Catlin, the painter who's out probably twenty times nineteen thirties in the nineteen forty, has wrote some incredible books, but in the nineteen thirty six he said, every time I come out here, he didn't use the words and paraphrasing blown away by the wildlife situation in this one particular spot about three hundred miles wide south of into what we now call the Brakes region, the six county area. And he were back to Congress and said, we ought to say this beautiful thing as a nation's park. This is forty years for the Park Service even got going. He said, this has got to be saved. That it's going away. Beaver's getting trapped out of here. There's hunters already happened. There's no cows at this time. There wasn't cows from the twenty years, just bison and all that was Callen kind of nailed it did. Sorry about that. That was the dark ages May thirties. Sorry about that, um, getting used to my little echo chamber here with my headset um. But afterwards a lot of other people said the same thing. Park Service came up in the night. Now we had a as you know, the Park Service got going in the e teen set eighteen seventies with the Elbow Stone, and we had a golden era of building parks. And I think if Catlan had still been alive, he'd say, well, of course they're gonna pick this. This is gonna thick fit in the suite of parks that people are imagining Roosevelt and everybody else. But we had a pretty darn good run. But our last one, Grand Titon National Park we did in nineteen fifty. We haven't done anything big since. We call the stop seventy years of nothing, no more parks. We did amazing things Yosemite and Grand Canyon and every glades on well topography. Aesthetics mostly was about aesthetics, and for the most part, if you go back and take a look at it and uh, look at ken Burns, you know, greatest idea films and things like that pretty much was for views and getting people out of nature, but nature as through the viewer aesthetic view, and they passed over the grass lands. So other people, particularly some f TOVP biologists David Daniel Lickman and Uh and uh in Uh Colorado in the nineties, said gosh, we really blew it. We should make a some day, we should get red of this park idea back up and make some sort of protected area here. Um, the paupers didn't really go that far. We already talked about them. The guy who really probably nailed it, I think who deserves the credits a guy named Robert Scott, Bob Scott. He was a rare book dealer in Missoula, Montana, and he came up with who knows what He camped with the Big Open, Ok, he did the Big Open. The Big Open was first time he said. The Buffalo Commons was a demographic shifts statement that was happening in the world. Real people going to the cities and perhaps certain areas could would be rewild and on their own. Bob Scott in the early to mid nineties said, there ought to be a protected area right here, five million acres to thirds south of the third north of the river. We'll call it. We're gonna call it the Big Open. That will be the name of the thing, just like Big Ben National Park. But you can hunt in it. I'm going to bring everything back full ecology. I've got his papers like thirty pages long. He wrote it in the eighties. He was the first to totally nail it, and he went around talked to college students all of the United States. He was a huge cult hero. Had a hard time starting any any business uh too around it, and he got more than can you imagine the blowback in the eighties. Timing is everything right? So that was a big one nature conservancy. He can say more about bomb he's a great guy. But but back up in the Big Open a minute. Yeah. So he was like, like, can you set the stage a little bit, like set the table about what is up there where you have the CMR. You have large federally managed lands already in place. What we have up there, well, I think Bob rightly, he's a very astute um. He said, this is the thing is this can be affordable. One of the reasons we stopped making National Park because we got got extremely contentious, just really hard in the park to service just said it wasn't because they were out of money. They're hard of being beat on, like this is not the highest and best use in Grand Teton. It was a lot to get that shoehorned in and then be done. That was rough, you know, the Snake River Land Company and all. How to get that in It got to be very, very difficult and contentious because you're excluding so many activities, excluding activities ranching, farming, everything else, excluding commerce and in our our society, you know or capitalism. Uh, it better be able to make money some way or it's gonna often an awful, amazing intrinsic value. That's really clear to everyone that we back away and not want to make money on that piece of land. So, yeah, it got difficult. But he said, how about this. It's already there because we have b O M land, we have state sections. We have one point one like an acres of the c MR Native Americans, both bell Nap and Fort Peck Reservation will be into this and all the puzzle pieces are there. You only have to get a little bit of private land glued all together. Airbrush it bring the animals back. Not mammoths and mastodons and short faced bearers, etcetera, but the stuff that was there just a hundred and fifty years ago before it's eradicated. We're so close, We're so close. And that's what he crystallized when he talked about the big Open. How did he have a square mileage idea of what would be like an adequate size five million grasslands park? He's he kept he up and said five million acres And for for context, what's Yellowstone two point one two two? Okay, So to make a to to make a patchwork of federally managed lands, state lands, reservation lands, and then private purchase lands, you would make something twice as big as a grassland. I don't want to call it the park, But what's the good word? Honestly, Bob, if he somehow here's this podcast down the note, he may write an email and say, SHAUNO slightly off, are really off? But it's probably the closest model we have out there is the Blackfoot challenge over by Alvando is what are he's shooting for. He was assuming ranchers would stay there, and he was assuming they would allow they were a lot of hunting on their properties. But what he was trying to get them to do is tolerate by in order of magnitude more wildlife out there, use less fences. Bring the idea of cowboys back, push your cattle around, bison, go that way. Problemly with that way, oh go that way, you got your you move your cows around kind of deal. So, managing fenceless cattle operations in the midst of wildlife abundance, I think he was very much blackfoot challenge oriented. So Bob please write and correct me on that. But I think so that's the model, not a park. Uh not no hunting, Uh, definitely. He was big into access. It's pretty you know, it's very very interesting. Surprisingly, how close um to what to what we're doing? What happened? Then? Are you comfortable with how we're walking through this? Yeah? You know, it's great gold outside, it's warming here. I'm good. So what was the what was the next? Like? If we imagine that this is like a continue there's some sort of continuum of inspirational thought. Right, two more steps, really important ones, and all the way along. I think what I want to make sure is people feel like there's a lot of credit to pass around. This is like a rugby game. The ball has been going down through the ages and people working hard, trying to crystallize and trying to change hearts and minds to see how this can work. So from Catlin to Lick to Uh to UM, I'm gonna skip over the because I don't think the Poppers are trying to push anything. They're just making a statement. But Bob Scott, Bob Scott was pushing hard. And it's in the Poppers interesting to me because that was I remember I would have been too young remember one it was proposed, but that was the first idea I heard about this and it was like a really just interesting concept. So I I bring it up because in my understanding of that landscape and in this story, that was my point of entry. Well, I think you're right to see it's not only did you intersect time when you're old enough to have consciousness to see it, but it's also they were trying to say, guys, this is a trend, and I in I spent more time in for profit business than I have a nonprofit business. And trends. I want to talk about that later. If we can't put something in the queue, is what trends. It's really important to take a look at long, long term trends. That's all they're trying to say is, guys, here's a trend that we see because we think about every day. We just want to put it out there that it's happening in Brazil, over the world, that's happening here, so you might want to think about it. That was their point of view. Uh. Now, if you're gonna get mad at somebody, get mad at Bob Scott Army or Nathanservance he or WF because we're really talking about doing something. So the next really important nature Conservancy of Montiana and deserve a lot of credit for crystallizing that. Moving forward in the early nineties and mid nineteen nineties, they took a look at well, if you were if if by chance anybody was to try to fire up this not the park Service idea after titon, but try to save a big space, I mean, really go for it with guts. Try to save a big space where in the northern Great Plains all five states and two provinces of Canada. We're in the Northern Great Plains at the bioregion. I mean it's a it's a it's an eco region they call it. Where would be the best spots to really really go big? And they didn't. They identified ten thunder basin and places in South Dakota were thunder basin. Uh. Now, my buddy from wis gonna kill me. Thunder basin is in southern Colorado? Is a right south Dakota. I'm not familiar. Look it up, gonna look it up. And I'm my buddy is from WFF just cringing right now because I don't know where it is because I haven't been there. But anyway, the uh. And they wrote a seminal article on if you were to do it, here's ten spots top ranked if someone was going to do it. We're not saying we're gonna do it. And so they got were a whilelife on a cast of characters, probably eight or nine really innovative thinkers inside w WF w w f US not out of Switzerman. And they took a look at Dan, this is amazing. Let's take the ball again and run with it, and how can we how can we get something going that actually someone like the fuse on this, just get someone to consider doing it. As they looked at the ten uh, this area in Montana came up probably in the top two or three for a variety of reasons. So much public land is already there, so hopefully this is this is a misjudgment. But people can't possibly howl about it because its public land. It's the public's land, or turn it over to the public, taking down keep out signs and fences, more wildlife. What's not to like? Turned out there is plenty that I learned. Um, the public Uh, it can be upset about. Um. So it's it's affordable. It's really really important trying to buy all this land with costume. Maybe I don't know, twenty billion dollars to do if you had to buy it all private, right, But because you don't have to buy at all or hard to buy anything at all to make the model work, it's affordable. Really important from TNC to their credit in w WS is the amount of intact grassland that has not yet been plowed. It's been there for thousands of years, looks like it did all the way back to the Wisconsin Glacier, right, and then the wildlife history. So in some of those other places big, yes they're cheap, um, yes, the lands intact, but there's no record of them having the the population numbers and the diversity of wildlife that all those people I mentioned earlier saw, Even though they didn't meet each other, they all reported the same thing. This is just unbelievable cornercope of wildlife here from grassland birds, waterfowl, you know, the angulusts of predators everything. So because in an open grassland environment that had um a history. Yeah, so you had a unique history. Bison, l mulder, white tailed deer, grizzly bears, wolves, coyotes, badgers, yea, all the grassland birds everything. It was just and we can talk, we can take a whole podcast. Why was that as a compared to the town their tan areas. How Come there wasn't that kind of stuff and that we'd see in the sandhills in Nebraska or upan Saskatchewan, our Calgary. How come it wasn't just didn't have that kind of concentration. But that's for another time. But it did, so I think, and then what happened was uh, what's keep this short, but word Wildlife Fund was struggling to figure out a model because there are no models to copy anywhere in the world. Blackfoot challenges something like it a little bit. But the landowners stay in the fences, stay up in the public a lot is not allowed onto their property. So the music bears can move up and down the Old Stone to Yukon Corridor, but you're not able to move as freely as that bear is because you're crossing private property. The added thing with our model was it would be open to the public and we take down science and take down fences and invite people out to enjoy this. And that's where we're a little bit different than what was happening over there. So um uh wide open at the public owns this land, we're actually going to count the private land as accessible to We want to be able to walk across it and not get locked out and have the donor holes and corner hopping, all that stuff you guys are familiar with. So so when you hit on corner hop I think it'd just be helpful for everybody listening if if you kind of just to jump back, say like if you had to buy all of it. It would cost twenty billion. So like the grid system out here, the Jeffersonian grid system, UM, we have private sections UM that can basically open up the access to public sections UM. And so just like quick and dirty you guys, I think basically you have like a third deeded and if if hundred roughly a hundred thousand deeded, roughly three hundred thousand that you count as part of the A p R. Yeah, and that's how the ratio is going so far. It's a good question. People can be lost right now. Yeah. I think what's important is go now that you did that, you bet you better do it. I guess the Jefferson what do you mean check if you had to buy all of it? So then you're saying we didn't have to buy all of it, and that that is the deal. You have this checkerboarded landscape where there's public land that can be blocked by private land. So UM, you can have two sections of UM BLM or UH state land UM that you cannot get to because you have a section or two sections of private ground. UM. So you buy the private ground and you essentially have two extra sections of land because that public land the private ground was the gateway to the public land. Is that helpful? Yeah? The Jeffersonian part would be when they were parceling out and handing out chunks of land, they would often create a pattern of federally owned or state owned and privately owned land that resembled when looking at the grid work, that resembled the checkerboard where things are joined up corner to corner. Sections of land joined corner to corner, so you didn't wind up with big, contiguous pieces of ownership. In some areas, nice tidy squares. UM typically spurn off a railroad lines. M. That's cool. I'm happier, Okay, But I feel we're missing something right now, Like I think I want to touch on um, what is I feel we haven't done this yet, Like what is the a p R? What is the American Prairie Reserve? We kind of missed that in a real clean way, Like what is it? It's a project to create the largest wildlife reserve ever assembled in the continent United States, to be opened up for a public access for the public's and enjoyment with all the wildlife species that were there for roughly eleven to twelve th yars up until about eighteen to about eighteen nine years. So um put all that back, perhaps not in pure historic numbers, but a lot more than is there now, and create a lot different ways for people to go out and enjoy it and save that phenomenon that I just described for three or four hundred years into the future. And doing this requires the purchasing of privately owned land as a as a small aspect of the of the strategies that we're using. One unfortunate part of it is you have to buy the land. I say unfortunate because it's a horrendous lift to go find the money and then get the land deals done. And it's a really really big project, but it's a small part of the overall thing, which is putting in the visitor infrastructure, helping people understand how to move about without disrupt thing um anything from lex to wildlife corridors to whatever else. How do we work with nature and all that. There's a lot to be done, and the land private land assembled, which is a key component to make this whole thing work, takes just an extraordinary amount of time and effort and stress. So again, because you can have a roadblock of a relatively a quarter section of land that is absolutely necessary to open up a hundred thousand acres of land. I think the blocking, Oh what happens over the place. So you know the last two properties we got out there, you can see on the map the two crow on the piano. As people are now the instant people here. We get some part of a property, they'll say can I go out on that? Say yes, this way, this way. We've got to fix this bridge. We don't want to falling off the bridge. Wait until we fix this bridge across the Judas. But you can come in here part here got right across our private land. Access all this public land on top of the big sag or whatever. We get maps we hand out to people you can download on events and maps or whatever you want to use um to show people how to move about and excess every single piece of public leile that's on there. And so that's let me I think, let me I think some people. I'm just gonna guess Steve that people are interested in our technique and our strategy and all that, but some of them behind it is why a lot of us quit our day jobs to do this. My life was going just fine on my early forties a lot more lucrative than working for a nonprofit. I can tell you that why would you do this? And this is really really exciting to be a part of. I'll just speak personally. Don't look for the on the website. I'm not speaking holistically for a p R right now, but to me and I started thinking about this at the w WF. Guys that are going, how do you think we got to go about this? And there's a lot of it was really interesting time. But I started. I started hunting with my dad and probably first me first, rather than leaving me home. You're talking about your little kids. He probably finally acquiesced and let me go when I was seven or eight. So let'll be in the mid nineteen sixties in Montana. I grew up mostly in Great Falls. My dad had L camps. He guided a good bady had L camps in the high Woods then west of Augusta from the Sun River Canyon across Gibson Lake in that area, back behind some L flats and all that stuff in the sixties, but even coming out onto the flats around Haystapute or we'd be down in the Deer Born a lot from you, old dear come out here in this country for prong worn whenever he'd fortunate enough to get a tag. That's pretty exotic to come out to the northeastern Montana from Great Falls looks like the end of the earth, it felt like. But we would go true ranches and he would have the name on a piece of paper. There's no electronics back then, knocking on the door, go in and sit down, have hot chocolate, and sit there for an hour and a half and talk of the rancher. And we would have access and they'd say, well, here's my private section. You go in there. Please close the gate and go over here, and you can park in that corner. Just climb right over the top of it. You'll have all this public land, but you can if you see something on the private that's fine. How many tags you got, my dad, I got an eight gonna be tag? Okay, you know, we just I watched this discussion from the time I was eight years old. Lots and lots and lots of times all over the state, not too much in the southwest, Dylan, we didn't honestly didn't get down there. But there was a way of operating at that time, and this just sounds trite and too simple. But I hope this can be a part of bringing that back. I hope when people look at APR they go, that's how it kind of used to be. But you don't even have to sit in the kitchen. You don't have to take that step. So if you got to some prayer, various other areas, you can see exactly where you go. We took down the gates and we put in cattle guards. That eliminates a lot of problems. Uh, put in cattle guards, and the idea of leaving gates open goes away. It's at it's our it's at our expense, and we say, we want you to be able to find this. We have some warnings about getting stuck. So you know, a gumbo is we we lose a lot of people out there. They eventually get out. Nobody has been lost forever, but a lot of surprises. People haven't seen GUMBOO before. But I if you look at just me personally, I'd like to take it back to how things were like fifty years ago, and it was better because I've been here, I've I know this. I've been around hunting all big game hunting all my life, and bird Hunting is a part of culture in our family. My mom hunted with her at six um. It's things have changed and all this to me. I've listened to your thing on Public Access. You show. I can't hearb when it was, but I listened to your show on public Access and people are you guys are getting into the details on corner hopping. I just thought, how dumb is it that we've gotten to this place that you know, do you own the airspace above that corner? It just seems can use a pole vault. No, I guess people own airspace. And it's just something's happened and I'd like to just I think it's become silly. And what I'd like is a three and a half three three and a half million acre area that's well taken care of. You don't wreck it and a lot of yah who's running around on motorcycles and tear it up that people can go This makes sense. We've we've we've we've red e acted some of the silliness. It doesn't mean you can do anything you want because people wreck things quickly if there's not rules and parameters and sideboards. Anyway, just so I want you to know what's behind this. It's not it's not a wonky technical business thing. There's personal motivation behind it by me. And now we got over forty employees. Our new CEO, she's terrific. Alison Fox's put together a group of people that are really really fired up about what I'm I've just described. How is the how is the money? How do you guys raise money to buy the lands that you've bought? And how many and how many acres does the American Pray Reserve own? Now, uh, I should have a lifeline to call back to the office. But I think we're private acres um and owned as a squishy owns, just like if you have houses, you own some of it in the bank, ons other parts of so, but we own better than six of all that land you see on the map, free and clear. So we manage to balance sheet very very carefully. And but yeah, those are our private acres um. I think all told her a little over four hundred thousand acres with state sections as you were describing and BLM sections. The way we get the money, I say, unfortunately, because it's hard, is just pure fundraising. It's asking people describing to people in various ways. Sometimes using social media, sometimes on our website, sometimes flying all over the place and sitting down one on one if you can finally get a dinner with them or something. Say this is what I'm doing, we'd like to take this next step. Would you like to help us take this next step? People hundred years smell, I really appreciate the action you might take here because of this, and as they like it. They don't always, but if they like it, let's say, I'm not gonna get your money right now, but keep me informed maybe a couple of years. I'm kind of tied up right now some other commitments. So you go back over and over and over and over again. The biggest mixed miscalculation I made leaving for profit business. Uh, my own whole company is running. It's been around about thirty five years in Silicon Valley. I had no idea how hard fundraising was going to be. I thought it's like sales. You know, you just get you do it for a while when you're small, and you finally get the sales team and you get a VP of sales, and you're good that you don't have to do it. It's not like that. It's unbelievably difficult, and particularly in a very crowded fundraising environment in the world. And if you they can look at what people give to philanthropically, they give to their churches, they give to their home and maters, they get to the arts and way way way way down below you've seen these these tow ranked list is conservation. It's like a sliver. Within that sliver, a lot of competition, a lot of sharp elbows. You gotta move it and NonStop. You can hardly stop for a brass I've been doing it for seventeen years. Do you do you primarily draw small donations from private individuals or do you primarily draw like large donations from extraordinarily wealthy people. We do everything. Our strategy on fundraising is everybody go along. So we've got a huge team that focuses on this because unfortunately got to buy the land's expensive. The way it works right now is we get money from all fifty states in the United States and ten different countries around the world. If you put that in the top rank, the most people donating to American Prairie Reserve are Montanan's and then a descending order down to their I can't tell you all fifty how it actually stack up, but I can send it to if you want to put it on your website or something different. Some people, um are what you call sustaining donors. They let us hit their credit card for five bucks a month. We love those people. Lots of those people adds up to a lot of keeping this project moving. So that's the big one. That's the really, that's the big thing. We're trying to grow. And there's some thousands of people in that arena. But to buy these properties, you also do have to have in your portfolio a certain number of bigger donors. So they're forty or fifty people out there that can give that. We have to travel a lot to see summer in Montana most unfortunately or not so even have a cup of coffees of plane ride expensive and difficult, time consuming, but they will sometimes give us enough to get, you know, with a few other people enough to take a run out of particular medium sized piece of property or something like that. So it's everybody maybe everything Steve so across the gamut. Have you guys had pieces of land that would fall within the area you're trying to do this come up for sale, but you weren't in a position to to try to make a play on it, or are you usually able to when something comes up for sale to get in there and try to be a purchaser. Uh, the only time that was not the case where things there's a short anomaly, and that was in the tech crash. Couldn't have been a dumber time to start this project in two thousand one, because the tech crash. Tech crash happened in two thousand two. Anybody I knew had money, they didn't have money anymore. It's pretty bleak. That was the only time for about a three year run when there was not property out there that we would like to buy. Since then, since I'd say about two thousand six, if and I've been around every property we've deal, deal we've done, we've done twenty nine of them so far. Any snapshot in time on that whole continuum until this morning, and this morning is still true. There's far more property for sale on this map than we can afford to buy. So there's like six and more than half of those people have called us and say, before we go on the multiple listings, would you like to do it? Because you know, with the rumor real they know how we operate, fair price, all that kind of stuff. We perform well, it's frustrating because we don't have the money to buy all six at once. That's always the case. It used to be like there's two and there's like four. I'm probably about five or six years ago. Now there's probably five, six, seven properties any given time, any morning, I can come in and see which ones are there. It's just a matter of you know, you do something like the pan of the two crow, and you gotta at a rabbit going through the snake, and you've gotta get that digested before you can go eat some more rabbits. Right, that's bad analogy, but it's uh. It makes us. It makes us feel it's hard to you can't move and just go wow, I'd love to be able to do this. And what happens is we eventually we lose those two other buyers. Generally someone will buy it and plow it up for farming or another reason we lose properties actually is we're in a we're in a bit of a buying that other people don't have to deal with. We're a nonprofit. We're audited every year, so it kind of looks like this room. People have never seen before, come into the table, open up their laptop, except they have white shirts and ties on, and they're the auditors, and they audited every move we make, and they tear our books apart, and I see where we got our money, how we spent it, and all that kind of stuff. One thing you got to do is a nonprofit to spend your donor money responsibly. So if we're paying out of fair market value of that range, they'll soon go why are you doing that? You're just throwing money around. That's not responsible. You can lose your status as a nonprofit. You're done. You can become a four provit, which can't be a non profit by doing that. So we have to work with an a range. If we had more time, another podcast to show you a map of where property that I just would have loved to have had up on one ninety one by Fort Bell nap Uh, and we did have the money to do it. We thought in the range. For instance, we get to the very top of the range, we call up and say we'd like to get this offer before somebody else gets this, and they go that, I'm not even gonna put that in front of the owner. We already have two offers well above that when we back off and they're bought by local ranchers, they're not by Californians to buy out build a ten thousand square foot house. We just lost one south of the two crow actually down by win It. It was really really perfect for us. Three ranchers bought it and they paid more than we're willing to pay. So I got a story after a story of that. There's a lot of painful ones that we would have loved to have had it some up and around Malta when a state legislature beat us out one day on a phone call on auction. We got to the top of what we think we could justify and we had to back off, and he bought it for more than are more than we were willing to pay. So that happens. There's a misnomer out there that we can pay anything and we're driving up prices. Absolutely not completely false. How often do you run into situation where a landowner um just doesn't want to sell it to you because they have an emotional connection to it being a working cattle ranch that fits their definition of what that looks like, and that their adversarial to the idea that there sort of legacy and work on the land would be upended, and they don't want to sell it to you less than five percent of the time. But it does happen. How is it articulated to you when that does happen. M I don't want to take the flak from my neighbors that I sold to the a p r um funny thing though it does happen where someone will say I'll sell it to somebody else if they sell it to you, that's not my fault. Yeah, yeah, not. But the truth is, you guys are technically running cattle right um. You you have properties that have um uh leases or BLM. In order to keep certain BLM less read you gotta have some working component to it. Um yeah, for the most part, you need to keep some grazing animal on there to maintain your allotments that are associated with your base property. You can rest it. The BLM allows you rest for two years, three years, and you can ask for another extension or whatever. But um yeah, we do lease, and we have these numbers wrong throughout whe We got somewhere between four thousand and five thousand cows on our property right now. Most of the property you're looking at is is leased out. UM. Part of that's a business decision is a very expensive project. Leasing it out is you you rant it until we can get there with our model UM to have ice and and other things. We lease it out and that helps our overhead costs. And some leases as to three years. There's some out there that's a big one over in Valley County that was a twelve year lease. We've had about four thousand yearlings on that something like that. So, and that's that's about clarified as situation where it's land that you own and you're allowing a local cattle operator to graze cow calf pairs or whatever to graze cattle on your land. And are you guys doing some uh, you know, like trying out some different practices as part of that lease UM as far as uh, do you guys write like a grazing management plan or anything like that right now? Very specifically we do, and we call it the Crazy Scale for Grassland Management and it has nine points on it. How do you want to see repairian areas? Look? How big we want patch sizes? Like we don't want two small fencing pens? Uh total amount of fense for a wild easy wildlife movement. So a big priority for US is American propiser is trying to maximize for biodiversity, not for livestock poundage off take. We're happy to deal with livestock producers, but they've got to realize our number one thing is we're optimizing for nature and biodiversity. So we'll say, if you want to lease on our place, and not everybody does, but most people look at and think, Okay, it's not so bad. I've changed a little bit. A lot of times we'll ask them to have a lower stocking rate than they would like to have. Take it right to the wall maximum they can have lower stocking rate. You know, it's too easy to say, but kind of the take half, leave half idea, leave half for wildlife, for the forbes and the grasses and things for prime learn everything else. So lighter touch on the ground with a few less CALCIE might like. So you've got to accept that. Uh. Sometimes fencing out, repairing areas, UM being okay with some fire now and again um having some natural uh water course things like less use of spreader dikes or no users edderdykes, and being okay with beaver dams and things like that. So there's these these sorts of things. They're not draconian or particularly arduous. We'll show them how to do it, and we give them time to get there. But if you don't want to do it, um uh within our way of operating, then yeah, well maybe we're not a good match. So far, we haven't any trouble, trouble leasing out, we don't have anything empty. We generally get six seventy phone calls like that. And is this a program? Um? Are you guys saying that this is going to get phased out over time or do you think long term you're gonna have um, you know, some chunks that are going to have some grazing long term or domestic cattle grazing long term. No, it's a good point. So I think, Um, one way to look at this as we're thinking about our our idea is down the road. And Ali Fox is a lot younger than me, well much more likely see this in in situation you have we might call a core reserve area, right, and that is going to be a very uh amieba like circuitous border. The days are over drawing a square on the map like Hillstone Park. The only way it's defined as who who will sell to us. We have no control over who sells to us, but eventually have this corrier that might be between three million acres three and a quarter million acre or something like that, and in a six county general area north and south of the breaks, north and south of the CMR, et cetera. Outside of that is a boundary. Or if you see the next if you think about another area outside of it, maybe like you think about fishing two miles offshore, go quite a few miles whatever it might be, forty miles around that whole thing, A band around that is a is a is all cattle. Frankly, I don't know what's going to be there. We don't have a control. I can't tell you with four or five years from now, but probably the next hundred years is going to be very robust cattle industry there. And then even beyond that, we believe there are wildlife areas that our Secretary of Materior is now talking about, corridors between us and the Rocky Mountain Front and corridors down the Greater Door Yellowstone ecosystem where elk and other critters can move back and forth. So you saw this, somebody around here is knowledgeable about which house bill that was. But the zinky just put out so that I want to take a look at these corridors, wildlife corridors between areas. We gotta start thinking about how do we make those sociologically softened so critters can move back and forth and these things. So three things. There's a core, there's a immediate surrounding area maybe thirty or forty miles thick. And then there's also this corridor idea that's going to these two other big ecosystems. We consider this a huge ecosystem of about eight million acres. That's where water drains into the milk or drains into the Missouri. So in the core to your question, eventually, over time we will uh those those property right now our stage with cattle on them. Over time, what's happened on White Rock, on Drive Forork, on sun Prairie, on Sun Prairie North, we'll turn those cattle off and we'll turn bison onto them. As the grazer, as a legal grazer, because you have to have a grazer. Llamas, sheep, goats, horses, cows, buy some. You gotta have something in there or you'll lose your allowments. I imagine that like you, you talked about your your personal interestingness and you grew up hunting. Um, I imagine that a good majority of the donors that are really paying high high dollar amounts. Do you guys are probably deeply suspicious or adversarial to hunting? Would be my guess, Like I know that you even a lot of interest from like National Geographic Society, right, and they're like very antagonistic to hunters, Like what what? Um? How do you how do you weigh that out? Like do they know do you talk about that you have an interest in hunting? And I know that hunters go on there now, But I imagine that the long plan wouldn't be that right that they probably don't like that idea. Donors, there are one that the majority that's not correct. I don't know. That would make are my life even harder to get this thing done. It would be very difficult that philosophical divide. So I would say there's some as far as people who are squeamish about it are queasy about it, I don't know. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty, I would say something like that, and where they where you knocked that down to about three percent that I don't want to hear it. I'll say, you know, people have been out there for eleven thousand years hunting animals. People have been a part of landscape. First it was thrusting spears. Later got the idea of at laddles. Later at the got the idea of archery. That numbers sitting at about fifteen right now for the fashionable keeps going. So I think it's going to go deeper. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well may well sixteen maybe because I think I heard you on one podcast listen, is it Dan Flores where you're talking with I can't remember who you're talking to? Was about the idea you correctly said the oldest has been found? And was it so the South South and South America? Yeah, there's older stuff out of a tex out of Austin, Texas. Yeah, so how do you anyway, So a long time ago people have been hunting, whether they're throwing or checking a rocket something or finally a fixed a stone to a spear. So people been hunting out here for a long long time, all right, So that's in ports most important thing. And uh, I hate to use words sustainably, So when we use that, but it works seemed to work. Okay, Yeah, there were some periods of very unsustainable hunting preper exactly. Also, it's not getting too that. But what I would say to people, and because this has come up a lot in the last seventeen years for sure, is well, why aren't you guys are gonna be like a park and not allow hunting, right, So look what our what our goal is first and foremost is extraordinarily robust wildlife populations, which do not exist there now. So our job is to create robust wildlife population something you'd see in the serengetti. You're gonna be astounded if we are successful. Give us a couple of decades to pull this off. It's a lot, a lot to do. You're gonna be astounded. So in other words, don't worry so much about the hunting. If you have that and you have access, or you're happy. Is it just a philosophical thing about hunting, or you think they'll take all the wildlife away? So I realize, okay, well, if you have serengetti like stuff that I can see and I can go view it and show my kids and my grandkids, then yeah, it all, it all can fit for sure. So that takes care of a lot of it is that people have been doing this for thousands of years and we're not about to let hunters knock back and not get back until there's no we're not gonna kill everything, right. And I tell them about my background in it, and I understand the whole the whole sport of it and all that, and it goes away pretty close, like, well, I still don't like my hunting. And they might say, why do people shoot some many coyotes? Why do you have to shoot fifty coyotes? I can't explain that to you. Why why did they trap a swift fox? What did the fifth swift fox do to you? It's the size of a housecat. I don't need to trap that thing. I think canna eat it or nail it on their wall. Or I can't explain that to you. Why do I have to say down with a with a tripod and shoot three dogs at a go? What's that about? I can't explain that. Let's let's move on to other things. You want to give me some money for some land, you know? So, yeah, So there are some places where I think hunters maybe shooting themselves in the foot in terms of capturing the hearts and minds of the general public. But as far as big as far as as far as pure big game feel the freezer kind of thing people can people can get that for the most you say robust numbers, like if you're going to compare it to what Yellowstone has now, Yeah, is there like the way that you guys can articulate that Yellowstone has three to four thousand, three to four thousand bison? Well, I want to be uh, let's make my crew that I work with very nervous when I started saying numbers. So because you can always argue that once you get a number, but bison I gets on our website, so I can say that I think we could the most importantly Yellowstone and Us, there's a bit apples and oranges, because you have size, but you also have habitat and elevation bison from six thousand feet to over eight thousand feet in that habitat on that on the sides of that volcano or in the bowl of volcano there. As you know, it's very different than where we are att with an amazing forage and again a history of wildlife that yellows don't never had, or the rocks yellows don't like the habitat's all confined to the right parian areas. I mean, like not all, but like there's there's a lot of alpine timbered stuff that isn't isn't doing much good for those animals. Depends on the species. For wolverines or pretty happy to that high stuff. You know, it depends. And by the way, you have to realize who you're talking to, and I'm talking about just what I'm saying, Like when we look at like the size of Yellowstone, the fact that it can support you know, I mean this number, this is a hotly contested number. But the fact that Yellowstone can support three to four thousand, knowing that some number are gonna drift out every winter. Uh, that I feel like an equal patch of ground out where you're talking about would be able to support a higher number. Uh. Scientists would say the carrying capacity for wildlife where we are is indeed higher than the exact same number of acres if you had three million acres at Yellowstone smack in the middle of the call it there in the volcano, there in three million acres where we were are. And but they're looking at numbers. We're looking at pollinators, grassland birds, all kinds of game species, predators, et cetera. So we're looking at the important thing is we think about like a coral reef. We're looking at every single thing that moves or breeze or digs or flies or whatever. A very small subset of our bigger view of wildlife orbout adversity is game animals. But they agree that you guys are known for the people's the popular understanding of what you're doing as sort of this emblematic keystone species is you're known for doing bison recovery. I mean, that's like that's in the air, and I hope this podcast can help correct that. So help me with that. But can you hear me from it? Can we talk about that for a Second's talk about bisons? So we're should I wrote who damn book about I read your book about it. It was quite good, by the way, and uh, someone starts. Someone told me it's funny to go pay before you go on this podcast. You gotta read this book. This book just came out. It's really important to read it. Going here another one and digging around look on Amazon, I saw the one. It was two thousand and six, two thou five something like that. Like I read that, where's the new one? This is going to be stupid if I don't read his book on bison. We got a new cookbook out that it's a very important book. But like, just okay, I'm super interested in let's talk about I can't tell you how interested I am in blackfooted ferrets everything. Okay, I am, genuinely, But just because it's it's it's a right. Yeah, it's a big thing, and and it's a it's a like I said in the title of my book, it's an icon. So what could lay out for me what it could look like in terms of that animal. I think what it could look like is the greatest um bison viewing human experience in regards to bison that anybody alive today in North America has ever experienced, far beyond Yellowstone. That's why I think you can look like. Part of that is numbers. We're shooting for regards to bison, a minimum of ten thousand. That's a floor to get there. That's our goal as a floor. Okay, I think it depends on the year. Of course, with Yellowstone, you could be thirty one while over five thousand, so imagine ten thousand. But because it's the prairie is much more viewable, and because of how they they don't have to leave. They're in a bowl where we are. They're in a bowl right, not on the top. It's a it's a convex situation. So and every time you get sun on the south side of the slopes there you open up, even thirty below zero, you still get open grass and sage brush and lots of lots of really good forage without having to pack out anywhere else and go somewhere. So I think them being able to stay, be located and stick there is real good. We can support more numbers and people Sometimes people say ten thousand mice, and that's bigger than anything in the lower forty eight states. Isn't that just gonna be kind of nuts? And I said, well, he can look at those six counties there. There's four hundred and fifty thousand cows. Four thousand cows, and those six counties were working right now. So I think you can ten thousand miss back in there. In fact, maybe fifteen twenty, and you're still not getting in the way of that's a lot of cows. And in Montana there's a lot more cows on that there's almost half there's almost a half million cows in it. Yeah, two and a half million in the whole state, roughly two point four two point six depending on the year. Last year just about two point five million cows. So yeah, Um, do you have the human population in those six counties to have fun numbers to balance? Yeah? I imagine the big charismatic predators m play into this. Like you talked about an intact ecosystem. Um, you know, grizzlies are nosing their way out under the Great Plains, Um, wolves are expanding. What what what do you picture the American prairie reserves relationship with grizzlies and wolves would be, And what do you met, like, what are the what are sort of the the obstacles there? I picture those two species, well, black bears, cougars, wolves and grizzly bears. I picture them being there. And before anybody jumps on that and said, well they'll be bring they're they're bringing them in, we're not. We can't touch those animals. Uh, they're not going to commit any horse trailers with us or anything like that. But I've been around already. I mean you already got lions there, definitely got lions. They they suspect they got back from the little belts about they were completely extirpated. They expect they got back me and did nineteen nineties, Uh, from the little belts, but they were all gone from this particular area. And uh, we can get back to that. But most scientists I talked to, including FVP biologists, don't believe there's a viable, genetically viable population and putting out too many tags right now for it. There really really need to do their bottleneck. They're too small, but could be a robust population. But what I've seen is again we had a cabin up in what's called by Gibson Reservoir my dad built was cheap use material from UBC lumber and great falls, uh pretender son Over Canyon. And when you talked about a grizzly bear in the sixties, it was a real anomaly. I mean, if somebody saw one, they talked, We talked about it all winter, that somebody saw a grizzly bear doing something or track. Well, seventies maybe a little bit more, eighties, a little bit more. And now you as you know it's so full. A huge success story's starting to spill out onto the grasslands and it used to be just ten years ago. Kind of for a visit in the summer, just take a walk about and go back into the mountains. Well, now you can't go back upstream of that concentration from her habitat standpoint, and they're having young on the grasslands. So but then in my mind, I'm thinking Tiber Reservoir, shot O conradt, various other places. Now they're east of Fort Benton and now they're on this map. They just killed two at Denton right there, and now they're by White Silver Springs just three weeks ago after we got one on a camera trap just a little bit west of Harlowe, Harlton right, So they are well into that red air already. And so that with us doing nothing, wolves are moving north also from the southwest in that direction to into the crazies and the little belts. Now doesn't take much to find out where they are uh expanding, So I would expect why would they not get to where we are because they're already on this map already doesn't take very long. Plus the habitat is fantastic. If you're an omnivore. The brakes is terrific, and the history of bears there, if you read Paul Shillary's Lewis and Clark among the grizzlies encounters every single day as they came to that area. They're thick, all right. So no, it's no surprise. It's not that much of a stretch to figure out why what grizzies want to be here, because that's where they were all the time anyway. So what I what I think, we gotta we gotta make it okay, And back to the frocky mountain front is now. I go back up there and I know ranchers who we used to knock on the doors when I was a little kid. Now I'm sixty, but I still remember that area. And those ranchers are like, yeah, we see them. Don't have that much of a problem with them. They don't slaughter my cows, and we've learned to live with them. There's a couple of adjustments you gotta make. But they're not yelling for f TOVP to come kill all these bears. They don't belong here. They're like great white sharks or something. Take them away. Uh, it's become normalized. So to your point, Steve, how do I What do I see is that over the next ten or fifteen years there'll be a lot of anxiety because they've been gone for a long time, and then that front edge, that leading edge of the wolves of the bears will be People are are looking for how do we live with them? F tovps starting to do uh seminars, evening seminars in Stanford and Dent and other places saying you live in bear country. Now here's what we've learned looking two miles to the west about how to live with them. You kind of got to get ready for this. We don't have the money to helicopter every single bearer back to the front. I ain't gonna work anymore. Um. So, you know, for a while, Wyoming was spending for every grizzly bearon Wyoming, even though they were federally protected species. Every grizzly bearon Wyoming, Wyoming was spending over half on each baron at state that when Idaho spends per kid in public school expensive Yeah, I think if and if you're a hunter, and you won't have to be p to spend money on things you want opening habitat things like that helicopter rides for one animal time is taking money away from you getting on more land and more social change stuff and getting public access and uh, you know, so it's a it's a public they don't want to do it either. So what I see is them being there is going to take a long time, but I think it will get normalized exactly how we've seen it in Montana two d miles to the west. Very normalized, no big deal. Yeah. A thing that happens right now is when a grizzly does strike out and oftentimes one a mountain lion strikes out into a new country. Um, they get in trouble and then they die. I mean they get in trouble on the highway getting hit by a car, or they get in trouble with just coming up against that the human wildlife interface, and they kill something or turn up on someone's doorstep like that's usually the end of the story because they're going into areas where conflict. The opportunity for conflict is rich, especially with an animal doesn't have a set core home range that it knows well. He's seeing it for the first time too, and they stumble into trouble. I think that by if you were to create this big block of habitat were they were welcome or presented with a place to live, that were they were less likely to come up against that wall, the very hard wall of civilization. I think that that would probably aid in there hanging on and perhaps creating breeding pairs and more. You know, static animals, right, they had like a spot where they could live, So I mean it's definitely something that could assist in the expansion recovery of the species, whether or not you took an active roll in that or not, just by creating the habitat. Right, our role is to create habitat so that everything can be there, not to drag it all in we did with bison. Is the only way we get them there from wind Cave National Park in South Dakota and from from Elk Island, Canada. The only way to do it is trucks and trailers everything in the beginning, Um, we don't need to import anymore. But and uh, swift fox, you actually have to put them in a little cage and bring them down so they don't get hit across the highway and let them out somewhere. Other than that everything gets there on its own, like Sugers did Cougar. Well, let's go back in this period of time. You guys know this. You watched I'm sure you've watched fps movie Back from the Brink and read the books and what happened out here or every every big horn, every elk, every grizly bear, every wolf, everybodyson was completely wiped out right in this area. There wasn't one left. The elk came back in ranching trucks with FDVP in the nineteen fifties, so they were brought back right the Rocky Mountain sheepy. I heard you're talking with Garrett and those guys from the Sheep Foundation. They brought those back I think from Castle Reef and the Rockies Uh to put them back in the brakes in like early nineteen sixties or something like that, late nineteen fifties. So a lot of stuff has been brought back. I think we're pretty much the end of truck and stuff in and now it's just letting populations grow. The predators will get there on their own. And you can tell every year that's the movements are happening. It's it's a it's a fore gone it's a historic inevitability they're gonna return. Um, what would let's say everything was for Let's say you don't like this. Let's say let's say everything was for sale right now that you that you guys felt like when you got a thing like to make this work, it needs to be ex big, right. Let's say it was all for sale right now and it was just market like standard market value vote a cost to buy all of it. Um, you're probably talking about another properties between two hundred and three hundred million dollars roughly maybe a little more time value of money. You have to put a qualifier on there. How much time do we get to buy it? If it's all available it's all for sale, If we buy it over fifteen years, gonna cost more. Cut the time value of money and property out there goes up about three percent sometimes four percent a year. The longer you wait, the much much more expensive. Yet so but that amount of money would push this landscape piece up to milk done million, four million acres because of the public land leverage aspect of it. So yeah, here's how we we often say. People say, well, you know, one of the reasons it's hard to do these projects they're so darn expensive. That's why the government got out of the business, etcetera. But we think about this way, this entire project, everything, all the management, all the remodeling costs. There's a lot of work being done out there, are people doing it right now today while I'm sitting here in this warm office. Is UM purchasing the land, all the remodeling and the operational costs in a very large endowment which will keep it going forever, like a university endowment, so you don't have to have the vagaries of administrations. And like Yellowstone has million dollar maintenance backlog right now, we want to avoid that. So endowment's maked into that entire thing. All right, about seven a hundred million dollars that's the price of the project. Well that's that's that's a lot of money. Well think about it this way. I don't know if any of you sports fans but watch football or something like that. Not at all used to be. So the Raiders, Los Angeles Raiders, you know, are the Oakland. They're gonna move to Las Vegas. So they just gotta gotta build a stadium, right, So the prices stadium at one point eight billion dollars. Lanta Falcons just did one just before the last Super Bowl one point six billion. Dallas Cowboys just did one, one point two billion, Minnesota Vikings, etcetera, etcetera. We built up a new football stadium almost every year in this country, just like that, from the idea to the paint's dry. You're playing games three years average one and a half billion dollars. So for the biggest reserve ever created the United States, a three and a half million acres, a million acres bigger than nell Stone Park, less than half the cost of one new football And that's a stadium. I'm interested in going to hot dogs. You pay some games. I'm just saying, where the heck are you gonna get that money? You say, if you've got a good idea, money doesn't exactly fall out of the sky. But you can tell just by that sports story. Entertainment venues, performing arts centers, operas, wings of hospitals are regularly in the six eight million dollars. Just like that. Martin Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are always losing that amount of money today during losing that amount of money today, and value during fluctuations in the stock market. Right, So, there's a lot of ways to make it seem approachable, but it's still a bunch of money. Yeah. Yeah, So our our fundraising crew, our fundraising crew, if they could call in, they'd say, but tell them that's not easy and it's not easy to raise that. Um, it's a lot easier raising money for a football stadium or anything else. Because people look at it as a big economic driver. It doesn't have. It doesn't have a big footprint. Well, it's also you have a village, you have it's a tribal thing. Okay, I'm I, I have a I have my Packers T shirt on. Yeah, we need this much money? Where where can I send in my ten bucks or whatever else it is, so we don't have in this kind of situation where a lot of things around the world I work with Geographic. I get back to the hunting idea. I think it's not this nuance. They're not as I can tell, they're actually into market hunting, including the chief scientist Jonathan Bailey. Uh So, no, when National Geographic let's go back to that in a second. But I think one thing that's hard about conservation I'd like to get onto. Actually, while hunters, I think are blowing a huge opportunity to make things better in Montana is people don't get organized. There's no sense of tribe or work together. So you have a few tribes, you have ducks unlimited, you have Rocky Mount out Foundation, Deer Foundation, back country hunters and anglers, but not enough for critical mass. Hunters could not pull off a fundraising thing to build the stadium. And hunters are not organized enough to actually make big time gutsy conservation happen because they don't want to be a part of a big don't want to be a part of a bigger tribe like a Packers fans or Atlanta fans. And you get things done in numbers. You get things done with gusto if you pull together numbers. So we have to go beyond Montana to build this thing because everyone's sitting back waiting for us to be done and say you've done yet, Can I go in and shoot something? It's kind of irritating. Yeah. But one of the things people say is they say that you won't guarantee hunting access and perpetuity. I don't even know what the hell that means, because I don't know what who has made that guarantee I mean, like, I don't know any private ranchers that have made hunting access a guarantee and perpetuity for how they would go about doing that. But that's a criticism. Well, I think, yeah, the criticism. But here's a couple of things on again, I don't even know what, Like I said, I don't even know what that looks like, how one would draft up a guarantee of hunting access and perpetuity. But but it's the thing people say, and there's suspicions that what will happen is you know all this. I'm just telling you what I hear out walking around on the streets right here too. The suspicion is what you're going to do, because you're gonna do this, and then you're gonna be like, ha, suckers, it's a park, right, That's what That's the accusation I've heard most frequently leveled at this is that, I mean, it has been mixed up in the National Park. I mean, just having that that phrase in there has complicated this enormously, I imagine, or if you don't even get there. To go back to the first part of this conversation, right, you got private land, private property rights, in Montana are strong. Um, and as we already explained, you got private land that is the key to locking up or unlocking a bunch of public land. And what is going to guarantee that you guys just don't exercise private property rights that everybody else does and says, yeah, you know what, Actually we're not gonna lay on today because all of that land is hunt Like whether the apre are never existed, all that land was accessible to hunting. So like you had ranchers that their families were hunting, people were out hunting it. So and also relative to you gotta also understand like the power of the relative perspective. Well, Lewis and Clark saw that there are many explanations for why they saw the Abunce wildlife they did and what George Catlin saw there. Um, granted it's not anywhere near that now, but relative to what people are experiencing elsewhere, you're here shifting paradigm syndrome, shifting baselines. Yeah, okay, that is still the land of milk and honey. Okay, remains relative to everything else that people are seeing. That remains like this great wildlife haven. So from it, like nothing, you have a struggle hunting. Understand the perspective I hear from people. The perspective is it's pretty great, it's all open to hunting. Um, why would I take the risk of removing millions of acres of huntable land from hunting? Was because people are just like really suspicious about the long term plan, that's all. And I don't even know. Like when I have I always say, dude, I don't know. I'd like to talk to that guy. All right, Well, I think the shifting baseline thing is very interesting to me. Um on two things. One is the amount of wildlife that used to be out there, so it's it's kind of bit frustrating. Sometimes saddens me that people go out there and see what's out there now and they think it's good. I don't think it's good. I think there can be a lot more. And I've covered that country a lot of times and airplanes all kinds of aircraft on foot twice now. I've walked five miles the entire length of that map west to east, biked it on my mountain bike. I've been out there hundreds of times, and I was raised to look for game. I've absolutely trained to do that as a kid right, and a lot of our folks who are with a pr big game hunters, and you go out there, you go. It's it is really unbelievable. This is empty, is absolutely empty. I've had folks from fish waving parks uh in aircraft flying back and forth, fly a hundred miles, go anything. They said, I can go anywhere I want. So they're pilot, fly around, U l bend whatever. Seeing in the elk yet nope, go south the river twenty more miles seen elk yet, nope, go a little further anywhere seeing an elk? Not one? And this is a hundred miles slow and slow, or walking with us five miles one time. The last time we did it, a hundred eighty five miles. We didn't see one elk in the you know, in the nine period, and you hear Lewis and Clark whoever else coming up. They didn't even start hunting until four o'clock in the afternoon, and they got done work and they got enough elk to feed forty people every night. If you tried to walk upstream and started elk hunting, imagine just every night your job, two of you, two guys to go out and get elk feast forty people. Uh could you do that? You have some pretty hungry people in the first three days. Right, It's just not the same. So I think one baseline that shifted. I think we have an amnesia about what used to be there. How do you deal with that amnesia? It's a big thing, and there's no one book would be nice. But I brought about nine books here that you read and you have to take bits and pieces from each one and piece the one together and realized it spans fifty years. They never met each other. They're all saying the same thing. That's an interesting cross referencing the other shifting baseline. You're all pretty very young that I'm looking around the five of you. But in the sixties and seventies, it was a different experience. The baseline of walking up to a ranch was like, yeah, go ahead in the Deerborn even if somebody who owned the deer born in, which they did there in California in the late sixties, we calmed down there. My dad found out who it was, Gary Cooper's old ranch and Tom Mix and we got to hunt mule there. Down there is just great or we go want to hunt elk or whatever else. It was most likely nless you got somebody really crabby. Oh yeah, how I'm gonna be here? Well, if we can put our camp over there, just a couple of days, got a lot of the year, Is that okay? Yeah, it's all right. My dad got really good. It was either George Dickle or old Crow. And they bring a fifth and you're in. And I got a whole bunch of brownies because the lady was very nice to me, a little kid. Look, I try to look really cold. So another baseline is you guys feel like you're locked out because the attitude of change. Now you knocked on the door and they say no, or hell no, go away, private property, don't bother me, or sorry, it's least out. That was not a factor. So you've got a baseline now where private property very unlikely you're going to get on it. Somebody's gotten to it before me an absentee landowner, a grouty landowner, or a hunt another hunter that's least it out. That's not that's not what I found is normal. So taking it back to normal is both wildlife populations and an a p R. Being like by the time you get there, the fences are gone, the keepout signs are gone, and there's a new sign and it says welcome into American Pury Reserve. And that's the interest to our private property. That makes sense, and you'll see that if you go. I think I think that if yeah, I think that that makes sense. I think that that would be that that's exciting to people. And I know like you have way a bit like you guys have a mission and you're driving towards the goal. And I don't expect it to be that. Um, I don't expect it to be that this is all meant to be in service of of humans, like you're doing something for wildlife and humans. I have. I have my backgrounds of psychology and sociology. I'm very interested in human beings. And I think as we pull further away from nature, you've probably seen Richard lose flash child in the woods, the nature deficit disorder idea. Adults have that disorder too, And I think sometimes it's just hard to where do I go where something big enough for full full ecology is happening. Uh. My wife and I we've probably been more thirty seven some lot of years to get there, have been to about almost forty different countries around the world. Were like diving. You get down on a coral reef, you know, you feel really small, but you can we see sharks comebine. But you get on a big coral reef and Panama or Honduras or somewhere, and you look at that and just go that's unbelievable. You're looking at the entire thing, how how it all works together, the plants and the animals, the little stuff, the big stuff, everything. And I think, unfortunately, from a trestle standpoint, what most people think about the outdoors when they drive around, uh, they see fences and cows or crops, which is cool. The nothing against that. We own a beef company, so I'm not against cattle, that's for sure. But I have a statistic here. This came from Natural Natural Agricultural Service statistics. You guys know how many acres are in montanae million acres? How many acres in agriculture ranching and farming on a nine three million, fifty nine million, fifty nine million acres at our ninety three is an egg that's of the surface of Montana's and agriculture. So I think normally, of course, when you go out there and drive around. That's mostly what you're gonna see. So I think, though there's a there's a coral reef like thing out there, to just be stunned by the beauty and be stunned by the diversity and the richness of wildlife and nature and bio diversity, just knock your socks off. I think it used to be like that. It can be again without putting a dent in the agricultural industry, not a dent or a worldfold supply anything else. So that's not to me. That's what's really exciting, and make it accessible to people. As far as as far as saving things permanently, the answer is yes, in due time. And you're taking a snapshot in time. You're looking at the first third of a really big construction project. So if I'm building a house and you know, the sheet rockers there and and there's no tapers lining the sheet rockers, framers and plumbers and concrete k lock and you walk in and say where do you want this couch? Say hang on, hang on, it's a total mess right now. I'll give me a couple of months and then I'll tell exactly where the couch is going to be permanently and forever, in perpetuity that you want to know where that couch is going to go. I don't know yet. I haven't even stood in the living room. The walls aren't up yet. So when you say, how come you're not putting permanent easements across your land right now, because we don't even understand the land. It's huge. The last property we bought is fifty two acres. That's our twenty nine one. Just to get to know that and how the wildlife moves around. How do we know where to put a permanent easement? Right now it's in block management. Go out and enjoy it. Ten twelve years from now, we'll know where we put something that sticks forever. One of the problems of conservation easements. I hate to say, but we'd be much more likely to put conservation easements where and I we have Montana landry lands easements. We're already starting to do something. Nobody knows about that, but we're starting to put things in easements. You've got to be awfully careful. If you were able to sit down with the easman entity every ten years and say, how's it working. Could we shift the footprint of the building envelope over here, or we made a mistake on that road. It's too close to the creek bed, and it's really messing up the travel of this particular species. The frontwarmer don't like at their spoots or whatever. If we go up around this hill over here and then down this other side and they go, you had your chance. Never ever, ever is that discussable ever. So when I come from business, nothing in nature is like that. Nature evolves, it's adaptable, it's resilient, it's shucks and jives with new information. And I don't want to be trapped at this point into something that is never discussable again. No matter if you made a horrible mistake, you can't change it. So fish walking parks do the same thing. They want to put easements on we would like to we like FWP. I'm in the block management all that right now. They want to put rest rotation grazing on the private land. If they do conservation easements and rest rotation grazing, even the BOM is beginning to break open. And look at they have eleven experiments around the west right now taking a look at the change or evolution towards something called outcome based grazing management outcome based, so I can read to you what you want to hear. What that says. Outcome by based grazing emphasizes conservation performance, ecological, economic and social outcomes, and cooperative management of public lands. This will help demonstrate that permitted livestock grazing on public lands can operate under a less rigid framework than is commonly used in order to better reach agreed upon habitat and vegetation goals, shared conservation, stewardship of public lands while supporting you such as livestock grazing and other things. So what they're saying saying is, rather than forcing you to use a technique like rest rotation grazing, we're going to force you to nail the outcome good looking forage for you. Yes, you can extract, it's an extracting industry. Extracts some to go in your cow and raise the poundage. But there's gotta be left for wildlife, a lot left for wildlife. Shaggy mosaic of habitat not grow. You know. I love the outdome outcome outcome based grazing idea that the BM is now spearheading. That's really cool. I think it's very smart. They're experimenting and adapting rather than saying rest rotation forever, even five years from now, rest rotation at the b all end all no innovation possible. I don't think that's a good way to look. So we're gonna be pretty slow and f VP easements if we have to put in rest rotation. Not that we don't like the ftervup, but they're forcing a technique. I often use the analogy is I like a lot of history books. I'm reading one right now. But ships in the in the lates undreds, and these Spanish course airs and the privateers, they got these boats to chase down the big boats that were laiden with all kinds of products, and they just they couldn't carry as much, but they're super fast. Well they set up the sales and everything. Uh French, I'm sorry, French course airs, and they catch all the they catch these ships, and they would their ship couldn't one ship, couldn't take at all, but they brought three. But they're really fast, chase them down, take all their stuff and then leave with it. And it was well known technique. And the people who are hauling stuffs, So how do you how do you beat that ship, and we could have said, right, there is the Spanish. The French coursairs are so fast that that's the end of the shipping innovation. Let's just go with those forevermore. This is what the French nable use his coursair's sailing ships right forever. We'll try to run one of those in the America's Cup today, I'm not gonna do very well. Right, And the idea of rest rotation being and I've talked with Alan Savory over email. He knows about our project, likes our project, our rust Horn maze. Idea of rest rotation great for the time, but there's probably gonna be given a hundred years. I bet it will evolve. And locking down on this now as the best and we can quit thinking about there's no innovation necessary. I think it's the right way to go. So we're gonna be slow on Easeman's because Eastman's are forever. We'll we'll protect it, but just give us some time to get to know our land so we know what we're doing. Let me ask you about another manage that makes sense, It makes perfect sense. I want to ask about another management obstacle I could foresee and how you picture this um when you get the If you build a contiguous block and it's a lot of mixed ownership, there's gonna be federal lands, state lands, privately held lands, tribal lands, and block, it's gonna be really hard to get everyone on the same page in terms of management. Meaning there are places right now where, for instance, like bison, what you imagine functioning as wildlife, but in this state they fall into the domain of the Department of Livestock under a lot of situations. So you know, what is the calm? What is the conversations you're having with federal land managers if you look toward the future, what are the conversations where you're saying, we want to look like this, and we want the chunks that are under your administration to assist this. But it seems that you're gonna have these internal, very hard borders where management goals, management practices are anything but unified. Yeah, it's a good concern, but I feel just the opposite. I'm quite optimistic about being able to come to a shared set of practices. We're never going to own the BLM. They own that and run that. We're never going to manage the public's wildlife. That's FWP. I'm not going to own or run the state lands. But uh an example sun prairie on your map there, that's about uh twenty thousand acres shrines, So you're up into a nearly forty square miles of land. It's big. A lot of bison on there. So what we have when we first got there there was miles and miles across fencing fencing out the state sections and the BLM pieces which is the light blue on that map. Dr the BLM. They go, what do you want to do? We said, well, this is different where we would like to take a cattle off and put bison on and and we'd like you a round grazing, and we'd like to have no interior fences. And we showed them lots and lots of science papers to about how bison can mostly rotate themselves, and um that we will at that time. It wasn't at that time, it is many years ago. We said, we will. Can you test, can you judge us on outcomes? Come down and take a look at the habitat after we've been there for a few years. First we asked them, what do you want this to look like? Which sometimes a lot of Landers don't do. We invited the blom who said, take a look at this. Tell us what you want to what you want us to look like. I'd like this little taller. These fours are pretty, forbes are pretty hammered um. I'd like to have this looking like this, et cetera. Plant diversity. Plant. Hete things like that, and some hit hard, some not so hard because they're big in the grassland birds as they should be in different habitat. So we started with outcome based grazing and two thousand and five with our first property. Eventually they said, you know, you guys seem to know what you're doing. They let us take down the fences between our private and our bom. Later the state did the same thing. We took down the fences between those two entities in the state and we have two or three state sections inside there. If you go to Sun Prairie and Earth, I think, Steve, what you'll see is a example of the future. You go out there, you see first, you see you species, You see elk, and you see some We don't have very many prong horn. They're starting to come back. Mule deer, a little bit of white tail not not usually on there, and bison and those animals walk across b OM and then State and then private and there's no fences. They have no idea who they are. What's really cool, we have a campground out there as full ail counters right now, right in the middle of sun prairie where you're looking at the hunters. Also they know where they are, but there's no indicate, there's no signs, and there's no fences. They walk across unimpeded, across the landscape. They're going private to BLM to state to private. It all looks and feels the same. That's a big area that's half the size of the entire Gallton Valley here. So that's a microcosm of the future. We've done it once. All I gotta do is scale that up. It can happen. And the agencies are particularly the on the ground people have to vp real good to work with. We don't see eye to eye on everything, No way, we don't. They don't want to move as fast as us um with ficial walking parks. One is the oil. One is the need for rest rotation grazing. Do we really have to do that? Okay? One is necessary then amount of hunter days if we do a conservation easement. Uh So the ease ments we're hav a little bit difficulty right now because we put a conservation easement, they'll say, we want a thousand hunter days on that piece of property. Well, a thousand hundred days right now is okay. But what if we're down to only this many big horns? How do we control that later on or there on our private property? What if it starts to get out of control in terms of people driving off road and things like that. It's, uh, this is never discussable again, right, So we're gonna go slow on that. But in terms of strike agreements every year, however, well, we're we inherited some purchase properties that already had F. TOBP. Easeman on them, and some of the part, some parts, some aspects of the Easeman's feel too draconian to us and unchangeable and undiscussable. So we're gonna wait a little while before we do more until we're absolutely certain that a thousand hundred days of the right or number seven or twelve or whatever else. We gotta get to know the properties. So what we do agree on lots of things like we'd like to have um more of certain critters prong worn whatever it might be, and working on prong oar and studies right now are engaged collaborating with them on the possibility of reintroduction of possibility of re introduction of swift fox. Uh. They have an interest, We have an interest. It's all about timing. Let's guy seem like an easy win because I can't believe there's a big anti swift fox lobby. You never know they might buy. They're about that big. Yeah, that's like pretty cuddly man. No one's gonna get pissed. No one's because most people are never gonna know they're there anyway, right, And they're nocturnals maybe prairie dog shooters, Yeah, but they but they will tell you that there's too many prairie dogs. They'll be glad to have the assistance. So fox don't eat prairie dogs. They eat bugs and grasshoppers and stuff like. Don't need dogs. Praye dogs are bigg than they are. We We we pounded in the one down in uh in Mexico that the winter. So I think so, I think, I think that I think the important thing bom the range cons the on the ground ft EP guys. Um uh, we're interested in for instance, you know, I really want to get to before you, so don't end us till I get to this. It's really important how I see hunters and what hunters can do. Um, that's putters that might trust us in our long term visions. Well hunters can do at the A p r H in Montana. I think I think you know, being in hunting and the sixties and seventies as you know, definitely big in the hunting member of the n r A, all that kind of stuff is just living in hunting camps and sting. But I think hunters are making some mistakes now that are hindering were things they want to go uh in this state, whether it's access or population numbers or whatever else it might be. So let me know when you want to get into that. So ahead, how much time we have? How much time we got get time to do all that? Well, I got a lot of questions, A lot of questions. Can we jump back to the relationship with f WP, So I think we missed a big one is where he has at on the bison conversation right, because we got wild bison and we got live stock. You guys have bison has livestock right now? Correct, and you man and you're that there's some benefits to that, um, But long term goal is bison has wildlife. So can you comment on like where I'm assuming right that that is the long term term goal? Correct? Yeah, I as we get a lot of bison right now, about eight hundred or so, and we're on a floor. We have to flatline him now because we're waiting for our next approval of the next piece of property where we can go out like some prairie. So we're in phase going around this block again to where we are allowed to put bison out on the bl So we have to hold but that that'll take off at some point. I can't predict when when you get approval for our environmental assessment and we go, um, but I think that's one thing like earlier you hit on it. Well, like yeah, to satisfy um, the grazing piece of this BLM least we turn that over. We turned cattle off and we turned bison on, and then a lot of people are probably like, well, bison's wild animal, right, Yeah, Well, in this case you get us satisfy the least. But turning bison has livestock onto that lease. So bison have, as you know, a very funny dual citizenship status in Montana ours. There's nothing, um confusing about it. They are livestock. We pay a livestock fee about four dollars and twenty cents a year on every single animal, just like you pay. You pay like fifty on a cow for twenty or whatever on a bison. Um, they are a livestock animal on paper, meaning you pay the BLM just as listeners understand, you pay the BLM a fee to be able allowed to run your livestock on BLM land, same way a cattle ranchement buck sixty for a cow calf, just like exact same prices account, exact same price account yep. And the other thing I was just talking about was the Department of Livestock fee. There's a lot of fees associated with having livestock to different entities, so we pay exact same as cows. In some cases more. Department Livestock charges for some reason, more for a bison than for a cow. Uh So right now, I foresee for quite some time because as you take a look at trends, I want to get back to some of that the trends. You look at the trend of bison on the way to becoming wildlife. I think it will eventually happen down the road, but it's not happening very fast. So I think our our bison are going to be livestock for quite some time to come on. Perfect okay with that, probably beyond my career lifetime. I'm guessing, is there anything good? I think the way I look at it, you know, are we gonna try to ram it through somehow? I think the way I look at it back to we started the podcast with um looking at females. Let's go back to females, and funny, Michelle just raised her hand. I think I look at it like women's suffrage. And it was in the late eighteen forties and this big meeting in Seneca, New York, where they all of a sudden they realized women should have the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony and a bunch of other folks started different organizations and pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and push. But that that that first seminal meeting where they got the epiphany the women should have the right to vote was in Lady eighteen forties and Seneca in New York. And you know when they got the right to vote. I mean, how obvious is that's when all those guys got together and decided to give them next Some of you, well, it's about time. Maybe even some of this we think that was a big mistake that they ever got who knows, but but you know that took. Think how long that took and how obvious that is. I think Poles keep saying, I don't know, a little over sixty in Montana, it's like to see wild bison in Montana. That's one indicator of a trend. They just became our national mammal. That's another indicator of a trend. Remember that, Uh, every animal moves creusily bear, you just name, it, goes anywhere it wants in Montana except for one who's who's our national mammal? And city of the people in Montana. Every time you pull more people want to But look at women's suffrage seventy years to get the right to vote. After people realize it was the right thing to do, and that was and a lot of people even in ninety were still upset that it happened. And I think bison. I don't know it could you know, sometimes historic inevitability, whether it's legalized marijuana, gay marriage, right to vote, bison and Montana can take a long, long, long time. What waste? What was your question, Michelle? He kind of answered it. I was gonna say, beyond social tolerance and acceptability of this animal, what other factors do you think are inhibiting that acceptance? I think at different times, like inn the women's suffrage example, at different snapshots in time along that continuum until uh, it actually occurs and you tip over the edge and it's there. I think at the moment we're sitting in right now, which is kind of the only thing I can live with because it's today, is lack of understanding of the animal itself because it's been gone for so long. So the people that are most afraid, concerned, UM, skeptical, whatever it might be. UM. I find the there's a correlation. The people that have the most vehemence against it have had the least experience with the animal. Our direct neighbors who see them all the time across the fence. Here's our cows, and there's our bison, hundreds and hundreds of bis, and even watching them on the runt. When they're really going at it, they go, not a big deal, because they've been desensitized. They know us, and they know the bison because they see him all the time. The people that are most hot about it. The further your weight get away from our bison, the more people get upset and start seeing those signs, those huge green signs that say don't buffalo me. Yeah, there's all kinds of signs. So but I ask you a question, Michelle. At the moment, it's just lack of understanding because it's been gone so long that, yeah, you also have there's like this there's this big sort of theoretical debate about them where it's like clashing worldviews, but the debate will get hung up on there's details along the way, you know, like like with like in Yellowstone, there's kind of like we're sort of in this this debate about like what is this animal, what's our relationship to it? Is it wildlife? Is it livestock? But then the debate gets hung up on like a snag like brucellosis, right, and brucellois Like this this disease, the disease spread issue. It winds up being that you can avoid the big conversation about where we headed as a people, what is that relationship with wildlife and native flora and fauna. And you go like, well, yeah, but you know, let's let's hang it up on brucellosis for a minute. And I think that will always there will always be a thing of the day where the debate centers around that. You know, there's and you know, and that's probably not even issue because you guys probably have quarantined disease free. We do. In the early two thousand's that was a really big one of the bruce loosis. But then we sat down with a lat of rancher groups sometimes you know, fifty at a time and circle of chairs and Second Creek Hall and Phillips County and US and they say, tell us what you're doing and they ask really good questions, um, and we said, here's how we do it. We at the source when Cave National Park, that the time alkhala Ash. We we do all twenty diseases, reportable diseases about the department livestock, not just bruce loosis. Make sure they don't have it. As they load up, they get TB tuberculosis checked on both sides, of the border, just a law. So they have to be quarantined here, but it's for t b When they get here, they sit for a couple of months, then they go out onto the landscape. We also do testing, random testing, knock them down with tranquilizer, darts, take care and blood samples, send that in so we get a report every year how the herd health is doing. A lot of people don't test that much. Uh so, and those tests are available to anybody who wants them. Ranchers want a hard copy, just come over. We'll give you a hard copy. We'll show you exactly what got back. So completely open book and transparent on that. So the Bruce loisis actually it pops up a little bit here and there, but since really after two thousand and ten, two thousand eleven, it's really tapered off to that's gone for the most part. A little bit here and there, but mostly it's gone. And now the the idea of wild bison and what they will do to us and damaging property, and that's say like then it becomes you get my point, there will always be another thing, and so then it's like, well the integrity offenses, Yeah, that's really what's at issue for me is the integrity offenses. And now we'll talk about that for a long time. Bison crash are you know bison crash fenches and we'll say fish wealving parks one of the best things they've done. First, a lot of good things they do. It's a good organization. They helped us design the most wildlife friendly of fence we could possibly imagine wildlife and people friendly fence. So it's forty four inches at the top up so i'll can sail over. We've got a lot of cameras that show elk sailing over prong horn underneath eighteen inches off the deck, off the bottom, and so the prong warm can hit it at some pretty good speed. They don't have to go back and forth and back and forth. And then there's one hot wire. Bison don't like that hot wire all solar paneled or it's all solar powered and one on a quarter mile increments so the whole fans doesn't go down. But you watch wildlife, we want to make it like gortex sort of. All wildlife can go back and forth. Better stop the bison. That's a trick. That is a trick as amazing to watch these cameras and a five point boilock lazy as judgmental, but all the other up over. He sticks his head through the fourth and fifth wire, just jams through that wire and the camera shaking over the place. But he's rubbing that hot wire and his belly couldn't care less nothing that nothing bothered bother about that heat. That hot wires with the bison. They don't like it, so they back off, they stay away. So we use one hot wire to keep them where they are. The other thing we use is tons of water and amazing forage. They're happy at home. When you're happy at home, there's not a I sure to go in that direction. So yeah, some people talk about fences, but then we show them our fences and they go, wow, that actually keeps them in. And we got more than a decade and hundreds of ice and experience behind us that we know what we're doing. So you don't. You don't have an epidemic of escape. Ees get a lot of cows on our on our property. But that's how it is out there, and you call somebody to go, I think these are your cows. Because the people on that side have salmon tools and you have angers. These are definitely black. Do you want us to put them in a crill and say no? Can you hold until next week? And that's just how it is out there, you know, particularly bulls, they get to fight and push through a fence and then they start walking down a ditch and just going on walk about and everybody's pretty pretty easy going. Yeah about cows. Um, you had a lot of questions. Yes, I'm good, I'm done, all right. I mean I got questions that I still have. I want to talk about hunters if I don't know if you guys are into hun but I want to talk about you. I got deep Montana roots, just as it sounds like you do. And I was doing a lot of digging on you guys are gonna out Montana each other? Now? No, no, are you older than me? Um uh. But it's like a lot of the core arguments against APR are can kind of be summed up like this, right. So one thing that I got from multiple folks is like, oh yeah, Sean Garrity he uh, he's a real smooth talker. Where's tight jeans and slip on shoes? Okay? Um? Which I think is hilarious, right because every rancher in eastern Montana. They were pretty tight jeans and slip on shoes. They're just called cowboy boots, right, um. And that's how like a lot of these arguments are like driving up land property values. Um. But to me, and we talked about it a bunch and use this word access in the beginning of this thing. We we hit it pretty good. But you know, like our Secretary of the Interior at one point he was trying to hijack the word access as a place where you can drive your r V and hook it up to power and water. Right that that's not the access that you and your dad enjoyed on the Rocky Mountain front, Bob Marshall, Right, um, And so I know a lot of folks, myself included, is like there there's a hole here that I think and and I think everybody in this room is going to agree with you that hunters do plenty of shooting themselves in the foot. Um. But it's it's hard and we do good. We're doing better I think every year on activating hunters around issues and getting that united voice that I'm in full a greeance man. We need to get a hell of a lot better at that, um. But it's like, so, how is ap are going to define access? Right? And I had one real snide comment where they're like, well, yeah, access might be you gotta go drive around in one of their lifted up sprinter vans and their Serengetti model, right, um. And and you know, I'm I'm not guarantee. I'm not gonna say anything you don't already know, right, but you know, if you're looking for more funding, like every nonprofit is is like, is there can you guys add something into your mission statement that is bulletproof and long term and says, yeah, we are going to guarantee access to hunters. We're gonna guarantee hunting long term, and that's why we're gonna swing these hunters over and be like more favorable long term. And maybe we're providing a big chunk at uh dollars for the fund? Is there is there some middle ground there? Okay? Are you guys, are you guys iron clad on allowing um swift box or might you change your mind about swift fox allowing some fox? Yeah, oh we're working hard to get him in there. So that's absolutely, But you don't need to leave it open. You're gonna change your mind about it about no, but it's not in our mission statement. Were all that statement though, here's the reason why is I think to your question, why are we not going to put that in the mission mission statement. I've looked at this statement for a long time and we've made it simpler and shorter. We're trying to make it more universal and uh so that it fits a lot, because if I put that in there for hunters, this is what is to me, that would be what a politician would do. I'm gonna promise this for hunters, et cetera. And then you go down the road I just walked three blocks down. Then I'm gonna promise this for snowma builders. They are on a promises for skydivers. Then I'm gonna promise this for Audubon people in bird watchers, And pretty soon you got yourself all tangled up in a lot of promises that don't match up. So I'm gonna pick something really big, not amorphous and squishy. But you know the seven Points of the North American Hunting North American Conservation, there's seven foundation calls him the Seven Sisters. Those are pretty those are pretty high high level things and it doesn't say this and this and this and access to or whatever amounts it might be right, and that has endured for a very long time. I think you could use some tweaks. Have some comments about that, and there's tons of contradictions with it. They're not there's there's tons of things that exceptions. Yeah, well there's ton of things that aren't that we're doing that don't jive with the model. It's not working right, Yeah, privatization, all that kind of stuff. So what I want to do is try to include everybody and uh and uh you know we we want to do is include everybody in our mission statement, but not get screwed down so tight that we made this promise back in two thousand seventeen to something whatever it might be. We'll hear people say, well, you just you have this in block management the two crow because this other place over here on the p N, which is true where you can't hunt helk. There's no elk hunting allowed. The reason why is we don't have any elk on the p N and the populations out there are pathetic as it is. Let us old robust populations will open at the elk. You can hunt mule deer, sharp tail, pheasants and all kinds of other stuff on the p N, but no elk because there isn't any. We did give out two big horn sheep tags on the PN because I have to vpace regions six four ask us to do that. But yeah, we're going to try to build right now. We're trying to build robust populations. We take all this flax. See they lied. You can't hunt elk on the on the two crow there against are on the on the PN there against hunters. Life is nuanced. You have been a lot of black management properties where they have don't touch rules. Yeah, I hunted husant on show in showto you know north a Shota on Solid Road up there for pheasants on block management and you come on. You get to do the morning. You get three guns, doesn't matter how many people party. Three guns. You're off at noon because another crew comes in and Sundays only because the runners are at church. They don't want to there on Saturdays because it's too loud. All kinds of restrictions. They're not against hunting. So there's five of us. One of us has to leave a gun in the trunk truck. We just block with the ox. You know, you just got to adjust. But mostly what we get critiqued by is I want to be able to hunt and trap everything, or you're not in the hunters. I think life is not that black and white. And because of that black and whiteness, frankly, permeates some of the honey community. That's why hunting's losing some public support. Frankly, it's just too aggressive, too in your face to blunt, and nature is nuanced, and so is a big project like this. Okay, was was the big advice? That's it. No, I was just answering one of his many questions. Here here's the advice I think you guys could help with. Maybe you'll say, no, we don't want to do that. That's your you guys a job. So one of the things we get with fish five from parks and they're not against this, they're just going, guys were in a buy in here. Um, some of this is region six, some region four, and we'll say we'd love to have more of this particular thing. So let's just focus on oak. That's not so touchy, okay, And we said there, you know, as best we could tell the carrying capacity from science standpoint out here for elk is if you have four fifty cows, there could be a lot of elk out here this whole area, whole region. The counts might be six or seven thousand, a little bit more elk out there, not much in a huge area. Again, you can spend an awful lot of time and I have hunting around any time of the year, you canna have a hard time find an elk. All right, So robust populations of elk, how do we get there? And how are quotas are population criteria set in the North American conservation model says wildlife is stept through science and we talked to people in the region. They go, no landowner tolerance, So it has nothing to do with science and carring capacity and where elk can be and can we fit this many in here? It's social science. Yeah, So like I said, it is social science exactly. So you go to a you go they say, we would like to raise quotas, but we get extreme pushback from a rancher and this is going to get onto something you can do, I think from a ranchers saying the elk reading me out of house and home. Uh, you're mismanaging me. You're the it's the public's wildlife. It's on my place that's eating my stuff. You're mismanaging it. Population overall, populations about you need to go down. Those people say something to the legislature. Legislature says something that they have to be be commissioned. Commission says lower those quotas. I'm getting a lot of heat up here in Helena. Quotas go down. And that's where a lot of the underground guys are of no animosity towards you have to be a few folks. They're in a difficult bind. So imagine the scenario. I just think, as in Spain last year with my wife and we were eating this unbelievable prestido, and I had time to think about philosophical things. I start imagine, I know the front pretty well. It's where I grew up. Imagine had a rancher and they're ranching cows out on the front somewhere west of Shoto, right just in those slopes underneath castle. Read for sun or or saw tooth, and that a lot of you guys have been up there before, and uh, somehow they're reading something. They go, gosh, you see what these what purshuto selves for like a you know, per pig, which you make and I gotta do a feed of acorns and things like that. We gotta we don't get ourselves about three hundred hogs. Add them to our cow situation and as a portfolio and make a whole lot of money. And we can get acorns, which is what you feed them. We finish them on acorns from California is super cheap. They're trying to get rid of them. So they do all that, get the hogs feed of acorns, make these beautiful product, cut them all up, and then they they have to air dry or age for about four weeks. So they hang them in the forest on private lands, their private land, and they hang bake front shoulders and bad bat on the back quarters in the forest to air dry. Right, this is a rocky mound in front. They're hanging ham all through the forest the grizzly bear country, but grizzly bears are evenly distributed twenty thousand acres thud acres group grizzly bear terrator home range something like that. And thing goes pretty good for about a week or so. One morning they walk out and there's nine grizzly bears and their forest having a great time with those hams. All right, call up f w P. We've got a grizzly problem here, and they got what So I got nine grozzly bears eating my stuff? So well, do you have a fence around that? No? Why should I have to fence that. That's the public's wildlife. Your mismanager them, we need to knock down the overall population of bears. This is untenable for me. It's costing me a lot of money. All right, So you hear that story and go where do I fall in this equation? How do I think about that? Moving over to where we're working, you have some ranchers and they've moved into definitely elk habitat, kind of grizzly bear habitat elk habitat, and they'll get along with cows or just fine and all that. But they've been buying hay on the open market, you know, big one ton bail, one ton round mills. They decided to produce their own, so they plow in about three acres of alfalfa in the middle of native grassland habitat that's been out there for thousands of years in the middle of elk country. Elk might be evenly distributed all over the landscape. Long about August, you go just about two more weeks and alfalfa is looking great. It's like electric green neon out there. About two more weeks, I'm gonna cut this and we lost some nice bills and relatively cheap except for the diesel fuel to cut it and roll it. And they go out there just two weeks before they're gonna cut it and there's three elk in their alf alpha field. They called ft w P and say they're eating me out of house and home. You got to lower these quotas. This is ridiculous. There's there's way too many elk out here. And if l P says you got a fence around it, no, why why should I have to have do that as a cost of doing business. To have that fence around that, you're mismanaging the elk. And that is the crux those conversations actually go on. There's elk in my alf alpha fields. Push those animals down so that they'll leave me alone and stop costing me so much money. En ft VP would say, how about some cost share? How about we could help you fence that out. We can't pay for everything because we're kind of we don't have a much money right now, much budget. We can bring you some materials and maybe even help you a little bit, but you you pay for half, we'll pay for half. Why should I have to pay you for wildlife. It's the public's wildlife. You're mismanaging it. Get him out of here, and I want the quotas. And then he calls that calls the Senator to the commission back to the people they have to be p in Glasgow and said lower those quotas. And a lot of times the f W pill probably come in there and say, well, why don't you let people on there to hunt them. That's a pretty good way to get elk to run away is to let people shoot at them, at least for a little while. Second week August a little tough if you have a shoulder, seas and the backs up into that when they really hit things hard. Yeah, when they're keeping away from your haystacks and things like that. But anybody who might hear this story, it's a cultural thing. There's no right or wrong. So some people might say, well, Sean just said it's exactly right. That rancher with the grizzly bears is in a world that hurt after we should take care of that. Or the rancher with the alfalva field after should take care of that. It's exactly right. It's the public's wildlife being mismanaged other people. I don't know, you've got some of you guys, maybe I don't know what you're thinking, would say, you know, that is a cost of doing business. If you're gonna put an unnatural thing out in the middle of that country, be at Hams or bright Green alfalfa, it's your responsibility fail and set out because you're pulling these those elk are trailing from fifteen miles away to come hit your stack right, whether it's rolled up or veiled or whatever else. And after EP goes, I wish we had more money because when the conversation I'm in a lot of conversations the ranchers, it gets down it's not that they don't like yelk. They actually like yelk. A lot of them are bow hunters. It's not about the species, it's about what they do to their operation. It's finance, which is a good news for I think for you guys, because if you can come up with more money connecting the docks here, if we can come up with a whole bunch more money and we can fence that help that rancher and fence out that field, they will quick complain and the f TOVP, the college from legislature and the commission stopped, and populations from go up, and you will have lots more elk out there, a lot more elk out there. All it is just finding some money. What we have found, for instance, this is the important thing we have found, for instance with our wild Sky program, where ranchers or get paid to be more wildlife friendly, wildlife tolerant, should say everything by the way, wolves, cougars, elk, whatever it might be. We pay them money for that, substantial money on top of what they sell to in the commodity market. So it's an extra bonus, and that money is enough to tip the behavior in the direction being more wildlife friendly. That's one example. So I think there are a number of things that hunters could do to conjurept some more money. If you want to hear them. I got six ideas for that. And if we can get more money into the game, you can get those ranchers feeling better, those quotas will go up and you're gonna see a lot in the more robust populations out there. Hit me with the top three. Top three. Yeah, this is ways hunters could get more money to create more wildlife friendly Sean Garretty's top three ways in which hunters could pump more money to make a more wildlife friendly habitat regime out there in the United States of America. Some wildlife equaling more alilive so that you can hunt it, you can chase it around, Yeah, and have more fun. You got my attention. Everybody wins the really big ones. I think there was the what was the what was the Act of nineteen six with a with Pittmanstoration Act, And all they did was charge on They put a tax on guns, right, and ammunition and ammunition, and then the one there's the one that followed up later on fishing equipment. If you actually lobbied I'm guessing back country or somebody has lobbyists and lobbied together in Montana and so we want to do something like that, we want to tax all kinds of stuff. Oh yeah, man, we're all over this. They won't do it. So the backpack tax next idea, So yeah, I just say that comes up constantly. We want to we want to actually be taxed more, be really organized, not just one group, but a whole a whole bunch of people hammer on this, hire some lobbyists until you finally get it through. Took three tries, I think three runs of the legislature to get rid of snide heepleach mining takes a while. You gotta stay on it, don't don't give up. So we were at tax backpack skis birding a. It meant everything because yeah, guns and am ar tex, the manufacturers are paying third everything. There has been some other proposals to like specific to a species, like okay, well what if we lobbied for uh an additional dollar specific to getting bison back on that style license plate? And they'll go to it. Whatever. If you can go up against industry and get Sinai heap leach mining out of Montana, you guys can do this if you're organized and persistent as hell. Only if you persist not just throw it all. We tried once to give it up. Do we hammer we hammerun this all the time. I love the idea of a backpack ta gotta do that. Next one is let's make a note of that. Here's another team. This is interesting is you got to broaden out and let other people help. So I know a lot of biology game biologist from FTVP. Of course we could being in the business who work with them. Uh. Jeff Hagner actually used to work for APR, who used to be ahead of Fish Walking Park. So he and I spent lots and lots and lots of hours on airplanes and cars and things like that. For him, it was, you know, we got a job after being with that TVP I talked about. He said, a lot of interesting antidutes every time. So why don't we raise hunting fees to get more money or are there other ways to get more money because the revenue is going down doubled I mean not too long ago. They doubled nonresident fees, right, but I mean resident. I'm talking residents. And so they said we can't put this wildlife stamp idea. We went on the road and said, how about wildlife stamp. We can get people that we get all these artists do these cool stamps, like a duck stamp church people who don't hunt, but they'll buy the stamps for twelve bucks apiece because it's done by world class artists. He said. Everywhere we went, particularly in Livingston, that got shouted down by hunters, So why would they not want that. It's more money to manage game and make things work better at all, go into game management. He said. You know what people said, and it was hunting guides and hunters, and the loudest, most volatile one was over in Livingstone one night. He said, we just backed off. Hunters said, we don't want anybody else at the table besides hunters deciding what happens with Montana wildlife. And what a great idea to get lots of money for people who are't going to compete with you and try to shoot that deer. They just want to go out and look at birds, and they were glad to buy a stamp so they can help, so you can have more grosshand birds than whatever else. I think hunters chased away other people because you want to own the discussion. That's a big mistake. I think there's lots of people in Montana wildlife viewing is on a dramatic increase, decades long increase. There's a lot of money in those people pockets and you're leaving it on the table. Here's that one. Another one with sports. So I don't know if any of you golf or ski at Bridge Bowl or whatever. Definitely no golfing. I don't golf either. Okay, let's not go with that joke. I'm golf. My father was a golfer. So anybody downhill, ski ever you're hunting, is not keeping up with the increasing price of sports. About my first season pass in Bridge or Bowl, I think it was a hundred and ten dollars. Seemed like a king's ransom of the time. Almost killed me to pay that much money. I mean that was uh didn't leave any money for gas to go, so it's a bad move. I had to hitchhike or you know, get rides up there and call. And now let's see at Bridge of Bowl, I think a season passes eight hundred bucks. If you want to go skiing one day, I think it's fifty nine dollars for one day, and you can get a ten past thing for five ten bucks to go. So just look at other sports like golfing for three hours that okash forty bucks for one time for three hours skiing one time from nine thirty until four o'clock in the afternoon and fifty nine bucks. So you can get an elk hunting season pass ten bucks for your general tag and with the elk tag now fifteen dollars always okay anyway, so if you can, so, do you want to go ell hunting in Montana for gosh six one of the best places in the world. You want to go hunting Montana? Ten bucks for general tag and it's it's ten dollars, so twenty bucks six d I'm just talking about for get that, not on residents, you guys sitting right here right you get a season passed to hunt elk in Montana for four straight months for twenty bucks and FTW pieces. Every time we try to raise it, people come absolutely on glued. Yeah, so you'll know you'll never hear okay, Okay, So I know you're like throwing out like general recommendations for general folks. I don't think that. I mean, I think general we did. How long did it take? You're not paying up, Sam, You probably know how long was the duck stand set of fifteen bucks? Oh, I mean like forty fifty years. They didn't even get it adjusted for inflation. When ye know, I think the hunters can't come, so you know, if you can't. So, if you can't do it, we want it all man, if you can't, Yeah, we want it from not to pay. I don't care if those dumb skiars pay that much of those golfers or voters or anybody else. We don't want our tags going up. And I hear I actually argue, you know, on a chair lift with people, someone who's got an eight hundred dollars key tags, saying if I have to pay twice what I'm paying now, I'm done. I cannot. Yeah, with that bottle I West whiskey cost you forty five bucks, and that MOSSI Oaks stretchy thing you're just showing me the day there was ninety bucks. Let's just take all the stuff out of your car and put you in to strip you too, your stand there naked for a few minutes. I want to price everything that you used to hunt. And you can't pay bucks for ELK tag. Yeah, I think I think a couple of year ones are things that people are already talking about but they're not doing it. Yeah, there are things that people already talking about. There's a robust conversation. You know, I like them. There's a lot of movement. They're the one I really agree with you on. I think that the Yeah people are really resistant understanding, like knowing where the money goes and the good that it does. I think there's an irrational resistance to paying the fair price for the opportunity. So the f DPS revenues, there are fifty nine million dollars a year that they get for game stuff. They do other stuff fish million bucks a year. If you get that to a hundred million bucks or d twenty million bucks or heard in fifty million bucks, now we're gonna start to get a lot more access and a lot more animals. That's the most point to pay. Those ranchers defense that stuff out, they're calm, more wildlife. But it gets down to money, I believe. So if the easiest thing, if none of this stuff, because legislation would change and all that kind of stuff, Hunting groups could also get together. F to VP has an f to VP foundation, there's nothing in it. It might have almost nothing in it. If you guys all got together form some organization you just raise money for. They have to be f foundation, just just like kPr money straight into that raise three four million bucks a year. That's a lot offenses around Alfalva fields. That makes a lot of ranchers happy. That gets the f t VP Regions six, Region four off the hook. No more screaming at him. You've got too many elk here or bears. He might purshoot it or whatever else. Now I'm happy. I'm cool because I'm a hunter. Two. If I'm a rancher, a lot of them are, and now all of a sudden those quotas can go up. Just give just today when I leave right a check to the F to B Foundation. You don't have to ask anybody, no change of Congress or laws or anything like that. Just give them the money, but ear market for that. I want it for wildlife damage. I wanted to be helped for wildlife damage and fill that bucket up. Fundraising is hard, but you guys, if you got with your with Steve's reach and that mouthpiece, the reach that he has and just said, I want you guys, just like I want you to buy Snaze boots, I want you to buy my cookbook or whatever else. Oh, by the way, you guys, do not go to sleep tonight until you write to check the f TVP found. It's a big damn country and Montage is Blee state. You're talking to a lot of hunters here, though. What if everybody, what if everybody wrote fifty bucks fifty bucks every guide everybody wrote fifty bucks, you'd get millions or by by three duck stamps, whatever it is. But you guys ought to be jamming for millions order that foundation. But you say to the foundation head, I want this earmarked only for wildlife damage uh mitigation, and pretty soon we'll have wildlife coming out of ears. You guys can control it. You know, we do a thing here, hot tip offs. That's your hot tip? Is it? What do you think of it? I love it, man. I wish everybody would give thousands of dollars tomorrow, so there. I wish they would buy ten duck stamps and give thousands tomorrow to their fishing Game agency. But I don't not I don't not wish they would do it. That's a good point though, right, It's like in the enclosed circles. I kind of spend this argument different ways. But um, you know, hunters as a group, that's just you can pick any group, and there's some nasty examples out there too. But hunters are can be a diverse group, and there's plenty of hunters in this Bell curve that are spending a lot of money, a lot more money um than that fifty bucks every single year to a lot of different groups, right, trying to get this ball rolling and keep it going right. So, yeah, man, there's there's plenty of folks within our our ranks that are doing the bare minimum. And a long time ago we said, you know, buying your duck stamp and you're hunting and conservation licenses, it's just not enough anymore. It used to be, you know, the price would mission. But yeah, just like just there's you're I'm looking to wrap her up. Yes, But there's also like big historical stuff, you know, the the hunters that we grow up dreaming about, Okay, that we tell the narratives of and talk about. John Coulter Um. You mentioned the guy that you know, the guy that was a chart One of the guys was a charge of hunting game to supply the Lewis and Clark expedition was a feller by the name of John Coulter. Um. We all know Daniel Boone, Um, Davy Crockett, Jed Smith, Okay, are sort of the the legacy that has shaped the identity of American hunters where guys that didn't pay to go out and be in the wood, they got paid to go out and be in the woods. So there's like your body, you know, there's this there's this this thing that it's like you have the right to go out and extract said resources without a lot of um push back and red tape. And there's people that have an expectation about that, and I think that those expectations need to get up to speed. I agree, But there is a there's a way if you want to look at it, like where did our mind frame come from? That that's mine. I should be allowed to go out and get it. Uh, you don't need It's not hard to understand how we came to view it that way. So when something when something has a real long track record, like a mentality that has a long track, it's difficult to spend it. And people did a big move towards changing it. And you know during the Franklin Roosevelt administration with the Wildlife Restoration Act um when we had to you know, when people are like had to start doing a duck stamp. That's a big step. People had to start using non toxic shot to hunt waterfall, Like, oh my god, I'd rather quit duck hunting to do that. Right, So you have people go not kicking and screaming into the future, but kicking and screaming into the present. Man, I mean, it's like hard. So, but anyone that's involved in wildlife policy in any kind of serious way, and anyone's involved in hunting and fishing in America in any kind of serious way, realizes and really better realized that fund that wildlife costs money. It's here because we've made It's not here by accident. It used to be here by accident, and it was here despite all of our best efforts to remove it. Now it's here for the simple reason that we've decided that it's valuable and that we're gonna make sacrifices to have it beyond the ground. And it's like that's why around it, like hunting seasons, it's here because we decided to have it be here. And what we've got missed. I think you're on a very good track. You're important track. One thing that got miss kind of snuck up on people like a ski resort. When I started skiing the seventies of Bridge of Bowl, Why why the tags keep going on, the price to keep going up when you look at the infrastructure that's there to create a good experience for you, from a keeping the ski patrol warm with a little hut, those chairlifts, obviously, safety things, uh people, all that kind of stuff. Well, but when we decided to put that structure around FTVP and say there's seasons on hunting, so we don't eradicate everything anymore, and somebody has to maintain that structure. Fish Walton Parks has nearly seven hundred employees. That's game wardens and trucks and laptops and radios and gas and buildings, all that stuff and going out there and buying easements and buying property. That's a huge infrastructure, expensive instructure infrastructure there so that you can have a great hunt. They're out there while we're sitting here drinking coffee. They're out there busting their ass, resting somebody trying to open this was closing the gate. What we're doing a talk slide show, doing disease research. But these are good people. Have to be a pete and they are broke because people go, I shouldn't have to pay for hunting ten bucks, you raise it, twelve bucks. Can't do it while we load our bourbon and our guns in our truck. I don't. I shouldn't have to pay for It's a rights, god given right. Well, it's not a god given right to ski a bridge of bowl for free. Uh, there's a huge cost. You live in a capital of society. Hunters need to pay up and we'll everybody'll be happy. It's not that much money compared to what your god on your body when your archery hunting. You just take the cost to your poly pro maybe your boots in one sock. That's all you gotta give. I feel like, um, you know that. I take that point well. But at the same time, I really believe that FBP should really hold other users accountable too, in terms of like really giving back. They try try with the stamp. Hunters shout them down, but hunters won't shot them down. If they want to do like um uh, ski tax I could, I'll make you personal guarantee if they want to impose a thirteen to fourteen percent tax on ski equipment in order to um fund wildlife in America. I can promise you you won't hear a lot of great from us. But that's not true. We've had this discussion. It is true. No, no, no, no, it's true that hunters are are like the way that it is now at the table, and there aren't a lot of other voices. Well, just they should give the money but have no input alright, looking to wrap her up. I appreciate the call out. I don't mean I'm not trying to be obnoxious. No no, no, no no. Some people will obviously take it that way and we'll be offended. I appreciate. Yeah, people are always offended by everything. Someone's offended by us trying to sell our book, which is a public service. Someone that was it just no, it's great. I appreciate hearing that from the from the outs and not really from the outside. I mean, you're I consider you one of us, but I think we need to be doing more of that. You gotta work together and the solutions are the solution, just not do it's not it's not undoing. I mean when people say, how did in the world do you think you could take on this project from scratch, a private enterprise the Race seven or a million dollars and build this whole thing. He's gotta get organized and execute over a very long period of time. Can't just give up because he hit a few frustrating bombs. So that's well, you guys can do it. Yeah, well we've done an extraordinary amount of work. Yeah on behalf of American Wildlook. Yeah, absolutely absolutely, uh and you know we should do a lot better work going forward. Thank you very much. Tough questions, you know you did some of them. You dodged a couple did Yeah, a little bit. But it was good. It was good. I liked it because you know what, it wasn't a dodge. You just don't know. I understand sometuff I don't. I know. The older I get you guys are you're young, you older, you get, the less certain you are about a lot of stuff. Can I give you you said it? Can I give you a concluder? Oh you're allowed to having. I'm not gonna let anyone else have a concluder. I had looked. I'm not gonna take a concluder, but I'll let you have a concluder. He just do you, guys, concluder. Here's I like people to take away. They probably even you guys might have another thousand questions. I'm glad to come back anytime to try to answer them. Some things something that didn't sound quite right. So we're gonna get back in here and straighten this out. Whatever it was, you know, glad to do it. Please do people listening, what I like you to take away is you can count on us to keep going. So we've done property acquisitions. We're adding about thirty five thousand acres a year to our model. We will work our butts off to keep this thing going and keep adding more wildlife habitat or work really hard to take that habitat and moving into something that is going to support a huge amount of wildlife, but also change the baseline for which what is normal today in Montana. And when you come out, you'll see less fences, you'll see less takeout keep out signs, more signs saying welcome to prairie American Prairie Reserve on our private land. And we want to make things like corner hopping and all that kind of stuff moot because the fancy needed there. We've already done that. We can show you and thousands and tens of thousands of acres where we've already done that where it's a it's a You don't have to say that. You just walk right across our private the checker the world of checkerboard goes away because he can't see it anymore. Right, But um, we'll also put in infrastructure. We're just finishing our second really big campground right on one where it'll be open in the spring. But there's hunters and other so we're put in campgrounds fifteen bucks a night. If you think that's the exorbitant, you can camp on the BLM right next door for free. Gorilla camp. We're doing a two mile wide hut to hut system, one of the biggest hut systems in North America. There's hunters using those huts right now. Based on the p N. We're moving west to east all the way across towards the fourth back down. So we'll put in things for you, will buy, the land, will remodel, land, will work on wildlife populations. We'll put in places for you to stay and make it easy for you to move about. Try to take it back in some ways to the old days. But you guys can help us, mostly by helping barking up the wrong tree by hammering on us for acts us. All I can say is, don't worry about it. Come talk to me, Come talk to anybody or CEO Ali Fox. Just ask you guys really serious about public access, and then once you feel good about that, help us build wildlife populations. And you can do that by some ideas we just talked about in the last half hour. The issue is a population. So it's because everybody's chasing around tiny little fragments of what used to be there. We can grow that up big. Everybody's gonna win. But you got to help the ranchers. They're working on three percent margins. They need some help, no matter what you think, whether they should share the cost ordever else. Just let's just help. We'll get more wildline. So that's what I'd say. We'll keep working, all right, you have the weight to save your concluders. I had a good one ahead. If you I want to hear, I'm pushing and I feel like you know I'm gonna push it. Like he was saying about what the bisons like, the farther away you are from them. That like I'm anxious about bison. I don't even because I don't know that much about him. You know, I just know what's on the park. So the same thing with APR. It's like people need to go up there and check it out. Like you said, it's wide open right now, go check it out and go see what's going on there. There's hunting opportunities up there now, we don't need to talk about what they are. Go online and go check it out. And I think a lot less people would be scared of the whole thing if they just probably took a drive up through beautiful Montana and go and check it out. In fact, come on right now today as we're sitting here, there's people out in the snow hunting bison. There you go, go on some bison. Sam, Oh yeah, I was just gonna say that. My dad thinks that you already have your ten thousand bison floor there. Not too long ago, we walked out of the tent in the morning, goes Sam, come look, there's thousands of bison. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like I think they only have like a thousand bisons. And I come out and it's you know, it's that grainy first light kind of dawn. Where were you Yeah, yeah, And and I go, well, yeah, I see those those three that are right up there in the foreground. Like He's like, do what you see all those other ones? I was like those that stage brush? No, but what But what what I wanted to say was that first time I went out in that that country, I was reading Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose, biography of merywether Lewis and and talking about this area. Uh Stephen Ambrose said that it is the area that's least changed since Louis saw it. And that was just so inspiring to me in that moment because I was like six seven miles back in hiking chasing around elk Um and it's just magnificent country. And it always uh plays with my imagination too to think about what it looked like, you know, that two years ago when they saw it, and how cool would be to have that kind of population level again for wildlife someday. God, it's great glad to getting out there. We're trying to get people to see it. It's a long ways and so many people who have questions actually ever been there? A lot of Montana's I've never even seen it. I'll call you my as little wedge one in um Boy. I've talked a lot about a lot of good stuff. I gotta have you back. I'm glad to come back. Yeah, I definitely need to make field true. What's it and that's all I got? All right, everyone, thanks for joining us.