00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening Hunt podcast, you can't predict anything presented by on x Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store, nor where you stand with on x okay before we start. This is the This is the biggest thing to happen since the uh Bismith shock, ELI with the cotton gent and on like since opening hostilities of the French and Indian War. This is the biggest thing to happen. Um going on going on tour called met Eat off the air me Steve cal Kel asked me and and Yanni and friends are going on on our tour and you'll be able to see and hear things that you will not be able to see in here anywhere else. We got eleven cities. Me and Calorie take turns name in the cities. I'll start San Francisco, Portland's, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis, Chicago, d C, Pittsburgh. Tickets go on sale Friday, January seventeen, but are available exclusively to the mediator community beginning January at ten am local venue times, So in your venue whatever becomes ten am for you. You go on our site, the me eater dot Com, go to the live events and you'll find your venue and you use the promo code mugs and then you get tickets before they go on just general national sale. We're also gonna have an exclusive meat and greet where we take some photos, signed some stuff, signed books. That's available for v i P ticket holders. There's only sixty five those v i P tickets per show, so get on that. But Meat Eater off the air, come seeing meet me, Yanni o Cal we're thinking about having a thing at the show. When I when I was a kid and you went to a wedding, they had to think called the dollar dance, and you would come and pay a buck and dance with if it was a dude, I think a word like this. You put throw a dollar in and it's like I think it was like a dude, you dance with the bride. It's called the dollar dance. It's a big part of every wedding. You put in a buck or five bucks or something dance at the bride. You know, do you not know what I'm talking about. Our producer Crint Crin, do you understand what I'm talking about? A dollar dance. Have you been to a wedding with a dollar dance? I have not no, but I'm I'm getting like a picture in my mind. There's a part of this thing. Everybody's a little looped up. That's a youth missen for drinking and they, uh, it's a big part of the night. Everybody lines up. It's a way to raise money for the bride and groom to buy the house. Everybody lines up and you throw a dollar into a can and you get a very very short dance with the bride or I think a shot. How short it depends on the line. Quick dance would be like a lot of people per song. Yeah, so like a song, the bride might dance with ten people who are all throwing in money to raise money for the couple. Or I think you get a shot. Or it was like ladies get a shot, dude. Either way, you know what I'm saying. The dollar dance, got it? Yeah, we think about having the thing um dollar dance with cal for twenty bucks, but it all goes to conservation. I want to end the I want to end the off the air live shows where you can either leave or do a dollar dance with Cal for twenty bucks. Go go get your tickets for this. The most important part it will be uh hoping that when a dance with you're buying a dancer cow for bucks. I've already got already got the playlist in my head. We're gonna have a spotlight shining down on cow. You can whisper in my ear all the things I'm getting wrong, but whisper loudly because I'm down. Yeah, and I was thinking about ladies get a kiss for an extra five, so much money for conservation. But what if they're like a thousand people? Then if it gets that bad, me and yeah, and you'll jump in and we'll start dancing with people too. If but but my wife pointed out that no one's gonna want to dance with me. You either gonna want to dance the cow. But if someone was like, you know it needed to get out of there because babysit or whatever, they just needed to dance. They didn't care who they got it from. I'll give a kiss, Okay. It will be a great opportunity to come down and have fun with a bunch of outdoors folks. Meat Eater off the Air Levin Cities. Tickets go on sale Friday, January. That's by just next the exclusive thing on our own website, The mediator dot Com. Promo code mugs ten am. Your time off there, folks, dancer cow. Okay, we're joined by very special guests with Fosburg second every time on the show. Good to be here. The first time we did what we're gonna do right now. We did like a conservation round up to the eastern shore. And now that we're kind of like the dust is settling. I mean there's a new dust to stir, but the dust is settling from teen and we can review like the lay of the land. Yeah, that sounds great. Uh, first we gotta take care of something. Oh and uh, we need to say yeah, he's gone well with Fossburg CEO. You know, I said that the first time, but still hadn't done his you know, um CEO of Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership t RCP. We talked about a fair bit. Um. Yanni's gone. This is the fourth ever episode he wasn't present for. He's out ice fishing, he's on assignment. It's part of our fur Hat ice tour, which we haven't announced. And Yanni and I were duck hunting the other day and he let me know that he is not much of an ice fisherman, which I found kind of shocking when you take into consider, um, you know where he hails from. But he's not a true outdoorsman. He just said, Oh, I come on, he is not a true outdoorsman. I will often I will often uh invite him to go do things, but hey, let's go ice fishing and he can't. He's going skiing. He probably like, you cannot be a true outdoorsman and a skier. You just can't do it. That's why me and Seth the flip flop Flasher, are the only true outdoorsman. You can't. You can't unless you ski to unless you're like skiing to hunt snowshoes or something, you cannot. It just doesn't work. I was flabbergasted recently to find out that his family didn't hunt on Christmas Day. Oh really, they don't hunt on Christmas Day. He grew up not hunting Christmas Day, not taking a walk in the woods for squirrels or rabbits or ice fishing the whole day. They just sat there. Well, they're up all night doing their pagan rituals that time. Yeah, and then they drink too much the Latvian people. Uh, quick, before we get into the main stuff here, the lamestream media refuses to cover, um, what happens with people's We've been talking a lot about this, what happens to people's limbs and fingers and whatnot when they lose them. Um, here's a fresh story. This guy. There's a guy in Edmonton. The guy just sent the things we've been talking. I don't know how it came up, but somehow we gotta. Oh it was from getting de gloved, conversations around your wedding ring, tearing the skin off your finger, and how silicon wedding rings are the way to go. I I switched to no ring at all recently because I lost mine, my rubber one. Um. But that guy is into talking about just various things that have happened to people's fingers and arms. There's this article out about this guy in Edmonton who got in a crash a long time ago in his arm. He lost the use of his arm, but he packed it around. He's on a motorbike, his brother's more motorbike. Uh, and he packed it around for twenty years not working. Arm didn't work so evenly he thought just trying to move on and had the arm amputated. Told tells the doctor that he wants to keep it, and in the end, after he gets his army ampetated, he goes back and brings his frozen arm home in a sack. Calls around to a bunch of taxidermists and most of them won't even consider his request, and eventually he gets hold of a taxidermous. They even give the name of the tax I want to give kudos to this taxidermous Legends taxidermy in Drayton Valley, Alberta. Uh. They finally agree to take care of it and he gets it euro mounted. And it's funny because the article I'm looking at uh, um, there's an image of him holding this bone arm up in a warning about graphic images below the image, so it's like you already saw the image. Uh. He brings it. He brought it to Christmas this year to show everybody. He says that he thinks he might eventually retire the arm and he's thinking about I'll quote him, I'm just gonna keep it probably behind the sink in the kitchen. From the there's a good line from the taxidermist. So the husband wife taxidermy team, you know from this story, Yes, oh, you know more than I know about it. No, I just you sounds like you know more, but I just read a different the short short version. You heard a quote from the taxidermist. Yes, and uh so the one armed man calls and the wife picks up the phone and she's like, well, you need to bring it down in person so I can make sure it's your arm, which I found entertaining. Oh yeah, if a guy with two arms shows up and he's got an arm in the sack and says he wants his arm, I would be a credulous yes. And so smell of fish for sure. The husband, the second half of the taxidermy team, says, you know what's up? And she said, well, this is what's happening. And he says no way, and she says, well he's on his way down here already. Um. And the detail that I kind of want because she she did say that, like did they beatle did they beatle clean? That's the detail that I want because I would feel very differently. So typically for a European mount, either boil, slash, steam the meat and hide off of bone. Feel you busy down there? Would you mind checking to see if Legends Taxidermy and Drayton Valley. Uh, if they advertise beetle cleaning services, Beetle cleaning, Legends tax and Drayton Valley. But real curious was the Beatles. There wasn't a boiling clean right, because he's kind You're smelling what I'm getting at, right, It just be a little different. But I would never look at my Beatles the same way again if I was using drmifted beatles to clean it. Yeah, what do you find is interesting? You're not interesting? Fascinating? Yeah, it's great cast characters. Uh. And then they had to get so we'll let that linger until we get get the the final result. But um they had to with with the bones that were left after the cleaning process. Um, Legends tax during Me then reached out so much more about this. This was just a real tight snippet and kind of from their perspective, I can you know, I can't remember where it was from. But anyway, they had to reach out to a doctor friend of theirs um hand, doctor assumed assumedly, and they The doctor then put it back together for them because she apparently looked at the pile of bones, was like, hey, I'm not I got how this goes together, which should be kind of bummed, right if that's your because you can't give him another arm to work on. Did you get any sense of what they we should just call these guys up. Do you get any sense of what they charged for this? Oh? That was not in the article, not in my version. You know, I never endorsed Taxidermist, but um well I know I will because it's got Justin Sable. Dude, Justin. I took table and he called me yesterday afternoon, was like, yeah, come get these things. He doesn't waste time, he's got a system dialed. And then I immediately regretted the price that we settled on. Hold me, you got overcharged. When I finally came in and pay for something, I wanted to be as painful and argue as for the person I'm paying as possible. That way, I feel like I got my money's so you haggled. You can't. I can't argue with the speed. It's sable, amazing does he is justin Sables. Does he go by is it Sable? What's he call his place? No, it's Bridger Canyon Taxidermy. Yeah, he's a good dude. I love that guy's a great job. I met his mom, super nice. You see his lion hounds. Yeah. I knocked on the wrong door and instead of telling me to go around the house and follow the path, which I later found two justin studio. Um, She's like, come with me, and we just walked through the house. That she was in her nightgown, her robe, and I felt pretty bad about well, she was just just getting ready for the day. But she was watching somebody else's dog that she was very politely cussing out the whole time, which was cute. So how's it going, Phil? So they don't have a legitimate website, but they have a Facebook page. There's not a lot of info. But on December eighteenth, they posted a picture of them building uh some sort of it, I don't know, an arm box and it says our new custom home for our Beatles is almost done. Okay, detective word philis guys like a private investigator. Uh yeah, one more quote, um from from the guy. He said that he's talking about calling different tax nervous. He says a couple of them told me no, like right away. There was no way they were going to touch human body parts. All right, So that's a major news. Um quick thing. We're talking about dead as Dornell. Do you guys know what that means? This is a correction. I was like, why is it Dorneille dead? What beyond me? Where that expression comes from? Phil got nothing? Nothing? Do you still have Yanni's sound bites kewed up? Not not right now? I didn't know he wasn't gonna be here today. Um yeah, yeah, So let's we'll tack one in and I'll say, yann you know what that is Dornell means? And yeah, you'll insert a good sound bite from Johnnie. Uh, he's got a stab at where dead as a Doornell comes from? It was explained to me he's he's a carpenter, and when he was an apprentice carpenter was explained to him that frontier doors were made with two layers of boards with the grain running at ninety degree angles, and the nails were driven through and clenched. This makes a strong door that was not easily chopped through, right, because you want to you know, you enter in like you run your anyone who's using ax, know as you want to run your accent. If you want to splint or something, you run your acc in parallel to the grain, the blade being parallel to the grain with the grain. But it's backed by boards that are cross uh. And he got that. He goes on to say that this makes a strong door. That was neither the chopped through with the tomahawk. Now, nails were hard to come by and expensive, so oftentimes they were used time and again. Except door nails being clenched that tight, there was no way to straighten them, so they were considered dead. The only way to resuscitate them is they be recycled at the blacksmith shop. I like that, like that one I do? Yeah, you guys buying it. First framer I worked for. His dad was also a framer, and that's what he did. Every night. You'd have a beer out in his shop and he's straighten all the bent nails that he picked up around the job site and distribute the straight and nails the next day to his crew. That's good. When I was a kid, when you when my dad was annoyed if you one of the things he would do is give you a he kept a two pound meat loaf tin full of bent rusty nails. And now and then you get like a checklist of shores you're supposed to do it on. There was straight and damn nails out on a hammer and anvil for re use. Uh. Okay, first thing we want to do. UM here you explaining update on what's going on with New Mexico stream access law. Yes. So basically the foundation of this is uh. New Mexico State Constitution says all water belongs to the public. This is just as brief a synopsis as I can give here. Yeah, but there's some stuff changing. There's like trouble brewing. Two thousand seventeen, um UH bill came up and uh and and was voted on to then have a process to which landowners could declare their water non navigable. And they added into a rule and amendment so the landowner gets to say the landowner gets to apply for the section of water if they have their properties on both sides of the stream or river. So he's got a case of the ass and ones people not access and he can go and stay like hey, you know, yes, And then New Mexico fishing game declares or does not declare, looks at his or the landowners situation says yeah, this applies or does not apply. Um. So far there's been five permits applied for and received, two or pending an additional to or pending, and so five have been accepted. Yes, yeah, UM. I think Pacos and chama um would be uh to water any sense of what kind of dude these dudes are that are that are trying to get their stuff revoked. I would love to get back in there and do some proper research and see exactly what the cases are, you know, um for you know, public sway reasons. The ones that get thrown up are like fishing lodges, you know, up at the fishing lodges. Yeah, That's what I'm curious, I say, like, what kind of dude is is it? Is it like that? Like, what's the motivation is it? Is it trophy home? You know? Is it like eighth generation ranchers is fly shops? And so you know, from the private side of things, it's like, well, you know, people are just coming in here and and leaving trash and and I'm sick of it, which we can all understand nobody likes see trash outside, but anyway, uh. The so new Governor Michelle Luhan, a couple of new seats on the New Mexico Fishing Game Board and UM. November two, nineteen, the State Attorney General, Hector Balderis UM re evaluates because he's been asked to by the New Mexico Fishing Game Board UM and finds that the new rule, this non navigable water rule, is unconstitutional and unenforceable. So I'm gonna make sure I'm getting this right. All waters, historically all water is regarded as public. They make a rule that says you can pull your ship out of it. Then the new administration comes in and the point he's there say you know what, you shouldn't be able to pull your ship out of it. Yes, and this was has been tested several times. UM. The case that gets brought up the most was went up all the way through the Mexico Supreme Court. The new New Mexico Supreme Court at that time said you know, according to the state constitution, all water belongs to the people of New Mexico. UM. And then just to kind of like show support for this and this is this was just at the beginning of I'm sorry at the end of two thousand nineteen, just a couple of months ago, Senator you Doll and Heinrich and U S. Rep. Deb Hayland. Uh, they wrote in in support of a moratorium on non evigable permits. So folks that wanted to apply for this non navigable status, which is obviously in great question. Um, uh you do all Heinrich Halan, They rode into the Fishing Game Board said, hey, for all these reasons that benefit our state, we'd appreciate it if he has would put a moratorium on this. UM. And now to get into really the um the gossip section of this, the intrigue is. Um. There Joanna Prucup, who was a department head for Fishing Game New Mexico Fishing Game for over twenty years, was one of the new seats on the New Mexico Fishing Game Board commission. And um, she just got noticed. She had a lot of um, you know, public water folks really happy with her and um, and she just got noticed that she will not be reinstated. So but she's pro public access, not anti public access, correct correct? So um, so she's getting she's getting like in trouble for having stuck up for stream access law and that that was a question in the beginning. Uh. And she just came out and and made a formal statement that she says, this is all she can come up with. I said, look at my background, Um, look at my track record. There's no way I should be not asked back to sit on this commission. Um. This is what it boils down to, is the stream access situation. And um, you know it unfortunately gets gets down to this core argument of the US versus them type of situation. And if you have, if you if you own both sides of the river, chances are, um, you have some influence. And folks are like, see it's the rich folks swinging their weight around, um against the little folks. And yeah, it's it is bummer. It affects everybody if if this law were to go through. Stream access allows a lot of access. Um, not just for fishing. I use it a lot. Used it a couple of times for your hunts this year in the state of Montana, tubing and drinking beers. Well that's just good, good family fund, right. So Heinrich does a lot for people, does a lot for access issues. Well, he's got some steak in the game because he likes to actually go out and do that stuff. Like you. There's a sitting US Senator from New Mexico, Martin Heinrich, who went out on public land and kill the bull of the muzzleloader. She'd be like, coming down the trail, I think you got an archery bowl this year too, coming down the trail and run into dude and shoot the breeze of the dude and then realize he's a sitting senator and you have some some common interest parts at the trailhead. But I love it. Yeah, So that's Um. You know, this is something that's going to go on for a long time. But right now, and I should say, you can't trespass across private property to get to public water, right you have to enter the water legally. Um. And in this so right now they're saying that, um, you could get issued a warning, but you will not be issued a ticket if you are found in these sections of water that have been deemed non navigable. UM. And yeah, I mean it's I I know there was some build up back in two thousands seventeen when um, this came up in front of the house there in New Mexico. But I can't believe this. It was such a good rule favoring public access in a place that's got a lot of public land, New Mexico. I can't. I can't believe it. It passed in two thousands seventeen. Makes me wonder what was going on if you assume this is gonna get litigated right all the way up probably the state Supreme Court. It's in the constitution. Yes, that's what happened here in Montana on multiple occasions. Yes, yeah, And most recently was Sailor Lane, Right, was that that was the most recent one down in the Ruby maybe? And then you had the whole Mitchell sleugh over on the for that. And you know, this has been sort of a constant theme of the states like Montana, New Mexico. Then ye know, Utah that have more of these open Acts US policies as opposed to wyom in Colorado where the landowner owns the stream bottom. Yes, and if if man if if the biggest grape is people leaving their trash behind, Like, I absolutely get that. I hate seeing trash and um for one reason or another when I was hunting down But that's a that's a red herring. It's like a problem, it's too important, it's not trash is annoying, but that's not what it's about. Uh yeah, if you live in New Mexico or hang out in New Mexico, we should watch the issue because it has a lot to do with like your ability and people to live in states where you have stream axis you don't even think about how good you have it. You know, we grew up with in Michigan where you go to the launch on a river or a lake or whatever. You go to the public launch and put your boat in, and then you go down the river and you wind up in a spot where there's private landowners on either side. You don't even think about. You just like paddle down, motor down. Um, you can't take that for granted. This is like one of the ways that people will attack your ability to go outside and join nature. And and definitely New Mexico is absolutely gorgeous. I love land of enchantment. Right it's did you come up with that? A little something I came up? Uh yeah. If it can happen there, it can happen where we have it good here in Montana and Idaho. Um so I mean, this is everybody's issue. We all have the ability to travel to these places and and enjoy um you know, the States rights and um boy, it's hugely beneficial to have the ability to truck down and you know, hike down a stream a mile and and hunting some hard to get two spots and or just fish the thing, and um something you gotta pay attention to, because I just feel like if anywhere within the US we demonstrate, you know, a blase attitude, you know, not the willingness to fight over this stuff. Man, it's just get a slippery slope from there. It's everybody's issue. And I think it's really exacerbated in place like New Mexico, which just so dry. You just have less rivers, less opportunities. So you started taking those away. You know, you've taken away a significant portion. Yes, oh yeah, that's a good point. Well you have limited navigable again or New York where I grew up. I mean there's a lot of water and there's a lot of access, and you lose the stream here or there. You may not notice it. New Mexico you would notice it. Yeah, it's a good point. All right, went, you're ready you're fired up, let's do it, Okay, twenty nights public lands in general. We just covered public waters, but we like if you consider public waters being part of public lands, which is fair. Uh, thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs up. It was a good year. Then we started off good right at the beginning of the year. We passed the Senate or Congress past the big public lands bill. Break that down a little bit, so it was did a bunch of different things. And the way Congress works these days, you don't pass individual pieces of legislation like a Senior Wilderness bill or anything. It comes in these big, omnivous bills because so little passes anymore that whenever something is moving, everything gets piled onto it. Oh that's that's a strategy. Yeah, So because you know, it's just you have very few vehicles moved through so invariably, instead of just one provision, it's going to be a hundred provisions. And so that's what happened with it. What what forms the base in something like that, um, you know, typically as you know, and this one you could you could argue it was Land and Water Conservation Fund. It could be some of these public lands bills, but essentially just you need to have stuff. That's what everything is being tacked on. Ideally is something that a lot of people want to see pass. And really in this bill, yeah, there was nothing super controversial. So you had over a hundred provisions, You had, you know, a million acres a new wilderness created, you had six hundred miles while the Scenic River is created. You permanently reauthorized Land Water Conservation Fund, which is the primary tool that we use for public access, especially to public lands. Then that three percent of that has to be used for public access projects. So this goes back to things like the ONEX report we did, you know, which talks about landlocked public lands, you know, both on the federal side as well as on the state side, collectively more than sixteen million acres of public lands the public can't get to. So three percent of this Land and Water Conservation Fund is now targeted for projects like that. By a simple section here there and easement at someplace that will then open up a lot more public land. So a little bit different way of thinking about access, and we have in the past the past land or Conservation Fund has been thought of as a tool to preserve big landscapes. You know, big tracks of forests that are Timber company is selling things like that, which are still really important. But another use of it is these small strategic acquisition is they're based around access, and I think we're going to see a lot more than that. We saw that reflected in this bill. So now that has been permanently reauthorized. When when you say this bill was popular with everybody, like, what did it pass by? So the overall package passed in the Senate and then what was the who? Like, give me a profile of the eight. They have various reasons. I remember hearing one time that the Wilderness Um when they created like the Wilderness Act, that it was in the Senate because the one didn't think it went far enough. Is that the case with the eight? Oh no, no, it's the other way around. I mean you have especially some you know, Western senators that honestly just don't like public lands. I mean you look at a guy like Mike Lee and Utah who's sort of made no he didn't, but he's made his name on railing against public land ownership period. And you know, some folks slot it spent too much money. You know, it didn't spend all that much money, but anyway, it was sort of ideological anti public land, you know, that's where the eight came from. So the ninety two, you know, they were like something more they would like to have, you know, land water Conservation one permanently funded as well. We didn't get that, but we got at least permanently reauthorized, so we don't have to worry about it disappearing in three years or five years or one of the typical re authorization is um you know. So that bill was really important and the fact that it passed by that, you know, wid a margin, I think really represents kind of a sea change and a lot of the public lands. You know, we think about the rhetoric over the past ten years. You went from the Senate passing, you know, a nine bonding resolution at least Makowski offered that basically said all public lands other than national parks ought to be divested, and you know that was that passed with pretty much all Republican votes. Now compare that to this where you're expanding protections on public lands are expanding while the scenic rivers, you're expanding the acquisition programs to create more public lands. And it passes eight. So I think from that original a sort of stage brush rebellion, you know, kind of mentality we were seeing really a decade ago. That was we saw these bills passing on the state levels, like demanding return to public lands to the states, which were never there is to begin with. But you I think that rhetoric has really gotten knocked down pretty good. And I think when you saw Jason Chaffitz essentially have to withdraw his bill that would have sold off three point three million acres of public lands to help balance the budget, that really was a sea change. And you saw the Outer Industry Association move it show on a Salt Lake city because of the bad Utah politics on public lands. So we really saw I think the momentum has swung back in favor of public lands, and I think that's reflected in this vote, which is, you know, you can't do much better than eight. I mean, you could do a resolution on motherhood and apple Pie that probably wouldn't pass by that margin. Who Yeah, it feels like a bill says like we love motherhood and apple pie. Yeah, no, forget that, do we I'm a ferry pie? Who within who within the administration? Who within the Trump administration is uh who's influential there, you know, I mean like he signs it, right, he signs, So I think, you know, the Secretary Interior clearly this is mostly Interior related bill. So that's that's who's weighing up. That's who has that's who has the president's year exactly. And Dave Parnart has been pretty darn reasonable and most of these issues. Mean, he's been great on access issues, he's been you know, sort of approachable on land management issues. So I think he recognized that this was not only was it there's no point in vetoing this, you're gonna get crushed on an override, but it also has good politics and it makes sense and it's not draconian anyway. And you've got you got t RCP worked hard on this. Oh yeah no. And but not just us, I mean tons of groups, Wildlife Federation b h A. Yeah, pretty much everybody supported this. I mean, I don't think anybody in our community opposed this. Because another provision that was in this overall bill was clarifying that public lands are open for hunting and fishing unless they're specifically closed through an open and transparent process. And that was really an effort to push back on some of the things the animal rights community had attacked, like they did in Michigan a few years ago. Yeah, with the HURON, I think National Forest sort of trying to get hunting shut down there at that time. It was yeah, yeah, I can't remember. I can't remember the HURON or wherever, but at that time they got somebody who didn't like the noise of gunfire to try to shut down an area, and it really was back door. That's an interesting approach animal rights community to go in and try to shut down public lands. And so this is you know, listen, there are some public lands that makes sense to shut down, you know, near campgrounds, you know, other things like that, but there ought to be a public and transparent process to shut those down. Yeah. I mean you see buffers like there's you know, you go to river access sites and will say no discharge of fire. Yeah. So I mean, but there ought to be just say, thoughtful process to close areas off, not because it may you know, somebody may hear a gun shot a few miles away. Yeah. So anyway that did this. So even the right side of the community that typically does not weigh in on wilderness and wilder scenic rivers. You know, they were enthusiastically and word of this because of that, because they saw that as taking away one of these attacks on hunting and fishing on public lands. Do you ever see, um, do you ever see a situation where people within the animal rights movement UM will like take this thing for instance, where it's obviously doing it's beneficial to wildlife, is beneficial to habitat preservation. Do you ever see a situation where they'll sabotage the movement of something that I'm the whole is good for wildlife because it enables harvest of wildlife. Like, do you ever see it become like a real actual problem. Sure? I mean they opposed that provision that opened less closed provision for years, but when it's tacked in with a hundred other provisions saying what do they do? Then then they swallow their pride and they support the overall pack because it's all in all win, even though it's a loss for them in there exactly, And I mean maybe some of the he I mean I didn't follow what pe position was. Yeah, I mean the reasonable players who are actually out there trying to nobody gets everything they want. And when these packages just why it passed by such a large margin because it's sort of the fringe elements on either side get knocked out, and you know, so something like this makes a ton of sense, and I think this is the way you're going to see it again. My guess is that earlier this year, you know, Lisa Murkowski is going to put together an energy package, which would really be a public lands package too, because there'll be assortment of these smaller bills, you know that are you're ready to go their non controversial and you know, before you get into the election you're gridlock. You know, this is another Probably I think it's a good chance we'll get another package that moves through. We've been trying to get Lisa mccowski on the show without new luck. She's a tough one to pin down. Yeah, that's why I want to get around the show. And you know, being from Alaska, I mean I feel like she she like would definitely have a lot of opinions. She would I would love Yeah, I'd love to ask you some questions. Okay, break down the farm bill for me. Man? What I like? I think I feel like a lot of people know there is such thing as a but don't really understand it. Well, one thing I guess to point out that makes things uh tough on the education side of things is like, we need these certain things within the farm bill the pass, but you're talking about the farm bill or the transportation bill or the energy bill, and uh, people get really confused. So it's hard to be like, no, no, this these sportsman's issues are buried within this thing. But it is the transportation like the whole package, right is like let's say if the farm bill is composed of a hundred things to to our directly applied to sportsman or what the ratio is? Well, yeah, and there's plenty of people out there right who are like, I don't have a farm. Yeah, so I'll tell you what to tell you what the ratios are here? So we have Yeah, they basically nine herd million acres in the United States are in farm or a commercial forestry production tellon acres. So that's about the overall land masks to the US is in you know, it basically is you could largely call it in farm and of that, about a hundred and forty million acres are enrolled in farm bill conservation programs. So that's about I gotta I gotta hear these number. What's the number how many acres have federally managed public lands we have like national forest, national parks, refugees. I think the number I see is sixty million, okay. And how many acres of land again, are are in egg production, About nine hundred million. And of those of those, about a hundred and forty million acres are enrolled in farm bill conservation programs. What does that mean? But that in context, you know, that's society of these are privately held lands. Privately held lands enrolled in you know, basically the farm bill, the conservation side of the farm bill, which is the single largest you know, from a dollar standpoint conservation program in the United States, it's thirty billion dollars, and you know, so that's but in the broad scheme of things, the overall farm bill is eight hundred plus billion, So it's a allad ways like seven percent I think, you know, overall, I mean, you can add it up different ways, but relative a small portion of the world farm bill is conservation. The great majority of those things like food stamps, the nutrition program, Oh, that's part of the farm buil. And that was a they need to haggle over the farm bill every five years, and it was a deal that was cut a long time ago. You basically to get urban members and rural members to support something and the food stamp programs in the farm bill, and so maybe do that and forgot it. Yeah, I mean that's you know, but when you have a farm bill, that's what all the debates around. It's around you know, food stamp eligibility requirements and figures and things like that. But that was a very intentional deal that we're not just sitting around arguing about pheasant habitat. No, No, that's I mean, there are some of that. We argue about pheasant habitat, but in the big scheme of things, we're you know, decimal dust in the overall argument, which makes it vulnerable. Well it does, but I mean remember this is the you know, this reason we able to get a farm bill passes. You have that weird coalition between urban inner city you know, the Black Caucus, you know, folks like that that really want to make sure they have Yeah. There and back in the seventies was this is all started. There was a real nutrition problem in this country, and so the farm you know, the food stamp program at that time was really created to address a really particular need in this country. But at the same time they realized that this also helped farmers who wanted to have basically some guaranteed markets within the country of food. So that was how the whole deal got created in the first place, was urban members coming to go with rural members to create a farm bill that was good for farmers, it was good for the inner cities. That coalition has stayed pretty strong. I mean it's been fraid a little bit more in recent years, but you know, that's the reason we're able to get a farm bill passed now. So go back to your original question in terms of what does that look like. So of that thirty billion dollars, it's broken out into several remind me again, the thirty billion dollars that how do you characterize that chunk of the So that is what we call the conservation program of the farm bill. That's type too. So so the the whole thing with all that everything involved is exactly which is that's real money. That's that is real is the conservation part of it. So we're talking about the thirty billion dollar piece of and unlike other sort of environmental legislation. The Farm Bill is voluntary, so this is creating incentives on private lands to do the right thing for soil, for water, for fish and wildlife. And there are a couple of there are two different ways you can do that. I mean, there is the essentially what they call the land retirement programs, like the conservation reserve program, where you pay a landowner to set aside basically the most marginal land on his or her farm and manage it for conservation, you know, for you get better water quality, get more wildlife habitat, and the farmer gets guaranteed income for the source of that continent the course of that contract, which is typically ten to fifteen years. So right now concert from reserve program, they're about twenty two million acres that are currently enrolled in that program. Yeah, if you're if you're a hunter, and you keep your ears open, you will at some point in your life here someone say let's go hit that CRP field exactly, and that's what we're talking about. And I knew that line. I knew the hitting the c RP field line long before I knew what in the world that meant. And that's a great program. And then it's expensive, but it serves multiple benefits made it helps. When it was originally created back in the nineteen ages, was during the farm crisis, and it really was created as a price support mechanism for farmers, a way to pay them for not farming. Yeah, and and I feel just just jump on this because, uh, this is I feel that this is the thing that you hear people gripe about so much, like people criticizing farm subsidies and pale it's all subsidies and paying farmers to do nothing. But I mean, you gotta look at sort of world history and American history and it starts making a lot more sense. I mean, millions of people starved to death during World War two, real hunger crisis in the seventies, And it's like if markets collapse in some ways, some global thing causes Marcus to collapse, do you really want to have it be that everyone that has a farm that can't get through that period, that they sell the land or turn it into a golf course or subdivide it or whatever the hell. Or do you give them some way that that you can that that you can allow people to hang on to land, keep it an egg and be ready for the next time there's a global crisis, because you can't expect people to go like break ground and stout start a farm because we have a impending famine. It's like they've got to be ready to roll. But you hear people, I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure there are abuses like everything. Like you can talk about any government program and if you focus on the abuses, would be the same way as me saying hunters suck because some people are poachers. It's like, of course they're abuses. But may I hear a lot of people dogging on to sell program. It's like you're kind of like doing it without really thinking about the implications of it. If farmers all had to go bankrupt every time something happened. And this is very different in the back in the nineteen eighties and the nineteen eighties when it was you basically just we're paying farmers not to farm. Now, you know, CRP and the other wildlife programs, conservation programs have been much more refined and so they're geared towards really actually helping things like water quality, you know, soil quality, fish and wildlife. They're incentives. So if you enter your land call into a c RP. You're also gonna get some incentives from the federal government to go and you know, convert put in pollinator habitat. And so it's way more targeted and strategic and beneficial for the public at large than it was in the old days. And you know, obviously pollinator habitat you know, sounds goofy, but it's not to be incredibly important if you like value agriculture flowers, you know anything, and we've been losing it, and this is a way to encourage bringing a lot of that back. You know, monarch butterflies with a poster child for you know, loss of pollinator habitat. So I don't think that you know, we've seen a big change of it. You have c RP, you have the Conservation of Stewardship Program, you have the Environmental Quality and Habitat Program EQUIP uh you know, AQUI we touch on the bugs a little bit more. If you're seeing like in areas and intensely uh tilled lands and intensely in lands with a lot of intense use of herbicides and pesticides, and you're seeing like radical reductions and insect life, Um, you gotta wake up to the reality that like that goes beyond bugs and maybe you like the hunt turkeys a turkey pole se its diet is animal matter. Bugs. It's like, you can't act like you're gonna strip out It's like, oh, it's just bugs. Who cares. It's like, dude, you can't. Actually you're gonna strip that out and the life as you know it is going to continue to look the same. You can't like knock chunks of ecology out and act like it doesn't have it. So when people, if someone were to roll their eyes about allinator habitat, I'd be like, well, you don't only turkeys, yep, or whatever, you know. I mean, it's like it's essential stuff, man, and this is great. And it's not just Steven Turkey. I mean Bob white Quail. It's you know, you name it, you know, and it's important for it and that diversity is you know, just you know, good for ecological reasons period. Things we don't understand right exactly. And it's beautiful. So you know, I think there's a whole bunch of benefits. So I think that in the days when then, you know, you could justly criticize some of the farm programs is just straight subsidies with little public benefit other than keeping a farmer float. I think it's very different today. I mean, these programs have been refined, have been improved, and I think you're seeing way broader benefits, which makes it frustrating when we have a sort of a dwindling CRP like we're seeing right now. Yeah, that's the part I kind of I kind of wanted to get to that because when we were at the t RCP board meeting, there was some talk about um money was available for farmers to enroll in CRP, but it wasn't flowing, so they were there were people who were armors were putt in a tough spot because one hand they wanted to enroll, but they couldn't get the the compensation. And we're going to be put into a tough spot where they're gonna have to try to do something to figure it out. It's kind of screwing farmers. So CRP reached its peak I think it was in two thousand seven, which is about thirty seven million acres enrolled in that program, and that there was a direct correlation between you know, low you know, commodity prices and enrollment and programs like c RP, because when you're not making money off growing corner soy beans, ralph alf or whatever it might be, then CRP looks a whole lot better. During the you know, sort of go go years of the two thousand tens to two thousand seventeen. Yeah, when you had seven dollar corn things like that, you saw a bunch of land move out of c RP and other constants like that. Contract would expire and you would go into grain production money. Somebody would just break a contract and get the penalty and just go straight into touch you. So over that time period, we lost about six million acres out of c RP. All right, excuse me not six million acres of grassland and prairie land and pasture land got converted to row crops. And the grain prices. Grain prices are through the roof. Now you have the exact opposite. Now. So when the previous farm bill was done back in two thousand four, what made grain prices shoot the roof? Uh? There were a variety of things. I mean, it's just you know, we had a huge good weather here. I mean, we had huge export markets. So I think that was when come onside any like bad Russian wheat crops and like that. You also had you know, sort of the go go years, the ethanol subsidies, so that was driving production of corn. It was you know, so that was part of it. It was just a really good time to be a farmer, and it was not a great time to be a conservationist because all this land was getting moved out and converted to row crops. Now all of a sudden, you know, we have trade wars, and you know, prices are through the floor, and there was huge demand to get moved land into c RP and other conservation programs at a minimum, just to stabilize farm income. You had whether this storm because eventually prices are gonna stay abilize again. Yeah, because they're they're afraid of farmers. If if they're not able to do CRP, they're gonna maybe be in a situation where they're further contributing to flooding the market with grain and keeping prices down or just mean listen, I mean, you know the records suicides out and farm country right now, record bankruptcies. I mean, it is is a true crisis right now. And instead of giving them a thirty billion dollar bailout, which is what we've done to address, you know, some of the impacts of the trade war. We ought to be moving a buttload of land into conservation where they're getting payments which are also doing public good at the same time. Yeah, like get like where the tax periods are getting more out of it. Right. So in the two thousand eighteen farm bill that we passed, which was a good farm bill again thirty billion dollars, you know, and made improvements to the two thousand fourteen farm bill, changed the conservation programs a lot. It got rid of a bunch of them, consolidated them, streamlined them, created a couple of new ones, like the Regional Conservation Partnership Program. This most recent farm bill didn't make any drastic changes like that, but really improve toupon what we did in two thousand fourteen. And you know, among other things, that expanded c RP, which had been down to twenty four million acres in the two thousand and fourteen farm bill because demand was so low, kicked that back out to seven million acres because demand is much higher. Now, tell me the two numbers again, twenty four and the previous farm bill in the most recent one to make that budget neutral, they made a little bit less profitable for farmers. They reduced the rental rade a little bit, they reduced the incentive payments a little bit, but overall the INDs so they're making the same spend and getting three more million acres and are those people getting their money now? So just in December, for the first time in four years, they've done a sign up for c RP, which is just insane because you're having you know, acres expire, you have huge men in farm country. But we just couldn't get these guys to do a new sign up. So finally these guys Department Culture, Farm Service Agency because of what reason? Alright, so you have so farm bill is mandatory funding, so it doesn't have to be appropriated every year. So this is essentially, you know, something that has done and they don't worry about it, so it's not the vagaries of annual appropriations like Land and Waterer Conservation Fund. I mean, obviously we want to get LBCF off budget for the same reasons, so you're stable money is coming in and we know what it's going to be. But farm Bill programs are truly off budget. So these are mandatory programs. However, if you don't spend the money like you go and they look o MB will look over a few years and say, jeez, you have any to spent. You know, a third of this money. We're two years from the end. We're gonna basically cut a bunch of your money away. So the devious, the cynical of those among us, like me who's been in DC a long time, feels that this has been basically a backhanded way to reduce the baseline, so, in other words, to not spend the money that Congress expected them to spend, and then have om B say, well, jeez, you're not spending the money, so we're gonna reduce that overall amount and officers management and budget and uh, and there was there was in mendications they didn't like the original farm building that it was too expensive, and so this would be basically a back doorway of not implementing it the way Congress intended it to be implemented and at the same time lose that baseline so it makes it less spending for the federal government doesn't show you're running quite as big a deficit as you're doing it. But at the same time, it's not providing the benefits on the ground that Congress intended. So finally in December they announced new sign up. So if anybody is listening and has friends in farm country, tell them to go to the Farm Service Agency, get signed up for c RP. Get down there, Get down there, dug protectives at the front of the line. Um, and if your folks want to learn more about it, then go to We have a website called c RP works dot org, so you can go there and learn more about the program in general. But what we're expecting is not going to be a great sign up because they lowered and sent up payments significantly, so in other words, instead of that the payments for going and putting in pollinator habitat that used to be about now in this new sign up is down about five, which is you know, just it really does not that help. So they also moved a bunch of the continuous funding, which is way more expensive, which is non competitive, and that's where you do things like you know, a lot of the you know, like sage grouse restorations work being done on the farm bill is in these continuous programs. A lot of the Bob White you know, restoration, long leaf pine restoration is being done. You know, under this continuous program, there's much longer term, but they're also more expensive. And you know, but a lot of those wildlife programs that had always been in these long term programs now getting moved in the general sign up, which makes them much cheaper. So the folks like the Landoords will not get the same amount of money for him. So we're gonna they think that while we should be getting about eight million acres, it could get signed up. I mean, I think we'll be lucky to see you know, six million. Just in so right now they're twenty two million acres enrolled. They're about another six or eight million that are basically expiring in the next year. So there is a in their caps twenty seven million acres. So there's a lot of room to add acres, and god, no farm country needs it right now. But we're not gonna see that. We're gonna see, Yeah, we're gonna see some acres added, probably about six million acres and may kick it up to from twenty two. You know, I'll put decent amount, but given what's expiring, it's not going to come close to that cap acres are there's c RP lands in Hawaii for instance, Like where where is all this stuff? Um, not that I know of, but here, I've got actually a map on my computer which I'll I'll show you when. But yeah, you gotta gotta give these folks, you know, the value of their time and gas. Oh exactly yeah. And if if they're going to go spend their time and gas, they're gonna look for a better return now, exactly right. So anyway, we're gonna be disappointed with the sign up is currently going on, but it's better than nothing. We're thrilled they finally got to sign up out. But you know, long term, yeah, we're gonna have to, you know, have a serious discussion between Congress and administration about implementing this program the way it's intended. Yeah, will be organizing comments on behalf of the broad The administration has been uh dragging his feet, not not sort of exercising the will of the people in terms of and I mean part of the problem here is too is this is the one conservation program that is ministered by the Farm Service Agency and not NRCS, and that's where Resource Conservation Service they wake every day and think about conservation on farmland. Farm Service agency doesn't, so they look at the big thing things to do today. You know, this is down towards the bottom. And Steve's earlier point is the one that it's the development threat. You know. I mean farmers and ranchers they do what they do not because they have to. There's that's their life. I mean, it's it's the way they choose to spend their lives. And eventually they're going to get it in a point where it's like, man, it's not worth the hassle. And you're in a place like the Gallatin Valley here, my mom's plays there outside of Billings, where it's let's just cut this sucker up and get a paycheck and and moved to Hawaii. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's the real threat long term. If you drag your feet on this implementation, there's huge ripple effects through a farm country. Much rather have the argument of CRP or row crop versus c RP or housing development, because once it's housing, it's not coming back to Yeah, it's not coming out. Hey, Phil, We're gonna move on to um. So there's a map of where hot bed CRP and Upper Midwest Great Plains. Boy, things get complicated when you move down there towards the Upper Midwest and Great Plains into Columbia. Columbia drainage. Uh, hey, Phil, you know that noise Cali uses in Cal's weaken review where it goes Yeah, moving on, Yeah, put that noise in, right, got it? Access? Yeah? Twenty nine thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs up. Yeah again, you kind of are your kind of thumbs down in farm bill. Yeah, and I think thumbs down in farm bill. Um, just who combs down one and a half? So one thumb is one thumb the sideways down. Hit me two thumbs on. Hear, give me you both your thhonbes on access. Good. It's got two thumbs on, two thumbs up on access. So we've been you know, honestly, Dave Bernhardt and the Interior Department have been really good on this issue. So he's been, you know, sort of done a bunch of things in terms of opening up hunting and fishing on refuges and places, streamlining rigs. I mean, we had a situation in the past where you may have a refuge someplace that had totally different rigs than the state, which may make sense but may not make sense. But it made it really confusing for hunters, and so a lot of that has been streamlined. They've also you know, there are certain refuges and other public lands that got closed for no particular reason, and those all got reevaluated and a bunch got reopened, So that's good. Perhaps the most important thing he's done on the access front is dealing with you know, what we call disposable lands for BLM. So under the original FLIPMA, which is the Federal Land Management Policy Act, which essentially governs b land management, they're required to every time they review renew Resource Management Plan in r NP, look at areas that don't make sense for them to hold on too and are suitable for disposal. Give me an example of what that would look like. Yeah, let's say have a a plot inside the city limits of Las Vegas that happens to still be bland land, just some weed plot land, Yeah, I mean, just an historical anomaly. You know, maybe it's part of a railroad grant or something, you know, long term ago, and but rabbits out there there could be so but anyway there and there probably are variety of federal lands out there that makes sense to be you know, swapped or disposed of. And that's fine and honestly, and Jason Chan real quick. So let's say you have a you know, a parcel that you know it was in the city limits of Las Vegas, and you know the city really wants that to expand the strip just to use a hypothe a hospital hospital. Okay, then they could enter into say, okay, fine, we have we the city of Las Vegas has this parcel way outside of town, adjacent to a national forest, will swap it to you in exchange for this piece in town. Your national forest gets bigger, our hospital gets bigger, right, and it's a win win for everybody. Now, there's some rules in place about swaps have to be you know generally you know the same value things like that. Yeah, so people don't come in and manipulated. But there's it makes perfectly good sense to do things like that, and that's how we do a lot of in holdings and places or through things like land swaps. But you know, the part of the problem was in the original flipmoe or bill when it talked about looking at lands suitiful disposal, it you basically talked about lands were difficult to manage, isolated, It didn't talk anything about recreational access. So you have a situation where you may have a section sixty acres a b land someplace nowhere near other BLM lands, but it may be adjoining state lands or a national forest. Now, in the old days, BLM would automatically put that parcel on the disposal list because it was isolated. It didn't make it was hard to manage, didn't make sense in terms of big picture agency management. But so what we got Dave Bernhard to do was to change the rules, and he issued a secretary order on this three three seven three that when you know, the agency comes up and looks at area's suitable disposal, it's important for recreation, including hunting and fishing, it's awful list. So it is again and this is a direct result of some of that on X work we've done. You know, that identifies the sort of landlocked public lands, because if you're disposing of some of these isolated parcels, you're impacting way more than that one or that half section that may be out there. And that's uh. Well, Eric Siegfried of on X and I hunted a chunk this year that is so prime, so prime for disposal or land swap because it's surrounded by we're not talking mon pockheadle ranchers out in eastern Montana were like big, big money um, and you know, it's corporate holding type of situation and they're not in it for the cattle. And this chunker ground that we handed his great recreational value um. But it's not something the BLM could even get in and manage if it if the landowner around it decided that they didn't want them to. Yeah, so wake up in hot sweats over something like that because it has tremendous wildlife. You just think about like the fewer of the Wilkes brothers in Idaho and now Montana, and you know, obviously they're gonna if you know, they may have some lifes parcels make sense to trade to the federal government, but yeah, their exchange. Maybe you know that one section which allows the public to get to that national force behind him, If you get rid of that and make that private, then essentially you privatize all that elk habitat behind him. You can imagine the manipulations that go on. And so now with that secred order basically prohibits BLM from doing that kind of stuff, which is great and you know, I've a lot of credit to you know, Bernhardt and Interior if you're doing that one now, i'd say on also on the access front of the fact that we got permanent reauthorization LWCF huge win for access. Uh yeah, we now have again another result of this on X project. Yeah, which were acting or did he get he's permanent So he did get confirmed. But what what about the acting director of the BLM. Well that's the whole severe the w p P. Yeah, so we'll hold off on that one because there's still more to talk about here with the access stuff. But you know, another thing we're doing the project with ONYX. What we realized is that the agencies often have no idea where they have legal accesses. So they may have it may be you know, an access easement that was granted forty years ago. You know that's in the basement of some you know BLM or four service office someplace in a cardboard file box. And you know what Eric and the company found was that, you know, there was a huge need to get that information digitized and out in the public sphere because it's makes it very hard for you or me or anybody to know really where legal access aren't roots are now. So we haven't a bill that's being gonna dropped in Congress soon. It would give the agencies the money to go in and expert digitization of all these access areas. And you know that's something I testified in Congress on you know, last year about the need to do this, because what the agencies told us was it you know, if we if we're left to ourselves under current time frame, it will probably take us twenty years to get the stuff all digitized. And that's just ridiculous. How often do you testify in front of Congress? So TRCP and two thousand nineteen testified five times. I personally did three. I think it fun. I mean if you sort of you know your stuff. And for us, it's not bad. I mean they're they're no hostile. They don't like bust your balls real bad now, Like I just did, you know, right in December, I did a c w D you know on the Senate side, you know, talked about that with the Senate Environment Committee and it was super positive. I mean, you know, they had good questions, they had done their home work. You know, everyone from Barrasso from you know, Wyoming to Jill Brand from New York and oh god, it's the guy who likes to be outside animals. No, no, no, mean again, this is in the weird way. This is one of those few issues that actually brings folks together in Congress. And I'm not just saying C T, B D. I'm saying that in conservation, hunting and fishing broadly. And I remember right after the election when Trump got elected, you know, Martin Heinrich came and talked to a policy counsel, which is the sort of collection of all the NGOs are part of the partnership, and he said, almost nothing is going to happen in Congress these next four years this positive, other than what's in your space. So he says, you guys have an unbelievable opportunity. Don't waste it. And you know, I think we've taken you know, his advice on that one, and we've been pretty aggressive and asking for things and honestly been getting most of what we've been asking for. So I know, on the access thing, I think that's been you know pretty much. Yeah, a good story, because no matter what side of the aisle and you're on, you want to win if everything else is such a pain in the neck and not likely to get a win. One Plus, you just want to show you can govern and uh and do something that's important for your constituents. And it doesn't matter whether you're a Sierra Club member or a Safari Club member. I mean, these are things that you folks can agree on. Uh. In our notes here we have v p A HIP and three three seven three. Yeah, So three seven three is that tectory order I just mentioned from Dave Bernhardt. Vp A HIP is going back to the farm bills. We got a program in the two thousand eight farm bill at that time was known as open Fields, but the technical name was a voluntary public Access Habitat and Centives program. So this was a program that we just got expanded to fifty million dollars annually, which are competitive grants to states to negotiate walk in Easeyman's essention with private landers. So you have, you know, a lot of the actual money they can use and can they roll it into their existing programs. Absolutely, so they'll need to start some whole new damn thing. But part of the cool thing about the vp A HIP program is that you have states like Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania that have created walk in programs because all of a sudden, now there's a source of federal funding and you know, and they can supplement it with their own ways if they if possible exactly, and this has really started back and I think Kansas was the first state that really did this aggressively back with Steve Williams, who's you know, then became Fishing Wilife Service Director under George W. Bush but it now runs wilde management and stupid. When he was Fishing Game director in Kansas, they created this walking program, you know, basically to get people out there, you know, pheasant hunting and up on bird hunting, and it became so popular. Counties were giving the states grants to create walking programs in these areas. Real quick. What what's talking about is pro and you know, depending where you are, your state has one or needs one. It's programs are landowners are compensated to get financial compensation UM to allow people public access to hunt fish on their lands. And these programs tend to UM are oftentimes UH hunting programs funded through hunting or access programs funding through hunting fishing, Like we have the beast thing in Montana right now in Montana UM it's certain corners of license revenue fund the public access programs. So it's not like you're going you know, it's an internal thing. It's not like you're going out in tax and everyone on the landscape to allow hunting. It's something that that that hunters anglers are doing, you know, kind of a ford themselves through their agencies, through their state agencies, are with federal help. And the cool thing about the v p A hip program is it is also tied to conservation, so you don't have the risk of you know, some dude, you know, getting paid to open up his road crops, you know, to hunting and fishing where there's no no wildlife. So to the extent of that pro that land has already entered into other conservation programs c RP, CSP, you know, conservation easements, whatever it might be. They score higher, So there's the habitats can be much better in these types of programs. The other thing this is good about this is it takes liability away from the private landowner. So if you know, Cal trips and breaks his leg in a ditch, you know, he's not going to sue the landowner. State assumes that liability, so they will defend you know that, right, which not financially, but I mean just like a shoulder to crutch. But the reason county would support this program, right is, I can't tell you how many counties little townships we go through where it's it's very obvious the only money that's coming in is from recreation, whether that is hunting, fishing, floating, it's a local motel, it's the local diner. All these folks are benefiting from this. And that's why you find a Sioux Falls in November, and the big banner you see is you leave the airport is welcome hunters because it's such an economic driver. You station to Orange, the big orange bush signs going to a gas station with the meat eater crew. They're gonna get heard on snacks. I've noticed, uh, Phil play the noise? How do you describe that noise? I haven't labeled as a swish like yeah the swish? Okay c w D thumbs up. I mean it thumbs down, thumbs down, thumbs down. It thumbs down in two ways. It thumbs down. I'm guessing the primary way it thumbs down is it's spreading more counties all the time. I mean there's more testing revealing more spread. Yes, how else is it thumbs down? The unwillingness of most politicians to accept this is a real issue and deal with it. Why are they not scared shitless about what this would mean for egg They ought to be everybody sawing about like guys like me are like, well, what if how horrible would it be? What if a human got c w D? But why why is the livestock industry not considering what's gonna happen if CWD spreads into sheep or cattle? It would be like a would be like an egg apocalypse. Well, let's let's take it enough step further. Let's say Norway is already banning the import of agricultural products from cwdpositive areas because it's trying to control CTB outbreak in reindeer in Norway. So how long has it told the EU bands agricultural imports from CDB depositive areas and as twenty six states right now have it. That's a lot of CWD positive areas in NAG country, and and they just aren't paying They're not paying attention. So I mean, listen, I mean it's it's improving. They were. We did I think three hearings this year in the House on CDBD, so we're definitely making some progress in the sense of getting people be aware of this. You know Mark VS, who's a Congressman from Texas around that Fort Worth area, who's going to get our big award this spring. You know, he went to the floor and the agg during the appropriation RCP honors one Democrat, one Republican, somebody from the private sector every year as a big fundraiser in April. Steve got the Private Sector War a few years ago. Uh this year, you know, the congressional honorees are Mark Vsy from Texas and Garrett Graves, Republican from Louisiana. But Mark VS went to the floor during the e appropriations bill and offered amendment to add fifteen million dollars to go to state fishing game agencies to help with surveillance and testing, which is the first thing you need to do to get on top of c w D. And that was unanimously adopted. So that comes over the Senate, which is great and h then you know the Senate Egg Appropriations Committee cuts that down to five million of which half went to state state agriculture departments for the captive services industry. So I'm to do testing. Who knows, maybe do testing. I don't know. I mean, we have no control to try to bigger. Well, that's who knows what it's gonna be. Maybe it's maybe it's gonna be used for good things. But given our skepticism a U. S D A and how they've dealt with c b D, yeah, we have very little. They seems like the one if you told me that let's say there's two boxes. Let's say I'm on a game show and there's two boxes, and behind each box is like behind one box is a car, brand new truck, and one box says c w D UM spreads to livestock, and one box says c w D spreads to humans. And if I got the answer right, I'd get the truck you're tracking me. I would absolutely be the live stock one. Yeah, as much more. They have four legs. It's now eating the same grass you know, all the rest, and you think that I don't know why, Like so see that's one of the things that messages me about c w D is I look and I'm like, what am I missing? If I'm scared shitless, but if those people aren't scared, maybe I'm wrong. Well, I mean, listen, I mean you know there's a cottage industry out there of folks who are Jason saying this is a hoax not to be believed. And I don't understand that part though, I get it, Like I don't listen. I try. I try not to be like group think dude on this stuff. How is it a hoax when a deer dies, is laying there dead and it's got the symptomology, Like, where's the hoax? Always been around, never jumped to humans, nothing to worry about, did not come out of the captain served industry, the captain deer farms have nothing to do with the spread. Yeah, I agree with you. That's what I tell everybody. I'm like, man, yeah, I hope I'm wrong on a lot of things every day. But the disease transmission stuff, your research, it's funded by the U. S d A. Like it all comes down like uh, Iowa, Ohio, all these egg schools. The U. S d A is paying for a lot of that research. And yeah, it's it's bizarre to me. Okay, I'm trying to what's the late Okay, Texas. How long When did Texas first get c w D. I don't know. It was a while ago, but it's done a much better job in the other states of controlling it. Texas that there was a recent case, I think in December. But I'm saying I'm trying to I'm trying to better understand, and I got a pretty good understand. Like a c w D denier used to be someone who didn't think it was a thing. Now a c w D denier is someone like this kind of stuff changes like being I mentioned this a couple weeks ago. Being a Republican used to be you were like free trade. Now it doesn't. C w D denier used to be that you didn't think it was a thing. Now it's morphed into it's a thing. But it doesn't matter. It's like what it means to deny, it has moved. So the current thing are people are there people who are saying that a new state to get CWD solder are they saying that if you went to Texas twenty years ago and did all the monitoring, you would have found it like it's always been there. Like what exactly I don't want to try to get inside these guys heads. UM, but I think that's probably gonna say it that's been around that you could have you could have gone out and if you did all this testing they were now doing, nobody was looking for it. Then yeah, like what you know that The thing I think about you here, like like Montana had his first case a year or two ago, and then all of a sudden, you look like then there's like twenty some cases. But I'm like, yeah, well, all of a sudden, they're monitoring every deer that comes out of certain areas, so you see a big increase, UM, and then now at least have a baseline. But if you go from zero testing to testing, that launch is going to give you an increase. What matters is after five years of testing, what happens and you know you talked to uh, you know, the beautiful and lovely Doug Durn, who's really out there in his area, is trying to be impactful about this, and he's able to point to what is testing. Okay, we were doing exhaustive testing, so we have multiple exhaustive testings to look at to see increase. But I just don't understand arguing that, um, that it was always there, because I'm like where, right, No, I agree, if it was always there, it wouldn't be everywhere. Yeah, So the it's pretty clear, and you can look at the maps that show the sort of spread and it's something. There's something like it doesn't it spreads like how ship spreads. Yes, well, it spreads faster than ship spreads because you can throw a captive deer in the back of a truck and zip it across the country and you know, on a Greyhound bus and you know, it's all of a sudden, you know, mixing with other deer and getting dropped off here and getting one picked up there. So yeah, but when I was saying, when you have a a new infection, you find a new infection, it spreads like in a way you would imagine it would spread, like it's a it's a circle that girls and girls and grows exactly and you may pop up other places which you know you scratch your head about, but you know that's the truck. And let's listen, it's not just captive guys. Could be you know, me throwing a truck deer in the back of my pickup and driving a few states and addressing it and dumping it there. Well, if you listen to the guys that are really I don't want to use the word the people who are sounding the greatest alarm. Um, why is it not that you move to hay bail? Yep, Because the prions are in the hay bale there, in the dirt they touch, you can't kill him. Why is it not moving to hay bill? I mean, you're exactly right. The frustrating part is an apple. I heard that recently members of Congress have staff and they ought to be better informed on this. I mean I had a member, you know, say to me, well, at the end of the day, I we just gonna have to cook our meat longer. Yeah, well done. I think we should be throwing you know what, if you're a guy, if you're a denier, whatever the hell that means these days, God bless you. Um. I feel like, if you're a denier, you should be just saying. I feel like we should throw a lot of money at it so I could be proven right, right, dude. I I would when I have an argument with someone, I would spend money to prove I'm right, So prove you're right. I think we should be throwing a lot of money at it because this is like a huge, mongous deal and it's not a hunting deal, as you already it is. That's my avenue into it. But I would but if you care about even if you care about the livestock industry, and I do, I'm like, you know, how's it going save a cow stop a condo? What's that? Bumpers? Yeah, like col's not condos? Whatever? Yeah, dude. Yeah. So anyway, that's been that's been really frustrating because we thought we had that fifteen million, then the Senate cut it down to two and a half million, and you'd divide two and a half million up between fifty states. Yeah, that's just meaningless practically hilarious to think about when we talk about these amounts of money. Then to think about like the wealth held by person uh you know we're always talking about like Pittman Roberts the money. Then um, like Jeff Bezos could Jeff Bezos could give that amount of money every year and not and not notice it. Oh yeah, that's hilarious. I said, I was working with those guys in sacrament on the one game. Turned to me and he's like, yeah, you know this issue. It's just not you know, there's not enough private money to fix this. And I was like, can you say, the dude who owns this ranch owns three sports franchises. I think you just doesn't want to pay for it. All's all right. What we gotta do is we gotta get Congress to really step up on this issue. Now, they did kick forward, you know, one point seven two million. They're going to U. S g s for additional research into CWD, and that's good. There's also a National Academy Science study is gonna be going into look at transmission vectors, look at the U. S D A herd certification program, which is a joke, and other things. So there's gonna be some positive stuff that comes out of this year. But just given the threat and how fast this thing is spreading, the notion that you know, we're gonna you know, kick out two and a half million dollars to state fishing walife agents expect that to make a difference is just incredibly frustrating. No, it is. You know, Yeah, when you wake up in a few years and you're watching news footage of people are using heavy equipment to dig bassive trenches that are burning millions of sheep and cattle like you did from Ireland when Mad Colin scrapy. Yeah, then you'd be like, uh, pr modernization. This is I'm a little like Cal. I'm a little I like if I'm a little skeptical. Yeah down, So you love it? Thumbs up, you love it, Cal, He's like thumbs even. No, I mean listen, I mean I originally had the same reaction you guys did. No, no, no, no, no, I'm just skeptical, skeptical, curious. So let me give a little background here so folks know what we're talking about. So Pitt and Robertson program is the exercise tax that hunters pay, you know, on you know, guns, MMO archery equipment that basically funds you know, goes out to the states and funds conservation. There's an equivalent on the fish side, which was the Dingle Johnson program, then got changed the right name for Dingle Johnson, Dingle Johns names, and that's the exercise TAXI pittn. Robinson past I think in nineteen thirties six or thirty seven, Uh, Dingle Johnson past in nineteen fifty I think. And so which kicks off more morning, The fish and one, or the fishing tackle one or the hunting equipment one. I think they're more or less even there are a lot more or fishermen, but the hunters buy a lot more, especially Amo. Yeah, but the fisherman man when they buy boat gas, they buy boat gas that goes by gas that's hit by an excise tax exactly. So, but in the fish side they can use a states can use a small percentage of that for marketing, essentially to for the R three as we call it, you know, to recruit, retain, reactivate anglers. So that's why you see things like they take Me Fishing program. Uh, they've done a similar one reaching out Hispanic community of almost the scar program. My Spanish is terrible, I apologize, but those have really changed the decline and fishing the philis down that's like two years of French. So yeah, three thumbs down if I could do so. Anyway, So that the that take Me Fishing campaign has really reversed the decline and fishing numbers and it's going back up and you know a pretty aggressive rate, and it's reaching a lot of you know, his communities like Hispanic community that typically get you know, left in the crack you know, by our hunting and fishing community. So but because in the nineteen thirties, nobody could envision the need to advertise and recruit hunters because basically had everybody was hunting at that point, either because it was during the depression they needed food or you know, post World War One going into World War Two, you had a large ye like I don't know, like a quarter as many Americans, but the same number of hundreds exactly. And so there was no idea that we actually would need to use some of this money for you know, the marketing. But you know that's changed and the fish Walleye surveys in the last year two surveys for five year period, hunting went from you know, thirteen and a half million people to eleven and a half I mean, and so you know, the long term impacts implications of that on conservation funding are huge. So we wanted to do like fighting the animal rights movement absolutely, yeah, So what we want to make sure is that we give the States the same ability on the hunting side as you have on the fishing side to use a small amount of those funds for marketing. Now, I had groups like you know, Wildlife Society and Wildlife Federation argue that money is dedicated for bat you know, and a little pulls it off mission. And I would say, we are in the desk spiral, so you know, if you want more money for habitat and good stuff coming out of PR, you better get more hunters into the game. And that that's the argument that swayed me because they were also trying to make it that you could use PR money to create public shooting ranges. You can already do that, you could know? That was like, but that was like recent. I don't think so. No. I think you just might be the first time in your life that I've ever known more than you. This might be the first time I've ever known more on you about something. But I think that it was like PR money couldn't go to public shooting ranges until something happened, like some point in time in the last handful of years. Well, we'll figure that out. You could be right about that. I thought, I know that that would pay money to know that I'm right, like I mentioned earlier, But let me but here's the thing. Here's what I remember about the debate. Debate was one that everyone went out and shot old washing machines up out in the woods, and it was trying to like get that centralise shooting so that everybody didn't have their own patch of their own gravel pit where they went and through cans and bottles and appliances out and blue holes in it. So you're trying to reduce that, and everything was did. It would if people have more places to shoot and feel more comfortable shooting, they're buying more sporting this equipment, they're buying more ammunition and more money. And so it was like viewed as like an investment in the PR fund because most of the PR money doesn't come from hunters. Most of PR money comes from shooters. If an old granny New Jersey has a pocket pistol, she probably paid into PR exactly. She might be an anti hunter, yea. And if you're a you're a decent hunter, you're maybe do one box off m a year. That's a guy that's a friend's mind. Like at the NSSF they're laughing about is Um one of these guys Like, you know, I hunt all the time. I got like a gun that I got from my dad. I buy like a box of shells every few years. I'm not the guy kicking into this fund. The guy kicking into this fund is shooting is two two three down the range. Now, granted there's a lot of cross over there. Yeah, but I mean just this funny point, and it's like hunters are the ones that are eyes like pr PR pivot robbers, and you know, a little bit blind like where the bulk of that money is coming from. But I just think we need to do something out there to you know, engage attract people because you know, the demographics hunting are not great either. I mean it's an old white and getting older and at some point they're going to drop off that cliff because Phil starting to hunt, how do you, Phil? Yeah, we're all set now I'll get at But you know, and again we actually are seeing some good growth. I mean, obviously women are coming into hunting, you know, in a way they haven't in the past, which is great. I mean, I think you guys have been instrumental as we're getting that food side of people coming into hunting because they want to have harvest their own, locally sourced, high protein, non GMO meat. Yeah. So I think those areas are seeing growth, which is why you combine things like CWD, which is scary and may push people away from hunting. And and the fact that we haven't the all the advertise hunting you know those are you know, that's the death spiral. So you love it. I love it two thumbs, two thumbs. Oh not even kind of tipped to the side. And again you can't use No state is gonna yet they can't. But no state would take all that money and just do advertising campaigns because that's not what they do. So it's just you know, that didn't happen on the you know, the fishing side. So yeah, the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation was funded through the Dingle Johnston funds, the wallet Bro funds, and you know they get you know, maybe like seven million dollars a year to run these big national campaigns on take me fishing. And it's worked and we've showed this worked. Okay, Phil, play the sound. If you want a primer on big grain migrations, you should go listen to scroll back down through the episodes. Here's a good research question for someone sitting here. Uh no, I remember the name of it. Scroll back down and listen to a podcast episode that we did called land Escape of Fear and it's a primer on big game migration. So pause the episode right now before it starts talking. Listen to Landscape of Fear, and then in a couple of hours we'll see you as you come back to hear whether we has thumbs up or thumbs down big game migrations meaning uh, basically, what that comes down to is meaning the viability and productiveness of lands that are used by migrating big game. They're used by big game. How do we how are we doing? We know a lot more about it. That's because of what you learned when you listen to the Landscape of Fear. Is like how we're starting to learn about how animals use the landscape because of emerging technologies exactly. And this is something that you know has really I think Wyoming to a large degreece where pioneered this, you know, with a lot of beginning with Path of the prong Horn, but then a lot of stuff that Hall Sawyer and you know, guys like that have done in terms Matt Kaufman in terms of the mule deer migrations, and not only did they get good data, they got such cool video footage and really captured the imagination and national geographic picked it up and pushed it out, and so all of a sudden it became sexy. And then you know, Dave Bernhardt, his predecessor, Ryan Zinky, you know, did a Secretary order I think three to something like that that, uh, you know, basically told the federal agencies within the Department the Interior to work together to identify these migration corridors and to take the conservation actions necessary to protect them. Yeah. When you listen to Landscape, I fear there everyone that just rejoined us. You you'll remember the part where we're talking about with emerging technologies around GPS and and things, um, identifying little things that could be patches of ground seventy five yards wide along the edge of a lake that literally hundreds of animals passed through. And the ability to be so targeted about like this little thing really matters. It allows you to be It allows you be really precise. You know. So we are arguing with the Department of Interior early on this. You know, this administration and are you know, are encouraging them to do this. You know, the points are pretty simple. I mean, it's an inter agency, so you want to talk about you know, we're breaking down the silence between the different agencies, a state, federal, private collaboration. It's you know, highly charismitic megafauna. It is relatively small areas of actual conservation because you know, yeah, you're gonna need to protect some broader areas, but otherwise it's just a pinch point here or there. And I said, you can use a bunch of other people's money, you know, for example, in the transportation bill, the highway bill. You know, we just got two and two and fifty million dollars in the Senate version for an experimental program over five years for highway crossings, for big game migrations, and for aquatic connectivity. Are you weird? Are you awhere that those are controversial? Well, I know they are in place like Island Parkatto. In general, No, they're not that controversial. Tell you where it is. The massive government take over this country really went downhill and they made an overpass so so many animals didn't get killed on the highway. That's when I knew America had I'd had enough of this country. I want right to hit a deer if I can. Anyway. I mean, most of the time it's not controversial, and I think that you know. So the way it happened under this administration is they put out in order all Western states and focused on three species mule, deer, elk, and pronghorn. Told the states to nominate three to five core migration corridors and you know, then the Partment of the Interior would you know, basically commit resources to helping protect those. Joe was a rumor. Uh, let me to keep interrupting about this a lot, du because I'm doing it. But it was a rumor that they're using it to um move the deer away from public hunting areas. I hadn't heard that one channel them there. It's it's in viros, channeling the deer into helping them pick routes where they won't be uh subject to getting shot at. It was it was hard training those initial gears with the tall callers to go those different routs they've never been before. After they got through that hurdle, then yeah, no, I mean that's just you know, it's just that crazy talk. This does even makes sense for everybody. And you know, I think that you know, we've seen the you know, the Highway bill is going to contain this program. We've seen states you know, Wyoming, has you know, done, has sort of been lead on this, but they're even Mark Gordon is doing executive order right now that you know, is laying out how to formalize this process moving forward as they designate new ones. Those big lefties over in Wyoming. Yeah, uh, you know, Poles administration in Colorado pushed through an executive order on migration quarters. So you're seeing it have ripple effects in a variety of different states in the West. On the one on one right, um to um. Yeah, that the wildlife crossing over the one on one freeway in California outside of l A, there's anything using it. Wait, it's not going to be complete sometime this year, I think, is what they're saying. But that's the going to be the most expensive overpass in the United States imate we heard from one guy. Never fact checked him on this, but an angry listener wrote in and I was talking about all this money they spent building one. Maybes in Washington State. Someone they spent a bunch of money building one and then it just didn't work. I mean that was said like a coyote went over that. Never fact check. You gotta give these things time. And you know, at our net did a pretty good video that's on our website that's one of talks about this. Yeah, you gotta give them a little bit of time to work. A second, you have to have fencing, you know, that goes along with them, because you have to funnel the animals towards this, because getting to do something they don't normally do. But you know, I think they they certainly in Wyoming, you know, the evidence is overwhelming along with other places that once they figure this out, they use them like crazy, and not just you know, one species, but a host of different space small mammals, birds preferred to fly over them. They've got like reptile crossings in New Jersey. Yeah, so it's you know they've got you know, it makes sense on a number of different levels. I remember when I was a kid, snapper turtles eys get hit real bad when you're driving Nord to Mouskegan Marsh and um, they put up this really low fence, like a knee high fence that channeled snapping turtles into the right thing. I remember people feeling mad about it, just like kind of like this, like those idiots. It's like and I remember thinking like what, like what exactly is the problem, right, But it just insulted people that someone would spend effort to have lots of snapping turtles every June when they're going to lay eggs not get killed. They wanted to see them get killed. If you had a snapping turtle in the middle of the night, it keeps you awake. Yeah, and they're like insulted by I remember calling people in my own family were like, I rolly about the fact that you would try to keep all your snapping turtles from getting crushed on the highway When they come up to lay it's this giant marsh and it's like, really for them, it looks like suitable nesting habitats. They need to get out and dig a home in the sand. And you build this big artificial thing and every turtle in the area tries to come up there and get smacked by a thing, and people are like, just I don't know, no, I don't know. Well, anyway, I think overall, the the migration corridor stuff has been really a positive thing. I think it's spreading and it's got good momentum, and the exception of a few weird places, it's not controversial. Something again that I think everyone can agree on that sure things though, fisheries i'd say mixed bag, you know, sort of sideways seat thumbs. You know. So a lot of the fisheries one of the big issues with fisheries, well we got you know, fisheries is a broad term. You mean, there's fresh water to the salt water up. So you know, a lot of the folcus we've been doing is on the you know, the saltwater side of the marine fisheries. Now, we did get a bill passed and you know late last year the year before called the Modern Fish Act, which for the first time recognized that recreational fish should be managed differently than commercial fish. Commercial fish, you know, are really managed for maximum stained yield. So you're gonna you need instantaneous data. You're pushing that species right to the edge, and you have to have really good data for that. And you can do that with commercial fishing because you have a limited number of ports and you can actually count the fish wreck fishing, you can't do that. I mean, you have people spread out everywhere, a million little docks, marinas, and there is always but you can't manage them the same way. So instead of trying to you push that commercial management paradigm downe on the wreck fishing, which is what Noah National Maale and Fishery Service has always done, and to the point where we're getting a ton of controversy and things like red snapper in the Gulf where the lack of certainty on numbers were causing the agencies to shut down the fishery in nine days and seven days and three days. So if you and I were planning a trip down there, we'd have no idea. We booked our hotel room, we booked our guide with the season would actually be open or not. It's just not the way to manage recreational fishing. So Modern Fish Act passed and it did a few different things, I mean the main one said to the National Marie and fisher Reservice, you have the ability to try these different things that may work better for recreational fishermen. Let's use the waterfowl model. Yeah, So go out and you do surveys and the Arctic of what the breeding populations are going to be. You look at how many ducks get shot, and then you set a season. You know when it opens, you know what the bag them. It's going to be the end of that season to reevaluate. Now you have to be pretty conservative and for that to work because you can't be way off or else you just crush the species. So honestly, it's better for conservation anyway, if you were to apply that model for breck fishing, which is the same way with the model we do on fresh water fisheries, you know, be at largemouth bass or trout or anything else. I mean, there's a bag limit, you know what it is. You know when the season starts, you know when it ends, And we just haven't been doing that recreational side. So now that's gonna get changed. And a lot of these sort of hot button fisheries, and the hot button fisheries are the ones where you have nicked stocks. So part of its commercial, part of it's recreational, red snapper being a classic case. The all recreational stocks, things like red fish, you know, bone fish, tarpin, those are all well managed because they're managed with that same sort of precautionary principle that we managed water fell with. And so so we finally got that changed. Now the agencies, in the process of going through a bunch of rulemaking, determined how it might use that and there are different ways you could do it. You could do a tag system, you could do you know, these bag limits. You could do fathom limits where you know, outside for ground fish under a certain levels, wreck fishing outside of its commercial that's like in Washington's a lot of things like you can fish within at different times a year, within certain depths, so you deal with a lot of the bycatch issues with things like that. Yeah, so it's us being a little bit more creative. But the agency, because that wasn't the way it was used to doing things on commercial side, was always very reluctant to do that. Now it has a green light to do it. The other thing that the agency was where you're reluctant to do was to use you know, different data collection techniques. So it would, you know, do telephone surveys and mail surveys asking you how many fish you count, you know, last summer, which needless to say, we're not highly accurate, highly accurate, not instant talking to a bunch of let me tell you about this one in particular, take your arm off. So the state's got so frustrated with that's a bunch of the states period their own and basically you know, yeah, iPhone based systems where you're basically doing instantaneous reporting. You don't have to tell where your honey hoole is, but you tell, you know, how many fish you caught, what general size, and you know. So all of a sudden you have, you know, this instantaneous data on the wreck side, which the agencies had never had before. And so part of what the Modern Fish Act did was again give them a National Maine Fisheries Service the green light to use these alternative data mechanisms, you know, to manage the fisheries. And l a creole is one Louisiana. There's a separate one in Florida. There's a separate one in Texas. But they just make a ton more sense than you know, this modern age than a telephone survey months after the fact, I mean, the telephone series in Montana. I wholly buy into the system. I do, but every year I'm like, uh, yeah, you got a buck? Well what region um? And what unit my aunt's place? You know? Okay, do you know this that um in South like at our fish shack and in Southeast Alaska. No, there's just like an order to come down no nonplagic rock fish whatsoever. God, those things are tasty. I saw the yellow I mean obviously yellow. No non player. I think it's to protect the yellow eye, but no non plagics, which has major implications for US fishing, because you're gonna be no matter what you're doing, you're pulling up a lot of rock fish, you're gonna be like sending a lot of rockfish down to the bottom with release devices. Yeah, and no more targeting yellow eyes. I bought a new Damn Rod four jigging yellow and talk about an easy getting a kid fishing fish. Yeah. But I've been putting a lot of energy into um pioneering some new green ling and flounder spots. So it's gonna, you know, Brodie Henderson, right now it's timey some flounder flies. Uh say, may do. We're still gonna we're we'll still um, we'll still put some food on the plate. Yeoh okay. So uh I just got sent this last night a Texas Parks and Wildlife apparently just um try a case convicted. Yeah, I got fined twenty six thousand dollars for being sixteen or seventeen red snapper over the limit from last year. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's as far as I got into it, So that's I got right. So obviously red snapper is pretty hot button for a while, and it's I think a lot of the controversy and when it snappers calmed down. Since you know this, you know, the Modern Fish Act passed and basically the FEDS turned over management to the States and the States are doing a good job. Tell about the Manhattan deal. So man hayden Is is the basically the base of the food chain on the East Coast. It's also in the Gulf. It's a little fish, it's called bunker, it's called pogy and super oily. You don't want to eat it, but everything else wants to eat it. And the bat fish of choice, right, great fish of choice, and not just for you know, striped bass and wheat fish and blue fish, but for whales, for eagles, for osprey, you name it. And that's one of my that's one of the areas where I have least experience hanging around, like the Atlantic. All right, we can that part of it, that chunk of the Atlantic. So you know, in the in the old days, back in the nine hundreds, there were these you know, basically reduction industries up and down the East coast, and the reduction industries will go out in the perse se reduction so they would catch these you know, the man Hayden, bring them back, grind them up, reduce them to fish food, to pellets, to fish oil, fertilize er, to variety of others. So you go down to the drug store and buy ere olmate, you're you're eating probably man haden, your your fish oil pills. Yes, yes, which are useless, but it's fine, um yeah, so over time because it keep you alive forever. So you tell me that that the supplementary, I have no drug industries lied to me. I actually have no idea a way outside my comfort zone on that. We call that big Vita. Big Vitas lied to me. So back in the turn of century, you had these reduction fisheries up and down the East coast and to the point where they almost wiped out Manhadian and basically almost wiped out everything that eats them because big schooling fishing just get on them and claw room. Right, yeah, I mean the way it's done today and today so basically a state by state band started banning this type of fishing. Only one state still allows it in the Atlantic and that's Virginia and has one plant owned by a company called Omega Seafood, which was recently purchased by cook which is the you know, they they have big aquaculture salmon farming, no different cooking. They have salmon farming operations on the Atlantic up in Canada and Maine. They have had a mountain Puget Sound. They got kicked out of Washington State because are such bad actors. Tons of Clean Water Act violations, tons of escapements for Atlantic salmon and steel that habitat. So not a great company. But anyway, they own Omega, so one plant still owns it. You can imagine when that guy gets sitting around and complaining big cigar in his mouth, I'd love to hear it. So anyway, so this one plant, you know, catches eighty plus percent of all the commercial Menhayden in the Atlantic, and it has your big boats, has Spotter plant. The only fishing Virginia waters they can fish in, you know, so federal internet. So they go outside three miles three miles that three to two hundred that's the federal waters. So they can do out there. And then they also been fishing there. It's three to two d oh, where to get seventy miles from something that it's based off the bank, like with the drop off. Maybe this was all done back and then you know when Magnuson Act came into early in the nineties seventies, go off R three miles you can catch menhaden and federal waters. Yeah. Oh, then he's going off anyone's coast. So that's where you was front page of New York Times past year because you know, they the big bunker schools were up there off a long island, and whales and all the whale watching boats were out there, you know, watching this spectacle of nature. And here comes Omega with a spotter planes and it's a little you know, big factory ships and this you know, this persone boats and comes out circling around them, scooping them up, while the whales are out there hitting them, and while the recreational angles around the spite stripe bastard blitzing them. Everyone's pissed. And here it goes gets brought back so ground up in a fish food to be sent to Canada to feed alcuaculture salmon, another totally unsustainable industry, and to get shipped back into the US you know. It's so you can buy salmon that has an ingredients list on it. Yeah, you know when you buy salmon and you see this gut ingredients because like normally you don't need a label stuff. But since they died, it red and all sorts of antibiotics should say sam yep sam with the asterix. So anyway, so Omega we've been trying to do is change the way men Hayden are managed to go from single species management, which is basically how many fish can you kill before you crash the stock, to an ecosystem management, meaning what does the ecosystem need? And then based on that, how many can take out without messing things up. And that's probably gonna happen this coming year. And it's been a pretty nasty fight all along. Meantime, this past year, OMEGA decided it didn't like, you know, the federal limits, the Atlanta States Marine Fisheries Commission limits on Man Hayden and so it just decided to give a big middle finger to the agency and went in and blew through its cap for the chest Peak Bay and so caught you know, millions of extra pounds of fish. So they were I think expecting and who knows what was inside their head that you know, they could go to Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and get him to waive any sort of penalties. Now, you know, we as the wreck fishing community as well as Atlanta States Marine Fisheries Commission and every single state on the Atlantic, including Virginia. Because the recent governor does not like that fishery voted, you know, to basically find Virginia and Omega out of compliance and penalize them. So that fishery Virginia itself find yes absolutely and so that you know, Wilbur Ross, to his credit, you have rule in favor of the commission and shut down that fishery. Now that doesn't really mean anything because the fisher is shut down the winter anyway. This just happened in December, um. But what it means is that now the state has to come into compliance and there's gonna be a penalty for all those fish extra that it caught out of the Chesspeak Bay. It's going to get reduced that from its overall quota. Now, listen, I think they ought to be kicked out of the Chesspeak Bay altogether. I'd love to see this, you know type of fishing end. If bait fishermen want to do man Hayden, that's great. I mean, we've so wiped out herrying fisheries. A lot of lobstermen in Maine and other places are looking for other bait. Man Hayden is a logic one for that. All four using that. That's awesome going up to Maine for lobster basing. So you're saying like that, like like small scale stuff like that, but you're saying like the industrial harvest, yeah exactly, Yeah, I mean the big reduction fisheries, which where you grind them up and you know, tourna into oil and pellets. That's just it just doesn't make any sense now. And the crazy thing on this too is that you know, Omega decided during this process to add political weight to its cause to get it self certified on the Marine Stewardship Council as sustainable, which doesn't make any sense. For a host of reasons. We fought that. You know, they got it on the Atlantic, and they got it in the Gulf, and there's not even a catch limit in place in the Gulf. I mean, it's totally the wild West down there. And you know, so it's just crazy. So anyway, but what it has done is galvanized the fish community, the fit recreational fish community behind this cause. We won on the compliance fight in the Atlantic and the chest Peake Bay. You know we're gonna win. I think on ecological management, changing the framework, and then we need to go down to the Gulf and put hard cash limits in place down there. Okay, Phil Pebble mind man minds two thumbs down. So we thought this thing was, you know, pretty much dead, and you know we're putting nails in the coffin a few years ago. It's been hard to track, it's been hard to follow. So issue fatigue, well there's some of that too, but let's a things. This is one thing where it is a sea change from the last three years. So the administration, I think, to their credit, basically put up some very hard sideboards on any mind that could be developed in an area, which can you can you give people not just real quick bring people up speed, Like when when people say pedal mind, what are they talking about? They're talking about? One would be one of the world's largest open pit mines at the headwaters in a golden copper mind headwaters of the two most productive sak I salmon rivers in North America, the Queejack and the new she Gack in the world in the world. So you know, they're basically it's the backbone of a half billion dollar a year commercial fishery which it creates a surface lake of highly it creates it would create a surface lake of highly contaminated water. They would have to be maintained in perpetuity, an active fault zone behind behind, you know, an empowerment structure that this water would never be cleaned and you would need to keep it in place because should it. And not only that, because of what would eventually be the size of the c M. And you're gonna have to put in not only roads and harbors, but you know, utility basically power plant, and you're going to open up an entire area to other impacts. So and this is like from moose hunters, salmon fisherman, bear hunters. Everybody hates this, a couple of people except for some Canadian speculators who want to know basically, this Northern Dynasty which is a company that's pushing this. Yeah, once essentially sort of you know, to make a bunch of money on this thing, sell it off to somebody else, and get out of the business. So anyways, it was on life support. Then Presidents the story hasn't and I have no idea if this is true. President Stuffs on his way back from North Korea, stops to refuel on Anchorage, Alaskan governor who likes the mind, likes any story of development project, spends time with him on Air Force one. Trump goes back to d C, tells EPA to make this thing happen, and the core of engineers and all of a sudden, the core of engineers, which takes six years for a restoration project to do the permitting in a place like Florida or Louisiana is you know, has never moved faster on any project ever. And we're gonna basically moving creaning toward approving the permit on this, you know. And you're right about now. Now they've kicked it back a few months because everybody, including the State of Alaska, including Lisa Makowski, including Department of the Interior, have said, WHOA, your analysis is woefully inadequate. You're not looking all these potential impacts. So but we still think the core of engineer is going to issue a permit, which means litigation is going to begin. But what it also means is that, you know, the mining company, Northern Dynasty may get an infusion of cash because the stock price is bound to go up at that point, and it makes this thing far more viable than it's been any time in the past fifteen years. Yeah, I don't want to say about this crazy bet I have about pebble mind, I'm not gonna tell you about it, okay, with my sister in law. It's a brutal thing. Like you're talking about a landscape where you couldn't maintain a kiddie pool out there from overflowing or rupturing for any amount of time. I mean, the groundwater is on the surface and then the surface water comes down and freaking day louse buckets constantly. It's an active fault zone. I mean, you have volcano was erupting within, you have seventy five miles so but I mean, and listen, there are a lot of places in Alaska to make total sense for mining. There are a lot of really good minds in Alaska. This is not about being anti mining. This is about about the worst place you could ever pick to put a mind, is the top of Bristol Bay. Well, I'm curious to see. Um. I don't say this lightly, and I wouldn't say about a lot of things, but I'm curious to see a role that civil disobedience would come into play were they to actually go in and break ground to start extracting resources. It's become such a line in the sand issue for such a broad array of individuals from the native community, Native Alaskans, sportsman, commercial environmentalists, commercial fishermen. I wonder if it would be that there would be UM. I just feel like if it's not like that, this would be the kind of thing that inspire civil disobedience. It's so hard though, because it's like, look at where it is, you know, like the winner population of King sam and Alaska is like very very few. The summer population in anything that would probably be hard to make a human chain out of that too. No, no, but it's like if if if we can't pretend, I think people look at as a lion saying issue, because if you can't protect Bristol Bay, if it's not worth protecting Bristol Bay, than people will be like, so that means nothing is that wasn't good enough. Yeah, that mean that would mean to a lot of people like we're okay, We're just we're done because nothing is sacred. Yea. Anyway, this is gonna just you know, I don't think they're gonna be breaking ground anytime soon. This is gonna be extensively litigated if the permit is issued. So you know, and yeah, part of us, you know, running out of the clock and hope you got a more friendly administration and that we'll you know, actually do something good for Bristol Bay or the current administration change tack, which is entirely possible. Yeah. Yeah, he listened to the public opinion on a lot of issues. I just gotta hit him on the Twitter feedlook, thumbs in, thumbs out down. You know, I think we're gonna get some stuff done. Um yeah, I mean it's gonna play feel you got you got the noise in there, um you know the noise. Yeah. Uh. Obviously you have two things that are gonna make progress on anything difficult, impeachment and the election progress on anything anything. Do you wish the impeachment hadn't happened just because it makes everything so hard to do? There's not something you're comfortable getting into it. I'm not going to get into that one. So I just think that it is what it is now, the way it happened, I gotta deal with it, and we gotta deal with that another way. The rules are set up, they're gonna basically the impeachment sounds like they're gonna convene at one o'clock every day, so which means we have some period in the morning to get a little bit of business done. But basically it's, uh, you know, it's a different distraction. So I know that I'll just tell you what this isn't what talking to me talking what's been frustrating about this thing is going through is something that you know it won't happen. It's not gonna happen, that's all. Ye. It feels to me like like let's say I was gonna um, I'm like, I'm gonnag hole and Cow's like, uh, no, matter how how much you dig, I will fill that hole back in. And I can get I can guarantee you that I will fill the hole back in. But I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna do it anyway, and then spend a bunch of money doing it. We'll go on. So again, you could be right, but it is what it is, and we're gonna work around it. I am right. In election year, you know, there you really have until say they May to get stuff done, and then everything gets too tied up with politics, and then you have another window after the election until you know the new colors, and some radical stuff can happen during that wind. So the first of all, you're trying to clear the deck of a lot of easy stuff in the right now in the next month or two, and I think that you know, I'm sorry, real quick, how much time Okay, the impeachments going on now? You know the Senate trial is going on now and not yet but it will start some time soon. So how much so forget that part of it. How much time of activity do we have before the election cycle just throws everything into chaos and May end of May and then everybody's just thinking about that. Yeah, I mean here you made some few things odds and ends get done, but basically it's just everybody's out campaigning. It's too political, so everything gets put on hold until after the election, in which case you when you come back at a buttload of stuff gets done between you know that first week in November and the new Congress gets whether it's an outgoing whether it's an outgoing administration or an empowered administration, it doesn't need to worry about re election. Yeah, man, you have the dynamic of what happens with the Senate, what happens with the House, what happens to the president. But at a minimum, you know, it's a place so you can get a bunch of stuff done. And because you have retiring members and there are a lot of them on you know, on both sides. Yeah, who are going to say, you know that? All right, there's a chance so I don't actually have to be political. I can do us right for a change because I'm not run from election and you know, get stuff done there. So anyway, I think there are some opportunities. I mean, I think there is a you know, sort of broad wildlife billy know that we've been you know, putting through that has you know, really a bunch of non controversial stuff. Knock a reauthorization North American Wetlands Conservation Act, which funds wetland restoration and protection around the country. It's about funded about fifty million dollars. That gets reauthorized they're creating a CWD task force. Um, there is the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation reauthorization, the authorization of a National Fish Habitat Bill, which is essentially the fish equivalent of the North American Wetlands Conservation Act. All this stuff is non controversial and has been passed by committees or by houses or one body or the other. This is all going to get bundled and doing right now. We expect to actually to pass the Senate last night, it didn't, probably passed today, then go over to the House. So this becomes you know, a bunch of good stuff which is not controversial and everybody agree on. We can get that done quick. So, you know, I think that's good. Besides, I mentioned the fact that Murkowski wants to do an energy bill as soon as basically impeachment wraps up before things get too political. That may be another opportunity for a bunch of public lands provisions. Um. You know, so I think there will be some things like that to get done, but a lot of the focus is going to be on the election and what happens after the election. And honestly, what you know TRCP will do is, yeah, we will start developing we'll do it for scenario planning. You know, if Trump loses, if Trump wins, if the Senate flips, Senate doesn't flip, all these different scenarios, and that's sort of you know, how are you going to keep conservation at the front of and then what do we need to do and what are the priorities and how do we present them? I mean, climate is going to be a big issue because you know, even you know, the denier is recognizing that they can't, you know, not deal with this for very much long. Yeah, I would imagine, I mean everyone does. I mean if if the administration I mean never mind, like what will happen in the House and Senate if the administration is switches, there's gonna be a ton of I'm guessing a ton of Climate Act. I think even if it doesn't switch to is gonna be a bunch. If you look at the polling, Yeah, you look at Republicans under the age of thirty, climate is number one or one of the top issues. So you know the party is has to deal with that younger folks who recognize this as an issue and need to deal with in some fashion. So I think you're now you're not going to see a green new deal maybe, but you're going to see particularly on them come in again. What you're going to see though, I think there's things that folks again generally agree on. Yeah, you gotta reduce some missions, but you also have to do an investment on land sequestration, adaptation, resilience, and those are things that our community loves, that are great for fishing, wildlife, and that I think Democrats and Republicans can agree on. So you could see some smart climate package with that sort of focus moving forward. So I think there are gonna be some opportunities moving forward. A lot of it is what we do this year is positioning ourselves for one and beyond. You know what's interesting is uh in uh coming up pretty soon. Through my kids schools, there's this night where they can go do It's like this technology night. My wife understands better than I do, but anyways, she was preventing. She was presenting that with them, the menu of things, because you go down and you pick like four seminars. Your kids pick four seminars they want to go to in our um seven year old, nine year old were picking what seminars they wanted to go to this night and you roll through them, and that the seminars are like the life a year in the life of a grizzly sturgeon, migrations, um thing about developing computer apps. It's like some while half wildlife stuff at half nine wild life stuff. And one of the things was this sort of like climate change primer. Um, my daughter very readily pick that one along with the other ones you wanted to do, and um, my boy, without much uh, without too much persuasion, added the climate one in with one about Native American games, and uh sturgeon. I really wanted him to go into waterfowl migration, but he didn't do that one. You can only win so much. But it's uh, it was a thing that they're aware of. This morning we woke up the check muskrat traps and dark and it was warm out. And my son goes this, because all the garbage, you're confusing two issues. But let's talk about that quick question. Are the kids referring to these as seminars. It's gotta be like, I haven't heard them use the word seminar. It was more presented them to like, you're going to this, I assigned you, we signed you up for this thing. You need to pick which one sound good, And so we read over dinner. My why, I don't know. There's a dozen things that choose from whatever. She read through all the descriptions and then put their initials by the ones, and they had too many, so they had to narrow it down Sturgion migrat. I think Sturgeon migrations was top. I told him, you gotta go down and then come tell me what you learned. Yeah, I like it. I like it. I'm just gonna be real confused if I show up at the house and your kids are like so cal when it saw a seminar the other day. I don't know they'll frame it that. I'll be curiously how they tell you about they will tell you about it. I don't know what what they'll use. I don't think they'll use seminar. They're probably like a thing. Maybe we were at a thing, went to a show. Uh, you know, it's funny day. We're out, you know, in dark checking muskrat traps dark and we're into spot where there's a you know that flex pipe it's like eight inch flex pipe plastic and it's coming out of that there's a chunk where it's coming out of the ground and snakes across the ground and it goes in onto the ice on a pond someone's doing like some kind of drainage project. And we're hanging around there near there in the dark. And then later, my four year old it's talking about what's up with the big animal with the big tail? And then you can mean a muskrats a big long tail, And I'm like, the muskrat, no, huh, you know the one that can't move? Can can we bring that home? And so I get confused. We're about a hundred yards away, and I give him a flash that I'm like, I have no idea, Tom, let's go back and take a look. And we go back and he shines the light at that black flex pipe, twelve ft of black flex pipe running between the dirt and the ice, and he's like, that thing, that's what what's uh? You know what animal has that tail? Big one? That would be I would not be standing here were that in animals. That's chunk flex pipe. He thought it had got frozen in so hard that it was just stuck. Yeah, what's your state of waterfowl right now? Getting real interesting waterfowl again, And it seems like there's the data between migratory waterfowl against like our songbird data right now is oddly in opposition, so where it's like, well, we've lost billions of songbirds in the United States, but waterfowl it seems to really be kicking ass with the exception like pintails seemed to be taking a hurt. Um Geese in the Atlantic Flyer right now are actually down. There's one one bird limit in chest Big Bay of Maryland. Interesting. So no, I think that you know the answer is that you know, we pay a lot more attention to war Fell because we have dedicated we have hunters, we have dedicated funding for it. It's a priority, whereas you know songbirds, you know it's not. And which is really there's another bill in Congress called the Restore American's Wildlife Act that would put some dedicated funding toward these non game species which the states have responsibility for managing but really have no dedicated resources to manage. So no, I agree with you, is that I think the situation probably on a bunch of the songs, even worse than we think because our data is pretty poor. Real quick is it quick? Is it possible to explain like why from a conservation stand point, what's up with ethanol? So like, I get it, but I get it a little bit. But but tell me what why is ethanol? Part of why does it matter? From from what we're looking at, So, ethanol has a long and checkered, uh you know, sort of environmental history. It was regally created, you know, both to supplement markets for farmers, but also when during the oil crisis, as you know, a you domestically produced transportation fuel. Yeah, you better explained, like from the high, high level what we're talking about. Yeah, so this is basically you take corn and you can do with other cellulostic you know, plants, and you convert it into a fuel. And it's the same way you make alcohol. In factor, with ethanol, you've got to put a denaturent in let's keep people from drinking it. So it's you know the same as grain alcohol, you know, and it runs pretty well in cars and you have been used for years, going back to Henry Ford as a transportation fuel. You can have race car drivers use it or methanol in some of their cars today. But the issue became and when you know, Congress basically created an ethanol man and under the renewable fuel standard which expires and I think two essentially ten percent of the nation's gasolting fleet has to be ethanol. Now, the goal had been originally that that transition from corn ethanol to cellulosic ethanol over time, switch grass cud zoo and who knows what the hell you make it out of, but something other than sure do it for it. I mean, it all depends on the starch content I guess of the where the plant is. But the problem is that that's that transition has never happened and stayed with corn ethanol. And when you had that time of like go go corn prices, you know, we lost you know, six million acres of pasture and grassland to cut road crops. It was that ethanol mandate. It was largely driving there. So a lot of you know, you know, pheasant hunters, duck hunters can't stand ethanol because they see it the mandate, as creating basically an artificial incentive to convert habitat for corn. And you know a lot of the you know, urban you know folks that don't like high food prices see it as you know, an abomination too, because it's food that's now going to a fuel in basically subsidized way. So now I felt a lot more strongly about it. You know, when you know prices were high and we're seeing all this conversion, it's it's hard to you know. You know again, right now, nothing's gonna happen before the renewable Fuel Standard comes back up for Congress and Congress decides what to do with it. But when you go back to the dismal state of the farm economy right now, you know, I just think that you know, even groups that you don't like the ethenal mandate are backing off a little bit right now because it's just hold, yeah, because you just don't want to do anything else to make you know, life even worse. In agg country. When you see a gas station with giant signs talking about ethanol free, are they performance, Yeah, that's that's an issue. That's that's not them being pro or pro or against or whatever. So the a lot of the old equipment, especially things like chainsaw snowmobiles, yeah, couldn't handle ethanol. So you had when it was first moved into the gas stream at ten percent blends, there were a lot of problems with some of those, you know, small engines particular. Now all those there's talking about how you could get good boat gas there now, so all basically you know today you know all you know, essentially modern engines can deal with timbercent ethanol. The problem is that the ethanol industry, which is pretty greedy, has been trying to get the you know, the blender percentage kicked up to and e p A has approved that now at fifteen percent ethanol. You could have a very modern outboard engine on your twin two fifties, on your big boat going out off shore. It'll screw that up to ethanol. Now in theory, you know, it ought to be labeled, and especially marinas won't be selling it, but a lot of guys will fill up the gas can and take it out to their boat and pour it in, and it does really bad things to engines. And again it's just another sort of artificial subsidy that we really shouldn't be doing. National Marine manufact Is Association American Sport Fishing Association have lobbied vigorously increasing that ethanol percentage in ghastly because of what it does to marine engines. No, kid, yeah, that's interesting, thank you. Answering some of my own questions, but it's been improved. Anyway, avoid E fifteen on anything in your outboard engines. They're hat our our small engine expert with Bosburgh and I've just tapped the extend of my knowledge HU small engines. All right, man, Any final things, any concluders, any final things we didn't get to know. I mean you kind of you were influential and making our list. Yah know, I think I first of all, I appreciate you guys, you know, actually paying attention to stuff and caring about it because you know, again, most people rather talk about you know, dear stand placement or you know, hunting Coustier in Mexico or whatever it is. But yeah, this is Yeah, this is the backbone of you know, what we have in this country in terms of hunting and fishing. And if we don't pay attention to this, we're gonna lose it. Yeah. Well, thank you for paying attention to it. Well, thank you guys for paying and thank you for coming on. Um, we should just schedule it regularly, but it can't be like once a year. Maybe do a midyear check in six months check up. You know what. Every time my kids go to the Dannis, I'm gonna have you on all my six months stuff will just have like the like Dennis, I'll be associated with family paying. That's good, okay, be good. Like election cycle to be like all right, here's our conservation minded candidates. Yeah, you know what, maybe you'll come on you want to talk about getting people pissed, is if you come on right before you come on right before election time. I think I'm gonna appointed that one after the election time. Come on, Hey, we're five one C three, We don't that's true, Yeah, that's true. Yeah. As as t RCPs a nonprofit organization, you guys don't you guys don't play. We don't have a C four, we don't have a pack, so we just don't get engaged. And you guys work. You guys work work. What I like about t RCPs you're you're respectful of of bipartisan process and you strive to be just like as effective as as humanly possible. Well, I think that's a niche our community has always had, and I think that's you know, when Jim Range created the organization back in two thousand two, that's was his idea and I think it stands through today that you know, these are issues that auto unite and not divide, and they shouldn't be political. Yeah, but you hate fishing and nothing. Yeah, well then they're political. All right. Thanks again. Oh, Cal, do you have a concluder? Oh? I just I don't sure say on it. I can't. Oh, I got this for being in a ski race and Sun Valley. You're commemorating the fact that Sun Valley was what formed a six. I just feel like this is a comfortable sweatshirt. I feel it's probably formed the millions of years ago. Cal. Uh Yeah, yeah, a highly volcanic area. It's pretty young. It was just flat till nineteen thirty six and then it became a valley. That's fun, says sun Value. Um. Oh, I think on the on the your selection of political candidates, I just like to tell people, it's like you're gonna always gonna have to fight for something. Right. So you have somebody who you feel is going to give you an easy out on a topic, You're still gonna have to If you select that person to vote for and they make it in, you're still gonna have to push them on the other things that you believe in it. So this is just the way it works. One plus, part of our job is to educate. I mean, you have less and less members of Congress coming from rural America. I mean there are some much more suburban urban you know focus now and so if you know some members says to you, we're just gonna have to cook or and meet more for CWD. That's not because they're a bad person, just because they don't understand, and that's up to us to educate them. But I think that people when it comes to selecting UH candidates that you're gonna vote for, I think a lot of people look like I picked my purse and and then I look to them to see what I think about anything, right, So like I just go with what they say. Another way of looking, as you pick your person, you're you're balancing out. You're making a selection one between two things. You pick them, and then I'm gonna pick them, and then I'm gonna move them in my direction on all the things I don't agree with them on or work my hardest. And people get uncomfortable with that because they think that when you that your selection of a candidate is basically you're saying that's me, rather than saying part of that's me. But I really need them to move my direction on a bunch of other stuff, and I'm gonna do everything I can in my power to make sure that the whole that things move in my direction. I'm choosing you as the person that I want to then be heard from and and get you to see my side. Uh. Good, feels good. What's your shirt about? Phil? You got a wine shirt on? And this is my friends. My friend runs a winery in Kalispell, Tailing Loop Wines. Check it out next time you grow the grapes up there. He buys them from somewhere else. She brings them in from different parts of Washington and and puts them in barrels in Kalispell. And you like that wine. Yeah, it's like a fly fishing term, right, Tailing Loop. It's a fly fishing themed winery. Yeah, m hm. And you love the wine. I like wine fish. I like her wine. No, she's got some great art on the labels. Though you start, you're gonna start fishing too, now that you're gonna start hunting. I don't know. I went fly fishing once with Cal and it didn't go well. I had a great time, And then it sounds like it went very well. Your friends got a very inefficient winery because it's a fly fishing theme. P oh, I I own like about eleven thousand square feet. I don't think about it. Makers come up trap your place from muskrat. Sorry you don't have like a pond or anything. That's all getting messed up by muskrat's. Okay, no, no um, all right thanks again with you, we'll we'll, we'll go out. This is like the doctor where you I want on your way out, I want you to schedule your next visit. Okay with Osburgh TRCP. Thanks for listening.