00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Hunting Collective. I'm Ben O'Brien, and this week we are joined by Charles Post, a great Charles Post for another conversation around ecology, around wildlife, around fires, around grizzly bears, brown, how to be a better hunter, and just a bunch of jabbering about idealistic notions and philosophies of being better hunters. So hopefully that works for you. Hopefully you listen to all almost three hours of it, and it was a wonderful conversation, one of my favorites of all time, and an invigorating exchange with a very smart dude, Charles Post. So please enjoy Charles Post. Then O'Brien, Hey, buddy, how's it going. Oh, it's going great. It's going great. We both made it. Ice Roads. Yeah, Ice Roads Man Bozeman. I've been talking so nice about Bozeman lately, But now I just I think I'm gonna go back to Texas. I really it's too cold. Yeah, today was pretty frosty. It's pretty frosty, but it's still not bad. In fact, my family is back in Maryland right now and they got eight inches of snow they like two days ago, So we're behind the we're behind. Can you can you crab in the snow? No, you can't crab in the snow. Well, we're just red. Next man, we squirrels. Stuff in your garbage can? Yeah, I know if we live in western Maryland, which is like the it's like east West Virginia or South Pennsylvania. It's just like the little sliver that of Maryland that disconnects those states like very limital. Yeah, Northwest Virginia, it's all yeah, it's just right there. So where do you We're definitely squirrels. You could do um deer right now. Opening days coming up, people getting excited. Yeah, the Orange Army is that? Do you miss? Do you miss home? I do? I like home, but I like you could tell me from comp moving out here and being away from home that for me, like, I I appreciate going back and like having a perspective that I wouldn't have gained. But sometimes I feel like an asshole for thinking people that never left are are aren't as worldly as me, because that's that's an asshole thing to say. Yeah it is, So we'll cut this part out. It's too honest, it's too honest. But yeah, I think I think I'm glad I left, but I do miss it there, man, because I'm every time I read something or I think about tribalism, or I think about hunter gatherers, I think about um, you know, societies that were important to our humanity. It's always family, It's always it's you know, it's always tribal. So when you move away, like our modern um style of moving away from our tribe only like to seek success is natural in some way, but also a little that's a shitty way to live life. It's something it's hard. I've been here about two years, you know, my wife's families from here. But yeah, I feel like this year kind of just connecting with UM, you know, kind of creating that tribe, kind of creating that place of like stability and comfort. And it sounds like we're gonna be neighbors now, neighbors. I got a new house closing soon. You got one closing soon. Yeah. We should take a tunnel. Yeah, I think we could do it. You doing the summer be a little tough to do right now. Our wives is like, and what are you guys actually doing? I'd like to tunnel over to your house, like, come on, son, Yeah, we're coming with Get on your belly. It's only a half mile the Charles, could we drive? Sure? This is more fun. That is more fun like shaw Shank redemption popping up out of them popping up? Well, um yeah, you feel you feel like you're starting to get a tribe here in Bozeman that people that feels like home, like you can have over for dinner and doesn't feel like strangers. Yeah, definitely starting to get that way. And I think just starting to get familiar with the seasons and starting to get excited about um, you know, it's a great word in ecology called phrenology. It's like the timing of events and nature is kind of calendar, and that's getting really fun. Starting to just getting familiar with like the way things work outside. Yeah, it's super different from me too, because people talk about different you know, weather events or the way things are and not being from Montana, somebody flippantly talks about all the weather from the east or this you know, this time of year, this is this is what happens. I'm like, that's I'm excited to learn. I have no idea what you're talking about In a lot of ways, and it's cool getting getting your spots. Like I grew up surfing is what I did my all the places they did my field research from, mostly in this year, Nevada and the coastal mountains. So you have these little kind of honey hooles that you know really well, and depending on what you're after, you can go and kind of like make sure you get that. I feel like this year I kind of keaton on a few spots that really feel like they're mind So that's fun, like whether it's bringing friends and family out there, or you know, just maybe Rachel skiing for the day of my wife and I can just go like split and go to my little zone. That's where I'm That's what I'm excited to do. And you know, I've in the transition to get here. It seems like it's been a long time. Um you were saying, yeah, last time we podcast is like because we were just trying to figure out what to do we moved here and now it's like, Okay, that's I'm looking forward to thirty years of that, you know. I mean, I think that's one of the unique things about living in a place where there's public lands to tramp around on right, and there's so much. I mean, people ask me if I've been to this range of that range, or this valley or that valley, and I mean, I feel like the last two years I've just spent poking around our valley. Yeah, and just two of the multiple ranges that encircle it. Yeah, I can't I can't wait. I'm most stressed about all the stuff all that need. Yeah. Right, I gotta buy skis. Yeah, I gotta get all this fly fishing equipment. I gotta look really fashionable out on the water. I can't be out there fly just any clothes. I gotta get like sims waiters, and I gotta look the part. But I want to get especially in Yeah, you know, I don't want to be out there. I gotta get like a wicker basket ready. And people still do that because river runs through it an accurate depiction of that's what I should just dress exactly like those guys, cut my hair like them. That'd be great. Well, It's it's funny because you know, I think, especially I'm not traveling as much, it's just been awesome. But for so much as the loss, you know, better part of the last two years, Like you're reminded that you live at an epic place getting off the plane with all these excited people with their fishing gear and their hunting gear and their cameras and their packs ready for Yellowstone, and if you're like, oh, are you gonna go do this? Like I'm actually just knew home and go to sleep, probably unpacking pretty days. I told my wife that the other day. I'm like, do you realize we're going to live for the first time in our lives in a place where people come to go on vacation. You realize public land? Yeah? Do you realize that that this is how lucky that we are? And I think she she absolutely does. Um And to raise a kid here, you know, I know you just got married, but hey could be on the horizon to raise a little human, to mold a little human um in a place that has this immense amount of freedom, right, It's pretty cool totally. Because that's why I would describe like the feeling, because I talked that on the podcast a couple of times, Like the feeling of being here. It's just when you wake up, it's just a little bit different. The knowledge that there's this large tract of freedom just waiting for you. Like that's that's pretty pretty crazy. I mean last spring, I had a black wolf running in front of my car ten minutes from town, you know, and it was kind of I think in that moment it kind of dawned on me because back home, you know, we lived north of San Francisco, right on the banks of the Ocean um huge marine wilderness area, tons of life, but bald eagles were kind of rare. Definitely enough wolves, had a few black bears. But I remember being a little kid and see my first bald eagle, you know, which being somebody he grew up bird watching like Grandma since I was real small. It was awesome, but it was in a bed bath and beyond parking lot as I was loading shotguns on it A's truck to go bird hunting, and I was like, man, this is amazing, but this kind of sucks, you know that my first bald eagle. Think that might be the title of your autobiography. I saw my first bird eagle beath and beyond bald eagle in the bed bath and beyond. It could definitely be a chapter. It was the title, probably first chapter. But now, like my little spot right deer hunt. The other day, I had two bald eagles in the tree over my head. I was like, this is normal, you know, And how amazing is it that there are places where you still have relatively wild ecosystems, where you just get to be, you know, right right over the back fence. Really you can't say that, you know, you can't say it enough. And I think folks UM I was. I had Lantaani in here the other day and we were talking around we just it just came up randomly, Like there's a term going around UM in some circles now called like West East people are calling the people that live out west west East, like I thought West Falia like the but like the van life UM. People in the Midwest and the East like have this UM. I'm not sure what it is, angst around the way that you you know, that you're so proudly talk about the thing that you have. You know, if you got all this, you know, these awesome photos of you install on top mountains, and and I think the beautiful thing about I'm not from here, You're not from here, like we moved here for this, you know, we have other reasons to be here. But I'd say my primary one is for what we're talking about right now. And if you live in Iowa, or if you live where I'm from in Maryland, or if you live in North Carolina, if you live in Florida, it doesn't take long a kid here like come once a year, Montana, Colorado, Idaho, anywhere anywhere where you can get out and do stuff like that. It's it's the sitiation for it should be there for everyone because it's pretty important. Well I think what it does, you know, for somebody like us who or for anybody listening who you know, really spends time, um kind of appreciating nature. One of the things that we talked a lot about when I was in school, mostly a lot of graduate school really was like turn our restoration ecology, like returning the system back to a relatively pristine state. What we're trying to improve the situation. It's hard to know where you should be headed if you don't know where you've come from. In a lot of states, you know, East Coast colonized a long time ago, lost apex predators a long time ago, pretty uh, human influenced ecosystems, you know, up to the Rocky Mountain Front. In a lot of places. So it's nice to know that there are places that you can reference as benchmarks, you know, places where you can see an ecosystem that's functioning in a relatively pristine way. And that's something really informative because you can bring that home and you can say, wow, you know, New England would have had bald eagles and wolves and bears and moose in a lot of places, you know, and even by the time listen, yeah, listen, I will you, you would have had elk and grizzly bears and wolves, and you did at some point right before you Iowa. And if you've read Saint Kenny Almanac, the first fifty pages talk about, you know, the depletion of wildlife and not to resources across you know, the up and Wisconsin in particular. It wasn't that long ago that we had passenger pigeons, you know, blotting the sky out and heard a bison that Colonel Dodge spent multiple days in the saddle riding one one herd. So it's cool because you come to a place like this, you're like, wow, like this is what's been lost in a lot of places. You go to Alaska, you know, you see the salmon migration. I grew up in California. By the time I was in high school, the salmon that had migrated at my backyard creek, they disappeared, you know, functionally, that population was extinct. So it's funny though, I'm sorry, I think it's funny. One thing that that you're saying really like, you know, wory relatively young men. You and I, um, but I my father talks about being in the hills of western Maryland hunting grouse and quail and pheasants. In my lifetime, I think I've seen one pheasant that was on YouTube probably yeah, beautiful birds from China here was like that. That change happened within my and my you know, within my generation there were upland birds. That was like my dad's best pastime. It used to be small game and upland birds and then kill a orm opening day. And that changed within my lifetime. Now there are no very few upland birds because the way that habitat changed, right well, you know, and you see things in the news or you see these headlines that are kind of uh, I can be quite depressing at time, especially for people like I guess you probably keep our pulse. You around the pulse of the environment or the outdoors. And you know, one of the statistics that constantly runs through my head, for better or worse, is the idea that not the idea of the reality, that the extinction right on Earth is a hundred to a thousand times greater than would be without humans. So for us, like I had salmon disappear in my backyard, you grew up in a place that has changed dramatically since your dad was a young young guy. I mean that phenomena is is taking place across the globe and it's resulting in extinctions, Like there are still quail, there are still grounds, there are still Pacific salmon. But I mean it's hard to fathom, you know, growing up in a place like Southeast Asia where you're there was a rhino that you would have grown up with and there's no more rhinos. Like that's crazy. I mean the California grizzlies extinct. I mean it's and I think I mean what eastern elk I mean going further back but there, yeah, I mean there's these these very familiar your species that will never see again, right, And I think those are the canaries in the coal mine, These like big, charismatic things that generations have told tales of, you know, maybe Eastern Elk, and it's like, wow, they're not there anymore. Yeah. The amount of hunters that don't know that Eastern elk ever existed or ever seen you know, what one might have looked like, or what you know, depictions of them is is crazy. I think when you read about them and see what they were, it's amazing, right, it's amazing. I mean just to think like bison grazing from Canada to Mexico like insane. You know, when you read all the trappers journalist, that little naturalist Hudson Bay journals, they did the wonderful job of documenting you know, pray or whatever whatever they able to harvest. I mean, you just can't hardly imagine like what it must have been like. And I think again back to Montana and the public lands and the wildlife we have. It's such an important reminder for people from across the country to come out here and say, wow, like this is something we can work towards. Places that have you know, wild ecosystems still, places for wildlife are abundant, you know, and communities that you know, we sure certainly have growing pains in areas that we don't necessarily see eye to eye on. But I think people generally rely on nature in a lot of ways, whether it's to grow their their crops, or to hunted harvest, or just to find an escape. Yeah, I think it's a That's one of the things that perplexes me most about. And I think what I've gained from you in our time talking on on record and off record is is just the hunters can be, you know, agents of healthy ecosystems. And that ends up being at the end of the day, if you're if we're really about what we say we're about, which I'm not really sure we are, Like there in a lot of ways, we hunters are virtuous in a lot of ways. They're not modern hunters at least and probably all hunters through history, I would say, um, but what what it's help me to understand, It's like the most virtuous thing to be about as a hunter is a healthy ecosystem. You know, like meat will happen, conservation will get funded. Those things are there's what they're happening, their byproducts. That's there's nothing I'm going to say, and due to change the fact that I have to pay a duck stamp or I have to pay a license fee, and it it feels I used to want to celebrate that, like we can look at all the boddy I give you right, but I have no choice. I have no choice. I'm either a poecher or I pay and so, but I do have a choice to to whether to be an agent for an healthy ecosystem or not. Like that's my choice because I can be out there too and understand the natural world, or I can be out there just to fill my tag and pay my dues. Right, and and you can do there are so many opportunities to do more. We don't have community groups on road maintenance necessarily, or bridge maintenance. Even if you want to start a club, you probably couldn't go and fix a pothole leakal But you know along that same line pain and we've talked to us before. You know, paying your involuntary tax is just like putting money in the pot for roads or schools, which is an amazing thing about the American system that we were part of. But we also are blessed that we have all these opportunities to be more involved and be that agent of change and contribute not only to carry ourselves in a certain way when we're out hunting, we're engaging with non hunters or people in our community, but there's also a million opportunities to participate, and whether that's being involved in trail maintenance, picking up trash as you go, you know, leaving by example, being a part of a Christmas bird count, or being a part of a resta stream restoration project. I think you and I have saved many indigo buntings. That's right. That think that was the bird out the window hashtag it's been. There's a few of them out there. Yeah, I feel like the ending of people watch. Oh my god, I feel like that's happened. Well, next year we should do a live pot cast the Boson Raptor Fest. Yeah. I heard so. Litle Hilba from Stone Glacier we had lunch the other day. He had a bunch of scraps from a deer he killed in the back. He's like, I'm taking these over to the raptor. Like, what are you talking about? Veloscopy raptors. That was my first thought because I have a child, I have a child's mind, So I was like, veloscopy raptors put your crans down. Yeah, but and I was like, wait, that's awesome, dude. You know so he's a lot of hunters have started taking their scraps rather than chucking them out for codes or whatever and taking over the Raptor Center. Like great, right, that's just another thing. But I think you know, well, you and I probably repeat ourselves on that point a lot around. You know, you're paying your taxigo hunt. You know, I don't go stand by the bridge when they're finished the new construction be liked, you're welcome. I don't do that because I could. I could. We can all get together and be like, wait did bridge every Sunday? But hunters do that all the time. You know, we did at what you didn't really do because you don't have a choice. Um. We It is okay to celebrate the history that this happened, but celebrating the money that you're paying is not. It's not enough. It's not it's just not enough. And do you know do more? Um? And I love the deer scrap you know that's creation because I've done some work with BOS and Raptor Center and they're awesome. They're just outside of town. You're telling all about that I'm very ignorant to what they do. Yeah, so they're um, they're are rehabilitation center. They're also an education center. UM. They do a lot of outreach as well. So a typical situation is, you know, an alv I hit by a car. Somebody picks it up, either calls and they'll come and retrieve it, or you bring it out there and they have It's just an incredible staff of people that will, you know, with with the skills and the knowledge and resources to try to bring some of these birds back to back to life. UM, you know a common thing, uh, which we don't have to get into because it's a hunting issue topic, but you know, lead poisoning is a big deal for a lot of a lot of migratory um, you know, eagles especially, So the times that I've gone over there and shot some photos for them and helped them kind of you know, it's of interest, but it's also it's nice to be able to you know, support groups like that. And I've shot photos of these birds that have been picked up by hunters. Actually, the bald Eagles story that I did last year for them, there were two hunters somewhere in eastern Montana. I want to say, who you know. Bald eagles are big birds, old and eggles are even bigger. You see him in the groups. Like I've been to a lot of you know, Prince of Wales and there's like seventeen bald eagles ripping apart of you know, blacktail deer. You're like, they'll like take your groceries from the car. Yeah, yeah, but you know, so these two hunters in this one circumstance where we're out um rifle hunting and found this bald eagle that was obviously super sick, and these guys were super brave and probably lucky, but they went never in, literally picked it up with a towel, put in their truck, drove it a few hours to the Raptor Center, and it had incredibly high levels of of lead. So basically, what happens from a physiology perspective as you have these birds, um, I've done a little research learned from them, and oftentimes they're migratory birds. You have your resident eagles and you have migratory eagles. The resident eagles have a diet like you and I are home and we have certain things we eat, but if we're traveling at the airport. We're going to a new city. We're gonna be a little bit more opportunistic. So that's the same program with these migratory birds. They're coming through Bozeman, Montana. They've never been here. They see a pile of guts and they're like, oh, that's food. I gotta put calories on and I need to go eat that. Whereas the local bourbon like, I love fish, I know my spot to go kill over that dead deer to get to their spot where they know there's fish totally, and they just have their preference. So oftentimes these migratory birds are more predisposed to this lead poisoning. So what happens is the way these birds bodies were because they're sitting there. You've probably seen an eagle or or a vulture, even a raccoon. You know, a lot of these animals like, I gotta get as much down my throat as possible because I don't know when when my next meal is coming. I don't know if some bigger bird or bears and kicking me off this. So their bodies are basically ingesting rapidly, and then they have these digestive systems that are just like burning through the food. So they're metabolizing not only the meat at a rapid pace, but that lead. So instead of drinking like six beers over six hours, they're chugging six beers at one time, and it just punches them. So they get really sick. And a lot of birds will die from that lead poisoning. Um. So the raptor center, you know, they will stabilize the bird. UM. I'm sure there's a lot of other things. I don't know that they do, but um, you know, basically getting back on his feet, and a lot of birds do die. But in this case, we were able to let that bird go. So what makes a bird like that migratory as opposed to resident? You know, I know with with someone it's it's more of a of a fitness thing. If you're a rainbow trout and you saw up a stream, say, you know, you're you have ten thousands, you know, little eggs that hatch and there's you know, and uh say twenty fish that that survived to a young age. Certain OFFICI will stay as rainbow trout. The ones that get really big and exceed a certain size speciold will say, like ship, I can move on from this little creek and I can go to the ocean get way bigger, and the bigger I get, the more eggs I can have, or the more reproductive I can be. More of a cound that's the word we use, so usually it's like a size thing like that. Maybe that's the hashtag from this Yeah, that's definitely the hashtag this podcast. The condity that sounds like like a cool band name for something or like a bumper sticker. Yeah, for coundity. Yeah, all right, continue, I'm sorry. That'll be the hashtag for the episode. You can look at the bottom of the podcast. Both eagles, you know, probably a lot to do with um where they were born, you know, because it's hard to make a living being an eagle Northwest Territory. It's probably a little bit easier being a resident bird in the Bay area. Um, so whether it'll push these birds down and um, you know, there's also only so many you know, habitats are available. You know, on eagle has a home range and they're not going to be super psyched on another bald eagle moving into their spot. You know, nest sites are often limited, so it's probably a suite of factors that determine whether birds days or goes um locality is probably one of them. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. That's where they're, where they're born, and where they where they come up. Sure, yeah, so so they lead things interesting, you know. And I'm not a ballistics expert, but you know, lead has been outlawed in a lot of places where there's condors in certain waterfowl zones. Maybe maybe across the board, I'm not quite sure about that. Most Yeah, it's hard to find a place where you can use lead now and they're they're you know, in the past was it was a huge debate hunters, you know, on the side of you lead a lot of in a lot of cases, I think, but I think mostly you know, the steel shot has become you know, prevalent. Most most hunters you run into understand what's going on there. Well, it's hard, you know, um, because it happens when you shoot an animal with lead, is it fragments? So maybe the birds not swalling the whole bullet, But it's getting quite a bit of you know, it's the leads pretty well spread out through the end of Google that how many states lead shot? Yeah, for hunting, because that that's something not something I know off hand, but it's hard, right because the alternative might be tungsten. And if we're talking about like impact on the environment, you know, everything's kind of impact. Well that's yeah. I mean I think in the past that the hunting point was, hey, if we can't use lead and aim, it gets way more expensive and less people go hunting. And it was always like, well, this is a submerge of tact to have less hunters, and that was always So it's not a ballistics thing. People aren't saying lead shoots better than a steel I've never heard that. Yeah, I know, not a shot shell expert, but I remember early in my career that that was a lot of the you know, this makes this makes AMMO so much more expensive, and that is true in some ways and for all was listening. We'll be giving out Ben's personal cell phone nowhere you can call and provide feedback on the There's a lot of people that are like, I know what this is about. He's an idiot, and I don't know much. No, I don't how many states allow lead shot hunting. I gotta get out like a Googler person so I don't have to do it and talk to you the same time next time. But yeah, it's interesting thing because it seems like the United States banned lead shot for hunting waterfowl, and at least states of instituted lead shot restrictions beyond those mandated for waterfowl hunting. Yeah, and I probably say that most places that support condors are included in that list of regions where you can't use lad that says there will be a complete ban on the use of lead ammunition for any hunting purposes anywhere in the state by July one. And this is, um what state is that? Now We're going down this rabbit hole. Ammunition other than lead required for waterfowl and went hunting with a shotgun on wildlife refugees and wildlife production areas. So there's a lead Free Hunting dot Com if you want to get all the state by state rundown like free Hunting dot Com has every single state, UM, and most of them are required non toxic ammunition. Yeah, it's just you know, it's we talk about stewardship, We talked about, you know, being that better hunter, kind of going above and beyond in it. You know, we're obviously revealing we're not the experts on the topic. But it does seem that, you know, avoiding lead if possible, is one way that we can, you know, reduce our impact in terms of some of these wildlife that kind of get caught up and it's something like that this you know now it's you know, it's it's understood that lead shot has negative effects on on birds. UM, that's an understood thing. And if I'm just scrolling down and reading through this, really what I'm picking up is, you know, if I were just to read Kentucky non toxic gam unition required for dubs in thirteen wildlife Refugees Louisiana, non toxic gammunition required for dubs at certain wildlife management areas. UM, there's just a bunch of different a bunch of different rules and regulations on it, but it's generally it's generally accepted. And one of the things that's that's cool about this topic I'm glad you brought about this is that, you know, I just made this film called Skymigrations. It's a film about um raptors migrating across two hemispheres in some cases, and you can check it on a Vimeo. But the kind of the thesis of that film was that a lot of these birds of prey require at least two hemispheres worth of stewardship to be sustained. You know, there was a famous study that I referenced in the film We're Swainson's Hawk Hawks. This bird of prey that can migrate from BC all the way to the grasslands of Argentina was dying off in these huge spates. And what researchers found was that if you are poisoning crickets in Argentina, you're going to impact a bird that would over summer or reproduce in the forest of BCS. So these are these are continental wide issues. So the way that we choose to treat or stewart or care for our ecosystems in wildlife has these repercussion repercussive um you know, kind of impacts that go far beyond the in the region of the county is that we call home. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm just reading. We're gonna take a short break. I don't take a short break, and I could get educated on this very important subject. We'll go back to it now that these are good like we're talking about the y podcast that are cool prior to this, like this is one of the cool things because I guarantee maybe you will too. And this is over, I'm going to dive deep into the rabbit hole of lead ammunition. You're FaceTime like two am, Like, guess what, let's start on association already got shirts. Maybe it's gonna be great. Um, but yeah, I think it's it's there are some things in the hunting community that you're as a part of the community. I find that we have been traditionally pretty rigid, um and there's been a lot of things over the years that we pushed back on with initial you know, hey, listen, let's maybe not do this, let's maybe not do that, let's maybe change our ways there. And in the rigidity of the community has always been hey, this is our right, this is it's a tradition. And I think there's a new generation of of especially my generation that that and yours as well, I think a little bit differently around those things. So if for example, we were we were all all too come upon you know, an issue, we knew like you were to bring up an issue, say okay, this is happening, hunters are causing this. Um. The honey community is a little more malleable nowadays, I think to change those things. Yeah, and we kind of talked about it earlier, where you know, with the rise of social media and podcasts and content outlets, opportunities to learn. I think the general public is has blessed this opportunity to be exposed to a suite of perspectives. You know, it's not just what you might find in Peterson's or what you see at Cabela's or what you see in the New York Times. You know, there are thousands of perspectives that are packaged up and put it your fingertips if you want them. And that's awesome because I think it gives people an opportunity to be flexible and be plastic and not necessarily say, well, this is my news source, so this is my mentor, and not swimming to think, um, you know and we don't. There's also something to be said for being open to learning, right, Like, I was vegetarian for a few years in college. One of the reasons was I was broke and the house I lived in a lot of the people with vegetarians ate mostly plants. I also ate some you know, meat here and there, but it was mostly a plant based diet. Um I changed people change. You know, you're exposing these things, new ideas, new tastes, the concept of knowledge changes for us as humans. When I was a kid and you were a kid, they were pushing out, they were pushing across the table this pyramid. They're like, hey, checked this pyramid out. This is how you should eat. It's called the food pyramid. Like m hmm. Interesting, Like I don't see Simnto's crunch on that. But now, I mean there's a you know, many many, many people. You know, there are experts in that in those fields that that look at that and shake their heads like that's you should invert that pyramid. Some people will tell you. But um, the one thing about you know I've found about the human died and really listening to a lot of podcasts, Rogan does a great job, Joe Rogan do is a great job of having a bunch of you know, varying perspectives on is that it's a it's a fairly personal thing of what works for you. But the knowledge you can have about you know, calorie intake and heart health. I mean, there are a lot of different really smart people that that disagree on on those important issues right, and every everybody's ecosystem personal ecosystem. As we know, we have millions and millions of you know, flora living our guts. Those are all different. My wife, she has had, you know, some um health issues, not major fortunately, but some things that bother her. And she just got some body work done, some tests back, and they're like, you're allergic to these six things, and she cut them out of her diet. She feels great, you know, And that's not a I have some ideological issue with this plant or this type of food. This is just straight up I feel like ship when I eat it, and I'm not gonna eat it anymore. You know. Doctors recently told me all gluten. He's like, you should eat everything should you should have gluten in it? In the hunter percent gluten diet. I was like, well, that's odd. But things, I'm just kidding. You're like, I love nachos, what everything that's been maybe a T shirt everything glue um, But yeah, I know, I think that all those things are All those things are true, and and it's hard to navigate this world with the amount of information that is that would be required to do it right. It would really be you know even in even if you know the topic of this podcast happens to be hunting, even to be holistically pure and your hunting pursuits is it's impossible, I believe, because things are changing so rapidly. But it's also takes work. It takes a lot of work. It takes physical work, emotional work, dedication to skills, acquiring of new ones and refining the ones that you have. Like that, it's just a lot of work. And just like the mental game. I mean, we have conversations about things that pop up in environmental news or wildlife management. You know, we'll speaking for us both. I know we'll spend hours trying to understand the issue. I don't. Yeah, there's some stuff that I even like. One thing I am sure you could say this, dude, that I like about being a writer is it gives me time, Like gives me an excuse to like really dive into subjects. And sometimes I'll finish an article, whether it's long short, Uh, it doesn't really matter. I'll get done the article and people will enjoy it. And by the time it's a day old, I want to write a new one because you've you've learned something or I've kind of it opens up a new pathway to knowledge and you go down that path and now you're like, oh, now I found this and this and this, And I think that's just how how how it works, it has to be, and I think it speaks this this truth that nobody's perfect and growth is all about evolving and changing and totally being cool with the fact that at one point you had no idea what you're talking about, or weren't skilled or weren't experienced. Yeah, and I'm not you know, in the hunting space too, and especially in the in the hunting media space for a long time and and even probably now like you, weren't allowed to be popular or influential unless you were an expert and and unless you put yourself out there as I'm an expert um. And that was important because you know, people need to hear from people that are experts in the actual act of going hunting, because you need that. I mean you need not you know, there's no way to gather all the knowledge for um, for archery without somebody like John Dudley telling you how to how to tune your bow and how to shoot it and how to take care of it, how to how to hown your skill. I think I watched this video yesterday. Seriously, I'm yeah, I'm I'm in the knock on nation man, because because I really do want to get better at that specifically. But we should hold up guys like that, right. But I think now it seems there's two things happening. One, I think social media allows anybody to gather followers for you know, virtuous or otherwise reasons, reasons that will not be listed on this but also people that aren't experts, that just have interesting perspectives or are are like intrigued by what we do, are able to then also gather folks around what they are. So it's starting to diversify the type of information people can get. And it doesn't always have to be um of self reclaim expert telling you exactly how to do something. You can expand your knowledge in other ways well, And the experts will always tell you that they're constantly learning, they're constantly tweaked defining their perspectives. I mean, that's one of the things that I revert back to being somebody who spent a lot of time in the science academic world. It's like those professors every year are trying to improve their previous work. And that's the those the underpinnings of scientific exploration. Right, You're always improving, and you realize that you put something out in the world, as quote unquote truce, there is a high chance and you, as a scientist, are dedicated to that chance of it being wrong. That's a beautiful Yeah, that seeming to be the beauty about science is like you're going to be wrong a lot, and that's almost the point of it. That is the point of it, is that you stand on the shoulders of your predecessors. Yeah. Yeah, scientific discoveries is this game of who's wrong next totally and and to what degree? To what degree? How how wrong are you right? And that's and I think when we talk about wildlife management, I think it's important to remind people that when a wildlife professional says something about an ecosystem or a population of animals, they are doing their best job, presumably to interpret something that has identifiable unknowns and has probabilities that they can't control, and drivers they can't control, and things that they're predicting. And in the scientific world, we have when somebody says it's significant significant ice loss, significant declines of population you are using this thing called the confidence interval. So you're saying this happened, and I am confident. This is why there's that five percent that is like freaking the X factor. That could be anything that could just totally ruin your study. And that is an inherent part of the process. So when people say things, there's a everybody's admitting out the gates there's a chance five at least that you are totally wrong, or you are wrong to a certain degree. I say that'd be a good way to live your life everything. I might write that on the white board. I'm sure I'm right about what I'm telling you, right always, But I think that's the most most that's a high. That's that's on a good day. Mostly it's a fifty fifty. But I'm that confident. But you know, I think that's you know, it will be a good way to approach all things. I think, especially wildlife is so unpredictable, and nature is so unpredictable. You know, you just have to identify trends and identify how things you like you said, use history too to guide you well. And you know, as we all know, we all have our hunting spots and like the place that you hunt down the road is different than place you hunt two counties over, and that is an indication that ecosystems change every space and time. Yeah, and I think that's, you know, one of the more successful ventures around the successful parts of our model of conservation. So if you look at the North American mileth Conservation, it says very um. It says wildlife belongs to everyone, held in trust by the states, and what the states will then do is use science and wild if biology to determine how best to manage that wildlife. And I think that's something I've always come back to. Is you know, if if I would ask you, and I don't know near as much as you, um, but I'll have to ask you this question, why do you think when do you think do you think the North American model of wildlife controvation has been successful? Your answer would be yes, absolutely great Now again, yeah, we're friends again. Uh. The second question in there is why, Like at its heart, I mean, I'm sure there's many, many reasons, but why if you had to give one, I think the hy is illustrated in our successes. I mean, we have brought species back from the brink of extinction big like mega fauna, bison, wolves, ungulus, you know, white tailed deer. There was a point where King Ranch and Texas was sending year into the southeast. Now we have more white tailed deer on the continent than ever before, maybe in his history. I think looking at the successes and is an indication the models working. Um, Teddy Roosevelt try to come out and shoot a bison, you had trouble finding one? Yeah, what's what's the U? The quote is I was never in sight of a live one and out of sight of a dead one, you know. So I think they're in lies the the impact of that model on North America. Um. You know, we're also blessed to have political, you know, relatively stable political and social landscapes, economic landscapes, economic landscapes. I think a lot of other countries that come to mind where a wildlife are Dwin blame is is maybe not necessarily a function of lack of effort, but lack of stability across those different landscapes. Um. So we kind of have like the suite of drivers, I think has given us the opportunity to leverage that model and and be successful. I think also we have a culture and American culture that truly does value the outdoors, that you know, do value public lands and wildlife. So there's that social incentive to kind of push science and push conservation. But we also have an amazing, um, you know, body of checks and balances. Right. Science is there to inform the way that policies are incorporated into law, and we also have a legal framework that says are these policies being done in a legal way through different acts, whether it's the s A or the Clean Water Clean Air Act. Um. So, I think we we've done a good job. And I think you know, the fact that we still have the Yellowstone River cranking out clean water filled with trout, and we have herds of elk and you know, flocks of birds flying overhead, is we're doing a pretty darn good job given the circumstances. Yeah, I mean, yeah, given the circumstances. Right, I mean, I think what I always wondered about our mild conservation, which obviously, when we talk about little North American math of conservation, we should say that that wasn't a thing until the eighties when Dr Valarious Geist and folks like Shane my Owny decide we need to codify it and call it something. Um. But when we talk about it, you know, I wonder, you just I always wondered what you know it was. It was a reaction to a problem, right, it was medicine to an illness. And so will there be a time in our society again where we're ill enough that we need to create a new medicine? You know, right now we're fine, I would say, I would say relatively fine in terms of wildlife, um, relative to where we've been. Sure, you know, I wonder if they will ever be time again, whether it will be so ill that we need to, you know, create some new medicine. I think so. I mean, the ESA came about in seventies three, It wasn't that long ago, and those are like that's our parents hera, yeah, you know, I mean at that point, a lot of species we're pretty much close to gone. Our oceans are dealing with some serious things, a lot of them that we can't control. It's it's one thing to manage an elk population within the borders of our country. It's another thing to manage Pacific salmon that are using waters from the Korean Peninsula all the way to you know, southern California perhaps in some cases. So I think there will be remedies and and prescriptions that need to come about to address our changing planet and these changing threats to our wildlife and natural spaces. UM. Is there any you think that are broad enough that would have the same effect that this that model has had as they're going to even on a conceptual level, it's worked. Well, yeah, I mean it's it's it's um. It's a complicated, UM issue. But one that comes to mind is the Bristol Bay Watershed. I mean, there was a bill, a measure, ballot measure one that failed in Alaska this midterm election that would have past legislation to make it quite a bit more difficult to develop or create minds or do make big changes to the landscape and Bristol Bays Watershed. Um. Bristol Bays Watershed is the last real home to a robust salmon population where millions of fish return every year. I think that's shortsighted, you know. I think it's it's like a mini es A that should be that I believe should have been passed to protect something that you can't bring back, that that's impossible, Like you can restore a creek in your local community, and maybe you get like to salmon that come back, you know, the East Coast, they're taking down historic mill dams in Atlantic Salmon are coming back in some cases, but not ten million Atlantic salmon. I mean, we have millions of fish coming to Bristo Way Watershed and all the wildlife that rely on that ecosystem. Um. So, I do think there will be times in history in the near future, if not the current day, where do you have opportunities to pass legislation and policy that can have sweeping, you know, benefits ecosystems that are very much imperiled. Um. Yeah. And again it's it's it's one thing to manage a landlocked population of elk. It's another thing to manage a migratory bird, or a or a fish, um or animals that rely on an ocean, an international ocean. Yeah. I think I was, just as you're talking, googling the North American Midle of conservation because I feel like I've never on this podcast. We've always talked about it, but we've never kind of went through it right in much detail. Um So, let's do that in a little bit of detail. So the tenants I could I can rattle off like maybe five of the seven tenants, but I haven't in front of me now, so I'll just rattle them off. This is the the core principles of this model, of our model conservation are are built around some tenants, and there's seven of them. I just reading to you. Wildlife is public trust resources, which we've discussed already, elimination of markets for game, which we've talked around already, allocation of wildlife by law, which we've talked about already. Wildlife should only be killed for a legitimate purpose, which we've certainly talked about. You know, I would say mining, it's not a legitimate purpose for killing wildlife. Well, and there's a lot of repercussions, right, you build a highway or you you frack a landscape, and that has repercussive implications. Absolutely does. Wildlife is considered an international resource. Science is the proper tool for discharge of wildlife policy sure makes you happy, me too. And then the democracy of hunting. So I mean that you know, those are just overarching tenants. I mean, there's more details for each of those. But if if you're out there and we're talking about this model, and you're not aware. There's your starting point. Go and learn about those tenants and try to get yourself educated on actually how the success story came to be, because I think it's important, absolutely, And I think having that context and also that framework to inject your personal experience into gives um, it gives meaning to I think the way that you approach your time hunting, or your time get an advocate, or your time just being part of the community. Yeah. Yeah, and then and then it informs things like the E S A and and and some of the legislation you'll see on ballots if you have an understanding of like what what makes a successful And again, folks that are voting vote on these complex value system based decisions. Um. But I think having a general you know, as you're voting on something like that, you know, Connecticut's UM amendment to or the the amendment for Bristol Bay in alask because like if you if those things come up on mid term elections or whenever they come up. Um, having a general idea of the framework of our model of conservation can even a je real idea, even if it's not as nuanced as yours, even a general idea can help you test you know, put that seven tenants to test when you see something on a ballot, like is this in line with these seven things? And it gets complicated, right because you know, we just um, we had the Grizzly Bear decision, and we've had some other big decisions like the Bristol Bay decision. I mean, these are decisions that are made that lean on science, but also are determined through the lens of law, and law by nature is interpreted. Right. Our constitution is pretty darn vague, but our our country works, our world as Americans functions through the interpretation of that law. So that's good and bad for the people who disagree with it in whatever case we can think of. Um. But I also think it provides checks and balances, you know, and I think having faith in the process, even though sometimes doesn't come out the way you'd like it to, you know. I think about the Alaska issue that didn't pass, but having worked with some of the folks behind the campaign to promote Measure one, they look at that losses an opportunity to build more ground swell and do better the next time. Um, you know, and if we want to get into it, you know, we can. But like the Grizzly Bear thing, but we're going to yeah, you know, I think I think that's why, you know, talking through all these things and like a very you know, feet is great. It's easy to do. But I think the Grizzly Bearer decision, I think both sides of that decision want to make it. We want to turn it into a slippery slope. Yeah, And I hate slippery slopes because I think slipper slopes are fucking lazy except slipping slide, except as a sprinkler in it. But I think slippery slopes. I first came to this opinion around gun rights, right, I truly believe in in I believe it wholeheartedly that gun rights are important part of my freedom as an American. Like, I believe it, and I've thought it through. And it's not because I like thirty round magazines, but it's part of defending my family in any situation that may come up, all right, And so when somebody challenges that, it's easy for me to fall back on it. Well, it's a slippery slope. If you take this one little thing away, then then all of that may fall. But again, I just think that's lazy. And the more passionate you are about an issue, the more you feel like it goes to your freedoms and your humanity or your citizenship of this country, I think, the more you fall back on the rather lazy, an idealistic, slippery slope. Don't take any of it because I need all of it, right. Um, But that's not to your to your That can't always be right the it happens, and it doesn't have to be a reaction, right, um. You know, and I think the grizzly Um, so let's set up the grizzly thing. Yeah, let's take as far back as your knowledge will will allow us to go. And I'll hold out shine in if I know something. But yeah, and just as a as a disclaimer, you know, I'm an ecologist, but not a grizzly bear biologist. And I'm just a guy with a podcast. I don't know anything. So I've done my I've done my homework, you know, as best as I can. There's obviously more to be done, but the general gist of it is that ye Yessa comes about. Um. The ESA, the Endangered Species Act is an act that intends to identify species that are threatened or endangered threatened species or species that are at risk of becoming close to extinction, And how do they determine that. It's going to be looking at number of individuals, number, amount of critical habitat that's available, um pending or foreseeable threats to those populations, species at large or subspecies. Does any of that have to do with their historic population numbers? It does, but within that context, they're looking at available critical habitat. So bison, for example, bison would have existed from you know, ah, the Canadian border to the Rocky mountain front, maybe a little bit west of the Rockies in some places down to uh to Mexico over to the Mississippi River. So that would have been there like historic range to my knowledge, and and they continuous, you know, lower forty eight. Obviously bison are a fraction what they were. But we're not you know, bison conservation or restoration. Granted they're not listed. This is maybe not a good example, but point being, they're not looking at putting them back across that available habitat. They're saying, where can we put bison yea where they can thrive once again? And right? And what makes sense? So when we talk about you know, wolves, it's the same thing. They're not trying to reintroduce wolves to tire lower forty eight. They're saying wolves, uh, you know, the upper Peninsula of Michigan are listed. Where can we put wolves where there's habitat that's available. So you're taking an inventory of animals that exist, habitat that exists or could exist, and and then creating basically a blueprint to make opportunities for more animals to uh you know produced, be produced, and to have that available habit to be occupied. And the important thing about putting more animals on in the in the in the mix and having more habitat, and then you have more distinct populations. And the reason why distinct populations are important is because then you get genetic diversity. If you have an island of inbreads, they're not gonna be very resilient to UM issues that could drive declients that population. Whether it's exactly so you're looking at it through this like matrix of of UM kind of Uh. It's like a safety net, right, More animals a better and more populations, the better diversity is the best UM. So with the grizzly bears, you know pre seventy three you would have had grizzly bears would have been extinct in California, you would have had a lower forty eight population that was I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but you know, to the point they needed to be listed. It was in the hundreds, right, I mean the hundred and thirties. Maybe, yeah, I bet you that's close to it. Um but depleted, you know, I would venture to say, like well over with very little available habitat relative to what was once available pre European settlement. So you have seventy three, yes, a comes about I believe it was seventy five they were listed. Then something interesting happened in seventy eight where there was an amendment made to the Danger Species Act that allowed um distinct population segments to be listed are unlisted. That was the year that gray wolf was added to the ESA. So people are probably thinking, okay, well, with the gray wolf, you can have a distinct population that was listed as endangered in the Upper Peninsula Michigan area, and then you can have gray wolves in Montana that you can hunt and are managed by the states, and they're not listed. Grizzly bears, to my understanding were listed before that amendment was made, so they were listed as a sub, as a species, as a lower forty eight collective. Because I think that becomes that would become a big part of this conversation around those distinct populations and how we managed and so so I guess you would posit that it's not that's the fact. That's the reason why this is a larger issue. It's complicated. There's you know, I have the entire printed out UM decision by We're gonna turn on some elevator museum and have you read the entire It's only forty something pages. It's not bad, it's not no, and it's actually written. There is some legal jargon, but you can if anybody's listening is interested, you can download this on the internet. UM, it's readily available. It's actually not that complicated. There's you'll skim over some of it doesn't make sense because it's illegal, but there is some uh, some well written stuff in there that anybody would should be able to pull apart and understand. Um. Super informative. UM. But yeah, so this the population segment thing is one aspect UM. So without getting too far ahead of ourselves, grizzy bears were dwindled to a point of needing protection. They're listed they established have protection in seventy three and then seventy they were listed as a species in lower forty eight, Alaska's its own thing. And then population there were some population ecosystems that were identified. Um, I'm gonna kind of butcher this, but the main two that that actually have viable populations are the the Continental Divide population, which is like the Bob and Glacier National Park, and then you have the Good or yells On ecosystem. You also have the cell Kirks and the Cascades, and I believe there's six and full, but really the only two that really matter on like a functional level is the Continental or the Continental Divide and the Greater Yellowstone because between those two populations conservatively there's maybe close to two thousand bears. Those other four ecosystems have handfuls, so they're functionally from like a eco from a species preservation standpoint, are valuable but not being considered, you know, to a certain degree, because it really this this determination, this court case was around the dealist you know, the Greater Yellowstone population. So we get to this point where grizzly bears are relegated to Glacier in the Bob and Yellowstone and the states work in a conjunction of the federal agencies, say we're going to put together a recovery plan, an inter agency group of federal, state, local biologists and constituent and we're gonna try to get these bears back to a place of stability. The Bob population and the Glacier populations, I know, like, um, so yeah, the Bob Marshall is just a little south of Glacier National Park. It's this kind of big swath of pretty wild landscapes so known for its remoteness. Yes, um, and so the Greater Yellasun population gets to a point where the of US Fish and Wildlife and the States Idaho, Wyoming in Montana in this case, say we've got this place. This population a pretty healthy number. You know, we're looking at conservatively seven hundred bears and this is two thousand seven. This I think it happened twice. It was like seven. There were efforts to dealist and those efforts were um stifled. I guess that is the word you could say. You're not stife rejected on various grounds. One of the grounds that comes to mind that that's kind of interesting is the judge saying, we'll wait a second. A lot of grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone rely on white bark pine. So what's happening on planet Earth? As we're having in northern Northern Hemisphere ecosystems are having warmer winters, we're having drought in a lot of places, especially in the Inner Mountain West in California for that matter. Um that those dry winters, warm winters and droughts are causing these pines to die. One of the reasons it's because you have a pine beetle that used to be kept in checked by cold winters sub zero that would keep those pine beetles from from proliferating. But now with these warm winters, these pine beetle infestations are killing millions and millions of treats. This happens in other populations too, I know, like moose up north in Minnesota are have been you know, they'll positive that there've been ticks that are alive longer because it's warmer into this summer time. So, yeah, read about that a lot if you really look. Yeah, so these warmer winters are are a big deal and that was something that that uh, the judges used to halt the de listing. Then in time more research was done, it was presented, UM, and that was one of the things that was presented before this court case, the most current one and what the judge and the professionals that were involved in the de listing or the regulatory process determined was, yes, white bark pines are declining throughout their range and we'll talk about the California fires to that's a big thing there. But on the top of grizzly bears, Um, that is true. But we also have found three more throw research that these grizzly bearers are very flexible and in biology called it plastic. They're omnivorous. They can eat anything from a nut to a dead moose, to a berry, to grass to a fish. That's one of the great things about Christy bears. So what's happening is the the biologists said, Okay, well they've actually they're doing well. They've just adapted. So that was kind of checked as addressed. We're moving on in the in this most recent hearing. What the two main things, um, So let's set let's set up some of the history to this, and folks that are UM hopefully listen to this have have some background on this. But there's two essentially two sides, right. There are animal rights activists on one and on the other side there are I mean, I just tell me if I'm wrong, hunters and state game officials from Wyoming on the other. Is that it's about right. Yeah, And i'd hope probably a certain degree. Montana opted to not partake in the YEP. They went on a zero zero tag basis something the guida who had what to one one to my understanding, and well, I mean had twenty two UM. And so you have UM one side of the coin, which is we've expressed as advocates for hunter groups and um biologists state in state game officials for state of Wyoming and Idaho who are saying these populations is created Yelstone populations is at a point where we if if done correctly UM and if done in science and has told us that two is the number based on the current population what we feel UM would be appropriate, and then we can take out a certain number of bears through this tag draw system and it would allow us to and really I think it goes. What you'll see a lot from those folks is um well, like private landowners, ranchers, um, folks that live in those areas complaining about interaction with the grizzly bears right is one of their big ones. And so in the animal rights activistic set up that side like what's that? What are those folks thinking? You know, because there's we can go through. Um well, there's a lot. I'm just trying to think through mind how you approach, but give give the other side of the coin. Yeah, So the other side of the coin is eco tourism, you know, and a lot of people we can't deny go to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons or go horse packing the Bob Marshall and seeing a bear at a safe distance is something that they're after for a photograph or an experience or whatever and their trophy. Um. So there is this conflict of interests where you have a very real, thriving eco tourism industry that none of these states can deny is a huge part of their economy. You also have people who live kind of in the wild urban or not wild urban, but wild kind of rural interface where you have grizzly bears in the backyard. A lot of people are trying to make a living raising livestock or crops or just living there. Um. Then you also have hunters who would like to participate in this very limited you know, this resource that would be very limited, you know, twenty three animals in this case. Um. And then there's probably a certain group of people who feel like this is a threat to their ability to hunt or a threat to their the way they identify with hunting as a as an opportunity that we are privileged to have here. And I think it's it's um, we can take both sides. But and I'd like to I think if you take the hunting side first, right, And we talked about the our model of conservation um successful e s a listing to me. And I think that everyone that you know is aware of the model. Conservation starts with dwinding the population, and like you said, the availability of critical habitat is also dwindling, right, and these distinct populations, assessing that, determining that which was done with with with these bears and then saying, okay, what do we gotta do to get them back to you know, there's all us always in these cases markers like when are when are they healthy again? What number of these animals allows this to be? Allows us to pull them off this list, say this is a healthy population center. Now we've done it right, we did it party, we did it Now the value and success of our model of conservation then says it's a successful es A listing two. Then hunt these animals again because that allows us to dictate our interaction with them in in in a way that's uh scientific works off sound wildlife management practices and works off wildlife biology. And so I think that's what hunters I think gets lost. And I'm not argue. I'm not I want to argue. I want to talk about both sides and then continue forward. But I think what's disappointing to me is that it gets lost. Like the motivation of why someone would shoot a grizzly bear, which is is something I'll probably never do. In fact, unless I change, I won't do I don't have any I'm a hunter. I just don't have any need to do it. I don't have any want to do it. It's not something I would participate in. UM and says like I, as a hunter would challenge the why of those twenty two people that draw those tags or the hundreds of thousands of people that applied. I would challenge their while and legitimately challenge their why. Um. But at the same time, here we are with this model that says, if we do this, it's worked for other species, distinct population centers or not. We can't then, So there's like this ideological or philosophical this works, Let's do it. It's hunting, right, and the person the more personal explanation of why would you then be the person to pull the trigger killed there? Um. So that's where I think the work lines up for me where it gets difficult on the hunting side, because there's there's easy inroads to start shipping away at the why that the personal why. It was easy inroads. Oh, you just want to kill it. It's a big bear, it's charismatic, it's seen as it's a unique in its landscape. People love to come and watch watch it, people love to interact with it, and and hunters do as well. Um. And so I think there's a lot of reasons that goes into those personal wise that I think whether I don't I don't even like the term anti hunters but like animal rights groups, as I guess probably the right right terms, you get into really examining those individuals why and using that those personal wise as a reason to stop the critical use of hunting is a tool to make this process be complete. So you agree with that kind of characterization of the personal why and the the conservation why. Yeah, And I think the one thing I'd add is that both non hunters, anti hunters, animal rights and hunters, I think we all agree that the Endangered Species Act exists to bring animals back from the brink of extinction to the point at which the populations are stable, and law says once populations are stable, states have the right and the legal obligation to manage those wildlife. And yeah, historically hunting has been one of the you know, better ways for them to raise money too, to conserve habitat, to do other things to raise value of these animals. And then also um the actual act of taking some animals away from the population to stable. Right. And for everybody listening, I know a lot of people listening to hunts, but for those who don't hunt, there are wildlife biologists and agencies doing their best job of saying okay, well, if you have bears across this known area, we should hunt this many and this part of the area, and this many and this part of the area. It's not this free for all. There are quite a few checks and balances. And that's why, Yeah, that's why I thought it was interesting, you know, to read those tenets of our model of conservation before we get into this, because you know, it's like, well, okay, how we're elk successful, How we're you know, how were the how is the Mallard duck successful? Like there's a system. There's our American system of conservation funding and then and then there's North American model wildlife conservation. Those two things interact in such a way that those animals were given value and those populations, distinct population centers in in their species entireties were allowed to then be forward and they've done well right. And I don't I don't think anybody. I think it's one of the things that pisces me off in this situation is anybody that characterizes hunters is uncaring assholes. There may be a few, but the greater population, hopefully, if you found in your time hunting is not like that. That's not what's happening. Well, I think that's a function of media. Yeah, right, Like we can all think about the person on the far left who is popped up on our feet or on the headline like they're insane, and we can also probably think of somebody in our own hunting space that has done things you're like, that's crazy, that was a stupid thing to do. But unfortunately the people on the other side of the aisle only see those assholes. And yeah, I mean it's just limit from this point forward in the conversation, will just eliminate the assholes. It makes it way easier. Because there's an assholes hunters. Asshole hunters they just want to shoot a bear for so they can hang it on their wall and do and say that they did it right. And to me, that's not a good enough reason. And there's asshole animal rights activists who just blankly want to save every animal they see and don't think twice and are easily inflamed by the by any harm to any animal, like, let's release all of the wild horses back on the range along, let's do even though they're fair on have brands they're destroying. Yeah no, but I think, but I think that all. You know, if if in this situation, you would eliminate the assholes and the outliers, and the outliers be like, listen, there are some animal rights activists that are so extreme that they almost eliminate themselves from this conversation. Uh, and they're so hunters. There's some hunters they are so extreme that we would eliminate them from this conversation. I wish we could do that with this federal court case. It's ruling. I don't I'd be interested to think to see your opinion and whether it was or not right, whether when we made this decision or when this ruling was made, whether we eliminated all of those folks. Yeah, you know. And my interpretation of it, you know, high level, is that I think the judge delaying his decision. He said, I'm not going to make a decision in court today. I'm going to hear both sides and gonna go home two weeks, fourteen days. Yeah, I'm gonna do my homework. I think he understand, and he says it outright in the first few pages. He says, I realized the emotional baggage and social commitment people have to both sides of the eye all of this topic. Let me stop you when we start talking about this judge, this judge, right right, Let's just go forward thinking that this judge is acting in good faith. Yes, is anybody that listened to this conversation and writes in or comments and says that the judge was a liberal a whole You're gone. I'm deleting you. Get out of my life. I want to live in a world where I believe that all judges are acting in good faith of the law and doing their jobs. So let's just we're not even gonna have that conversation. So I was like, children, No, we're just gonna do this, and we're gonna we're gonna act like this person even if that wasn't the case. I don't know this judge, never met him, and you can look at his decisions and make your own decision. But for this conversation, we're gonna act like he did the best job he could. And then we're also going to eliminate the outliers. Now, let's go because I think we're living now, let's have this conversation. Um, so he and he, so, he points out this is a complex issue. He brings up things that led to a decision that had nothing to do with the people who might go to the park I want to take a photo of one or the people who just want to shoot on the put on their wall. He made a decision based on the legal confines that he works within as a federal judge, and one of the main things that he brings up was the fact that if you, if we're we, as the Greater Public of America and the Danger Species Act, as the most important piece of wildlife legislation, are in the business of returning species from the brink of extinction to a place of stability where they can be managed by states and hunted. If the states determined that's what they should be, that's the way they should be managed. Which in Montana you can pretty much shoot everything you want, except you need a tag for a few big corn swans whatever, but generally you can hunt most things. So what he says is that the determination to dealist the Greater Yellston population was illegal because the species is listed. There's not a distinct population segment like in the wolf situation that can be delisted. Furthermore, what he's saying is that if you delist the Greater yell a stone population, a population that has no proven emigration or connection to the Continental Divide population in Glacier, or to the North Cascades or the Selkirks, or some of these populations in Idaho. You will jeopardize the future of those other populations that would benefit from genetics from their yellow Stun population connectivity. You would you would jeopardize their future. So he's he's not saying that the Wyoming, Idaho Montana inter Agency didn't do a good job and that this population is not doing well. He is saying that by delisting this population, which one is illegal, but two, if you could, would jeopardize those other populations from rebounding populations where you have four, twelve, twenty individuals or zero. And there there are just there are ecosystems identified as grizzly bear habitat that haven't had a grizzly bearing him in a hundred years. So let's unpack that a bit, because there's some things there. Um. The legality of it comes to your earlier point around the entire species being listed. Um, So hopefully everybody understands that we're talking about there. It seems unfortunate that they're these distinct populations weren't listed, you know, separately and able to be manned separately. Do you think that the E. S A in this case, I would say I could get on this train. The E s A in this case didn't do its job very well. I think it's hard. Foresight's hard, right, and saying saying like hey, seventy three, we can go back seventy three and be like, hey, guess what do Yeah two doesn't the pine beetles, Hey guess what, pine beetles. They're gonna they're gonna have a big issue. We're gonna have pine up problems. We can't we can't go back and change that. But but I think where what to me wrapped up is our model of conservation and what we say in the model of conservation around wildlife UM states managing that wildlife and trust and that scientific science and biology specifically science being the tool on which to manage those populations on a state level. I feel like that's a sound way to do it, and it's been proven as a sound way to do it. UM. The E. S A in this situation is because the entire population is listed, goes against that idea. Those two things are now at odds you have the e s A that's saying the entire population goes as listed, so you can't do the thing or the entire species. Yeah, the entire species sorry uh is listed, so you can't do the thing you did for these other populations. Is that accurate in your mind? Like those two things are up against each other. I think from a from a conceptual level, I the the maybe the disconnect or the the inefficiencies. But from a from a from a biology level, the gray wolf and the bald eagle are inherently different than a grizzly bear. Grizzly bear that's reproducing that at age six uh, an adult female might not replace herself in the population until not maybe nine years have passed. So we're talking at an animal that is inherently different than many animals we've ever protected in the past. So these are they're slow reproducing, dispersal, they don't have wings. They're not an elk that's migrating perhaps hundreds of miles, and they're not a wolf that's having litters of three, four or five uh, you know offspring where maybe three or three survive. You know, these are bears or maybe having twins and and maybe one survives and they're not reproducing until there maybe age six. So I think inherently you have some just different biology. Also, I think that's a that's a great point to make, um, and we have to be we have to really say, look, I love this model, right, I love it. It's working well, but your science and what you do says that you can't that umbrella works until it doesn't. Yeah, and it's not. Everything is not a square peg in a square hole. I think that's the problem. I've seen the hunting community around this is like and I and and I've been guilty of it too. But I and when my reading about this prior to this conversation and throughout this process, like, Okay, this is these are different species there are they're in different situations. We can't the s A can't do it, and in our model, wild life conservation and state biologist can't do it. Right. Um, we'll get into later once we get through this conceptual, we'll get into the actual. But let's continue. Well, and it's hard, right because like it's interpretation. So it's we have these things that are pretty find or that are you know, you can put them in a box like the ESA is a thing. With these tenants, the model of wildlife management and with the North American model has tenants. There are there are, you know, aspects that we can't deny exist when we're talking about the management of an animal over space and time space. That's different yellowstones different than glacier glaciers, different the selkirks. There are different realities on the ground, there are different ecosystem aspects. We require it, you know, we have to lean on interpretation. Somebody's saying like, okay, well, grizzly bears are little different than wolves. Grizzly bears are different than elk or or bald eagles. So what we get down to is this reality that yes, the law treats animals differently, like with the wolves and the grizzly bear functionally different. My interpretation of this genetic issue, this lack of connectivity, is that if our goal, if you're a hunter and your goals to hunt grizzly bear one day, give it some time, because if things keep going the way they're going, and this population continues to grow, and federal resources are put into connectivity and creating corridors and creating more stable populations outside of the greater Yellowstone. Then in the not too distant future, we will have more distinct, healthy populations that might merit dealisteine. And at that point, what a success like We've brought these animals back from nothing to six distinct ecosystems where there's populations that have genect diversity or thriving, and that's awesome. And I think we're getting to that point. And for the people who are anti grizzly bear hunting, they should realize that we have this amazing legal precedent that says, once species are back to a place of stability, it's up to the people who live with those animals to decide how they want to be managed. Yeah, because I think there's that the actual part I talk about that I think about it. I would say for the migration and the seating thing, I would would admit to not having a lot of around grizzly bears knowledge of how that exactly works. But when I see a species like a meal deer migrate across the West in a lot of cases, I wonder how you compare those things, right? Because was we hunt because there's state? Um, we're because we're not regulating mule deer across their migration. We're not saying like, hey, follow these guys. You know, Wyoming has their system for how you hum mule deer, how many tags you can draw, where you can draw them, the units that are you can hunt them. So does Idaho. So does other states where these these animals migrate across, and there's migration corridors are critical habitat to protect for these species. So here's an example of a healthy population. I mean, mule dey or healthy I don't know. Let's let's not go that far of I mean, would you consider me like those migratory mule deer to be seed to be seeding populations in other places? Absolutely? I think know a lot of those migrations are summer to winter as opposed to mule deer moving into novel habitat like I'm gonna blaze a new trail and I'm gonna like set up shots over here. Yeah, totally, and and there that is happening as white tails. A great example. You have white tailed like I'm gonna head that way and like, oh ship, I'm the first white tail in this meal there country. And now there's white tail coyotes did that in in droves to sting totally. I think with grizzly bears it's a little different because you don't have three hundred grizzly bears in a line hopping through the stage. You might have one or two. And along the way, those grizzly bears might be young males who have no manners, and they're like, well, ship, there's a cow, there's a chicken, there's a sheep. I'm gonna go rip its head off because I'm a bear and I'm i'm and I'm a teenager and I don't know what the hell I'm doing. And then that causes conflict and that bear gets shot. And the fact of the matter is there were twenty three bears slated to be hunted. There are more than twenty three bears this year that have been killed by other vehicle strikes or wildlife professionals coming in and killing of problem. That was Yeah, that was my actual. That's what I was talking about. Actual. So we need the conceptual is is? I think it's a it's an interesting argument, and conceptually I can see what you're saying. I can see, um, there being a larger threshold for the health of this population, right, I could see not being so shortsighted as to think that conceptually this we've done it. We did it, We got that, um, and has somebody who never really wants the hunt grizzy bear whatever, you know, but respects like our model and how it works. And some people do, and that's there, and that some people do. People I want to hunt grizzle bears, go for it, um. But the actual is is it more interesting to me because you're talking about twenty two dead your twenty three dead grizzly bears or twenty three dead grizzly bears, yeah, or like fifty dead grizzly bears. They are already dead this year, So it's dead grizzly bears or dead grizzly bears. So the other thing around this that that confounds me a bit is around the human interaction with grizzly bears and is hunting. Would hunting decrease the number of those interactions you're talking about where wildlife officials are shooting them or they get hit by cars? Do we know that? Can we say that? I mean, the bears that have bad behavior are probably already dead, you know, and the bears that are dumb are probably already dead. And well, I mean, there are certainly not to say that, like you should go strap a you know, a highd quarter of an elk over you know, behind your your on your bag and go run around the Bob Marshall because you might bump into a bear and that could be scary and dangerous, and that happens to people. But there are already a lot of checks and balances in place that are removing problem bears from the ecosystem. And as more and more bears get pumped out of Yellowstone and the Continental Divide, population, vehicle strikes around the rise, so or the number of people driving cars around these wild basically to hit a bear with your car totally. Somebody hit one, like right in Big Sky Canyon last year, you know. So it's happening, you know. And and and I think the argument to say, like us hunting twenty three bears and like the woods safer, or it's gonna keep the bears from eating the sheep in my yard, it's like no, no, no, more bears than you're gonna hunt this year are being killed. So that's that's where I come to again. It's like more of the wildlife officials that are shooting problem bears, right, probably because I just like it's I have his exhale because it gives me anxiety to think about these things because they're super complicated. But right, it's not like you call in a hunter to shoot the problem bear totally. So I think let's anybody who says, like, hey, if we go hunt, it will limit the interactions with problem bears. That's not all the way true. One thing I don't know, maybe you do, is how they you know, of the twenty two bears, how they choose exactly where in these populations you're gonna take a bear out, And I think there's ways that you can marry those things up together. So the reason around, like the actual reasoning saying if we hunt these twenty three bears, the population will decrease by twenty two and there'll be less problems with interactions with humans. Yeah I'm not I'm not, I'm not there, But where I am is we have to pay a wildlife manager to shoot a problem bear. Hunters are paying to go and so to eliminate that money is um something I just don't agree with. I mean, I think if if we're saying that we have problems with interaction with humans. We have problems with car strikes, we have problems with bears ripping the heads off cattle. All this ship costs money. And if we can shoot twenty two of them, and science and biology say it's not going to limit this population so so much that they can't see to other populations, why wouldn't we do that? Take the money and still and then use that money to address us car strikes and bad bears and pay for better ways for ranchers to interact and and teach them how to do it. Like that's where the line ends for me, But there's prior to getting there. It's it's a really a whole lot of like I can see it, but I also I mean it's complicated. There's no perfect solution, right because, like it was up to me and I could rewrite the law, I would say, keep him, keep him endangered. Get the hunters who want to spend whatever thousands of dollars for a tag and go shoot the problem bearing that guy's ranch that's killed a sheep. You know, maybe we just did it. Why is this judge not doing this? But like that that's to me, Yeah, Like I hate to be I hate to be so presumptive is to say, yeah, hunting is the answer. Yeah, it's not the answer. Our model of conservation says it is the answer, right, it was the answer for wild turkeys and mallard ducks and elk and white tail. These are and these are varying populations across different landscapes, with different histories and different interactions with humans, and they've all been fine being managed on a state basis by science in this model. So I trust that enough to say, like, let me, I'll fall back on that. I trust that enough to say that. So I think that's maybe why I'm always like, let's let's let's kill the bears. I guess let's do it. Well, it's hard because all those animals are inherently so different than grizzly bears. They're either geese that you agree though, that they're inherently different than each other, absolutely, But I think that some of the key differences are that they reproduce quickly, they are far ranging, they can fly, or they have these migrations. They aren't killing you, and they're generally not on T shirts and sell gift shops. Yeah you know elk, yes, but they don't kill you and there's a lot of them, there's not seven. But I think that sets it up well. It's like, yeah, look there's this unique animal, right that is not unique in the fact that we drove, we killed a ship ton of them, and now there were a few, because that happened with the other species we just named. So in that, in this way, it's not unique. It is unique in a lot of other ways. It's megafauna, super charismatic. They show up and you were gonna wear a grizzly bear was. They show up, they show up in your kids crib, they show up on TV. Like I truly do believe that that ends up being the heart of this anyways, right, because let's live in Let's say we live in a world that there there are no anti hunters and there are no animal rights groups to argue this and to put this in front of the judge. Texas, Yes, Texas, put up offense around, put the fence up around. The grizzly bears ain't going anywhere. They'll they'll grow, Yeah, they'll they'll be huge. There'll be thousands of them. Those just benefense. But let's say we live in that world where there isn't any anti hunters and nobody, nobody challenged the way this went down. Um okay, and that in that world, I not not having the knowledge of you know, grizzly bear gestation and the way they interact with national worth that you do. And that's why I wanted to have you on because I don't have that knowledge, and and I think most hunters don't, almost all of them. If anna hunters didn't exist and this was never challenged, and this went forward, and these twenty two folks, unencumbered went out and shot twenty two bears. I think if the next year you went back and you said did so, if you were looking at a few things that we just talked about, did problem bears the interactions with humans and problem bears decrease, I would guess no. Right, so that that would be my guest, just because the random nature of killing an animal and another animal another area doing something we don't like. No, would that population of bears, the Yellowstone Great yellostone population of bears be unable to to see those other populations of bears the other four or five that you mentioned, there are four critical ones that you mentioned, I would say yes, they will still be able to do their job in allowing the same to grow. Um, So in the end, both sides are a little bit wrong. Like when I think in the end it would work and still not do in this one case, still not do any real damage to the future grizzly bears. And I think you know in the court decision, there's nothing about hunting twenty three bears. Yeah, I know, it's about the law, the connectivity, the genetics. Uh have you said you you're saying you read it a few times, Like, what's you know? Give us to the crib notes on this this guy, I mean basically what he's saying. It's like it's complicated. I realized, appreciate I'm saying that it's emotional. Guys, this is easy. Yeah, I'll tell you what to do the things with won in your shirts, let them live well in I'm sure if you had to be with this guy, he would be like, that was a challenging decision because there are there are rights on both sides of the there are truths on both sides. Yeah, but he made his decision based on the law that exists, and and if he didn't make this decision, he would have not been doing the law of justice. Or he would have had to change the law, which gets into a scary place where we say, oh, we really give a shit about this issue. Let's change a holistic law that manages wildlife at large. Yeah, I mean I think in I don't have this all in my head, but I think. And then if you talk to like the guys that Sportsman Alliance or or or pro hunter advocate groups, you would find that around this e s a thing. They lose a lot. They lose a lot because the law is really kind of in this way, even in like in semantics, really not on their side in a lot of these cases. Um, then they might tell me I'm wrong, but I'd like in just anecdotally having been trying to get educated about wolves and bears, and in some of these situations, I feel like they lose a lot just based on the legal precedents. Well, and it's hard right, like sage grouse, it's a hard thing. People run cattle. People don't want critical habitat on their backyard. I know. I've done work in sane just country with people deeply invested in that research who no of ranchers. Obviously it is not indicative of the whole, but like when they were on the table to be listed, ranchers destroyed the lex on their property because they didn't want critical habits on their land. It's a real thing. There's more people every year on earth trying to make a living, and there are fewer animals with an opportunity to make a living. And I think that trend. Gosh, that's a good way to put it, man, because every time, I mean, that's Republican versus Democrat right now in this issue, right it is. I mean it's it's jobs versus environment and not making more environment. No, we can make more jobs. And that's what I think I always come back to. I think, yeah, it's there's some logical fallacy in the jobs. You know, we we need to attract because we need jobs. We need a healthy consistants, healthy have a healthy country. Um. I think Governor meat and Waowings and what he said about sage Grouse said it, well, in that particular state, they need healthy habitats. So you can have a healthy state economically, right, and so any hindrance of that bye by ridding yourself of that critical habitat and that and that wildlife in exchange for extraction or cattle ranching or whatever you might be doing is short sighted from an economic standpoint um, which is which has been the argument a lot. Well, the hard thing about it is that it boils down to people trying to support their families, you know, and we can assume that most people are trying their best and ecosystems and wildlife who don't vote yeah or or and don't need cash to pay their mortgage. Oh, it's it's it's. This is one of those situations where and there's a few of them in politics or in life, where it's human nature versus human nature. Human nature is to thrive and survive and feed your family and and be and in the game of life succeed. And if you have identified this one way to succeed, and that's a being, there's an impediment that is a bird or a bear, or your human nature says to rid yourself of that impediment, so then you can't succeed. And I get that all the way, but I feel like also somewhere in our human nature is the ability to have empathy for other living beings. And if we lose that empathy, we become sociopathic assholes. And rather not do that and we delete your comments. We delete your comments. I love judges, all of or impartial um. But but I think that empathy is also part of human nature. So your human nature should allow you to be empathetic for animals and allow you to understand their plight because, like you said, they can't speak for themselves. What human nature also says, survival is key. So what do we do? You tell me, Charles, I got nothing. I mean, it's so hard because I get it, like more than anything. I want to move into my new house, take care of my wife and raise a family. Yeah, I get that. Now. If there was now let's say there's if there was a you know, situation where having stage dress on your land impeded your like cost you money to where you had to go get a night job and didn't see get your kid and your kids get depressed because you were never around. But there were ship tons of stage grouse on the ten ten acres. You have to make some decisions there. I mean. A story that comes to mind is my friend Chris Boys. He's doing the in the Okavongo Dell, the research project for Nagio. It's the wildest watershed left in Africa. He came across a bunch of elephant poachers recently, these guys who have nothing. When poachers kill elephants, they usually cut their head off and bury it, and then they basically wait. They'll sit there at camp, bury the body or the head, and wait for the head to decompose the point where they can pull the ivory out. So my friend Chris, who's a South African explorer, he's an awesome guy. He comes up on these guys guns scared. They got a few elephant heads in the ground. He's like, that's crazy. He talks these guys, they say, I can kill one elephant. That I realized is a bad thing. I realized it's illegal and makes me sad. I grew up here, born here watching elephants. I respect them. I also have no money. I have a family to feed. I cut this thing's head off because I need to feed my family. That's the reality. And he's like, I can't argue with that. It's shitty. It's sad that guy is desperate that elephants dead there in decline. But it's real, ship, you know, And I think you can't blame the guy necessarily who might have the stage grouse in this yard. Who does something that's maybe unethical, but that's real stuff. And I think with the grizzly bear, people who lose livestock even though there are funds available that give money to replace those animals, Like, that's a real thing and you feel like your life or your lifestyle is threatened. However, it also is just a complicated pr narrative where that guy is getting sued by a Portland lawyer on behalf of Center for Biological Diversity. That looks bad. He doesn't live there, he doesn't have a stage grouse or grizzly or wolves in his backyard. But the fact the matter is one that guy on the ranch is probably not gonna get the tag shoot the grizzly bear. Yeah, that's that's that's the thing. Like I always cater remove that from the hunting conversation. Right again, all this stuff is just my opinion. It's not very educated. I read a lot and I try my best as well, I'll tell you, but I just almost always eliminate from the conversation because I don't I truly don't believe unless unless somebody from the State Wyomi would come on and say we are we are targeting problem bears in areas around suburban and urban you know, in in the case of where where people live where targeting areas problem bears, when people live in these twenty two tags are going to that, and then you're not as a hunter, You're like, well, why am I going? Right? That doesn't give me all the things hunting gives me. Now, I'm just just paying to be shooting, paying to shoot a past and so like that to me, if I'm looking at as a non grizzly bear hunter, I've killed a lot of bears, So I could say I wouldn't go in that hunt. I wouldn't pay to go in that hunt. I would not pay to go and eliminate that pest and call it hunting. Well, it's unique in that in this case we're talking about the deal listing of a potential game animal that threats people, where you, as the hunter, are not saying I'm using my bullet, arrow or shotgun two manage a population. You're saying I'm going to maybe you make the wood safer. There's a Disknecht there, Yeah, No, there definitely is. And I think you could argue that a well managed population is is less apt to have problem animals, you know, doing what they're doing. If there's if there's less bears, less competition for the things they need to survive, food and all those types of things you have less, it would be a less problematic situation. Now. You could say that, but I would need you to prove that to me, because it seems right. It seems like, hey, if we have seven bears, if we have and they're all competing for you know, a relatively they're not relatively small, but but in an area for for food and for all the things they need to survive, that shrapnel from that competition ends up being what we're talking about. Right. If it's spill over, it's spillover. Now, if there's less animals, that be less spillover, right, I could get with that. I just but I just don't think twenty two in this situation is enough. I don't. And then again I don't. Haven't. I'm not a wildife followed it, so I don't know. But that's that would be my just regular dude thoughts on. Yeah, well, and it's you know, and the corollary to that is like the bison in Yellstone. Every year, the Park Service kills hundreds of every winter they kill hundreds of bison because bison, like elk, carry brucellisis can carry brucellosis which can cause cattle to abort cats. That's a real thing. Yelisa National Park as an oversupply of bison, the excess are killed. Ye. Also in National Park has an excess of grizzly bears, the bad ones are killed. You know, I mean it's it's would you would you say um again, like going back to like why hunting for me? What what hunting ends up being? It's like healthy ecosystems and and that kind of thing. Would you say that that's we can define those interactions. You're just talking about the killing of an animal for something other than um, you know, hunting purposes, virtuous hunting purposes, or however we'll put that term is unhealthy interactions with wildlife. That's like an unhealthy killing it with a car, killing it with a with a gun because it carries a certain type of disease, killing it with a gun because it's threatening someone's life. For someone's livelihood is like the example of human wildlife interaction that is unhealthy. Yeah, but I mean we live in the anthropscene, like the epic we live in is the one defined by humanity. So it's not like we're making these decisions based on science alone necessarily. Well yeah, but like the only the only opportunity, the only option we have is to determine, like what's an unhealthy interaction, what's a healthy one, and promote the healthy one, right, yeah, And but sometimes a healthy one conflicts with with society. I mean a great example in the segue into the California fire situation, there are a hundred and twenty nine million dead trees in California. Many of them are dead because of drought that's exacerbated by warming winters. Also pine beetles, same thing in Montana. Californians don't want to see, you know, people coming in and cutting down dead trees and building walking roads. People who live in California and elsewhere we had fire this summer. It was shitty. You don't want your backyard forest being burned as a prescribed burn because you don't want to have your kids breathing in the air. Those are real things. The results of those realities, or that you have this excess timber that's dead that turns our force into potential bonfire, which is what happening now, and it's freaking horrible hundreds, you know, And that's a real thing. It's like you're telling people, hey, we're gonna let your back out in fire this summer. It's gonna help you out in ten years. Or we understand that California is environmentally a very environmentally progressive in friendly state, we need to build a bunch of logging roads through this national force and cut down a ship ton of trees to save. And that's that's I think ends up what ends up happening around the more pragmatic approach of someone that's involved with wildlife, you know, like on the ground um decision making to say, hey, here's I love the environment, but I don't love it so much. I'm not gonna love it to death, right, which is what you're talking. Wow, So you talk about a pragmatic love, which is I think what most hunters hold and what most health fishermen hold and most outdoorsmen hold, which is the healthiest type of love, and an unhealthy type of love, which is love something without any context of how to really do it justice. Well, in my argument, my counter that would be you have the far left that are like I need this many grizzly barras because I want to get photos of them. But a lot of hunters, I bet you aren't super verse in genetics, you know, And that's I would say, are neither. Neither of those two folks are versed in genetics, right, neither. But I would say, like, those are probably two gaps that lead to opinions that are maybe uninformed to a certain degree. And then I'm not very willing to call out hunters right for what I believe is a deficiency and knowledge and opinion like that. I get super frustrated with certain groups in our world that fit that start their communication with their constituency of hunters by telling them hunting is always the always a solution, Hunting is always right, Hunting is the best thing to do always. Bullshit, bullshit, No, I'm sorry, not happening, Not happening. Um It's it would be just as well to say, like, here's the history of why this is good. Here's what's happened in the past, why our monologue conservation works, Here's why we here's why we is. The Rocky Mountain Foundation of Ducks Unlimited protect nesting grounds and and critical habitat for elk, and these are the things, these are why we do these things now, that should inform the way we think about grizzly bears. But that isn't We can't just blindly walk up to that and say hunt them, right, I can't do it. Well, it's hard because in the nineteen of any three, when a lot of these precedents sending setting legal measures were enacted into law, our environments weren't changing like they are today. So it's hard to say we have the numbers where we want them to be today, but we don't know what's going to happen to the rest of the pine trees. We don't know what's gonna happen to the snowpack. We don't know what's going to happen to you know, white deal white tailed deer populations. You know those girzly bears that you see pine nuts are now eating more meat. There's more hunters and people in the woods than ever, right for conflict, more cars than ever, more development than ever. So it's like, those are things that I think lead me to like I don't freaking know, Like I don't know what the answer is. It's yeah, I mean really damn complicated it's me, would you like, is I think you get to a point where, like, is your opinion that the least amount of bears killed possible is the right thing to do. My it's a hard answer for the short term, I know. Yeah, I know. It's just saying like, once, okay, let's let's say, let's let's get out, get off the table. Um, what might happen in the future. You know, for like the current that current population, um, there's seven hundred of them. The least number of those things killed, the better for the next three years, so we can see how that affects these other populations. Yeah, I mean I think that don't just say well, you know what, Okay, this is but I don't know. I don't. I will start just saying don't I do not disagree. No, And and I'm certainly they're like, my goal is to have grizzly bears off the es A managed by the States, because that means we succeeded. Conservation was a success. Yeah, So that yeah, that's I think we like, we get in a lot of these conversations where it's like I believe totally different. Again, I think most people that care about wildlife feel the same way. I feel exactly the same way. Anti hunters and hunters feel the same way. They're just really crappy. They're really crappy at getting like communicating or just remembering that Like you might speak to different languages, but you're like end results the same, Yes, you know and not and and listen because I'm not somebody who wants to run out and crack a grizzly bear. Um. I would say like if if, if this is if somebody presenting me a solution said like, just give me, give me five years, and you could, you know, scientifically, say here's here's how grizzly bears breed, how they grow, how they travel, how critical populations can seed other populations, and if you give me six years as a scientist an ecologist, six years, I can come and report back and tell you that that worked, like which it sounds like could be done, right. I would be like, cool, great, let's give it a shot. But if you fail, we're coming in with our guns. But like something like that would probably be you know, because it gets the legal thing starts to just get frustrating. Well, I think that's kind of what he says here. He's like, here's some things like here's your homework. You know, this is what I this is the these are the flaws that I found from a from illegal and also uh conceptual place address that and let's get these things that this species to a place of stability, then the states can do what they want. Well if somebody can, like, please everybody agree on stability, because I think that's the thing here now, because you get into this, like let's make him stable, and anti hunters and rights folks will say, we'll always move the goalpost, right, I'm gonna just keep moving the goalpost back, back, back back, and you're never gonna get there. Ha ha ha. But history would say the opposite, we can hunt wolves. Yeah, well ten years ago. But would you agree that that's that's a tactic, right, because because any any uh animal rights person with where AsSalt that's got a brain is going to say, like, man, I can I'm not really gonna be able to argue very much with that model of conservation. Right, I'm gonna ail there, but I still don't want him to kill him. Well, I think those I think that's the left that won't ever like invite us to dinner, you know. So it's like but I know that they're out there, and I know the other sides out there, and they're never That's why I like, I hope people listening to this can gain the perspective that, like, I think there is a faction on on the animal right side that wants to continue to move the goal posts. I'm sure there is. It's it's evident, and I would imagine there's a faction in the hunting community that wants to move the goal post closer. I disagree with both. I mean it's to kill them all or save mo mentality. I disagree with both right, and I disagree with that the disingenuous like connection between that person who who on the animal right side wants to move the goal post connecting themselves with tourism, and I disagree with the person on the other side who's a hunter connecting themselves to the rancher. Sorry, you don't get to play right. I just That's part of what I hope people can take away from this conversation is like, don't let somebody can that that has this staunch, rigid idealism like idealistic view on one side or the other connect use use a real world problem to convince you that they're right. No, man, no, it's it's way more complicated than that. And I think that's the key. This is a freaking complicated issue. This is like really smart people who spend way more time thinking about this than you and me. I would say, like, this is freaking complicated, and we're gonna do our best, and we're gonna try to to create a blueprint moving forward that will be uh judicious and and as fair as possible. But like I guarantee you, this judge wasn't like this is easy. Let's like, let me just tell you what's up. That's my favorite that's my favorite part about society today. That's like, if something happens that you disagree with, the person who made that decision that you discroe with immediately is some sort of evil bought Like oh, it's that dark money must have bought that because anal rights guys must have paid that judge off. Maybe they did. Maybe you're right, but I'm not. I'm not interested in that conversation because if that happened, hopefully somebody finds it, they arrest that fucker and put him in jail. Otherwise, otherwise, let's just have the conversation because we can't. I'm not going to start the conversation with some crazy conspiracy theory like that. And and I think what I trust in your readings of that is that that that decisions a person who looked at the law, which is his job and his determination, was the way this law is written, this isn't the right thing to do. And I think, at the end of the day, and if learn anything from interm elections is the public is hungry for people who straddle the middle and who are flexible and the like. I had a vegan dinner yesterday, but I shouted during my dough. I shot it, tearing my daddy. I shot a deer in my yard it last night. That was kind of my weak story, you know. But that's I'm hungry for that. I am hungry for that in my daily life. And and I think I'm sure there's a lot of people that are hungry for that too, that are hungry for that type of world where, um, it's not easy because it's super easy to be rigid because then you don't have to think just a reaction. You don't have to if if everything as a hunter, if all I was doing was looking for validation for my opinions. Life would be easy because I would know who to hate, I would know who to like, I would know who to have dinner with, I would know who to keep out of my yard. It just makes life easier. And and I think at some level, I I care about the hunting community. I care about humanity, but I don't feel like I can do much with that hunting community. I think we can work with here and we can say, Look, I care about you. I don't want you to be that. I don't want you to be so rigid that you can't see. I don't want you to be so so idealistic, you know, or idealist not the right word, but so rigid that you're blind as I guess what I would say, Well, not to be nerdy. But there's a theory of island biogeography. So if you think about the condaday, if you think about your little island out in the middle of the ocean, the number the probability that new species will show up is small the further from the mainland you are on the smaller island. So if you're a person and you have your little island with your little tribe of people who are all saying the same thing. I hate all of you. I love all of you. You're not getting a lot of new information because you're way the hell out in the middle of the ocean. You're on a small island. The bigger the island and the closer yard the to the mainland, the more other species will show up, and you're gonna have a more diverse suite of perspectives of an ecosystem. And I think it's important to remember that that it's all about saying I'm not going to cast myself out into the abyss until everybody go fund themselves if they're not speaking my language. But instead it's like, hey, coming to the table, let's have a conversation. Maybe I'll change my mind. And I think that's the mindset that makes progress and makes things like this grizzly berry issue all the more palatable because you realize it's these are people trying their best, trying to manage an animal that is scary and lovable. Well, And I think I think that's why UM, as a journalism uh trying to be a student of journalism. I try, and I was at some point they gave me a piece of paper. Um. I think that's why true journalism. Honest, true, unimpeded information is being suppressed in our world because that's dangerous, right, it's dangerous. You can't manipulate people if they're educated. You can't. And the one thing that scared me around the midterm elections was the amount of people that I heard, even whether I agree with him or not, I think public Lands is a huge you know, I love public Lands. We talked about that in the beginning of this, but public Lands is it's becoming something that people just say, and that's just dangerous just because I agree with it. Let's say I didn't agree with it, I would be mortified that everybody was just parting the same thing. And so I feel the midterm elections scared me because of the amount of people I saw that were just rolling out the campaign at jargon and comments on things that I saw. It's like, boys, you ought not to want to be a sheep. You should strive to be more right, you know, and for the health of the hunting community, we should, you know, strive to be a little bit more and to be it's good to be provocative, but from a place of curiosity, you know, and I think, you know, one of the things it's hard for me not to, you know, be thinking about my friends and family back in California. Um, but it's also hard to ignore something that Trump was saying the other day where he's like, this is a state issue. When the governor asked for federal support, he said no, because you're not managing your force. Well, the force in California owned by the federal government, owned by private companies or private individuals, three owned by the state. So he's putting that out there into the world, polarizing people. People who aren't going to go and do their homework and figure out the distribution of ownership are gonna be like, oh, well, they asked for it. I hate when needed Trump goes into the conversation because he is the lead asshole. He is what we're just talking about. I was thinking that you said it. I don't care. I don't care if you listen, If you're out there and you support Donald Trumping, you don't think he's an asshole? Boy, what, I don't know what you're reading, because, yeah, it's about to be Thanksgiving pretty soon. If somebody that acted like Donald Trump does on Twitter was at your Thanksgiving, you would want to kick them out. Immediately, and and and so I hate what you hate what I hate When he whether you agree with what he was saying or not, you'd be like, why is this guy at the table spouting offer and just talking ship? That's not true, that's not true, and it's really a pity dated and and I can't bring facts to the table. Maybe one thing if he was off by a few percentage, but California owns three percent of their forests, and the fact that there's one million dead trees is not we can we can all. It's it's so like we just elected the lead person of what you like, the person we're just talking about, like the person like really, let's let's be a radical centrist, let's really think through issues, let's really be you know, have have uh sound processes around how we come to our opinions. Here's a person who we elected to run our country, who got elected in part because he doesn't do that or give a ship or give right. I can't I hate even to talk about it, but but I think what what he's saying. He's not saying something that's totally inflammatory. Manage your forest, manage your forest. But well, and that's if but if that state voted for him, they'd be flying in the helicopters. I think like if that wasn't you know, if they had didn't have a democratic they have a democratic governor in California. I really think if that was a Republican governor asking, he wouldn't have got he would have got a different answer. But it's just it's it's horrible when in this case, people and ecosystems are caught in the polarized crossfire of humanity and in the case the grizzly bear, these are air is just trying to be freaking bears. You burning it up there out there, just they're burning it up. Yeah, they're just being fund Is that right? Is that how you use that term? Yes, that would be that the right episode. Yeah, that would actually mean they're reproducing or their potential for countity is is how many offspring you're able to have? Like ron Berg, anyway you win in Rome, Like, I don't know what it means. I'm not there yet. I'll get there. It's crazy because like in this case, the grizzly bears are in this case, people and ecosystems are just caught in between our inability to find common ground or be radical centrists, you know, and instead it's like fuck you, fuck you and nothing really gets done and then get Yeah, when people are dying, we should do the right thing always like hundreds, maybe up to a thousand. Yeah, I mean it's it's it's unbelievable. And then just so people know that, you know, this is your your home statement. You know. I worked with somebody from Paradise, the guy used to dunk duck hunt with. I haven't talked to him, um hopefully. I don't think he lives, Aren Moore, But yeah, I mean it's it's I can't imagine what was happening in my area of the world. I mean, it is, it's terrible. I mean, my dad has respiratory issues because of the smoke, and he's talked to the last night. He's sitting in front of the air filter with all the doors and windows shut in a room, you know. I mean it's crazy. Yeah, I mean it just goes back to the fact that we should all strive for health, Like do you healthy ecosystems? Do you like both sides anybody, whatever side you fall on that you read a love and that forest death or want to cut it up? You know, like you should act with the health of that ecosystem always in mind. If you if you did, you wouldn't be breathed in smoke, right in. A healthy ecosystem affords a healthy society, and I think people now unfortunately being reminded of that through horrible things, these hurricanes and these fires, and it means something when like your world is destroyed, you know, And I think people will in the Southeast will continue to say, like, ship, whatever we want to call it, hurricanes are getting worse, waters rising, Let's figure out how we can address that, whatever you want to call it. Our forests are going up in flames, and let's figure out how to address that. Because if you're because there's just this like level of having an opinion about something you very much know nothing about, right like in the example of even me, like I've seen the California fires on TV, but I've never experienced that. I don't know what it feels like to have to leave your home. People that have people that are well off that that happens to you can go get a hotel, hang out, drink some sparkling water. We're all good. It was fun, maybe like a vacation. People that aren't well off that are scraping to get by they have to evacuate, are fucked right, They're just not that they can't do what um other folks can do. So when you're displaced by a natural disaster, man, there's no there's no there's nothing to rip away your safety. All the all the work we do to build this, to isolate ourselves, to insulate ourselves from the real world, there's nothing like a natural disaster to rip that from you. Nothing like it. Yeah, And I think it boils down to a lot of it, this idea that we can be bombarded with information that is polarized or just straight up bullshit. And I think about social media just for an extent, and the people who the people who will chime in and say things as though they're an expert and get away with it. This is crazy. I mean, I think about the environment. I went to school for ten years at UC Berkeley studying ecology. That was my profession. Like a mechanic goes and becomes a professional fixing cars, or you fly planes, and that's what you do. There isn't a group of people on the internet telling people how to fly planes. There isn't a group of people who have never climbed l caps saying, oh, ship, this is how I did it. I wouldn't do it that way. But there is an incredibly loud group of people who have zero ecological, environmental scientific background spouting off about ship they don't get. But that becomes gospel in a lot of places and a lot of communities, and it's crazy. I get it. You can look out the way and say force on fire, ships messed up. But to start pointing fingers and being like this is why. It's like I'm not going to napple out of parts and be like you don't know how to fucking put a tire on? I do this way. But for some reason or know, the environment is this like free for all where anybody can be an expert overnight and talk about whatever they want to talk about, over fishing, wildlife management, rising seas, forced, you know, ecology. It's my brother. When we were moving up here, my brother and I and my dad were driving through North Texas, rolling through in a U haul and um, we're driving through an area where there's windmills, I mean probably a thousand of them within site of the highway. When I see that, when I saw that, I'm like somebody who like loves while places, like appreciates landscapes. Like my first reaction was like, God, that sucks. And my brother, who you know, like really cares about the environment and is really hyped up about that like me, they got pissed at me. And the conversation we had around it was very much like windmills are always good. Yes, He's like gas and oil drilling is always bad. Windmills are helped as a solution. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I think I get that. I can get on more with that, like just as yes, my the pragmatic nature of like the way I see that, I'm like, yeah, but they had the I've seen those big windmill propellers going down the highway on on eighteen wheelers. I've seen it. I used to live in the corridor and in Illinois where they ran them stuff Like I've seen that, and I know that they haven't cut roads to get in there and put those things up, and I know they kill a lot of birds, and I know like it. And my I guess my point was like it's complicated. So I'm not saying that I know. I'm just saying I know it's complicated. I mean it's like domestic oil versus international. Do you want the Niger River Delta that lightening on fire because illegal oil is such a big part of their economy, Or do you want oil that's offshore that could come up, you know, like the Horizon oil spill. Where it's in our backyards. Maybe we have more regulation and higher standards of of practice, but it's like it's freaking complicated. You know. Maybe it makes our economy uh stronger and less reliant on others, but it's in our backyards. You know, I don't know if there's a if there's a solution, Well, doesn't it get scary when I think it gets really scary when the course correction doesn't happen Because yeah, fires, hurricanes, We start to identify really bad things that are happening right and happening more frequently and more intensely. But what what scares me not that they happen, because disasters have happened through time, and humanity has marched on in our environments, have have thrived and in a lot of ways. But what scares me is that we can't course correct right like right now, we're not like would you agree we're not course correcting. Is it a yearly in California? These fires are happening getting worse. Well, so we've there was six years of historic drought. Top ten droughts took place in the two thousands ever on record. So that collection of droughts I think predisposed California to the extreme fires it's experiencing now. Also a legacy of fire suppression. You know Smokey the Bear, that was one of the worst things we ever did for forests in the Inner Mountain West, in the Mediterranean coastal California environment. What if we have a we do a film about fire. I mean, I think it. Fire is one of the most misunderstood aspects of our planet. If you read early journals of folks who explored California and horseback, they described the stare Nevada as a park like setting, those words because you could ride a horse at a gallop through the foothills or the mountains and not hit a tree. Because fire exists across the spectrum of intensity and frequency, and fires are returning to these patches of earth every one to three years, burning frequently, but low intensity, thinning the forests, creating that park like setting where you had some understory, but a lot of mature trees with some young ones where it didn't burn, and you would have had this patchwork. Now after you know the brilliance of the smoky the bear, you know motto came out and fire suppression became this huge thing that was necessary in some respects because people were moving into these wild interfaces. You're left with forests like we have up here at our local reservoir, where you literally have deadfall that you can't walk through because it hasn't been able to burn in ten twenty years. And when you have millions and millions of trees that are dead and you have warming winters, and I asked the dumb question real quick, why why doesn't it burn? Why can't it burn? We suppress it when a fire is in a lot of place except wilderness areas. If a fire starts, most fires are not started by lightning. Most fires started by people. They are put out to save property, in life or air quality. So unfortunately it's society saying protect me first that compounded over decades and decades has been like has led to the situation where we basically are surrounded by tinder boxes and that can't fire that cigarette or that you know, those sparks from that toe chain that weren't wasn't wrapped up properly. Doesn't just light a little one acre fire. These fires are hundreds of thousands of acres. I mean, California has had records setting fires like multiple in the last five years, and it's not you know, I was reading today that the our agency efforts to suppress or to control that fuel load, they've removed eight over eight hundred thousand trees. There's a million dead trees. So we've removed eight hundred thousands so far, and there's more trees are gonna be dying because right now it's like tropical in California. I'm gonna talk to my friend yesterday and Taho and he says, it's cold Levins. We didn't had to look a ring, so it's you know, I think California in a lot of Western states are gonna be forced to say, hey, I realized the public might not want us to log our forests and put fire, um you know, uh, logging roads through there or use prescribed prescribed fire, but we're gonna have to do that if we want to save people in property in the future. You know, And I mean I was in Nevada shooting the film on the Feral Horse issue this summer, and there's a five hundred thousand acre fire that burned through northern Nevada like insane. Twenty years ago fire big fires were ten thousand acres, twenty thousand acres. Yeah, man, that's I was trying to think, like what a good analogy would be for what's happening there. But I feel like it would fall short. I feel like anything you'd say would fall short of. It's just like we don't understand. It's like we we bought a house, we build a house. We don't understand how to take care of the land right especially now, because it's not we've we've we've pushed our environment past this threshold of normalcy where we can say in the past, things have happened this way, so we should prepare for that. Things that are happening or everybody's looking at the situation and holy shit, this is not even within the realm of possibly that we knew existed. This is I mean that fire that burned in Malibu. If you read the interviews of the firefighters, they're saying the Wolsey fire they're saying that fire can't even be managed, like water doesn't do anything that fire that fires creatings on weather systems. I mean, that's what's happening. These are these are fires that are that are creating their own life that doesn't exist in a textbook that says, let's teach you about fire ecology. These are like outliers to the tenth degree. We can't if the guy we're paying to have knowledge of how to stop something like well, listen, like that doesn't exist in books. Yeah, and I think it's hard too. It's like, you know, back to wild life, we're dealing with situations where it's like, okay, you have a bear, you have people populations increasing at incredible rates. Never you know, we're we're doing things to the environment, drawing on the environment in ways that have never been done before. So you can't. You kind of got to hand it to these people who are managers who are tasked with interpreting ship that's like totally foreign, and we the public like you should do better, and they're like, I don't even know what's like, I don't even know what this is anymore. It's talking about. But but there's so many throughout human history there. I always think about it this way. There are things we do we don't do now that if you win thirty years into the past, they would laugh at you said they don't do that. There's there's knowledge we've acquired that's changed our habits so much. That's something that your parents might have done you would laugh at today, you'd be like, how foolish smoke and while pregnant, what do you what like our knowledge base in our in our our species, our humanity changes so much. What type now? It's rapid with technology and what we can learn and what we can do. It's like, what are we It's like, we should know that we're ill equipped. We should know that we're ill equipped, because all you gotta do is look a few years back in the in the past and be like, well, we were ill equipped back then. You think right now, we gotta figure it out. So there's things we're doing right now, and fire suppression seems like it's one of them that years from now we'll look back and be like, boy, we were children when it comes to knowledge about these issues, you know, and I think it speaks to this like broader environmental we've been of of awareness and carrying and reducing impact. And you said everywhere, whether it's at Walmart or Target, or somebody's Instagram claiming there an environmentalist, or even our daily lives, like we probably wake up to a certain degree and say, like, I'm not gonna I'm gonna try to do the best I can to reduce my impact. And one thing that I talked about the other day, you know I made a post about on my Instagram, talked about my wife, is you know, you'll get shipped for shooting a deer, but you won't get shipped for buying that new coat. If we're talking about like net impact, everybody in America should go shoot a white tail deer because they're doing irreversible harms a lot of ecosystems. They're incredibly abundant at zero risk of disappearing in a lot of place and and I would say the entire country. Yet nobody thinks twice if you go to Target and buy a bunch of stuff you probably don't need, which is destroying ecosystems or having this tremendous negative impact. We're very like I think we're just we're children in a lot of ways, like are and I was I always try to look at things like, hey, twenty years from now, what are we going to look back at and say, what the hell was happening over there? Right? You know? For now, I think it's like, prescription drugs is probably one of them. That's fast food is probably one of them. Twenty years from now that hopefully we'll be like, whoa boy, we were killing our folks with that, right, And in wildlife and hunting realms, there's there's you know, there's things we're doing right now twenty year from now we're gonna look back at and be like, wow, boy, gladly course corrected that one. But that's that's why I come back to course correction, because because then I think, okay, well, we're always going to be stupid now, like now, we're always stupid. But if we can if we can continue as as a species to correct the things we're doing now we shouldn't be, then we'll always at least be somewhat Okay. There's some irreparable things that we can't change, but the environment seems like that the rare occurrence where it is evident that the thing we're doing right now isn't right. You know, when that person was pregnant and smoking cigarettes. It took some time for babies to be born and for the cause and effect to happen. We are seeing the cause and effect in front of our faces. We don't have to study those fires. They're right there, like, okay, well there they are. Let's just keep doing what we're doing, and it will light on fire next year and eighty more people will die, thousands more people will die, and we'll just keep keep on going. Well, and I think you know one of the things, it's Alda Leopold, who we've talked about, the author of the Sand County Almanac. He said something in along the lines of the trouble with an environmental education, as you live alone in a world of wounds. And yes, that's true, and it's easy to get hung up on like the complexities or the things we could be doing better, or the lack of force that we have. But we also live in a time where information is now have been more readily available, where communication is is you know, broaching topics that are uncomfortable, and people are thinking outside of the box. You know, if you look at our midterm elections, a lot of first happened. There are incredible gains in the environmental kind of whatever you wanna call it movement. I mean the American Prayer Reserve. I was just learning about that. It's the biggest contiguous piece of protected short grass perry in the country. It's up near the Breakes and and here in Montana. I mean, amazing steps are being taken to address noise pollution in the ocean, marine debris in the ocean, the way that we manage wildlife here in North America. I mean there is a robust, healthy, active, energetic group of people joining b h A, getting involved in environmental issues, learning how to hunt. You know, I'm one of the editors at Modern Huntsmen. The number of people who hit us up, he say, I never thought I was gonna hunt, and I just harvarded harvested my first, dear doctor Turkey, and we're like, hey, yeah, regardless of who you voted for the fact that you're connecting with the land, developing this relationship, putting food on the table, understanding where meat comes from. I mean, that's inspiring and it's easy to get. You know, turn on the news and be like, holy shit, the world is messed up. Then you can pause and say it wasn't Raptor Center. They're doing an amazing words for sure, Yeah, I think. But even the push pool we're talking about, the push pool of should we shoot grizzy bears and should we not shoot you eil wars, that push pool is causing conversations like this one and a lot of conversations like this one about what's good for grizzly bears and that's good like that, you know, I think as humans were set up that way, you know, like grizzly bears hopefully be better off because of this debate because most, hopefully most everybody that's in it is thinking about what's best for grizzly bears, just happen to disagree about what to do. Um And like you said, a lot of it's disagreeing on the path to take to the same goal. And that's been my biggest one of the guesse things I've found over the last year or two, you know, really diving into the hunting industry and getting involved with b h A and then and trying to just like wrap my head around why I believe hunting is this medicine. It's like this this thing that we can all take to be a little bit better right, it has. It has a direct effect on our world, but everything does. And so living in that thought process, hunting is is this enriching pill you can take to bring you a little bit closer to the things you need to be close to nature. Animals are environment, your skills, all that ship and so that's at some point it's it's how do we go from a how do we go from a moment where we're standing back to back and we both agree with something, and we and then we start walking away from each other, and by the time we turn around to have the conversation, all we can do is argue. I was like, dude, everybody cares about wildlife. That's the reason our model, That's the one reason I believe our modelogue conservation works because everybody cares about wildlife. And I think it's I think you bring up a good point. And I also think that more people are stopping halfway and saying, wait a second, we actually have a lot more in common than you'd like to believe, or that the public is telling us. We do as you know, by on paper, I should be very different than you. But when we sit down, maybe we see things in different lights. But I think from an ideological perspective, we have a lot of the same. That really matters at the end of the day, because if if if you could agree, if if you and I could agree that we're not gonna be at the same spot on everything, but we're trying to get to the same goal, then every interaction we have is positive, right, even if we're yelling at each other. They were like, fucky, that's before the recordings. Yeah yeah, yeah, um yeah, even if we're are doing even if what we could say, hey, look, let's before we start. We want grizzly bears to be healthy, thrive, and to be doing their thing. Okay, good, great, great, let's go right, nothing you can do from that point forward, in my opinion, would would would be negative. And I think your point about like having space for discussion is huge, And that's you know, I'm doing some workover at SITCO next door, and we have this ecosystem thinking grant that we're putting together in all these different measures that I think some people would be surprised by. But it's like no, no, no, We're in the business of hunting, and we're in the business of the outdoors and the environment and those three things hinge upon the health of our ecosystems. So if we're not putting that ecosystem thinking hat on, then we're not doing the resources and these systems that we care about justice. And that's what you guys do so well over here is like, let's create a space for conversations that shanna light on what we can do better or what we're doing well that benefits the resources that we identify with. Yeah. I mean, I'm wearing a hoodie right now as this public landowner, like I'm into that. I want people to wear these shirts. It's over his ghostly bar t shirts. Yeah, well that's that's a tank top, sir, with sequences. Um, and now I'm thinking about me wearing a jazz tanks out. Thanks. Bro can make serious points that environment. But yeah, I think like this publicly and ownything. I always come back to that. I think, yes, I want public lands, Yes, of course I do. It's too easy to just want that. Is not that I just want public lands, is that I want healthy public lands that contribute to our world. I just don't want to be It's I'm not arguing for the right to go somewhere. Really, when I'm talking about public lands. I'm not arguing for the right to go on public lands. I want that. I'm arguing for the right to have them so we can keep them healthy and so they contribute to our world, like healthy habitat, healthy wildlife populations. That's what I'm at they're doing. I'm not saying I want it so I can do whatever I want on it. No, I'm saying I want it so we can make it better and make us all better. That's the point of wearing a shirt like this. And that's where I come back to, like, don't you get in this boat with me if you don't want that to if you just want public land so you can cut roads through them and ride around and shoot you off an a TV, like, that's not what I'm talking about. And what if somebody went up to you and said, you're a public landowner and I'm gonna tell you can't do what you want to do because of these three reasons. We can do that over there, fine. And I think that's a big thing too, because there are things that happen, you know, like you're into off roading and somebody says, well, that's critical habitat for this tortoise, and like well, screw the tortoise. I've never seen one. I drove my truck out there all the time. I think, you get up. People get hung up in these these purported threats on their ability to do what they want on public land. And the beautiful thing about public land is it's a collective resource. And if somebody is saying I get off cutting off you, you know, by cutting off huge cutting up huge trees, and somebody says, well, you can't do that. We have this beautiful suite of checks and balances. Were like, if you do want to go cut down trees, you can go to a beauticual force and cut down big trees. You can't do it here, you know. And I think that that that's another big thing. It's not a it's not a threat in your ability to be a public land owner. Public land is owned by the collective, which means everybody gets a vote. And there's a few people that say, are these votes done in a in a an appropriate way and are they being you know, used and leaned upon in an effective way? And and that's the beautiful thing, right that. Yeah, that that National Monument thing was a great example of that. Both sides got that's so wrong. That couldn't be It could be worse. One s I was like, well, we're protecting the land and the other side's like we're given access to the people. And wait, you're both kind of being assholes around this one. Because if we really wanted, like if we really broke it down, throw out the Antiquities Act, who cares it was past three? Write something new, Write something new that says protecting this ecosystem, the critical habitat um, the important artifacts that are there. Let's do that first, right, Okay, first, check that off. Got it. That's we can all agree we need those things. And even if you don't, if you don't agree that we need those things, I don't know what to do with you, Like go look at the fires or go like I just don't know what to do with you. Kindly leave. If you can't agree that we need habitat for animals and we need a healthy ecosystem, and if it's it's a historic artifact for human humankind or some some culture and we need to protect it, boy, we're gonna like you're just not going to be in this conversation. We need little sound design button with Will Ferrell. Same. Kindly leave, kindly leave. So let's say say like, let's let's say we're all still in the room when I say that to you. So, okay, good, we got that. What do we need to do to get to that? Okay, let's figure that out. That's not an easy one, but we'll figure that out next. We want we do not want to limit people's access to that area for any reasons other than the first check. Right, So we want roads cut, We want um places for people to go and view wildlife and and hike and hunt and uh perfect, great, that's second check. Like we keep inverting this ship all and mixing it all up and be like step one done, Step two done. Everybody happy, Great, go see you like, go out and run around. We don't care. But but you can't. You can't do like the most important thing and the second most important thing have to stay one and two because if you start flipping around, then they start to hurt each other. Right, it's like uranium mind check, ecosystem check. Yeah, they don't know. The second goes first, like is that uranium? Like, okay, do we have a healthy ecosystem? How do we define that? Like that's a really tough one. But then once that's done, then you can have your fucking ranium on all you want. I love Uranie's one of my favorite so one of my activities. I've been minding uranium since I was a kid. But it's like, there has to be a better way to set those checks and balances because we certainly I haven't strived to do that. We've strived to to be right. You know when one of the like the precedents that really explains what we're talking about here was back during the gold rush time, back before we had conflicting uh you know groups where it was miners against ranchers or farmers against loggers, there was a river system in California where gold mining was being done in such a blindly horrific way, a destructive way. Setent was filling up these rivers and coming down stream and destroying crop lands and along the way, making these huge levees that flooded these mining towns. So that burst and flood these mining towns. And that was the first time in our country's history where that I know of, I know it was a it was a kind of a landmark case in California where the government was tasked was saying, okay, well, if this group of people is looking at this landscape as a resource for trees or gold, and this group of people looking at this landscape as a resource for crops, and these people in the middle are just trying to live there, but they're caught in the crossfire, how do we manage with all constituents in mind. It's a challenging thing, right because you look at bears ears and it's it's it's a it's a homeland of people who were here long before us, who got short end of the stick. It's an ecosystem that's the Danes, wildlife, plants, and animals. It's a resource that private enterprise would love to mind and extract, and it's just a place the hike for others. And I think your point is brilliant because we've got to say, like, what is the most important thing here, and that is a functioning, healthy ecosystem that provides cleanary, clean water, and everything else a secondary or tertiary. And it's okay to have secondary tertiary things that are also important in that. I don't hate roads because I hate when people arguing like a wilderness is the only way. No, it's not the only way. Roads through through public playing areas, roads through wilderness. Boy, I'm fine with it. You can take your Segway on them. I love my Segway drove off a cliff um. But yeah, I mean, I think I think the priority is where I find the most problem. And that's what I love. You know about the hunting thing, because, honest to God, ten years ago, if somebody had said you're gonna be in the hunting space, you're gonna be working with brands you know that identifies hunting brands. You're gonna be working with people and friends with people who are hunters. Grow having grown up hunting. My dad was on the board of California. Try to grew up in a sportsman's house. But there's something awesome about this space hunting and fishing because by default, you give a ship about animals, and you give a shit about the systems that support you know, you can't help it, you can't help it. Without those you're identifying, interest doesn't exist hunting or fishing. And it's kind of like being an ecologist with like a potential and little cherry on top, which could be your deer or your duck or your trout. And I love that and it it's it's awesome because it gives us common ground to work from where we can say you and I both want to kill deer, but at the end of the day, we need to focus on how to get to that place where we have dear to kill or dear to watch, because we both know we spent a lot of time in a tree or out in the woods watching animals and not ever fire narrow a bullet. Yeah, well, I think like the one of the one of the things I want to have a segment about this. It's called like what bothers? What's bothering me? Like maybe I have like a little like what's grinding my gear? Is really like that, But one of the things that bothers me is around what you just said. Right. So our value stem and hunting is is it's rhetorical in nature in a lot of ways, but it's it's very valuable. Like it it helps the things, the animals that are involved in that value system. Like it's it's clear that the value hunting provides helps animals almost always in in the umbrella sense of a population. It may not help that single animal, I guess got shot and eaten, but it helps the greater whole. And I think that's you know, as a human, that's kind of what I'm into. Okay, well it might it might not help me today, but does it help us always? So that's good. So one of things that bothers me is, let's talk about this in a podcast previous with Bryan Callahan, is that like the outfitting industry, and I would say, you know, groups like I'll call him out by name, fuck it s C, I's Far Club International. I got problem with you guys. Okay, I think our value system is infallible. I believe that to be true, but I believe it's being hijacked by people that are just using it as an excuse to do what they want. And that bothers me. I think it's being hijacked by outfitters that are making money from people that are using it. And the users are the clients that are traveling across the world, are traveling across this country and using that value systems excuse to do things they ought not to be doing, or or using it as reasoning that they don't truly believe. And I, you know, I will say, honestly, I have thought some days, you know, before I was able, probably before I had a podcast, and this is one of the reasons I have a podcast, is because I got so dejected by that and so pissed by that that I thought, you know, maybe I'm just gonna stop hunting, you know, And then pretty quickly I'm like, no, no, no, I'm not gonna let it. That's crazy talk. This sake is delicious. But yeah, but but I think, like I've had those moments where it's like me, this is exhausting, Like here's here's something I know to be, you know, as infallible as it can be, as something can get that's this broad being used by people that don't believe in it and caring is exhausting. Yeah, like you pointed out, it's easy to be on one end of the spectrum. It's easy to look at the media of those people who are doing things they ought not to be doing and taking that as a wholesale representation of the of the greater population or the greater community. Yeah, go go to Yeah, I'm it's not my nature to call people out, but go to this far Clip International Convention. I've been there for the last five years and there's a lot of really good stuff happening there. I mean lots of really good lots of money going and conservation. I mean just just a lot of immense and wonderful things happening there. But there is also there's an example. There was a booth at across from the booth I was at last year, and that booth had a sign this is an out there I believe in South Africa, not the matters where they're coming from. And it was like one of those signs you might see out in front of bail bonds place or maybe like get your money today type of cash or paychecks. It was like, I just want everybody to just think about what this sign looks like. It was it had like a gray background, but it had florescent lights blinking all around the outside and on the inside they had written in fluorescent pink and yellow, ah, come for an elephant, fifteen thousand dollars get a free impaula. And I had to spend the whole week looking at that sign, and that sign got like burned into my retinas to the point where I was like, is this person, wait, is this person selling an animal? Like It's like first I thought maybe everybody got a Chevy impaula, which was what I thought how are you going to get those cars back to America? And you're thinking I would like to Chevy. I was like, I would maybe go an elephant hunt because that's almost like a deal because Chevy and Polos are worth more than fift k leather seats? How do I get it back to America? But then I was like, these people, I'm making an assumption here, but it's an educated one that the people that were running that booth. If they were pulled out of that scenario and somebody ran up to him, we're like, why do you do what you do? You shouldn't be killing those impolos and selling them like they're you know, cars, use cars. That person would be like, well, let me tell you about the value system of hunting, because now I don't have this sign right next to me. Let me tell you about the value system. Let me tell you why this allows her to be more of these animals. And that's where I'm like, boy, I can't get with that. I can't get with it. That's I'm sorry, but don't use don't use this wonderful thing that we've got to excuse your selling an ampollo like it's you know, a gift bag, just don't do it. And I think that's you know, that's a representation of those outliers. That's a representation of people who were not hunting with ant we're not inviting to Thanksgiving dinner. Yeah, but you you'll see like all of these and I'm sure you've lost all that. I can't think of the exact names of the documentaries, but normally, as an anti hunting documentary on killing rhinos, some British dude goes to Sei and walks around like, hell and look at this hand and there's like just some you know, like yeah, yeah, Trophy, there's the perfect example. And they walk around there like this is something like Alien World where a bunch of people, um go up to a booth and say, oh, that's a giant animal. Maybe I'll want to pay fifty, yeah, or ninety or or whatever, and then that British dude um in trophy. I think those it was a couple I believe, eventually said like, hey, we get now that we were over there and we did it, we get what hunting brings to the table. But but what they never did get, in my opinion from watching the film, is how you could go to a place like that and connect that with the value system on the ground in Africa or on the ground in America, like that that thing didn't represent the good totally. And I also think Africa's a slippery slope. You know, it's something that we get talked to, you know, their topics that arise with the modern huntsman. And I when people say Africa, I'm like, hey, um, I'll be in the other room me too, you know, like it's not something I'm familiar with. I'm not an expert in it. It's too it's complicated. That's why it's easy for to be called out totally. And I think the representative narrative in hunting in America in November is white tail honey, which is very different than shooting an elephant. And if people watched me in my backyard hunting my white tailed dough, which I was super fired up on because it's going to be great food, and I sat for days and days and days and picked right one and felt like that was a choice and an animal at harvest personally, regardless of what other people would say, I felt good about that. And that's what a lot of people are dealing with. People are putting themselves outside and making a conscious decision to harvest to particular animal for reasons that are probably pretty darn good, you know. And it's not I'm here's eight grand. It's not a let me play games with a relatively stable, developing country and in a continant and nothing about. It's a I'm gonna go in my backyard or to next day over, meet up with some guys who are probably even keeled and harvest an animal that there's an abundance of. And that's representative hunting in America November. But that's not what people in Portland, San Francisco, or people watching Trophy are scene. They're not being presented that purposefully because it's easy. But it's also real. It's not fake, it's not being made up. And so for me, it's like, yeah, here's here's these two very different and it spins right back to grizzly bears. Man, it spins right back to them, because like I said, I don't, I don't uh I would shoot a grizzly bear. I'm not saying I wouldn't, but I don't. As I sit in this chair field the need to do it um and if I met someone who truly believed that it was their duty as a hunter to take part in the system of conservation, whereas they went out and had a great experience that enrisk their lives and they killed a grizzly bear. And I'm with that all day long. But what I'm not with there's somebody who wants to wants it for other reasons that we could we listen all days. It's not no need to hammer on that. But I'm not with that. We're just not with it. And so I hope generationally we can start to clearly define what that is and when it's not. And I think that's I think if we do that, then, um, anybody that's an animal rights activist or an anti hunter will lose the ability to to change the rules based on that, because they certainly didn't. British Columbia, you know, they changed the rules. They tried, they changed the rules because they knew they were people out there that were shooting the bears just to shoot the bears. Which sucks. Boy, that sucks for the bears and for everyone. Um, but they weren't wrong. There were people out there shooting the bears just to shoot the bears. And it's like we talked about you know, if if the hunting community didn't, I think so aggressively published photos that were less than thoughtful on the internet, representing our community industry at large, we'd have a better time. And if the alternative was that thoughtful image of the dinner you're prepared or the experience that you were after, because we all know that hunting is not about killing something every day, because one that's not possible, not legal, and not realistic. You know, like the narrative that that the public would then be presented with is the one of drinking coffee, the drive, the flight, the adventure of the food, the camaraderie, the sunrise, the sunset, all the cool ship you see. You know, that's when we get out and hunt. You know. It's like I harvested my dough, and yes, it was an awesome experience sitting in my tree for all those days. But I brought some of that meat to my father in law's birthday and I was like, here's some meat that I worked my ass off for and I'm going to cook at the best I can, even I suck a cooking. My wife's gonna help me, and we're gonna serve this up. And I'm gonna be proud and know that that was a sustainable, awesome contribution to our dinner. I felt freaking good boy. And I think in general nobody disagrees with that. I think if you were pull the country, you get about a nine to five. And I wish that was the ship that ends up in the headlines where it was like like pseudo hippie hunter trails post harvest's dough and feeds it to his father in law, Like that should be the Actually, yeah, I think like they like we can all go back to like all these I think the hunting industry. What's funny that I've realized this is the last couple of controversies around air quotes, around you know, people shooting animals in different places, and the guy that shot the baboons or the young lady in Scotland that shot the feral goats. I think hunting is just over that, Like the hunting community is over over that conversation. And and hopefully it's because we know that's just it's not worth our time. When we see that stuff and we're like that's freaking crazy, like I want to have done that. We and when we disagree with it, and so it ends up being this like Ricky Gervais and the celebrity crew that's out there trying to find examples of bad hunters, and and they're I mean those people traffic in publicity. The people a lot of people that don't agree with hunting traffic in messaging, marketing and publicity and so and a lot of them are celebrities, are big followings. So when that when somebody like Ricky Gervais or who did he just person comes to mind, grabs a photo sometimes from like years ago and says, oh, this fits my agenda, puts it up there like what's in the media takes it on, which they always do. The guy the shot at Baboos is on Good Morning America. He wasn't but a story one. It's like, what's like, do we spend our time fighting this is I don't know the answer to this, it's fighting that bullshit or do we spend our time doing what you were talking about and just doing it right, talking about it consistently and ignoring Ricky Gervais and his crew. I mean, I think my experience hunting that dough and that narrative being communicated to my community will do more too. Two bring support and interest to the hunting space from non hunters. Then the the one bad story a here. If we all find our good story and pass it off to our community and remind the people who were connected with Hey, this is the most beautiful thing. I got to go, have this experience, share this thing with you have this, you know, food to put on the plate. If we can propagate that as our currency, we will outshine that little bit of noise that the far other side of the spectrum likes to just re you know position. I think they've already found themselves in an echo chamber in that way totally. I mean, at that point, it's like people that hate hunting see that and like this is confirmation that it's gnarly. But I think the rest of the middle ground of America, Okay, maybe he shouldn't have shut that giraffe. I can agree with that, But that's the all the deeper it goes. It doesn't go much deeper than the right um and even this conversation around being able to call out like, hey, you know, there's I can see holistically, holistic, good and virtuous reasons to shoot that graffe. I'm getting. I'm with that. I can have that conversation. Um, but I would hope as time marches forward, just like just like what we were talking about with smoking while you're pregnant, that rich globe trotting hunters shooting things for what's on their head is something that we can treat like smoking while pregnant. Just be like, look, I know the money is important. I'm with you, I want and I know the concessions in Africa have done wonders for wildlife. I am with you, can can and yeah, there's plenty of evidence that you can spit off. You can spit off what in how many African analope antalope species were in Africa and what were the populations and do it now and you'd say, Okay, that's amazing. That seems to be working. So I'm with that conversation. I don't have any problem with that. But I think it's it's the I think we're already starting to as a honey community. Just move away from that a little bit. Because when um Blake Fisher goes to African and shoots his baboons, I had all my non hunting friends, all my people in my life that aren't a part of the industry calling me that day, what's about this? What you know about this? What do you know about this? What's going on with this? I think most of my hunting friends are like, I didn't even know that happened. So it used to be like when cease a lion would happen or something something like that would happen, that we would be immediately on it and defending it and defending it and defending it and saying all I was degraded it. Now it's kind of like heah, you go for it. Yeah, what have you gotta do? Right? Well, if you know, if we're looking at the hunting, the future of hunting, we can be getting more people outside because that breeds stewardship, that breeds people who care, and that breeds just more voices from diverse backgrounds that can add to the broader effort to protect our wild spaces, wildlife in public lands. And the end of the day, that Good Morning America story is not getting new hunters in the door listening to this podcast or walking over there to said to go to buy a new vest. At the end of the day, what's getting people outside is saying, hey, look, we're normal people trying our best, working hard, trying to raise a family. We enjoy hiking. We probably bike or snowboard. I surf. I also hunt. I eat plants, ate some meat too. That meat that I eat I like to get myself. It's generally a dough. It's generally a buck. It's generally an elk that's three out, like you saw like a normal person. Right, Does that make hunting normal if you're doing it totally? And then they're like sweet? So I can just take a hunter's d course. I can go buy an entry point bow or rifle or shotgun, get a friend going to public land, give it a shot. Maybe get a duck, Maybe get a deer, not a big deal. Doesn't need to be a bood and Crockett. It can be a deer, you know. And I think the industry and the community at large needs to remind people that, like, that's what's up. And it's about taking your kid out to do that. It's about taking your friends out to do that. It's about saying I'm not like I have a job. I don't get paid to hunt. Yes, I like hunting, but it's like an escape, it's a release, it's an activity. I also USA have a vegetable garden. I also used to surf. I do all these other things. I do the dishes you know I do, and I enjoy listen your podcast, I'm doing it. Don't tell my wife, you'll expect me to do. But you know what I'm saying, It's not this like we're not flying around on jets, smoking drafts with like high powered rifles and like putting the trophies in our huge halls like you said. I mean that that when that when that can be identified as an outlier, which I believe it is. I mean the numbers say it is. You know, how many people hunt deer, white tailed deer in America versus how many people go to Africa. I mean it's like ten thousand millions, ten thousand, ten millions, right number. Um, So again, like if somebody's seeming to me, like you know, so I was thinking about so, well with ten thousand and ten million, that does that that work for you? Right? There's ten thousand people and ten million people. Can we have that conversation now like yeah, maybe that guy shouldn't have done that, but yeah, so I think that ends up being I've had that just just a recent kind of reality, Like I don't really need to talk to anybody about that got killing the monkeys, because he'll get land based and he'll get what was coming to him for something he probably shouldn't have done. And that's just noise. Life will go on and the noise will go and he'll probably his life will go on too, and he'll have learned a lesson to not do that, you know. And it's like you eat you eat plants with your meat, right generally, I really do. Yeah, you know, he's like, you have to remind people that we're not just like cutting a backstread out. He's just you go on Instagram, you just see like meat. There's never any other gonna be like just me like, but you know, I mean, I'm excited to look at you know, Steve bron Nell's cookbook because those recipes I assume have plants as components in them, maybe small fun factory pages asparagus. It exists. Increasing I love it. Well, good man, we've been talking for how long almost three hours as a full roguan podcast. That's good man, it's fun. I um, That's why I appreciate. I just appreciate a good conversation. That's why I like podcasting because it's good, too good to rip it up. Well, that's awesome, because I think while we talked for a while and we cover some topics, I think what they all boil down to is this idea that wildlife management is complicated, policy is imperfect. People are trying their hardest, we should assume, and I think that that's something that you'll find in a lot of people. They're really putting their best foot forward most days. And at the end of the day, most people aren't freaking crazy. Most people are just trying to get after it and do the best they can. And and yeah, and then don't dig in too hard. If you have a position, dig in if you think it's right. I'm all for that. I do that all the time. Don't take in too far. To be a little bit flexible and have an understanding that of what the other person you're talking to or you're disagreeing with, wants to do, and if you want to both do the same thing, then be a little bit more flexible. Even then. I think that's something that's helped me and hopefully that can help other people, especially when it comes to things like grizzly bears or any hot topics around wildlife management just just don't dig in too damn far, and that you can't get yourself out and there's more to know always um, But yeah, I know we will see. I mean, I think I think we might have to have you write a grizzly bear piece for the Mediator dot com. Well after reading this court decision for five times, been writing a bunch already. Yeah. No, it's it's fun to be a part of the conversation. I hope people out there who are listening, you know, and enjoy our perspective. And you know, while we may seem like we can't land on an answer, I think that's just us trying to give it our best go. You know, it's complicated, Yeah, I mean fecundities, but I always say no, I mean, yeah, that's a good point. But at the same time, it's just a conversation that this podcast is not is not designed to be the answer. It's not because it will never be. It's designed to be the conversation. And so hopefully you guys listening come with that. And if if Charles or I ever in the public eye or on this podcast or any future media, um say anything that's typic retal to what we said today, and we don't try to strive to be educated and be centric in our thinking and strife healthy ecosystems first, then let us know absolutely because because it's easy to talk, but it's a lot harder to walk. So hopefully we'll do that and continue to Yeah, thanks for having me. It's second third one we've done. You've been on This would be like thirty, this will be in the mid thirties. You've been on roughly, like, I don't know what I'm trying to do. The percentage in my head roughly ten of my podcast. You're like, yes, but it's I really enjoy these conversations and I hope you have to do more of them. And like I said, it's something that I makes my day better because it's it's better than just washing TV. You're running errands or doing anything. Well, you can keep calling him, just don't FaceTime yet. Midnight every like every night I'm like, Charles, guess what I found the Andy go bud. But also to close it out, you did get a sticker there. You're the first one ever. I'll be getting a hammerd pretty hard by people around like not having any like what do they call that? Paraphernalia. No, it's not it swag. It's not paraphernalia. That's illegal. Yeah. Um, so yeah, there's a sticker. You're the first person ever to receive the Hunting Collective podcast sticker. It's pretty slick. Yeah, it's made of biodegradable plastics. Um. But we also have some other stuff coming out. So what do you have? Oh, we got hats, you know, I get that next time. Yeah, something to look forward to, something look forward to. No, I have. This is the investment I'm willing to get at this point. This is a sticker. Okay, Yeah, all right, thanks brother, awesome, Thanks so much. That's it. That's all. Thanks to Mr Charles Post for joining me for the longest podcast and the history of the Hunting Collective that goes all the way back to February. But this is a great one. Um. I'm just just proud to know to know Charles and proud to have access to his knowledge and and as uh folks who are relatively the same age like it. It would be great too to go through this journey of hunting and life, you know, with Charles nearby to hang out with us. So thank you, Charles. Hopefully everybody enjoyed those three hours. What else have we got? We got We have the mediator dot com as always, that's the place to go if you want to find honey collective stuff, all the good stuff, all the podcasts, all the things articles. Anything I do is going to live there. So go there and see what's up. And if you could do me a huge favor and sign up for the newsletter. It's so on every page it says a little thing up in the right corner that says sign up for the news letter. If you go do that and sign up, you're gonna get every hunting collected podcast, every article UM by folks like Steve Ronella, April Fokey, Mark Kenyan and so much more. And you'll be able to track our company, Media Incorporated as it grows. And I do want to say before we go, you've been listening for a while now, so just hang with me. Thank you to everyone for the encouragement around Media or Incorporated. UM. It's been a while now since we announced the company, and it has been really awesome to see the support for what I'm trying to do, even though if what we're trying to do is a bit of a mystery on a tangible level. It's it just enforces to me that being in the hunting community and being part of this thing is was the right thing for my career, my life, and for my family, for my friends to all be in some way a part of this granted conversation. So thank you very much. I very much appreciate that, and we're going to continue to work hard to better this conversation. And so that is it for Honty Collective this week. Join us next Tuesday morning forget another awesome guest as we round out and look forward to all right, bye bye,