Ben O'Brien and Joe Rogan are back with a brand new episode of the podcast, and they're joined by a guest who's been in the business for a long time: John Dudley. They talk about the origin story of the Cat Lady, the origin of the Riese brain, and how they're making a new kind of cocktail: the Fanny pack. Also, they talk about how to get laid in a fanny pack, and why you shouldn't be worried about getting laid if you're carrying a gun in your bag. This episode is brought to you by Benchmade, a New York-based company that specializes in custom knives and kitchen utensils. It's a small town, but it's a good town, and we're here to make you feel like you're in a good place. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. The theme song is by Suneaters, courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Fugue Records, recorded live at SXSW in Austin, TX on Nov. 28, 2019. Thank you to everyone who reached out to us with their music requests. We're working on transcribing this episode and we hope you enjoy it. We'll be working on a new episode next week with a new sound engineer and a new editor, so stay tuned for that! and we'll be back with more episodes in the next week. Thanks again next week! - Ben O'Brien, Ben, Jake, Joe, and Sam Soho Cheers, Sarah, Sarah, Caitlyn, Rachel, and Rachel, Rachel, Emily, and Sarah, John Dudley, and Jake, . Ben, Sarah and Rachel . . . Sarah, Rachel & Rachel, thank you so much for all your support and support and love you all so much love and support you, so much appreciate you all for all the love and respect and support, you're so much more than you can handle it. - Thank you for being here. Thank you, Thank you. Joe, so thank you for listening and support us. XOXO, bye, bye. Love ya, bye - P.S. - Elyssa, bye bye. <3 - J.J. Sarah & Rory, Emily, J.B.
00:08:22.000And you think of the important points of history and things that you want to, ideas you want to articulate to people about things that are very important to you.
00:09:20.000Especially if you're a person that has many interests, because there might be multiple things that you're really fascinated by.
00:09:27.000You know, I always say that I wish I had many lives that I could live simultaneously, because I would have a bunch of different occupations.
00:09:35.000And you've gone deep on many things, just in your life, like pool, when I first met you.
00:10:42.000I killed one big elk on public land, but again, it was a rifle hunt, and I had a buddy helping me, and I didn't gather the intellectual property in a way that I felt was appropriate to say, this is the thing that I did.
00:10:54.000This is a craft that I can now say I'm a part of.
00:11:10.000And that's by yourself, on your own, find where elk live, learn their habits, learn how they talk, and then be proficient enough with a bow, in this case, to get close enough and kill one.
00:15:24.000And I'm looking this way and the bottom of the drainage is behind me.
00:15:28.000And I knew, the longer story, is that I knew a buddy of mine had killed, his brother-in-law had killed an elk in the drainage to the day before.
00:15:41.000That trail camera had picked up wolves.
00:15:44.000Literally, probably 500 yards from where we were standing at that moment, I had a trail camera that only weeks before had picked up wolves killing cattle.
00:22:04.000Because it's like, if you're honest, like jujitsu honesty is like, you know, like there's white belt, blue belt, purple belt, brown belt, black belt.
00:22:13.000So I'm like a purple, like now, all these years in, I'm a purple belt in hunting.
00:22:17.000And even, as I was saying earlier, you could pick lanes there.
00:22:21.000You know, because I'm in kind of like hunting knowledge and overall, I spent 12 years reading articles, writing articles, thinking about this, podcasting about this.
00:22:29.000So like, maybe I'm a black belt in kind of being able to talk about it.
00:22:33.000But that doesn't mean you have the physical ability, the mental stamina, you know, really to put the time in.
00:22:39.000And that's really a big part of it, too.
00:22:40.000You have to be immersed and put the time in.
00:22:43.000And you have to sacrifice other things in your life and go outside and suffer.
00:22:48.000You have to get a feel for how things work.
00:22:52.000There's choices that you make when you're hunting, when you're in the field.
00:23:30.000And it's one of those things where you try to describe it as, there's a bunch of topics here all mixed together, but one of them is that, why do we hunt in the modern sense, right?
00:24:10.000And we tend to focus on one part of the game or the other.
00:24:12.000But the game itself is understanding an animal, understanding the landscape it uses, understanding its ecology and biology and the history of the landscape.
00:24:47.000I'm going to take advantage of this thing, but the game theory, I think, is, in a modern sense, because we can just get meat at the store, game theory is what draws us in, but what keeps us there, and what becomes kind of like what I always think of as a side benefit of hunting, not the reason we go, is the meat and what that provides for you.
00:25:34.000And I'm like, dude, I'm 54. And there's a lot of supplements and hormones and all sorts of other things that go into why I still can work out and do things like I could when I was 34 and even 24. But I think game meat is a part of that.
00:27:04.000And even the muscles that are used quite often in the animal, like if you think of shank meat or things that are muscles that are used a lot so they become...
00:27:15.000They got a lot of sinew, a lot of tendons, a lot of things you got to work through to get the meat out.
00:27:18.000When you slow cook them, you almost get to taste the effort of the animal.
00:27:23.000It's so beautiful to peel off the meat from a shank.
00:27:28.000But you know, I'm starting to change my opinion on tender meat.
00:27:31.000There's a thing about tender meat where it's easy to eat and everything, but that's the reason why people have bunched up teeth and small jaws.
00:27:55.000You're doing things to stress your jaw.
00:27:58.000I think you put your tongue in your palate and you...
00:28:02.000But the idea is that the reason why people develop these like small jaws and the reason why people are their facial structures changing and their teeth are getting bunched up his thought and it's not just his it's many people that understand human beings and I guess evolution is that we're eating soft food that doesn't require you to have a strong jaw like we used to have to have during the caveman days the Paleolithic days And that
00:28:32.000strong, tough meat is what we're supposed to be eating.
00:29:14.000That's like a part of the reason why your jaw is supposed to be strong.
00:29:19.000And the thing about this Mew guy is that for the longest time people thought that it was genetics that shaped and structured a person's face.
00:29:29.000But what he's showing through his exercises, and other people are showing through similar things, like I have a device that I use, I forget what it's called, but it's basically like a half of a rubber ball that I put in my mouth, and I bite down on, and I do reps with my face.
00:30:27.000And that appreciation comes from every, like you know exactly.
00:30:31.000And I as a hunter also went a long time not knowing how to butcher a full animal from nose to tail.
00:30:37.000And I don't want to overplay what that really is, but it is, when I open my freezer, I know you've probably talked about this before, but when I open my freezer I get this comfort.
00:31:45.000And we have, I was thinking about this at some point in the last couple of days where, because I was out with my dad, he's the person who taught me to do this.
00:31:54.000I don't know if my life would have been different had I not gone the path that I went on getting in the hunting industry and making it my life.
00:32:01.000I mean, I think if I died tomorrow, three quarters of my funeral would be people in the hunting world that I've met and gave relationships with.
00:32:45.000There's nobody that's been like, yeah, it's nice, but I'll do it on the weekends.
00:32:47.000I can remember very clearly Me and Brian Callahan and Rinella and Ryan Callahan eating meat from a deer that I killed over a fire in the Missouri Breaks in Montana.
00:33:01.000And then Rinella asking me, so what do you think about hunting?
00:33:04.000I said, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life.
00:34:00.000I've committed my whole life to telling people about that and saying it's not for everybody, but if you do it, you're going to find some kernel of substance that will help cure the cultural woes and societal woes that you're experiencing.
00:34:16.000One of the things that I've gotten out of this podcast and having all these conversations with people is trying to put myself in their mindset and try to examine and understand various experiences that they've had.
00:34:36.000Whether it's someone who's lived in a monastery or someone who is an ultramarathon runner or someone who's a mathematician.
00:34:47.000Over the last 12 years, it's radically changed the way I view the world because it's allowed me to have this really comprehensive understanding of people that I do not think would have ever been possible.
00:35:03.000No, this is like a hive mind you got going here.
00:35:05.000Yeah, and it's also a massive education.
00:35:08.000I've had a 12-year education talking to some of the most brilliant people I've ever met, and in all sorts of walks of life, like Snoop, like having Snoop on the podcast and seeing his perspective and seeing that guy is a black belt at living life.
00:35:52.000Snoop, when he sees me, runs full clip to me and jumps and I pick him up.
00:35:57.000This is my relationship with my daughter's dog.
00:36:00.000So to see Snoop with the real Snoop, and I said, this must be what it feels like if a dog with his limited understanding of the world meets a god.
00:36:30.000I only watched the first little bit of it, but it was pretty clear that Snoop is Snoop.
00:36:35.000And he probably was like that from the beginning.
00:36:38.000Well, he's learned, you know, he talked about it during the podcast.
00:36:41.000He's talked about learning how to be like a peaceful, kind person and learning like from his mistakes and, you know, the early days of gangster rap and getting caught up in all that shit.
00:37:51.000My wife was having a conversation with her friend, and one of her friend's friends from England was this guy who was eating a steak, saying that it was appalling that I was hunting while he was cutting into a steak.
00:38:03.000She goes, do you not see what's happening here?
00:38:05.000And his rationale was that this animal's raised to be killed, and you're going out there killing wild animals.
00:38:11.000Pure ignorance and a lack of understanding about conservation, a lack of understanding about conserving, protecting, and paying for the conservation of wild animals through the Pitt and Robertson Act.
00:38:24.000Well, you get to a point where you love the game.
00:38:28.000And I think for me as a kid, you don't understand what the game is.
00:39:05.000I understand exactly what hunting does for my life.
00:39:07.000And then I can then understand there's a structure for why this matters for society.
00:39:13.000And there's a structure for how we pay for this, and there's clear evidence that it has done good for wildlife on this continent, let alone this country.
00:39:23.000And all that is very clear when you look at the evidence.
00:40:38.000I've been talking to him about how do we do a show together and just take these issues on together because him and I have the best conversations.
00:40:45.000So if you look for the best example of this is Dr. Robert C. Jones.
00:40:48.000So if you look for that podcast and look for Dr. Robert, you'll get some good discord.
00:40:55.000He's a philosopher, so he takes me on some of these philosophical journeys and tries to convince me that animal rights has some validity, which I often say, I've always said to him, I said, listen, Imagine if we, animal rights and veganism and hunting,
00:42:01.000And by the time we're so separated in this walk away from each other, we're just yelling back at each other with no context of how we started.
00:42:08.000There's also this lack of appreciation for survival itself.
00:42:13.000Because we've gotten to this point where it's so easy to consume food.
00:42:20.000Consuming food is like, we're like one of the rare moments in history where poor people are fat.
00:42:31.000It's not nutrient-dense calories, but it's just sheer calories.
00:42:35.000And poor people are often fat right now, which is...
00:42:38.000In history, if you looked at the moment, if you look at all the moments of human history, during a time where poor people are fat, this is the only one.
00:44:13.000The Dragon Man as a specimen represented a human group that lived in East Asia at least 146,000 years ago.
00:44:20.000It was found at Harbin, Northeast China in 1933, but only came to attention of scientists more recently.
00:44:27.000The analysis of the skull has been published in the journal The Innovation.
00:44:31.000One of the UK's leading experts in human evolution, Professor Chris Stringer from London's Natural History Museum was a member of the research team.
00:44:40.000And this creature was a completely new animal.
00:44:44.000In terms of fossils, in the last million years, this is one of the most important yet discovered.
00:44:50.000What you have here is a separate branch of humanity that's not on its way to becoming homo sapiens, but represents a long separate lineage which evolved in the region for several hundred thousand years and eventually went extinct.
00:45:04.000But if you see what these things look like, go back up to that skull again.
00:45:17.000But that's what, when you listen to Sapiens and you understand that book, they're saying, like, the branches of the tree, we were just one branch of the tree.
00:45:23.000We happened to keep growing while others died.
00:46:37.000It's interesting to kind of think about how, I think it's just a little bit misleading to say that we are tapping into that holistically in the modern sense of hunting.
00:49:09.000Years later, trying to struggle with why we should do that.
00:49:11.000I was looking for that, but this article came up first, and this seems like better information than what I just told you for the last time.
00:49:18.000It says, more than 545,000 hunters in Michigan had bought licenses through November 11th, nearly 10% more to the same point in 2019. Significantly, the number getting licenses for the first time in at least five years,
00:52:05.000Scared and uneducated is how I would, and I don't want to call my friends and family uneducated, but I think they would probably admit that when shit hits the fan and the person you're calling is probably the lifestyle you at least want to partially emulate next time the shit goes down.
00:52:20.000Did you guys have lines in Montana outside the gun stores?
00:53:30.000And that feeling, once you have it, once you understand it, and then you take it a couple steps further to getting meat for your table, and somebody comes up to you and be like, I don't think you should have that gun, or I think that gun is unsafe.
00:53:41.000You're like, look, I promise you, if you could climb in my head, you would understand how beneficial these firearms are to my life and how kind of core they are to who I am.
00:53:52.000Not only that, like if you were in a situation where you needed one and you didn't have one, you would be so goddamn terrified.
00:54:02.000Versus if you're in a situation where you needed one, you had one, you had training in one, you would be protected.
00:54:08.000And I've never run a gun counter, but I bet if you had somebody in here that did, they would say there's a large percentage of people that come in after some life-changing event where they were robbed, or some kind of violence or crime was committed on them, and then they decide to go get that thing that'll give them that extra safety when some people don't get a chance to go into the gun counter because they're dead.
00:54:28.000And you're seeing, and this is not in support of Kyle Rittenhouse, right?
00:55:05.000You don't point a gun at people unless you're trying to shoot them, and you certainly don't put your finger on the trigger.
00:55:11.000This guy doesn't realize that by doing this, he has validated everything that the pro-Second Amendment people have said about these anti-gun people, that they are ignorant.
00:55:22.000Fools who don't understand what the fuck they're talking about.
00:55:25.000This guy with his finger on the trigger pointing this gun at the jury probably put the fucking cherry on the sundae.
00:55:32.000He broke pretty much the entire NRA gun safety four-point rules.
00:55:37.000Fuck the NRA. Not fuck the NRA. Forget about the NRA. Common sense.
00:56:20.000All he would have to do, like you've done in your life with Terran Tactical and the stuff that you've done, is take a little bit of time to learn and understand and ask questions.
00:57:11.000This trial and how it's being played on both sides of the coin.
00:57:15.000And then, oh, by the way, our corporate overlords, the aristocrats, are having record profit that no one's talking about.
00:57:23.000He has this whole article about how while we're focused on this one trial and kind of the ideological polar opposite approaches, our corporate bettors are making lots of money.
00:57:42.000You know, what's interesting, too, is a lot of people that are ideologically progressive and very left are also honest and waking up to the fact that they had a very distorted idea of what happened in that case.
00:57:59.000And heavily left-leaning people like Anna Kasparian, who is in the Young Turks.
00:58:06.000She wrote a whole thing about how, you know, she had a perception of it.
00:58:10.000She wrote it on Twitter and, you know, some people attacked her.
00:58:13.000She's basically saying she was wrong and she made a correction, which is brave.
00:58:22.000And Glenn Greenwald has exposed a lot of this and there's many other people.
00:58:25.000There's many, many, many journalists who said, okay, I did a deep dive on this and I thought I understood what was going on and I'm incorrect.
00:58:32.000When you look at the people that attacked Rittenhouse, the Rittenhouse, again, it's not a defense of Rittenhouse.
00:58:47.000I mean, he's showing up in a place where, I guess, his grandparents had a business.
00:58:52.000And he showed up because there was rioters and looters.
00:58:54.000And these people are not these noble people.
00:58:57.000These people that he shot are not these noble people that everyone wants to pretend they are.
00:59:01.000If you look at the record of the people that he shot, first of all, one of them, pull this up, because they dismissed all his charges right before the trial.
00:59:11.000And this guy had like a fuckload of charges.
00:59:14.000All the charges of one of the guys he shot?
00:59:16.000Yeah, different stuff that unrelated to the trial.
00:59:35.000It doesn't matter if he was an astronaut.
00:59:37.000They were coming after him with a gun, and one of the guys hit him with a skateboard, tried to take the gun away from him, and he shot the guy.
00:59:43.000Yeah, it's all on video, and it's like, why the feeling to paint...
01:00:24.000He's going straight to the motherland.
01:00:25.000He's like, I'm going to own the nutrients.
01:00:27.000But the point is that we separate ourselves.
01:00:33.000Into these ideological categories, these groups, left and right, and right and left, and I'm a weird one because I'm a part of both in a lot of ways.
01:00:51.000I believe that we have to have some sort of a safety net for folks when they're down and out, and single moms, and people that are poor, and people that are escaping abuse and bad situations, and I think There's a place for that.
01:01:03.000And this idea that everyone needs to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
01:02:32.000Most people are well-meaning, they want to live a safe and happy life, and they don't want to be beholden to one ideality or the other.
01:02:42.000They don't want to have to march in line.
01:02:45.000And one of the things I learned, mostly from your podcast, Is the death of skepticism inside of these kind of tribal groups of left and right.
01:03:13.000And you should be able to see when, and like I said, I always take it back to being able to go into the dingo den with the vegans and ask them, who are you?
01:04:22.000And one of the things I thought is, man, that's a rough...
01:04:26.000You have to really believe that everyone, like Jamie, you, me, we're all murderers.
01:04:32.000You'd be walking around as a vegan activist, as an animal rights activist, looking at everyone as if you live in a world of people that have no...
01:04:43.000Feeling for sentient life as people that don't understand kind of the society that they live in and function in.
01:04:50.000They don't understand kind of the mass of death that they cause in this proxy executioner world.
01:05:38.000We all can lean left or right, depending upon what feels good, and you get a lot of confirmation bias, and you get a lot of community involved in this ideology that you adopt.
01:05:47.000There's a supportive group of people that are also adopting that ideology, but human beings are so susceptible to cult-like thinking.
01:07:05.000He seems like a fun guy and he does these things where he has a bunch of his fans and I think they go to an island or something and they do all these activities and dance around and have a good time.
01:07:25.000And that's, like, cult has a bad connotation, but what I was doing is, like, let's call ourselves this, because why do we have to call ourselves anything?
01:07:32.000Might as well just, let's take back the word cult and do something good with it.
01:07:36.000And so, long story, this is a very long story, but I was on my show, and again, that no longer is on the air, but I was on my show, and we had a guy named Juan Carlos.
01:09:09.000He was a champion in the early days of the UFC. Pat Miletic is a beast and also founded Miletic Fighting Systems, which is one of the top gyms in the early days of the UFC. One of the first top professional gyms and they produced killers.
01:09:23.000Matt Hughes, one of the all-time great welterweight champions, came out of Croatia.
01:10:48.000So then you have like the actual opening day itself of rifle season sounds like World War III. It is the wildest shit I've ever heard in my life.
01:10:57.000As soon as you start seeing the sun peek out You start hearing, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
01:12:02.000You should be doing something different.
01:12:03.000I've told the story before, unfortunately, but we were in Phoenix, and we were waiting to get into this place, and there was a guy in front of us that was like, All these other people in here.
01:12:11.000And this guy was like up here above the clouds.
01:13:30.000Like it was very difficult to make like now fighters can be rich they can make Conor McGregor is extremely wealthy like Kamaru Usman makes I'm sure he I don't know what he makes but I'm sure he makes a shitload of money.
01:13:41.000The top people that draw in the long style bender they make a lot of money but back then they didn't and you had to be a champion to make any of it and Tom Erickson he never broke through in like neither pride and I think he was too big for the UFC Once they put the weight classes in,
01:17:11.000The only way you get a fight that's that good over five rounds, you have to have two men or two women that are insanely dedicated to what they're doing.
01:17:22.000Because it was a crazy war for five rounds.
01:17:27.000It's so hard for you to get your body into the kind of condition where you can maintain a war for five rounds.
01:17:33.000I always think, you know, when I go to an NFL game or I go to a UFC or I go somewhere, I think of, I start to think of what it must be like for that person.
01:17:41.000What it must be like to run out on an NFL field or run out into the octagon and understand that you are the center of the attention, but you still have, like, it's all about performance.
01:17:51.000And in a way, it's the best kind of meritocracy because the lights are on you and you have a chance to earn, you know, by being more skillful than the other person, you have a chance to earn it.
01:18:02.000It's one of the bravest athletic pursuits for sure.
01:22:50.000And what was interesting about that is they often say that, you know, predators like a mountain lion will, they need about, maybe a neonate every couple of weeks to survive.
01:23:01.000You know, like what's the clip at which they're preying on?
01:23:04.000It's only every couple of weeks to survive, but if they have the opportunity, they'll do it more often.
01:23:09.000So when he said, he said 17 in 60 days.
01:23:12.000And again, I hope I don't have the numbers wrong.
01:24:11.000What he said is when you're tracking via collar, you can see the movements of these at intervals.
01:24:16.000You can see the movements of these animals.
01:24:17.000What this particular time would do is he would kill an elk calf, stash it, and then go a mile away roughly sometimes or maybe a half a mile up above it and watch out because he was getting displaced by grizzly bears that often and displaced by other bears and possibly wolves as well.
01:24:35.000And so you start to think of how impressive is this predator or mountain lion?
01:24:41.000But, there's something out there that is dominant over this mature male mountain lion.
01:24:53.000All he is is a meat processor on four legs.
01:24:58.000We look at this situation with predator and prey and us and them through a filter of the human being.
01:25:06.000So we look at it through the filter of living our lives, being on the internet and communicating with each other and getting a map of what reality is.
01:25:27.000If mountain lions had a number and deer had a number and wolves had a number, this is like a math problem that's being sorted out in real time.
01:26:50.000We have to play a part in the system, and we have to trust these wildlife biologists that have done these assessments.
01:26:56.000Yeah, so this is where we get to a bunch of very important concepts that I hope everyone can start to understand from this show or wherever they can get the information.
01:27:06.000And this is where I go back to where when I'm a hunter and I see this game theory and I understand why I love it so much, I also then get to understand the structure in which it thrives and has thrived since the turn of the century in 1900 roughly.
01:27:21.000There's a guy named Dr. Valerius Geist.
01:27:23.000He was a wildlife biologist, a legend.
01:27:26.000He was one of the authors of the North American model of wildlife conservation.
01:27:57.000He had, at least to his point, and again, he's passed away, so I don't want to get too far down the road and let him speak for himself, but I've interviewed him and talked to him about this idea of how predation works, and he has seen, he explained to me kind of how he'd seen wolves act With surplus killing and what he calls a predator pit when a group of wolves,
01:28:20.000a pack of wolves, takes over an area, they surplus kill, and they're not really worried about carrying capacity of the land.
01:28:28.000He met a lot of flack in his later life in the wildlife biology and kind of wildlife management communities because of that view, which was seen as anti-wolf.
01:28:37.000One of the most profound moments of my kind of professional life is when I had a conversation with him, and I pushed him on this a little bit, and I said, look, there's a lot of people that think your theories on wolves are a bit outlandish, that wolves are a blight on the landscape, they should be controlled.
01:28:52.000And he brought it back a little bit, and he said, you know, I am for intelligent intervention.
01:28:57.000And if people really think about that term and what that term might mean, intelligent intervention means that we have the cognitive ability to And the ability as a species to intervene in these wild places and intervene in these landscapes where we kind of belong and don't belong at the same time.
01:29:18.000But we can intelligently intervene and make sure that we can strike a balance.
01:29:25.000And in the case of wolves and in the case of bears, it comes down to carrying capacity of a landscape.
01:29:48.000The cannibalism aspect of bears can't be ignored because most people don't understand it.
01:29:53.000One of the things that happens, and Ronell has talked about this before on his podcast, The Meteor, that there's a possibility that these bears are actively hunting cubs when they get out of hibernation.
01:30:07.000Yes, they are, and they're trying to get the sows back into heat by doing this.
01:31:22.000Yeah, shout out to the Sportsman's Alliance, which is a group in our space that battles these kind of state-by-state legislations that are meant to end hunting practices in different ways, whether it's trapping or whatever.
01:31:33.000They're an important group to know about.
01:31:37.000And they often run afoul of HSUS, Humane Society, the United States.
01:31:42.000And they're often against each other, which is a strange dichotomy, but that's the way it is.
01:31:47.000And in New Jersey, it's been a while since I've been immersed in this, but in New Jersey, the first thing that Phil Murphy did was try to ban black bear hunting on state lands.
01:31:59.000And how this happens, and this happens with wolves and grizzly bears and everything.
01:32:03.000There is, with the Endangered Species Act, you want to get to a threshold, a healthy threshold.
01:32:08.000The wildlife biologists will set a healthy threshold.
01:32:11.000And if you take a few steps back, the North American model of wildlife conservation, one of the main things it was founded upon, and this goes back to the 1800s, is the public trust doctrine.
01:32:22.000This means that wildlife isn't owned by anyone.
01:32:41.000This is an important thing to understand about our model of conservation, and this is an idea that led to the renaissance at the turn of the century where our country went from extirpating many of its wildlife species to saving and conserving them.
01:32:56.000So the public trust doctrine bleeds right into our North American model of wildlife conservation, which in and of itself says that we will enact wildlife laws and legislation based on science and wildlife biology.
01:33:11.000So that means we have state game agencies, and we can get into this too, are mostly funded by hunters and anglers through American System of Conservation funding that you've talked about a lot on this show.
01:33:30.000This Pittman-Robinson was interesting because one of the things I learned from Manella's podcast is that a large percentage of that money is actually coming from people who are into the shooting sports.
01:33:57.000So, yeah, you take it back to 1936. America is kind of in the throes of the Great Depression.
01:34:04.000Franklin D. Roosevelt's the president.
01:34:06.000They have the first, you may Google this, Jamie, the first North American Wildlife Conference at the urging of many conservationists of the time.
01:38:04.000We still have two or three more to go.
01:38:06.000So, Ding Darling, he's out there dinging it up.
01:38:10.000And in 1936, a bunch of folks like Ding and conservationists of the time were challenging and pushing Franklin D. Roosevelt to kind of They'd already had the renaissance of understanding what conservation needed to happen in our country.
01:38:41.000So anyway, 1936, we've already gone through a bunch of the legislation, Lacey Act, a lot of the things that would lay the foundation for this idea that we needed to conserve wildlife in this country.
01:38:53.000In 1936, there was this first wildlife conservation gathering.
01:39:00.000I've read reports anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people come to Washington, D.C. And at this point, conservation was an idea that was kind of shared across party lines.
01:39:08.000I remember reading that garden clubs and other bird watchers, all these people came to the table for conservation.
01:39:15.000It wasn't like, bunch of hunters, and that was it.
01:39:17.000It was people that cared about wildlife, and they saw over the last decades how we had degraded and extirpated many of the wildlife populations that were important to this nation.
01:39:27.000Mallard duck, elk, deer, everything you see a lot of.
01:41:39.000And they decided, and there was, I think, five or six things that they wanted to achieve.
01:41:44.000One of those things was to pay for it.
01:41:46.000And they decided that we're going to create this bill and take a current excise tax on the sale of ammunition and firearms, 11% excise tax on sale.
01:41:56.000And they're going to take that and they're going to put it into a bucket to pay for many of the conservation programs that we have in the United States at the time.
01:42:07.000That legislation was put forward by those two cool-ass motherfuckers that we talked about.
01:42:11.000And those folks, I think it got to Roosevelt's desk in nine days or something like that.
01:45:02.000So they decided that this was sort of a compromise and also a good faith effort to try to preserve all the things that were missing during the whole market hunting problem.
01:46:13.000I know, but imagine if this is, and the duck stamp's this way too, and we talk about that, but the duck stamp and this tax, if they were to come to the hunting community, the fishing community, and say, we want to raise this excise tax to 12.5%.
01:46:39.000And if you have to pay a little more, but you know that that money is going to a good cause and that everybody feels good about the transaction.
01:46:47.000And so this is a constituency that not only happily pays this tax, but would support Whatever we need to do for that tax to pay for the thing that we love.
01:46:59.000It's kind of a perfect governmental...
01:49:28.000Which I think is one of the great failings of the fucking place where I, the community that I work in.
01:49:33.000The problem is that there's the amount of people that are involved in that world, in the hunting world, in the general, it's too easy to get food.
01:49:43.000So most people think it's frivolous, or it's sociopathic, or it's evil.
01:49:50.000They have this distorted perception of what it means to want to be engaged in that world.
01:49:56.000That you're doing this almost as an excuse to kill things.
01:50:42.000One of the reasons why I abandoned California, I was tired of being evacuated from my home with fire.
01:50:49.000There was a moment during the last one.
01:50:53.000Where it was, I came home from the comedy store, there was a fire that was like a mile and a half plus from our house, and I came home from the comedy store, and me and my wife were like, we gotta get the fuck out of here.
01:51:20.000The kids, our dog, let's get him in a car, and let's just go.
01:51:25.000And I knew that, like, I'm like, we can escape, like, danger in this one moment if we act now.
01:51:32.000But if we get stupid, and I don't even want to say stupid, because people have made bad decisions based on the fact they never had to encounter a wildfire before.
01:54:21.000Hundreds of millions of dollars going into this fund.
01:54:24.000This goes into a wildlife restoration fund, which is managed, I believe, by the IRS, and the IRS takes the money and says, hey, here, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, here's this money, fucking make it happen.
01:54:35.000And then the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service takes that money, and they go from state to state, and they use a...
01:55:21.000So now you have this thing where hunters, shooters, fishermen are paying into a system that many of them have no idea about.
01:55:28.000It's so ingrained in our system, in our minds as hunters and anglers, that we know that the American system of conservation funding, which includes Pittman and Robertson, but also includes license sales.
01:55:57.000And we take that money and we say, we're going to pay for a bunch of wildlife biologists to work for the state, and those folks are going to be the ones, for the most part, to enact legislation to keep these animals around.
01:56:09.000And that's a huge part of the North American model of wildlife conservation that is unique to this continent and that kicks fucking ass.
01:56:20.000If you look at it as a system in comparison to a lot of the other systems that are combating, whether or not it's like community violence or drug addiction or crime or anything, If you look at problems and solutions,
01:56:37.000it's one of the great problems VS solutions in our country.
01:56:53.000If we could have that same sort of ethic...
01:56:57.000Into other aspects of our life, I think we could do amazing things.
01:57:01.000If you think of the amount of money that has been generated willingly, and also, like, happily by hunters and fishermen and people in the shooting sports and knowing that it's all going to good, but it's sustainable.
01:58:28.000I've watched it for a long time, and I guess I should say the backstory is I was a big fan of it, and then it started to turn to something.
01:59:38.000It's like we have this idea that everybody on television or everybody who has a podcast or everybody who has a YouTube show has to share your ideas.
02:01:06.000Yeah, I mean, I apologize to John Oliver, but I think the frustration for me as just a normal dude that watches a lot of stuff is that I want to really like him, and sometimes I can see through it.
02:02:29.000And you want to have his show and you want to be entertained by it.
02:02:32.000That's where the problem with social media comes in.
02:02:34.000Because there's a lot of people that don't think that way.
02:02:37.000There's a lot of people that don't think like...
02:02:40.000Whether it's John Oliver or whether it's Donald Trump or whether it's fucking a lot of the right-wing people or a lot of left-wing people, there's an ideological battle.
02:02:48.000And if you've got control of the switch and you're like, fuck that guy, he doesn't think you should have a seven-month-old abortion.
02:07:12.000That's when you know the podcast is going to a good place.
02:07:15.000I can't do calculations in the middle of a rant.
02:07:19.000All right, let me take it back to my solution for all of our culture.
02:07:21.000We know now that we pay for a thing that benefits us.
02:07:25.000Now, I would encourage everyone to look up the duck stamp.
02:07:29.000I would encourage everybody to look up the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
02:07:33.000We don't probably have time to get into those things, but those are things that act in a very similar way, as do licensed sales, in a similar way to Pittman Robertson.
02:07:42.000These are things that help fund the things we love to do.
02:07:46.000We take money from particular areas and we place it back in the public trust.
02:07:50.000And we create access and opportunity across this country in amazing ways.
02:07:55.000And all in all, with all the different organizations, how much money are we talking about?
02:07:59.000You can look it up in terms of PR money.
02:08:02.000But most of this money, we have to then separate this in a lot of ways from conservation groups within our space.
02:08:09.000We have Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, of which I'm a part.
02:08:28.000And so we have conservation organizations, and I think this is just in the spirit of this user pays public benefits, how it is in hunting.
02:08:38.000We have single species organizations like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Wild Sheep Foundation, Pheasants Forever, Rocky Mountain Goat Alliance.
02:08:51.000All the fishing species, Coastal Conservation Association.
02:08:53.000I mean, you could go on and on about associations that are kind of entwined and ingrained in our community that help to fund hugely important access.
02:09:33.000Trying to help the conservation of trout.
02:09:36.000And this is, and so this is, like, the people that are using these resources.
02:09:40.000We call it the sustainable use of a natural resource.
02:09:43.000Sustainable being the important part there.
02:09:45.000We're using it, but we're not overusing it.
02:09:47.000And to go back to my friend, Dr. Valerius Geist, the legend of our model of conservation, we're intervening intelligently to make sure that these populations flourish.
02:09:58.000This is discussed by wildlife biologists.
02:10:00.000And this is a part of our model of conservation, and again, this is all intertwined.
02:10:06.000The point, I guess, would be to say that all of this says that the hunting, fishing community is paying a lot of money and a lot of time to conserve and to give access opportunities through public lands and other programs the thing that they are consuming,
02:10:49.000So, here we are in this kumbaya world of hunting where there is a user pays public benefits ingrained.
02:10:57.000I once, when I was writing an article about Pittman-Robertson some years ago, I did a straw poll of 100 people in my orbit that were hardcore hunters.
02:11:05.000I asked them, what is Pittman-Robertson?
02:11:07.00097 of the 100 people didn't get it right.
02:11:12.000They either didn't know what it was, they thought it paid for some random shit it didn't pay for, they thought it was part of the duck stamp, they thought it was, they didn't know what it was.
02:11:23.000Three people of a hundred, and this includes like family members, people I grew up hunting with, it wasn't ingrained enough in our own communities, and so how could we expect the people outside of our community to then understand it?
02:11:35.000On a side note, that'd be a great grill.
02:15:30.000It is backed up by a structure that pays for itself.
02:15:33.000And also that structure bakes in a value system that I believe in wholly, and the people that take part in it can opt in to believe in wholly.
02:17:06.000So my proof that hunting is good for you and good for kind of the culture is that the people that want to do it also want to share it with other people for nothing.
02:18:19.000And when my first reaction was, probably the first couple times I came on this podcast, I was in the realm of, like, we've got to fix Hunting's image.
02:18:26.000And that was what I thought was the thing that was needed.
02:18:29.000And then at times I thought, that's not...
02:19:29.000Using a very localized, very slow burn of just taking the good things that we've already talked about, teaching people the structure, teaching people the ideology of hunting and the values that it purports, teaching people how...
02:19:46.000To love an ecosystem, the one that you live in, how to learn about it, how to learn about natural history, how to learn about wildlife biology, how to learn about the North American model of wildlife conservation, how to learn about our history, and then how to go find an animal,
02:20:02.000find where it lives, learn about it, then kill it, and then eat it.
02:20:05.000This is a process that's repeated many times over millions of years, and it's very useful in today's day and age.
02:20:14.000There's a lot of people, I think, that want to do it that are adults that don't know how.
02:25:33.000So, my feeling is after all this experience that I've had that there is an opportunity to localize this thing to say, look, man, this is a hard thing to do.
02:27:48.000I've had many people, I take them hunting for the first time, they shoot something and they really don't want to see it struggle for its life.
02:29:10.000But to your point, to somebody like Cam Haynes' point...
02:29:13.000Now we get back to the craft, where if I learn to talk to an elk better, if I learn to shoot my.22 better, if I make my whole life about this craft, then that makes me a more ethical hunter.
02:29:28.000Because I now know where that arrow will land, I now know where that.22 bullet will land, and I now know Better understand the outcome of what's going to happen.
02:29:39.000That doesn't ever stop a wounding or a gut shot or, in this case, a spine shot.
02:29:44.000That doesn't stop the shittiness of the finality of what you've just done, but it does put you right next to it.
02:29:51.000It makes you realize who you are, what you are, and why you're here, and your impact on the things around you.
02:29:59.000Way better than someone else whacking a chicken over the head and serving it to you in this wonderful cellophane wrapper.
02:30:07.000I'm now, I have a side of like, I don't want to say I have a side of guilt with my squirrel slippery pot pie, but I have a side of understanding.
02:30:15.000Like I have a side of, I know what that thing is.
02:31:16.000That's corn, lime of beans from the garden, corn from the garden, squirrel there on the right, and then there's flat, those noodley-looking things.
02:38:35.000And then I see this brown flash go down this hill in front of me.
02:38:39.000And there's a bit of a, you know, if you look like this, This brown flash has to go down this ridge and then around the corner of the spine of the ridge and stay down in the valley.
02:38:48.000I know that above me is an elk carcass freshly killed yesterday.
02:44:35.000Again, having been in the industry and talked to a lot of people that have had encounters, I know kind of how this is going to go.
02:44:41.000And likely how it goes is the only way you get out of it is you get mauled and the bear loses interest or the person that's with you saves you in some manner, right?
02:47:37.000There was a lot of people saying, like, because they were hunting bears at the time, and they were hunting bears in their den on the Denali Highway in Alaska.
02:47:44.000And so people are like, good, you hunt them in their den, that's what happens.
02:47:47.000And again, and that's where I come back to the emotion of finally, because so much of my hunting life in Montana has been anticipation of those encounters.
02:48:10.000They helicopter you out into the middle of nowhere, and then you have, I think, a 12-hour delay before you can hunt once you've been helicoptered into the wilderness.
02:48:17.000I think it's 12 or 24 hours, but you have a delay before you can hunt.
02:48:20.000So you literally have to sit there and wait.
02:48:22.000And we were there at a time in August when there was no darkness.
02:48:25.000It was literally light pretty much the entire 24-hour day.
02:48:29.000And so we sat on a ridge line and we were glassing for caribou in the period where we couldn't hunt.
02:48:36.000And here comes this sow grizzly bear down this drainage.
02:48:53.000Whether her cub got taken or she was just in a predatory mood, I remember glassing her with a spotting scope going, I hope she doesn't come over here.
02:49:03.000Is that normal behavior when a cub gets eaten by a boar?
02:49:07.000I don't know if that's normal behavior.
02:49:16.000I imagine them to be aggressive in the times that they need to be.
02:49:20.000But I don't know enough to know if that's like every time a cub gets eaten, she goes out and whacks the shit out of the next thing she sees.
02:51:49.000So when this bear pops out, finally is kind of a way of thinking, if you take the chance to go outside in a place where you know there's grizzlies, and think about this.
02:52:04.000And now I'm in the dark by myself for roughly three hours till my buddies get there with a giant dead animal that I'm now skinning and removing the meat from.
02:54:46.000I learned, Jason Phelps is, you know, part of Meat Eater and he's a huge advocate for, I mean, he started an elk calling company and he has all this information and I want to learn it and I want to learn how to archery hunt.
02:54:59.000I want to learn from Cam Haynes and John Dudley.
02:55:02.000How to make that arrow go where I want that fucking thing to go and I want to learn how to pack as light as possible and how to be prepared for the backcountry with my medical kit and my kill kit and I want to go take that meat home and pack it out and then butcher it at my house and show my son what muscle groups are what and what's a roast and what's a steak and I want to take that and then I want to put it in the freezer and I want to pull it out and I want to cook it for my family and go hey And also,
02:55:32.000I want to boil the elk skull, I want to whiten that skull, I want to hang that on my fucking wall in my garage, and I want to go, hey, this whole thing, this entire thing, is interactive, it's real, and it challenges everything that I know about the world around me.
02:55:53.000What an ecosystem is, how an elk relates to a wolf, how a wolf relates to an elk, how I relate to elk and wolves.
02:56:01.000Terms like trophic cascade, things like intelligent intervention.
02:56:04.000It leads me to those real deep thoughts.
02:56:07.000And then when I'm worried about whether I'm doing the right thing, then I look back at the structure of Pittman-Robertson, the structure of the duck stamp, and the structure of the user pays public benefits system.
02:56:20.000And I look back at that and I go, shit.
02:56:23.000All these personal experiences are backed by a structure that's pretty beautiful.
02:56:47.000I think if you look at the sportsman structure, the fisherman, hunter, and then Second Amendment advocate that's out there shooting a lot of just rounds of the range...
02:56:56.000Those folks are contributing so much to the greater good while allowing them their freedom to pursue the things they enjoy.
02:57:04.000If we applied that to other stuff, like I said earlier, if we said every time you buy an iPhone, let's say 11% of that goes to prison reform, 11% goes to, like, education.
02:57:18.00011% goes to some sort of reinvigoration of impoverished communities, investment in the communities.
02:57:25.000Think about the public trust doctrine inside of our North American model.
02:57:29.000Public trust just basically says, no one owns this, we all own it together.
02:57:51.000There's a thing that happened during the pandemic where people realized there was this gap between people that hunt and people that use guns and the people that never would conceive of it.
02:58:01.000I have a friend of mine, his wife was like, you're not getting a gun, you're not getting a gun.
02:58:04.000Pandemic hits, George Floyd riots, you gotta get a gun.
02:58:25.000What we have to do, collectively, as people, is abandon these groups, abandon these ideologies and these teams, and instead just look at what is the reality of the math?
02:58:40.000When it comes to wild animals, when it comes to humans, when it comes to habitat, when it comes to sustainable resources, what's the math?
03:01:14.000They hiked it out, they went to their camp, and then they went back to retrieve the rest, and they found some grizzly bear shit, and they didn't think too much about it, and they sat down to eat lunch, and while they were eating lunch, unarmed, a giant bear ran up on them.
03:01:32.000Nobody died, so that's why it's a good story.
03:01:34.000And these are experienced outdoorsmen, Giannis Patelos, Franny Warren, Steve Rinella.
03:01:37.000It's a fascinating, fascinating story.
03:01:39.000Yeah, and again, I would say the stories that I've covered and understand about Krizzy Bears tell...
03:01:58.000Grizzly bears and wolves have been politicized in our time along the lines of the Republican and Democrat ideologies in a way that I just hate.
03:02:09.000And I think that's just a big part of how...
03:02:14.000Well, look what's going on in the Pacific Northwest, like in British Columbia.
03:02:18.000In British Columbia, they used to hunt grizzly bears because they wanted to sustain the population.
03:02:24.000They wanted to figure out how to get it to a manageable level because otherwise then the grizzly bears would attack a lot of the fawns and a lot of the...
03:02:31.000The calves and all these different animals.
03:02:34.000But then the city people, the people from Vancouver, those were the people that voted against it.
03:02:43.000Because that's the largest population.
03:03:31.000Yeah, or Vancouver in the same analogy, and that's why in our North American model we don't We cede these decisions to wildlife biologists and scientists in an effort, not a perfect effort, but a holistic effort to not allow public sentiment to override the realities of wildlife management.
03:03:51.000And that's what, when we talk about vegans and we talk about some of the struggles with animal rights, we talk about a public sentiment that's easier swayed in that direction.
03:04:00.000When you say to someone, We're good to go.
03:06:55.000This is where people get real weird, where people get real conspiratorial when they think about the elites that run this country, those weird world leaders.
03:08:12.000We could easily figure out an elk burger versus a plant burger.
03:08:15.000But I think what you're saying is the scariest thing about that is that we're able to quickly...
03:08:22.000When we look holistically at what farming is, what land use is, and what wildlife is, and what ecosystem health is, and we look across the space about what sharing the land might look like, how about sustainable use of land might look like, the version of the plant-based burger feels good and it's kind of the veneer that it paints across your consumption.
03:08:43.000But when you dig down deep, you look at monoculture crops, and you look at what this world would have to be to sustain this kind of veneer of your plant-based burger.
03:09:26.000Yeah, I'm not on, like I don't have a podcast right now, I'm not on the air, but I'm very excited about the future of conversations because all this shit is interconnected.
03:09:35.000All this shit matters, and we can have an honest conversation about how close we are to each other.
03:09:43.000There is one group of people trying to figure this out, and it's so complicated, and anybody trying to generalize it is probably lying to you.
03:09:53.000Yeah, and the idea to collect everybody into these groups, vegans versus hunters, right versus left, it's not good for anybody.
03:10:01.000I very much hope in the future that I'm able to get off the ground a podcast with my friend.
03:11:31.000The amount of money that goes from the taxes that helps conservation, that goes to wildlife habitat, the amount of money that's generated by that is really substantial.
03:12:06.000I don't know what the number is, but I would tell you that part of my work on Pittman-Robertson in the past has been to look at a thing called the backpack tax.
03:13:01.000For the sustainability of our state game agencies and the agencies that are put forth to manage these species in this land, you know, there's the Bureau of Land Management, there's the Forest Service, National Forest Service, there's federal and state agencies that manage this land,
03:13:17.000they manage the wildlife, all in trust, as we've talked about, all within our model of conservation, as we've talked about, all within the funding system that we've talked about.
03:13:25.000There's this idea that if a backpack tax, which just means enact the same Pittman Robinson taxes, the excise taxes, and enact those on all the gear that's sold at, say, REI. And that would be 11% as well?
03:13:43.000There was legislation in the late 90s, I'll forget the senator, the Department of Interior head and the senator that put it forth, that called it the backpack tax and said we want to, this is, it's way, there's way more, the economy for outdoor recreation is way bigger than the hunting and fishing economy.
03:14:07.000And so the idea would be like, hey, the hunting and fishing manufacturers are paying this excise tax on behalf of the public, and this is going into the Wildlife Restoration Fund and all the things we've talked about, that why wouldn't we do that also with, you know, in the user pays public benefits model with other users that are also using these wild places?
03:14:26.000They're not using them in a consumptive manner, but they are also consuming them in terms of trails, ice, you know, they're using these places.
03:14:35.000And so there's a group called the Outdoor Industry Association that was formed around a lot of things, but one of the things was an opposition to this backpack tax.
03:14:45.000But what if there could be some sort of agreement?
03:14:51.000Like, a consumptive tax should be more than a non-consumptive tax.
03:16:36.000And also, the duck stamp, when you buy a duck stamp, the money that goes from the duck stamp, and the duck stamp is required to hunt waterfowl in our country.
03:16:44.000Right, but we're talking about these people that sell tents, like the camping people.
03:16:47.000If you're saying that they don't want to participate in this, they have to look at it this way.
03:16:52.000What if it was just something that contributed to the thing that literally supports your business?
03:17:54.000In the example we gave earlier, 1980s hunting populations have been dwindling.
03:18:01.000I want to say around 14 million to around 11 million, give or take any estimate.
03:18:06.000Even our estimates are kind of shoddy in the way we gather them, but hunting has been going down.
03:18:12.000Hunting license sales are a big part of the way we fund state game agencies and other agencies that provide for wildlife management, wildlife biology, and access to state and federal lands.
03:18:23.000And is that only the hunting licenses, or is Pittman-Robertson buying ammo?
03:18:31.000So we call that the American System of Conservation Funding, and it has all those elements in it.
03:18:38.000And I've read, you know, it's confusing because I've read about 17 different things about this that say different percentages, but I've read from anywhere from 40% to 80 to 90% of state game agencies are funded by the American System of Conservation Funding, which includes the things we've talked about.
03:19:02.000You don't want, as much as I love hunting, you don't want one constituency within a myriad of user groups to dominate the funding of these agencies.
03:19:13.000We need that funding to be sustainable and diverse.
03:19:15.000We need that funding to come from all kinds of different areas because...
03:19:21.000As we discovered, when the hunting numbers in our population drop in millions and they recede, we have less money to fund an increasingly expensive endeavor of managing wildlife.
03:19:34.000Native and non-native game species and non-game species, we have to spend money to manage them.
03:19:39.000Public land and private land, we have to spend money to manage wildlife in those corridors.
03:19:46.000That's when we get back to the backpack tax itself and the diversity of funding where we might say also, as much as I want the constituency of hunting and fishing to have a seat at the table, it really can't be one of the only seats at the table.
03:20:03.000We need to have other people pitching in.
03:20:06.000And I feel as though the backpack tax is something that should be revisited.
03:20:11.000I don't want to generalize the Outdoor Industry Association or companies like Keene or Patagonia that care a lot about the environment.
03:20:18.000But I do think this is something that they should all publicly address and they should talk about and they should have a dialogue about because I think it's important.
03:20:27.000We were talking about taxes and about the idea of the Pittman-Robertson is very clear where that money goes.
03:20:33.000And if we had that with other things, like if you had every time you purchased a computer in the United States, you knew that there's a certain percentage that goes to education.
03:20:44.000And we radically upgraded the school system in this country because of that.
03:20:48.000Think of the amount of money that could be generated by that.
03:20:56.000I mean, I don't want to diminish people's struggles with like buying equipment and computers and shit like that, but if there was a small percentage, the amount of money, if it was proportionate to the amount of use, right?
03:21:10.000Like the hunting thing, like it's 11%, not a lot of hunters.
03:21:14.000The computer thing, it doesn't have to be 11%.
03:21:16.000There's so many, that would be abusive.
03:21:18.000If it was 11%, people would start showing up in fucking fur coats, driving Bentleys and Rolls Royces and shit.
03:22:22.000It's the manufacturers as well, because that's the thing that really...
03:22:24.000It's the people that make the stuff, the people that generate the finances that fucking sponsor these people to be in office, and they're beholden to those folks once they get in there.
03:22:37.000That's the big problem, because you're dealing with a fucking corporation that employs X amount of people, like thousands of people or whatever, many, many locations all over the world.
03:23:54.000We should all contribute a certain amount to this, and it would enhance the experience and make it more available to everybody, which would enhance everybody's life, and it would be barely noticeable to most folks.
03:24:06.000If you had a 1% tax, just 1%, That didn't exist before and now exist, it would have a significant impact.
03:24:13.000And it has had an impact in the example we're giving, which is an admittedly narrow example.
03:24:20.000It has had an impact on a very, very, very important thing for our country that doesn't exist elsewhere.
03:24:29.000The continent of Africa, it just doesn't exist elsewhere where we're able to say we pay into a system Where everyone in this country, every person that might sit down in this chair would say, I want there to be elk.
03:25:10.000I think we can do that with everything.
03:25:11.000We do that with a thing called the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which takes offshore oil royalties and puts that in a fund that helps pay for parks and access and fishing docks and shit all across this country.
03:26:32.000There's a lot of people that don't think we should make any decisions in like the California model where you don't do anything to manage predators like mountain lions and they kill all the deer.
03:26:41.000Like, good luck finding a deer in California.
03:27:19.000This is a thing that people have when they get locked into ideologies, right?
03:27:24.000I bet that lady, when that mountain lion attacked her kid, all of her preconceived notions of what a mountain lion is were out the window because she realized, oh, Jesus Christ, By being sensitive, kind, caring people,
03:27:39.000we have allowed monsters to live near our children.
03:27:42.000Monsters that would eat our children face first.
03:27:45.000Grab your kid by the fucking head, dude.
03:27:48.000That's when I hang out with vegans and I talk to people like, that I said Dr. Robert C. Jones.
03:27:53.000When I hang out with these people, I understand that the middle ground is the strongest place.
03:27:57.000There's so much of their ideology that I agree with and so much of, without knowing it, my ideology they agree with.
03:28:04.000In the middle is the fucking place where wildlife, the complex wildlife biology and management happens.
03:28:10.000And it's on the poles where it doesn't happen.