In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Joe and Ryan discuss Bill and Melinda Gates' plan to sell off millions of acres of public land in order to pay for more roads, bridges, and other infrastructure.
00:00:59.000And I don't think people in other countries understand this.
00:01:02.000I don't think people in America even understand how unique it is.
00:01:05.000Like our public lands, what they did when they set that up, not just national parks, but all the public lands, we created this insane resource, this beautiful resource where we can go into the mountains, into the woods, and enjoy nature.
00:01:23.000And I get, I mean, the amount of response from listeners that live outside the country and to a person, they're like, are you guys really going to screw this up?
00:01:36.000How do people not appreciate what you guys have?
00:01:39.000Don't turn into this country or this country or this country.
00:01:43.000Basically, any other country outside of Canada and the U.S. I think the real issue is the people in America that don't experience it and don't go there and don't know how insanely unique this situation is.
00:01:59.000Like, I don't know how to say Chamas' last name, Polyhoptia.
00:02:49.000So it's not just the recreational part of it.
00:02:52.000It is, I mean, it is no different than, if you want to think of it in these terms, than some, you know, one-arm jacked pumping oil out of the ground.
00:03:00.000Like it is constantly working on our behalf.
00:03:04.000And it, being public land, needs to be intact, an intact ecosystem to do its job.
00:03:12.000And there's less and less of it every year.
00:03:16.000So like, for instance, right, like America's grasslands, we are losing 2 million acres.
00:03:25.000And grasslands are kind of like a catch-all phrase a little bit, but it'd be like sagebrush ecosystem, short grass prairie, mixed grass prairie.
00:03:32.000But we're losing 2 million acres a year.
00:03:35.000It's the most threatened ecosystem, not just in the U.S., but in the entire planet.
00:03:42.000And people are like, oh, it's just grass, not development.
00:03:48.000Well, there's development, but also encroachment of tree species.
00:03:55.000So cedars, junipers, stuff like that, working their way back out on to the prairie, to the plain.
00:04:02.000And we used to have all these natural deforesters out there, bison, that wouldn't allow those trees to grow because they like rubbing up on stuff and they'll destroy them.
00:04:14.000So, you know, millions of bison out there physically removing or preventing that tree encroachment onto the plain.
00:04:24.000Those trees are sucking water out of the ground, making it more arid and more dry.
00:06:06.000We have 640 million acres is the number that you hear all the time.
00:06:10.00083 million of those are national parks.
00:06:14.000But thanks to the great state of Alaska, you can hunt inside the boundary of some national parks up there to the tune of about like 43 million acres, big, big chunks, right?
00:06:26.000And then you, you know, remove a little for structures, Roads, you know, we have over 400,000 miles of road on Forest Service and BLM ground.
00:06:43.000And then when we get into like talking about like the budgeting of things, like BLM, Forest Service, they're maintaining a lot of stuff that people take for granted.
00:06:54.000And then, you know, so we're down to like 580 million acres of what I would consider like usable.
00:07:03.000And then you consider what those acres can actually produce, right?
00:07:07.000Which, you know, if you go to a super arid state, you need a lot more land to support like mammal ungulate type life than you do in a state that's got a lot more water.
00:07:47.000But it is so diverse, which is what makes it amazing.
00:07:51.000And that diversity provides all this opportunity.
00:07:55.000And one of the things that people need to keep in mind is we have nothing but bad examples.
00:08:02.000All these other countries have gone the complete opposite way of what we have now.
00:08:08.000And one of America's largest exports is hunters.
00:08:13.000Like we send hunters all over the world to support these other economies.
00:08:18.000And what we have here at home is insanely valuable.
00:08:23.000And it just becomes more and more valuable because we have large, intact ecosystems that you just more and more cannot find anywhere else, right?
00:09:49.000I swear to God, Joe, man, when it was time to go to bed and it started out like bed was at 10.30 and then bed was at 2.30 in the morning and then bed was at 3 a.m because you would get as that sun's kind of like making this low orbit um i'm sure you've seen like the time lapses of the sun like kind of does a little dip yeah you get this like hazy gorgeous light that you just wanted to stay up and and see um but
00:10:19.000I'd close my eyes and I could see like the sun going down to darkness and in my brain because it was just time to go to bed.
00:10:50.000And a little larger group of people or a smaller group of people is like, oh, it started in the House about six weeks ago.
00:10:59.000And then there's a real small group of people who are like, August 24th, the state of Utah submitted a lawsuit for the United States Supreme Court to take 18 and a half million acres of acres of BLM land in Utah.
00:11:20.000August 2024 is when we were like, oh my God, we got to be on top of this.
00:13:59.000And then this idea of selling public lands got really conflated with like, oh my God, if you talk about anything that's going on with the federal government, you're anti-Trump.
00:14:11.000And it was just this ultra-politicized hot potato.
00:14:26.000Like, they're selling land that belongs to everybody.
00:14:29.000It doesn't matter what state you're in.
00:14:32.000And then, like, the next domino fell, and a bunch of states and counties signed on an amicus brief for that Utah lawsuit, which is like a friend of the court filing, because they wanted to get in.
00:14:48.000Like, stuff's going up for free or cheap fire sale.
00:18:32.000So on the Mormon church side of things, there's, you know, there's some doctrine, some church doctrine that says that the land is put here for the benefit of the people.
00:18:46.000And you're basically, and I'm very much paraphrasing here, you're spiting God if you're not developing that land for profit, like for the profit of the people.
00:18:58.000And so there is a strong theory that Mike Lee is.
00:19:37.000They, They're like public lands that are set aside for multiple use, don't get locked up, don't get developed in certain ways, are the best thing.
00:20:03.000He is the chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the Senate.
00:20:09.000And like I said, he starts getting drug into the White House.
00:20:13.000He starts consolidating power and he starts telling everybody, hey, I'm going to put this amendment in and you better not go against it or else for the next six years, which is technical, as long as Republicans stay in power, he's not going to lose his chairmanship of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
00:20:39.000As long as he's there, none of their stuff is going to be read because it's the chair that decides what they're going to review, what they're going to look at, and what they're going to pass.
00:20:51.000So here's this dude who is leveraging everything for his personal thing.
00:21:03.000And fortunately, people started cluing in.
00:21:06.000And there was enough of an on-ramp that there was a blowback literally in every state, all 50 states.
00:21:16.000People wrote in to first their representatives, then their senators, and it created enough of a, oh my God, this is going to set back the entire Big Beautiful bill.
00:21:29.000This is only one part of the dumpster fire that is the Big Beautiful bill, but it's going to take this whole thing off the tracks.
00:21:42.000Now, Lee issued a statement, which is like a gut shot, if you're in my position who've been like tracking this thing, you know, since August.
00:21:54.000And, you know, it said, oh, I listened to the American people, right?
00:22:13.000And you don't do that if you're listening to the American people, right?
00:22:18.000The American people, by the end of this, were very united in saying, not one acre.
00:22:25.000It started as not one acre in the budget reconciliation process, which is part of what they're doing here in the Big Beautiful Bill, or is what they're doing.
00:22:38.000And the phrasing there really matters, right?
00:22:42.000Like we have systems in place for land sales, legal framework, both of those, you know, it's acronyms, government acronyms, Flipma, Flipna.
00:22:56.000And the revenues from land sales go back into acquiring land of greater value.
00:23:04.000There's all these acts since 1781, all of these acts for the disposal of federally managed land.
00:23:15.000And those two that I named are the most recent.
00:23:19.000And they're designed to maybe not retain the same acreage, but provide the most value to the American people.
00:23:30.000And what Lee was doing in this reconciliation process was completely circumventing that.
00:23:37.000And as you mentioned, like nobody, no citizen of the United States is going to feel any change from dumping $100 million into the federal treasury right now.
00:24:11.000I mean, and that's the best thing that could have come out of this.
00:24:15.000Like, we are going to make, we made this huge stink, right?
00:24:18.000From all the different buckets that politicians pay attention to, right?
00:24:22.000All the different user groups, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, everybody came together.
00:24:29.000And more than likely, a shitload of people, the 36% of Americans who didn't vote in the last election, probably chose to speak up, some large percentage of them, and said no public land sales.
00:24:44.000Hopefully that created enough of, you know, what they call in Washington is like a third rail issue.
00:24:51.000It's like, it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're on, you can't have this as part of your agenda because you're going to get shot down, right?
00:25:00.000That's like the near-term win because that feeling won't last forever.
00:25:06.000There's a piece of legislation out of Ryan Zinke's office, who's our Montana congressman, and he was actually started as Secretary of the Interior under Trump in his first term.
00:25:19.000Zinke has this Public Lands and Public Hands Act, and it would not have prevented what just happened, this budget reconciliation thing, but it does put some more guardrails around the sale of federally managed land, and that would be like a really positive thing.
00:25:45.000However, just like I explained, like Mike Lee's position in the Senate, it would have to get through him.
00:26:27.000He needs Republican co-sponsors in the Senate just to get the ball rolling there.
00:26:33.000But we still have like these knuckleheads that are saying, if you didn't vote for my thing, I won't let a single good thing happen for the next six years.
00:26:42.000That goes, you know, provided they don't get removed somehow, some way.
00:26:47.000Yeah, it's really interesting when you see these bills.
00:26:51.000Because these bills are like, I think they read the entire bill on the floor and it took 14 hours and no one was there.
00:27:01.000They just read it to an empty audience because nobody sat around for 14 hours.
00:27:09.000Just like, who's, how are you signing off on things that I know you're not reading?
00:27:13.000Like, how crazy is that that this is a part of our process of government is that they pass these bills that have all sorts of weird shit piled into them.
00:27:49.000So I just went straight to page 202 and read through the new language to see what, because it was another revision by Mike Lee to see if he could get that thing passed.
00:29:00.000But a lot of that is nowhere near development.
00:29:03.000A lot of it's nowhere near development.
00:29:04.000And the language of the text, even on the very last revision where you're supposed to be listening to American peoples, and he did throw in the word hunters there, hunters, I'm listening to you.
00:29:18.000It says, like, bullet point one must be near existing infrastructure.
00:29:24.000And then bullet point number seven, I think it was, was like, or very far away and hard to manage.
00:29:50.000And then there's super fun language in there too, where it's like, okay, right if your first refusal is going to be state, then local government, through tribes in there.
00:30:01.000And then the only other group would have been landowners within the checkerboard pattern, how we have like that, you know, grid system of federal land ownership and private land ownership.
00:30:19.000Those landowners could also purchase more than anybody else would have been allowed to purchase.
00:30:28.000So state, local, then your tribes and local landowners.
00:30:35.000So basically like a huge handout to, you know, like, you know, the corner crossing case that we've been talking about, right?
00:30:52.000So what corner crossing is, is like, say if there's an enormous piece of public land, but the only way you can get to it is to cross over a very small corner of private land.
00:31:03.000For the longest time, that was prohibited, and you would get arrested.
00:31:06.000So you'd get arrested for trespassing.
00:31:09.000And we're talking about like a couple of feet.
00:31:12.000Oh, not, I mean, we're talking about something so small you can't even possibly see it, right?
00:31:18.000That's why it's been, it's like a theory, right?
00:31:21.000It's, it's like for all the physics majors out there, right?
00:31:25.000It's like that game of like, well, how do you get someplace if you only go 50% of the way, right?
00:31:32.000You'll you keep going 50% and 50% and 50%.
00:31:42.000Like you're going to cross that corner in a footstep.
00:31:45.000And we know where corners come together because it's right here.
00:31:50.000But that theory thing is like, well, and then the airspace all the way down to the center of the earth and to the heavens is how it's written.
00:31:59.000The crazy thing is, like, you could legitimately do it in a hop.
00:32:04.000So you would never have stepped foot at all.
00:32:07.000My 97-year-old grandma, who was hooked up to an oxygen tank, could have stepped across.
00:32:14.000Like, I mean, it's, we're not talking about a feet of any sort.
00:32:19.000We're not talking about like a football field that you have to cross.
00:33:15.000So if you go through that little thing, that little area right there, you're breaking the law, which is fucking insane.
00:33:23.000And now, currently in the state of Wyoming, and I got to give a shout out to Wyoming backcountry hunters and anglers for having the spine and the backbone to bring this, help bring the people who were caught and prosecuted for corner crossing, you know, and support them financially.
00:33:45.000We did a ton at Meat Eater 2 to help that legal case.
00:33:50.000It went to the state court, then the Supreme Court, and then the 9th District Court.
00:33:59.000And the last I heard is Iron Bar now wants to take it to the Supreme Court of the United States, SCODUS, and have, which is ultimately really good.
00:34:14.000We always joke that we're going to send old Fred Eshelman, the owner of Iron Bar, like a public landowner t-shirt, because he's going to make this stuff public for everybody.
00:34:24.000Because it's going to be, right now there's only two federal cases that have defined corner crossing.
00:34:31.000They're both in favor of the people of the United States.
00:34:35.000So you can legally step across, shocking, I know, from one piece of public to the next piece of public.
00:34:43.000And then if and when this thing makes it to the Supreme Court, the only reason he hasn't filed is because of this stuff with Mike Lee, right?
00:34:53.000It would have solved all of his problems.
00:34:54.000He would have just purchased those checkerboard pieces of BLM land within his ranch boundaries and just been done with it.
00:35:04.000And that's a really, there's a lot of those pieces in a lot of states, and states actually fund the ability to trespass for hunting on a lot of those landlocked pieces.
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00:36:52.000Well, it's also today, I could imagine how a long time ago you would get a lot of confusion and it would lead to people trespassing accidentally on public land or on private land rather because we're looking at maps, you know, and people would be, you know, 100 yards to the left, 100 yards to the right, and maybe not good navigators.
00:37:15.000But now when you have things like GoHunt, OnX, SpartanForge, all these apps that hunters use now that use GPS, you're 100% accurate.
00:37:27.000And a lot of the law enforcement agencies are using those same things.
00:37:31.000So they can be on the same page as the hunter or access seeker or whatever you want to say.
00:38:40.000This dude that I grew up with, we guided on parts of his place growing up.
00:38:47.000Right when I got my first ever GPS and the ONX was a card that you inserted into your GPS, he used to come pick me up so I could open the gates for him.
00:38:58.000And then he'd just BS and it was amazing.
00:39:01.000And we'd drive all over eastern Montana, all on his property.
00:39:05.000And his name was Leo Solph, Leo Solph.
00:39:10.000And we came up to this fence line and I was like, Leo, did you know that this brand new fence is 100 feet on your side of the property line?
00:39:47.000But there's people on the other side, too.
00:39:50.000You know, and that's like that old rancher mentality of like, you know what?
00:39:53.000There's going to be a fire and we're all going to need to get together and help each other out.
00:39:58.000And maybe I'll talk to him then about it.
00:40:00.000Or, you know, whatever, calving season, harvest season, all the things that bring those communities together, these very independent people, they got to work together at different times of the year.
00:40:12.000And that's like kind of a beautiful thing.
00:41:18.000And we think, people think in terms of like, oh, a million is a big number.
00:41:25.000Let's say we do have 640 million acres of public land, right?
00:41:30.000Well, there's like 1.2 billion acres of land in the U.S. set aside specifically for agriculture.
00:41:38.000And I think some like private timberland falls in that too, right?
00:41:42.000So that's private land, 1.2 billion where the bulk of our food's coming off, ideally.
00:41:51.000On the public land side of the fence, we have grazing leases.
00:41:56.000So you can run cattle and sheep on public ground.
00:41:59.000You pay a minimal, I would say a very minimal fee for that, right?
00:42:06.000And it's based off of an animal on that ground for a month, animal unit month AUM.
00:42:16.000And on our public ground, that's like a dollar, I want to say it's $1.35 per animal unit month.
00:42:29.000And just in the state of Montana, it just got dropped again, but it hit as high as $24 animal unit month.
00:42:38.000So if you have those federal leases, it's a big thing that you want to protect too, right?
00:42:44.000So you have to, in theory, show that stewardship aspect out there on the public land because everybody can come check it out to retain your ability to keep running cattle out there or sheep or whatever it is.
00:43:00.000What's going on with that American prairie?
00:43:23.000It might be a bunch of private philanthropic dollars, a lot of which is coming from overseas.
00:43:33.000I think the Dutch have somehow, some way, dumped a bunch of cash in there.
00:43:41.000And it is to connect a bunch of private land and Bureau of Land Management land out there, BLM, into one contiguous chunk,
00:43:58.000remove as many fences as you can, and allow that chunk of prairie to basically revert back to its natural state with natural species, the American buffalo being like their big goal species.
00:44:24.000They've done an incredible job raising cash to get this done.
00:44:49.000But right now, and knock on wood, for as long as they exist, they're going to keep providing public access.
00:44:56.000And they have a really good public access program.
00:45:00.000So they can work with the state of Montana for our private land public access program where you can sign up either at just like a kiosk type deal, sign-in box, and walk out on their place.
00:45:16.000But then they have like yurts that you can rent.
00:45:19.000So the kiosk is just set up as you get there and you just put in your name and what time you're going there.
00:45:26.000And do you have to have any kind of ID that you put in there?
00:45:30.000No, I mean, the state of Montana want to ask for your license plate number and your home address and phone number, and that's it.
00:45:38.000So, and then it's, I mean, they have a lot of gorgeous ground.
00:45:45.000Honestly, you know, when we did our big float in Montana, they own some of that property now that runs right up to the Missouri, right there around Cow Island is kind of where we took out real close to there.
00:46:00.000And they own, I mean, they own some of the stuff that we hiked around on.
00:46:06.000But their vision is to have this big, contiguous chunk and have it run like, you know, pre-European civilization here on the North American continent.
00:47:41.000So yes to allowing the existing animals to breed and yes to bringing the animals in.
00:47:48.000So they're coming out of the, I think the Yellowstone population more than anything.
00:47:56.000And then they work with the local tribes up there to kind of bring those animals in and some go to the tribe and then some go stay on the prairie, I think is how it goes.
00:48:10.000And then the reason that they're allowing for these old bulls to be shot is because they're no longer breeding.
00:48:38.000His theory is, and I think it's valid, that the time where they saw millions of buffalo was because the Native Americans had been wiped out by disease.
00:48:50.000This is the idea, is that there was never a time where there were that many bison.
00:48:56.000And that the reason why there were that many bison was because the Native Americans weren't hunting them anymore because they were 90% of them were wiped out by disease.
00:49:03.000That's why when they made their way across and I guess it was like the early 1800s.
00:50:36.000And there was obviously some sort of an imbalance that led to these enormous populations of bison.
00:50:43.000And I think Dan Flores is an incredibly brilliant guy.
00:50:46.000I think he makes a really compelling argument because we do know that the Native Americans were wiped out, that 90% of them were killed off by disease.
00:50:54.000We know that we're talking about millions of people.
00:50:57.000And if millions of people were subsistence hunters and, you know, they were riding around, living off the buffalo, following them around, which we know they did, completely makes sense.
00:51:07.000Especially when you take into account the long gestation period, bison, I think they have to be pregnant for a long time, right?
00:52:10.000I went there a few years back with my family, and it's really beautiful, and I enjoyed it.
00:52:13.000But I did not like the fact that all the elk were hanging out at the visitor station because they know they can't be hunted there and they know the wolves won't go there.
00:52:40.000Yeah, habituated as shit, as a lot of my biologist friends would say.
00:52:45.000Yeah, it's the national park system, right, is like, it's an absolute wonderful thing.
00:52:55.000I know there's lots of dedicated civil servants within the national park system that bust their asses educating folks, but they just can't keep up.
00:53:05.000Have you ever seen the Instagram page Torons of Yellowstone?
00:53:32.000It's like, it's fortunately, they've trained the bison to stand right next to the visitor information sign or the bull elk or whatever, right?
00:53:42.000It's like, this just is the way it's supposed to be.
00:53:45.000And then they'll walk right up to it to try to get us healthy.
00:55:04.000Like there were people knocking buffalo down everywhere.
00:55:09.000And in fact, so many that they had to come up with a system to where they'd be like, okay, between daylight and like 9 a.m., nobody's going to walk beyond this line.
00:55:24.000Because let everybody shoot and then we'll all go out together and start cutting up bison and get them out of there.
00:55:31.000And then the next round of hunters can have at it.
00:55:51.000So all the states, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, that's around Yellowstone National Park, the cattle producers have real fears of brucellosis, which is a disease that bison and elk pack around, and it causes domestic cattle to abort calves.
00:56:12.000So hurts them in the pocketbook, bad deal.
00:56:16.000Well, they want slash need to reduce bison populations within the park.
00:58:02.000And in years past, there's been groups that go up there just to go pull anything that's left in the field, the bones, stuff like that for making stock.
00:58:14.000There's groups that go up there and literally take the carcasses off the ground because it is highly sought after food stuff, right?
00:58:25.000It's a lot of bone broth you can make with a 2,000-pound critter.
00:58:34.000And like the each tribe brings their own tribal game warden with them.
00:58:40.000They're kind of like in charge of their people.
00:58:42.000They're coordinating to maximize the harvest.
00:58:47.000And so they're helping, very willing to help people like coordinate to get their animal and get out of the field so they can get the next person in there.
00:58:57.000And that's part of the system outside of trapping.
00:59:02.000So they trap inside the park and then they'll take those animals, move them to a separate facility where they go through, I can't remember how long of a period of monitoring for brucellosis.
00:59:17.000And then once that herd is, the trapped herd is considered brucellosis-free, then they can be given to the tribes or sold.
01:00:42.000And there's no real explanation of why there's such a population of dead animals in this one spot.
01:00:49.000And he thinks it's connected to the Younger Dry's impact theory because there's a very clear, distinct line of carbon in his ground.
01:00:57.000Like that, when you go deep, deep, deep into the ground, which represents where these, like a lot of these things that he's pulling, they're plus 10,000 years old.
01:02:06.000So with the impact came this immediate melting of a lot of the ice caps.
01:02:13.000You know, and this is what they think happened that ended the ice age in North America.
01:02:17.000You know, 10,000 plus years ago, you're looking at more than a mile high ice in a giant chunk of North America.
01:02:25.000And then almost instantaneously, that stuff gets melted.
01:02:30.000And this coincides with Randall Carlson's theories about this too, which also was unsubstantiated until they came up with the core samples for the Younger Dry Ice Impact Theory.
01:03:55.000And thankfully, John has both the resources and the desire to blast the permafrost with these high-pressure hoses to get all the stuff out of there.
01:04:05.000But, I mean, he's trying to set up a legitimate research facility out there.
01:04:09.000You know, these scientists, they want to take the stuff and bring it somewhere.
01:04:40.000And so he got divers to go look for it.
01:04:44.000And they found it exactly where they and they found steppe bison bones and all kinds of crazy shit that's not supposed to be there in a pile in the East River.
01:04:54.000When we were looking at the zone of tolerance.
01:04:59.000Not the zone of tolerance, the range, sorry, of bison, of buffalo.
01:05:06.000I was thinking of your skull that you have out there, but I found a gorgeous one in this wash in Alberta.
01:05:14.000And it would be like their summer range.
01:05:19.000So north of the Montana border, not all that far, up near the Saskatchewan River Breaks.
01:05:25.000And you get up on these bluffs that overlook the river, and you're like, oh, you just feel like somebody would have been sitting there watching stuff.
01:05:32.000And then if you look around, there's all, I mean, thousands over a lot of miles, but thousands of teepee rings.
01:05:41.000So all the tribes would go up there to hunt bison and camp out, a little bit of cooler weather.
01:05:49.000And that's where I found this bison skull.
01:09:27.000Well, listen, I think it's just bad for all of us because if people think that your food can come from someplace other than the land, then there's no value to that land.
01:10:11.000And this is the only thing that was...
01:10:16.000And when COVID came and, you know, there was a lot of shortages in the supermarkets and the lockdowns and all that jazz, he's like, the only shit that's available here is this fucking bullshit fake meat.
01:10:26.000Like fake meat was the only, he sent a picture.
01:10:29.000It was the only thing left on the shelf was like Beyond Meat or Beyond Burger or whatever the fuck it's called.
01:10:48.000And those things are filled with seed oils.
01:10:49.000And it's also filled with a bunch of process because you can't just, it's not, you know, look, if you want to be vegetarian, just eat vegetables.
01:11:03.000I know one of my biggest pet peeves in life, a buddy of mine was like going down the vegan train and we had to stop in all these towns that had like the best vegan restaurant.
01:11:12.000And I'm like, they're stealing our names for food.
01:12:15.000I just happen to need all my vegetables to resemble meat.
01:12:19.000Well, and then there's the problem of what actually happens when you have monocrop agriculture, because a lot of this stuff is coming from that.
01:12:26.000And by the way, there's way more death per calorie of food that you get from monocrop agriculture, from growing just one crop in an area than you're ever going to get from meat.
01:12:40.000Like there's thousands of animals, millions of animals have to get killed in order you to grow this food.
01:12:58.000Like these animals on the landscape that have been doing things for ever, like they just don't adjust to things.
01:13:09.000You know, I was talking about like the prairie, how we're losing 2 million acres of prairie a year.
01:13:14.000Well, there's this super badass little chicken, lesser prairie chicken, super charismatic little dude, dances, puts his tail fan up, big cheek flares, and game bird.
01:13:27.000Used to be in the, possibly into the millions in that time that you described when Lewis and Clark were coming out onto the prairie.
01:13:37.000It is a prairie bird to the point where it will not nest within, God, I want to say six acres of a vertical structure of any size.
01:16:00.000There's this awesome group of ranchers kind of in the Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico zone.
01:16:07.000And they formed the Lesser Prairie Chicken Landowner Alliance.
01:16:11.000And what they've been trying to do is get, because there's this huge conservation bill, biggest conservation package in the world called the Farm Bill.
01:16:21.000And it has a lot of incentive, subsidy for farmers.
01:17:51.000And so what this group, the Lesser Prairie Chicken Landowner Alliance, is doing is, you know, they're trying to Get folks in the Department of Ag to set up some funding specifically for grassland ecosystems that are used for grazing.
01:18:11.000So it's going to be good for the rancher and good for the grouse in this case, too, right?
01:18:18.000And that funding doesn't exist, but there's lots of programs to take like monocrop agriculture and turn it into CRP, which, you know, mixed grass, basically like rest that ground.
01:18:35.000That was one of the programs that came out of the Dust Bowl era.
01:18:39.000So instead of turning the ground over and all that dirt dries out and can get blown away, we lose that topsoil, plant it with grass and let it rest for like a three-year period, a five-year period.
01:18:54.000Part of our like big ag incentive structures, balance out markets and all that fun stuff.
01:19:00.000Yeah, monocrop agriculture is such a problem and industrial agricultural in general.
01:19:05.000I had Will Harris on a couple of times from White Oaks Pastures.
01:19:38.000And it's just like this weird, pale looking fucking, just, you know, it's all industrial fertilizer that they have to use and pesticides and all that shit.
01:19:47.000And his is like this rich, dark soil that he's like super proud of, like what they've turned it and converted it over to just this natural process that's supposed to exist when animals graze, the undulates, they poop and they make manure and then the grasses grow and the animals eat the grass.
01:20:05.000It's all that's how it's supposed to be.
01:21:09.000Oh, but we were just, I was like, okay, well, tell me about this.
01:21:12.000Tell me about, you know, Longhorn and what Wagoo means on his menu and all the pigs and the things that he's seeking out and like the breed of chicken that they have.
01:21:25.000But like you were saying, like it's not just the breed.
01:22:15.000I mean, they got nominated for James Beard on his turkey book, which is super awesome.
01:22:23.000The people down there just, you know, his employees stay there.
01:22:28.000They've been there for, like, everybody in that house has been there for a decade.
01:22:32.000And they're just loving the stuff that they're doing and putting out and the stories that he can tell on that menu, right?
01:22:40.000Like the bread is, he's like, yeah, I went and picked grapes out of the alley across the street, which doesn't sound all that great, but that's how he like started the yeast for the bread.
01:22:53.000They got yogurt that came from a culture that's been going from for 200 years from one of their employees whose family's from India and they brought it over.
01:23:18.000And I swear to God, when I go back to DC and I'm talking to people, like they are so disconnected from this stuff.
01:23:26.000And I just often think, I'm like, God, if you guys just knew where the food comes from, what the land actually provides, we wouldn't be having these conversations.
01:23:37.000No, I mean, human beings, for the most part, in urban areas are completely disconnected.
01:23:41.000If you had a survey of how many people really understand where food comes from in your average city, I would imagine it's less than double digits.
01:23:58.000I mean, the economics of food I've gotten really into recently because there is a real inability in certain areas of the country where the cost of getting anywhere near an actual grocery store is prohibitive to a lot of people.
01:24:20.000And so, you know, they're just like, they're shit out of luck for a real food.
01:24:26.000And then it's a cultural thing of Mom didn't know what real food was, dad didn't know what real food was, so I don't, and my kids won't.
01:25:34.000And they're like, why is it that when we do cross sections of these bones, they're so much more unhealthy than the cross-sections of the bones from 4,000 years earlier.
01:28:31.000You know, and that gave me like really, really made me feel good.
01:28:36.000I'm like, okay, things are starting to go our way now because all the other people who were afraid to say the same thing were like, oh, thank God some other people with a big microphone came out and said it.
01:28:52.000So now I feel emboldened to stand up publicly for what I believe in.
01:28:59.000Yeah, it's such a terrible thing to be so trapped in the ideology of your party that you can't stand up for what's right.
01:29:10.000Like, one of the things I feel when I go back to D.C. is there's a lot of people spending time on making sure, not that America is better, but that that system persists.
01:29:23.000So the next generation of short, short little boat shoe, no sock wearing people can have jobs.
01:30:52.000Trying to build these bridges for this goal of protecting my public lands that I love.
01:31:00.000We're working with all these nonprofit groups, are coming together, even groups that traditionally don't focus on public land access issues, you know, like your Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, who has done a bunch of stuff for access, but you know, they have an elk on their logo.
01:32:10.000It's like crush beers and crush the phone lines, whatever tag you want, up to, I'm on a steering committee that has REI, Patagonia, Rivian, all like big, big companies, right?
01:32:27.000That are like, we want to put some muscle behind this.
01:32:59.000But we started like building all these bridges and unifying groups and people and businesses around this common cause.
01:33:13.000And it's that public persistence, that we the people part that folks kind of tend to forget, that is literally saving public lands about like being out there public and loud.
01:33:30.000And it's working, but we need to take it to the next step, right?
01:33:38.000And maintain the momentum and stay unified.
01:33:43.000And the thing that was really interesting, right, is like we're up to the date, up to the absolute second that language is polled.
01:33:58.000Before it's officially polled, Mike Lee's team has his statement out on I listened.
01:34:06.000I still want to sell public land, but I listened to everybody.
01:34:11.000So I'm not going to do it right now, is really what it says.
01:34:15.000And he's completely fabricating this story.
01:34:19.000He was told, like, this is going to get pulled.
01:34:22.000So you can do it now and save some face, or we can pull it, and you're going to look like a loser, right?
01:34:31.000And unfortunately, he got the option to, like, fight again another day, which is brutal.
01:34:38.000But I get that information and I get to announce it to this awesome group of people at this off-road rally trash pickup deal that I'm out at called the Gambler 500, which is super cool.
01:34:59.000And I'm like, hey, thank you to the Democrats and thank you to the Republicans and thank you for all the voices that came out and the businesses and all this stuff.
01:35:10.000And then I was just like, set my clock as to when people were going to just start tearing each other apart.
01:35:30.000No, we voted because we felt like the country was moving in a terrible direction.
01:35:35.000It doesn't mean that they can't also move in a terrible direction once you get them in.
01:35:39.000The important thing is people stood up, people like you, luckily, that are very invested in this and used the considerable resources you have access to and got a lot of other people involved like Cam and Josh Smith and everybody else.
01:35:57.000We're just lucky that a lot of people care and recognize that this is a slippery slope and that if they got through with this and they did this, this is just one step.
01:36:07.000And if you let them sell one acre, that's why just not one acre was the best motto.
01:36:19.000And if you sell it, you should make zero profit.
01:36:22.000It should go, literally, if you did sell it, it should have to go to every fucking person that lives on the planet or in this country, rather.
01:36:59.000And that's like the thing that I keep coming back to.
01:37:02.000I'm like, all they're doing is being like, oh, see, we did something.
01:37:08.000They're not doing the hard work, right?
01:37:10.000And this particular thing would divest the American people of, in my mind, and we started doing it as a slogan for backcountry hunters and anglers, is like public land freedom.
01:37:26.000Like you are divesting the American people of the ability to be free.
01:37:31.000Like these places represent like a lot of goofballs, man.
01:37:38.000And I feel like there's a lot of people in the lawmaking side of things that get very nervous about American people out there having unstructured fun.
01:37:48.000They're like, what's going on out there on that BLM land?
01:37:50.000There's somebody riding a motorcycle and there's somebody shooting a gun and there's somebody fly fishing and there's somebody bird watching.
01:39:02.000They're like, we're going to maybe hold on to the national parks, but there's another play there where we're going to turn those over to the states or privatize them completely.
01:39:15.000Get full control of, like I said, like Colorado River, right?
01:39:20.000Like we're going to control the pipes for the watersheds.
01:39:24.000Yeah, I've heard that language before that water's not a right.
01:39:50.000A lot of people could use a mushroom trip.
01:39:54.000It's just a lot of people that are just, you're missing so much of what this life is because you're so concentrated on your election cycle.
01:40:02.000You're so concentrated on making more money.
01:40:05.000You're so concentrated on things that when you're 90 and you're in your deathbed, it ain't going to mean shit, man.
01:40:25.000And they don't see that while they're on the hunt, while they're in the middle of this process of trying to accumulate zeros in their bank account.
01:40:48.000Like there's a lot happening in between elections.
01:40:53.000And you got to know if you weighed in during this, you made a difference.
01:41:00.000Like everybody who jumped in and wrote to their representatives and senators and told their buddies about this and asked businesses, why aren't you on that list?
01:41:11.000Yeah, you can actually make a difference in this country.
01:42:02.000We're going to be consistent and we're going to be on your ass.
01:42:04.000And now that this has happened and we've had some success and it worked, now people know it'll work.
01:42:10.000And so now all the Randy Newbergs and all the people that were really enthusiastic about this, that really did their job, they're getting more support now.
01:44:36.000I'm like, could we get, and this is a screwed up piece of information.
01:44:39.000I was like, okay, I want to do a Freedom of Information Act request, sue for information for all the senators' offices and find out how many people called on behalf of public lands and how many people called to sell them off.
01:44:57.000And I want that information to be public.
01:45:00.000Well, those offices, they don't have to give over that information, I found out.
01:45:06.000So like, where the hell's the accountability on that?
01:45:15.000And I would just sit there and be like, okay, I'm going to find one person on the feed and just understand their side of things and see if I can pull them over to my side of things.
01:45:28.000And maybe that butterfly wing effect will do some sort of good.
01:45:39.000And people that, for whatever reason, thought Kamala Harris would be a good president.
01:45:43.000And then there's also people that I don't even know if they're real humans.
01:45:47.000I think there's a lot of this stuff that we have to understand about social media is coordinated bot farms.
01:45:53.000And so anytime you have a hot-button topic that could, you know, maybe get a bill rejected or get a bill passed, it's not organic, the comments.
01:46:06.000Some of these people that are negative, you voted for this, they're just a real fucking loser who doesn't like people that have public profiles, doesn't like people that are successful, doesn't like people, and they just want to find some way to call you out.
01:46:19.000But then there's a lot of coordinated artificial interaction.
01:46:26.000And we've highlighted that and we've been on that for quite a while because we found out through this one former FBI guy that 80%, his estimation was 80% of Twitter is bots.
01:47:23.000But when I do check and there's any sort of a hot button issue, I'll look at someone as saying something outrageous and I'll click on their profile.
01:47:30.000And then I'm like, it's like a bunch of letters and a few numbers.
01:47:44.000Like, there's no, I'm, first of all, I'm going to be real clear.
01:47:47.000I'm against a law where it says you have to post under your name, your social security number has to be registered to this account so we know you're a real human being.
01:48:00.000The reason why I'm opposed to that is because I think whistleblowers are essential because I think corruption is real.
01:48:06.000And I think if you hold someone accountable for everything they post, man, you're going down a dark road.
01:48:11.000You're going down a dark road where you could possibly get people fired for posts that, you know, like England is out of control right now.
01:48:22.000Like, I don't know if you know this, but England, I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood.
01:48:27.000How many people got arrested for social media posts in England this year?
01:49:05.000And what they're trying to do is make sure that everyone stays in line.
01:49:10.000And so they're doing this by scaring people away from being critical of the government.
01:49:17.000And the way to start it is to attack people that say anything bad about immigration, attack people that say anything bad about the government.
01:49:24.000In fact, they're just doing this in Brazil right now.
01:49:27.000They just passed this huge fucking law that you can get removed from social media for anything that's critical of the government.
01:49:38.000Anything that's critical of Lula, who's the president of Brazil right now, you get removed from social media.
01:49:50.000This is a slippery slope that we were going down with the last administration, what they had done during the pandemic.
01:49:56.000It's scary stuff, man, and people have to be aware of it.
01:50:00.000Well, I think there's a version of that, too, with what we were talking about on like the hard party politics people, right?
01:50:06.000Where it's like the social backlash of being a critical thinker is so much that it then creates a non-thinker or you just totally leave that zone.
01:50:33.000And that's how they get things passed because then you don't have any criticism.
01:50:36.000And then you don't have any people that are opposing you.
01:50:42.000It's very scary because, again, a lot of this stuff that you're seeing that's causing people to self-center is not real self-censor, is not real human beings.
01:53:02.000Great group of people, but there's no financial incentive to support or deny birdwatching.
01:53:09.000So if you go to the birdwatcher group on Twitter, yeah, it's probably 5% bots because they're fucking everywhere.
01:53:15.000But if you, I guarantee if you go to abortion or if you go to immigration or if you go to anything that's a hot button control, ICE RAIDS, whatever it is, anything.
01:53:44.000You're getting this artificial sense of what the general public wants because they've monetized it and they've figured out a way to artificially inflate these numbers.
01:53:55.000Yeah, and I think it gives this illusion of this consensus amongst people.
01:54:01.000And they can do that even with ridiculous conclusions.
01:54:06.000And I think consensus, though, is so dangerous to any political party, right?
01:54:11.000Like what we just saw, there was an agenda and everybody had to stand up and say something because of one freaking person who wanted to make this happen.
01:54:44.000We need them to be only birdwatchers, only bow hunters, only off-road users.
01:54:50.000Well, what we need to do is be apolitical.
01:54:53.000And I think we were with this, which is beautiful.
01:54:56.000So the Democrats, the Republicans, and the people like me that are fucking politically homeless, they all came together on this and said, no, this is stupid.
01:55:04.000And all these people, oh, you voted for this.
01:55:12.000And if history, if that didn't work, if we didn't have an impact, and if nobody stepped up and people like you weren't so steadfast, that would be in the history books.
01:55:23.000That Mike Lee guy would be the guy that you see, you know, your kids see in 40, 50 years, and they read the history books.
01:57:11.000There's a lot of shit it doesn't work with.
01:57:15.000there's a line item in here for, I think it's a few billion bucks for our next big birthday, America's next big birthday, which I always think of affordable housing when I think of it.
01:57:30.000I bet the folks like having their own little individual parties and might think it's okay to throw that couple hundred million at an issue versus fireworks and parades.
02:01:07.000I told that group I was with up in the Arctic, man, I'm like, I read them because I want to understand the argument and see if that's really the argument.
02:01:20.000Like, is this really where people are coming from or is it just an asshole?
02:01:25.000There's mostly just an asshole, and even their argument probably sucks, but also a lot of it's artificial.
02:01:31.000You got to think about how much money is involved in selling off this public land and how much of an interest do people have in pushing a narrative that would say that selling this public land is a good thing.
02:01:54.000There's services where if you want to push a narrative, you can use their service and they will incorporate this bot farm and they will push it towards whatever you want to do.
02:02:50.000You have to just interact only with real humans.
02:02:54.000I got in the practice of just being like, okay, what I'm about to say is going to be political, involves scary words, Democrat, Republican.
02:04:12.000Doesn't it feel good that people united and listened?
02:04:16.000I am trying to make it feel really good.
02:04:18.000But you're scared it's going to happen again.
02:04:20.000Because I know it's going to happen again.
02:04:22.000Again, I'm wearing the same shirt that I wore on this show talking about this same stuff six years ago or whenever we decided it was, right?
02:04:58.000I just kind of wanted there to be a vote on this amendment so all the American people can see exactly who voted for it and exactly who voted against it.
02:05:11.000And just lay it out on the table for everybody.
02:05:41.000I'm up at the state capitol in Montana.
02:05:44.000We just, our legislative session just ended at the beginning of the year.
02:05:50.000And there's some knucklehead brings this judicial amendment up to join, for the state of Montana to join Utah's lawsuit to sell off 18.5 million acres of public land.
02:06:11.000And 115 people showed up to testify against the state.
02:06:17.000This is during work hours in a Montana winter.
02:06:21.000115 people show up to testify against this.
02:06:25.000And there's some online two there, to be fair.
02:06:28.000Originally, there were 10 people signed up to testify in favor of joining the lawsuit.
02:06:38.000They only give everybody two minutes to testify in front of committee.
02:06:42.000Everybody testifies, don't do this, bad for Montana, bad for all these other reasons.
02:06:48.000Professional people, some lobbyists, nonprofit people, but just a lot of people being like, yeah, I'm a dad and this is where I take my kids.
02:08:20.000And then we have Steve Daines, who's been in for a long time.
02:08:23.000He's a senior Republican, also on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
02:08:29.000And Republicans, and they said, not in as strong a words as I would want, that they're not for the sale of public lands during this fight, during the House, and then during the Senate fight again, we're not going to sell public lands.
02:08:49.000Our Republican Ryan Zinke, also, he's a representative in the House.
02:08:56.000You know, he said, that's my San Juan Hill.
02:08:59.000He's like, I'm going to die on San Juan Hill before I vote to sell off America's public lands, right?
02:09:05.000So I think for everybody else who's naysaying whether a Republican can do this or it's just the Democrats that are willing, I think we have a good example in Montana right now.
02:09:18.000I'm going to hold these people accountable and I think everybody else should too, that these Republicans are willing to go to bat for public lands right now.
02:09:28.000And we're making it that like third rail issue where it's like, if you want to win in the state of Montana, you better be good on public lands.
02:09:36.000Were there any Democrats that were in favor of selling off public lands?