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The MeatEater Podcast
Ep. 303: All Up In Your Airspace
Play Episode
2h34m
Steven Rinella talks with Papa Janis, Nephi Cole, Dave Willms, Phil Taylor, and Janis Putelis.
Topics discussed: Papa Janis praises Jani for being a good dad; lobbyists; explaining the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the National Wildlife Federation; the death of Otto Schneeloch's parents and the life of his triangular shaped bullet idea; who's got Steve's old Winchester Model 94?; shooting sports injuries on par with that of billiards; the number one rule of safe gun handling; how you can bid on Pete Alonso's signed bat, VIP tickets to Trampled By Turtles, skin real estate on Spencer, Seth, and Chester's arms, Steve's speargun, Corinne's handmade squirrel jewelry, a tour at Doug Duren's farm, plus Buckman Juice, and other prized items at MeatEater's House of Oddities Auction; a corner crossing court case in Wyoming; should MeatEater's Access Initiative funds go toward step ladder apparatuses that enable hunters to cross corners?; the public domain of air space and the airspace above water; how there's no law in the books that expressly prohibits or allows corner crossing; how revisiting fence lines opens up a big 'ole cans of worms; when cows and bulls get it on through a fence; Alec Baldwin and the tragedy of what happened on the set of "Rust"; talking firearm safety with your kids; exactly why you can't find ammo in the store; the infrastructure bill; funding to Pittman-Robertson; delisting wolves to relist wolves; Your Mountain Podcast; and more.
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Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten and in my case, underwear. Listening to podcast. You can't predict anything presented by first, like creating proven versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear for every hunt. First like go farther, stay longer. All right, everybody, we got a ton to cover today. Papa Yanni's in town. Jannice is dadd Yannese is in town, and uh, how are you doing over there? What are you doing in town? Why are you in town? I came to visit my grandkids and my son daughter in law, kind of check out things. I'm getting ready to move here, hopefully within the year. Yeah, I'm trying to sell my house. I told Katie that the house will be up for sale, so you guys, if you want to move back to Michigan places. She liked the house, and she told me about a lot of times that she was there that I wasn't there. Do you wind up oh like partying over there? That you can't have the same house now that my wife used to party and that as a high schooler, I think so, yeah, more than what actually two houses? Why? Because I mean, I think it was more at his other house, his house prior to that. Yeah, but she was telling me about being out on the pond with you in the paddle boat we used to fish. He lives on like a I don't know, ten acre, Like, yeah, I got a good large amouth bass fishing. So you knew Steve's wife in high school. That's why I'm here today. Uh, like if you had when So when you're hanging around Johannest and his lovely children, right, are you all the time kind of like like biting your tongue because you don't like the job he's doing, you know, and you do it different or do you kind of like how his whole families grew. He's going to go into the spield to congratulate you guys on ten years. That's a big deal in business. Oh yeah, But I want to talk about his job as I think he's doing a great job. So when you're over there, you're digging what you're seeing in terms of how he's running the whole program with the family and everything. Oh with the family, I thought you were talking about meat eater. No, the family, Oh, absolutely, absolutely? Oh yeah, I think uh I even get some tips from him on like, you know, don't leave the male thing out of it. So you do you feel that he is uh doing better than you did? Oh hundred some really? Oh yeah, because is red right now. He's literally turning red. He's gotten bared, he got embarrassed twice already. But the reality is, when you're going through divorce, it's really tough on the kids, and it's it's equally as tough on the parents because you know, you're trying to figure out, like, Okay, where am I going to fit in? How am I gonna make this work? And so we each have our own sort of approach and guess what, you get that approach from our parents, Right, So some of the things that I picked up from my parents, or specifically one of my father we're not the way to raise kits. And so you go through this journey of learning, hey man, don't do that. That's stupid. That's bad for you, it's bad for the kid. And eventually you get to a point where you go, hey, I think I got part of this figured out. So I would say all of my children are light years ahead of where I was as an adult trying to raise kids. Wow. So the world's not going to ship. Oh no, not at all. And the other thing he's has the best news I've heard all week. I mean, there's you know, it's not just about raising the kid, it's what the child is exposed to write that environment, and that the child knows that you care about them, you know, like giving them limitations. You can do this. I want you to be adventurous. I want you to explore, but you know, here's the limit. You can't go beyond that. That's really important. I can't let your brother on fire now that you can try. So what I see them doing, you know, not just your honest but Jennifer there, they make a really good team. And you know, I would assume that if I went to your house that I would probably see the same thing, just your own version of it, you know, your adaptation of how that works. That's good here. Well, I mean you should be lapping us up, Yanni. You look like you're not You're not. This is not many guys ever get praised by their father in front of them. You think most people your dad's job is to take you down and take down that's what he does. Now he takes his own Manda joined also by nif Cole, Dave Wilms. We met because you guys used to be whatever the hell this means advisors two former Governor Matt Mead of Wyoming. That's right, was very well light. So they must have done a good job. It's the best politician in the history of America. But he threw in the towel, and he threw in the towel and doesn't want to run for president. No, he crushed it for eight years and then deservedly did what every good politician should do, which is he he said, I've I've I've served. He did my job, and now he is lifting weights at Gold's gym right now. Probably why while we speak. He's he's much thinner, he's tanner, he's buff again, he's playing a lot of golf. None of those banquet meals. Every time I think he should, I think he should do like a if. There's probably a lot of strikes you get and I don't know, because Cheney was from Wyoming. You can be from Wyoming and play on the play on the main stage. Actually Wyoming. This is like we're gonna go down rap hole. But there you get actually a lot of uh outsize political clout when you're from Wyoming, because because there's some interesting stuff that we've done. First of all, we keep the population very low, so we have two senators and five thousand people, so your ratio of senators to people in Wyoming is better than it is in any other state. And the math one time and figured out voting rates, So like Wyoming's population, how many what percentage of that population is voting age, what percent actually votes? Basically like six dudes can send you to the governor's mansion. That's about right, and the third of the populace is right here and U Yeah, and if you don't get elected, you still get to be a policy advisor. That's how it works. That's great. So that's nice, But now you don't do that anymore. So now, nif I you've been on the show too or three times? Two times? Dave and I have both been on here together twice, but the first time, um, Dave just listened to a football game on his iPhone the entire time. But well, in my defense, no, I don't have a defense. I mean I think I was actually kind of following a Broncos game at the time. You sports fan, I am a big sportsman, but also like Governor Mead was your guest and we were on there as well, and he was so good at everything. I just sat back, I'm not gonna need to say anything on this podcast because this guy, like he knows his stuff, he knows everything. Uh, and so I can just follow a football game. Yeah, it was pretty fun. We picked you up at the airport in Denver and we record at like some kind of sports stadium. Now we went that was different time we went to We went to p F Chains for lunch and uh, and then we with with Rourking some guys from Magpole and the Magpool guys came down. We all had lunch together and we drove down to the Governor's mansion and rolled in there and sat down the giant circle and ye fight or something because I know because you were hunting afterwards. You were going anilop hunting. That's what it was. You were going anilop hunting up in Wyoming. You flew in for the animal punt. Janice drove a pickup in with all the stuff in it, and then you guys met at the Governor's mansion and then he picked you up and you guys drove up to Casper, where I'm pretty sure you stayed at the I don't remember he stayed. I'm a little disturbed, Steel Trap, like they haven't impressed. I mean I remember this, stay right kidding? I mean I remember the stadium right, because you came a second time for Stage Grouse Hunt, and we were, in fact, the second podcast to do with you. You were like, we kicked on the lie to the football stadium because we want to make a pitch where people should go, because you always talked about going to the University of Montana, and so we're like, well, let's take him to the football stadiums. We went to the Wildcat or suite, turned on all the lights. While we're sitting in that suite open, They've filled the fridge full of adult beverages and whatnot. And Josh Allen was actually under the lights out on the field throwing passes to some of his uh to some of his teammates. Um, but you know, I wasn't the same guy for everybody who I still don't quarterback in Buffalo Backs. Yeah yeah, So now he's like really good, well yeah, but we were sitting up there talking about stage ground. I think do you think that he had all that success because of the podcast that night. I'm sure it was piped through the stadium speakers. He's like, now there are some boys to take their job seriously. That's right. I'm gonna take a dial out of that, poky uh nify. Now is the n s s F Director of Government Relations, State Affairs and ss of being National Shooting Sports Foundation. What states? I cover the Rocky Mountains and the Upper Midwest, so um, you know it's not the I love those states. And then I do all the interactions with governor's offices and then so I go to Republican governors and Western governors and all that. And then I do also association fish and wildlife agencies, so all the interaction with like the uh you know, conservation partners at those things, all the you know, the directors of game and fish agencies. Those are my people too. So I'll go to all those meetings and I interact with those guys on behalf of awesome. NSSF is the Firearms Trade Association of America. So for people that don't know, UM, we represent the nine thousand manufacturers and retailers of firearms, ammunitions, optics, UM, A lot of clothing manufacturers in the outdoor space. So some of our members. A lot of your sponsors are members people like weather be Bench, made Um, Vortax, absolutely, UM conservation groups like uh Rocky Mountain, Elk Foundation, Mule Deer Foundation. So those are members. Just nine thousand different entities that are members. It's not people. We represent entities like corporate entities, nonprofits. So do you when you say Republican governors, do you just not even getting to foot in the door with the Democratic No, we go to the Democratic Governors associations. Well, yeah, absolutely, and you'll get a one on one meeting or now absolutely, We've had some great conversations with there's a lot of you know, there's great So this is again going down the rabbit hole. I don't think you can classify good or bad politicians based on party. I think you have to really look at the individual and see if those individuals are looking at facts, if they're trying to find things out. In general, I think that human beings are smart and if people are objectively looking at facts, are going to come to They're gonna make good decisions. And I don't they don't just instinctively slam the door in your face. That they don't want to hear about it. No, I mean, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't more difficult in some offices than others. Because you know, if you know Dave and I like, you know, you've you've got a whole group of people. Sometimes you have to trudge through to be able to talk to the guy who's in charge. And with that comes a lot of opinions, It comes a lot of you know, comes a lot of you know, history and life history and background thoughts and levels of experience and levels of education. And so when you're working with um you know, political figures, and this goes for everybody listening. You have to be cognizant of that, and you have to be respectful of that. If you're trying to talk to a guy and convince him of something, you've got to try and understand where he's coming from before you throw your idea out there on the table and demand that he believe as you believe. You have to work your way into that. And and you know, I'm lucky that I work for an organization where I think we are doing the right things, and so it makes it very easy for me to be able to you know, walk through what I believe to be truth and what I believe to be facts, and then to walk people into what I think is, you know, the the right decision based on truth and facts. And I think that's you know, I mean, that's why I feel lucky to work where I work. Working for Governor Mead was the same way. When you work for a politician who you believe in and you believe he's doing all those things for the right reason, it makes it very easy to go to work every day and to feel good about yourself at the end of the day when you, you know, turn off the computer. Can you give us an example of like something an idea you might pitch when you go into these offices. Um, yeah, let's see, there's tons of them. Uh. Constitutional right to hunt and fish in Utah. So Casey Snyder. We visited with Representative Snyder when he just got into the legislature. And so that's one of the legislatures that I work. And so when I say I work legislatures, I means, you know, from January till April, I'm traveling around all these different states and I'm meeting with lawmakers constantly to talk about, you know, things that we believe our priorities. Every legislature and the country is going to have, you know, five hundred plus bills every year or someone who's gonna be trying to change some piece of law. And so my job is to try and look through those and make sure that I'm catching if there's something that's negatively affecting hunting and shooting, sports, wildlife issues and things like that. I'm gonna try and you know, analyze every one of those things, try and figure out whether or not, you know, we we we have a position as an organization that we can take um if we don't, if we can make one and then we share with you know, to go back and educate those lawmakers as as best as possible on what we think the facts are and why we think that. You know, I think people should vote a certain ways. So, for example, the right to hunt and fish in Utah Representative Snyder, we visited with him about it. Um. He believed it was important. The debate on both sides that will be some people will say, well, you don't really need to, you know, have a constitutional right to hunt fish in the state constitution. Who would take away the right to hunt and fish and so then we would respond to that. I'm going to go visit with that lawmaker and say, well, look, you know in California they've already outlawed bear hunting. There's places, you know, in in Nebraska they tried to outlaw you know, this is what I worked on. Also, they tried to outlaw hunting cougars um. They've you know, in every state you get these different rules, rags, laws that come up. And so I'm talking with him about this and say, this is why you need to have the state have a uh a constitutional right that says no, we believe, even in hunting and fishing as regulated by our game and phish agencies, that that's an individual right that should be protected under the state constitution. Because if you don't, it's it's not fake that people will come in and they will use they'll chip away at that individually. They'll find excuses for why you shouldn't be able to trap with this kind of trap in this area, and you know they'll they'll whittle away at that. And that's not I'm not making that up. That's happening today. And so what we do is we try and convince those lawmakers to pass legislation or to defeat legislation that would you know us, you know, take those things away. And so that's what I do for a living, is lobbyists and naughty word and your crew. No, not really, No, I'm so I'm of because people love to hate lobbyists, but they don't realize that, you know, and I'm a I'm a registered lobbyists in a couple of different states, I'm not you know, but you don't, you know, depending on the laws of each state, it's totally different. I mean, it's such a you know, you throw that word out there. It means different things in different states based on different you know, legislative priorities and different rules and rags. Again. And so in some states, I have little teams of guys that I work with, UM that have some fantastic people that I work with that that you know, I won't mention their names. But in Colorado, in places like that where they have those existing relationships, so you might have individuals that are super passionate about wildlife and sportsman's issues in Colorado, UM. And some of those guys are Democrats, some of those guys are Republicans, and depending on who's in office, you need to know those people because you have to be able to get through the door to talk to that decision maker. And if you have put yourself in the position of alienating all the people that you need to work with when something big comes up, you're not going to be effective. And so for us, that's why we, you know, we need to make sure that we nurture relationships and we care about people regardless of political party and all those different states where we work because firearms issues, sportsman's issue, they're not Republicans or Democrats. They are you know, these issues, these things we care about, these things that are important, they're a political and so if you allow yourself to be just lost in this you know, idea that everything has to be associated with an R or a D next to it, that's real tough position to be in because you know, ultimately then you put yourself at the whim of whoever you know you made enemies with. It's impect you want to like, periodically you're gonna get locked out of certain states for eight years or twelve years, and it makes no sense perpetually. Perhaps, yeah, because as Michael Jordan's I don't know, you probably know this. Michael Jordan's Michaels. I watched the last dance, well Michael Jordan's, you know, and everybody said they wanted him to respond on something. He said, Hey, Republicans buy sneakers to that. I mean, there's there's a there's a lot to that. You know that. You know what that applies to hunting in the shooting sports. It's like these things they are they cross political divides. Uh. Dave Wilms now National Wildlife Federation Senior Director of Western Wildlife. That's a big title, and acting VP of Public Lands. Yeah, yep, yes, so something just yeah, give us a sports scores and then tell us a little b about what that means. Yeah. So, um so when I left governor means offside join the National Wildlife Federation. Uh. And I think the easiest way to describe it for folks that aren't familiar with the National Wilife Federation is you heard a Ranger Ricky. That's us, right, So that's our flagship publication. So the National Wildlife Federation was Ranger rick still out. Oh yeah, can you get my kids a subscription? You can? I can? I can. I always got Ranger rick as a kid. I thought Ranger Rick was dead, not a ranger. Rick is alive and well doing doing great. Oh yeah yeah, uh still still our flagship publication. We also have a couple of other publications out there. Really you can still get man, because my kids right now are getting the Week for Kids. I don't like that. No, no, go get Ranger Rick. Yeah, now we'll talk after. I was a big boys life guy? Did you did you get boys life? I don't know boys life? Boy scouts? Wasn't a boy scouting? Oh yeah? Are you were? You? Were you an eagle scout clad? Hold up, now we got a topic. Yeah, because we got were a lot of we got a lot of right, right, so this is still those interductions. Right. So National Wildife Federation, Ranger Rick. National Wildife Federation was founded, uh back in nineteen thirty six. Right, So nineteen thirty six, President Roosevelt in risk you know, not Teddy obviously, but uh D r Yeah, in response to a bunch of conservations from all over the country, UH convened this conference that still goes on today at the North American Wildlife Conference, which has held every March every year. UH convene this big conference brought everybody to get there, to have a big conversation about like the idea was there are there are hundreds of these sports and organizations, conservation organizations working on the local level, doing a lot of great things, but there was nothing bringing them all together to advance federal policy to help wildlife recovery across the country. You know, there was this recognition at the time we were still dealing with the fallout from the market hunting and you know, and the expansion west and just wiping out all these herds of all these animals all over the place, you know, all the different wildlife that we maybe take for granted a little bit today. And so so we gotta convene this group, bring everybody together. And and this guy by the name of Ding Darling, who was actually a cartoonist, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist from a newspaper in Iowa. He was a political satirist, right right, Yeah, exactly so, And there's a he has a big wildlife refuge named after him. He does. He actually he actually designed the first duck stamp, federal duck stamp too. He was the head of uh what used to be the the preceding organization to the Fishing Wildlife service. He's also the first president of the National Wildlife Federation, and he was Yeah, he was the one that can help convene this uh, you know, working with the President and others, convene this big conference bringing I think two thousand people attended at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, d C. And at the end of this conference, what they decided is we needed a large federation. We needed a wildlife federation that brought together all of these interests from all over the country. Uh, to take all these local interests and and and really focus the efforts. You're one of the things that we're talking about at the time is the same thing you hear about today, right, is we don't have enough funding for wildlife management. Right. We you know, everybody wants to do the right thing. Everybody recognizes that wildlife are struggling, but we don't have the funding to put into it. And so this was one of the first things that happened so that this conference convenes creates the National Wildlife Federation. Now that this conference and one of the first things that the National Wildlife Federation does is helped pass the Pittman Robertson Act, the big you know, this big piece of federal legislation to figure okay, how do we at a federal level help get resources on the ground for wildlife recovery, so that the roots the history of our organization is, you know, with the this big tent idea of bringing together everybody from you know, egg interests and bird watchers and hunters and anglers and everybody that that can say, Okay, we might not agree on everything, but let's really work on the eight percent of things that we agree on, and let's try and improve the situation for wildlife and habitat on the ground. And that's been the mission really of the National Wilife Federation ever since. So today, you know, fast forward eighty years, where we are one of the largest, if not the largest um conservation organization organization of the country. We have six million members and supporters. We have an additional two million members through our affiliate network, which is made up of fifty two affiliates from all over the country. So we're here in Montana. The Montana Wildlife Federation is one of our affiliates. Our affiliates in these fifty two, more than half of them are what you'd call your traditional hook and bullet clubs right there. They're founded on really the hunting and angling principles. And and then we have a couple of dozen, right that are that are more of the UM they aren't really that are more of the environmental type of group. Right. You got so you got some of the groups that are just that that that aren't They don't they're not have a struggle in here, they don't have a stated anti hunting position, but you get the sense that they they're private conversations are very anti hunting, sort of like like Center for Biological Diversity. Are they in your group or no? UM, not that I've run across. No. And what's interesting about the way we operate as a federation is so at the National Wilde Federation are affiliates actually set our policies and you know, our direction organizational directions. So you have on one side of the coin you have your traditional hook and Bullet that view as maybe a little bit more conservative, right, and then on the other side you have more of your traditional environmentalists I'm using very broad labels, but that tend to be more left leaning. And they them together at our annual convention every year, and they set our policies and so they have to agree. And what that usually means is we come in right down the middle on things and we aim to be a nonpartisan organization that really just wants to make sure wildlife and people thrive in an ever changing world. That's our mission statement. So we're a big tent organization, UM. But we have of our membership UM I believe the last I saw nearly two million of them are identify as either hunters or anglers. Like they are hunters or anglers or are interested in hunting and angling. That makes us a pretty significant player in the hunting and fishing world. But we also have this other side of our organization that you have your you know, backyard gardeners and you know, you know, we have you know, your folks in the city that want to do you know, do right by wildlife in their backyards. And we have a Garden for Wildlife program where you can you know, have a yeah habitat in the yard uh recognized for doing good things for wildlife, for pollinators, whatever. So it's just a big, big, diverse tent. And then so my my niche within that is right now leading our public lands program, which is primarily focused in the western United States on public lands issues, although we do some in other places where there are public lands UM and a lot of Western wildlife issues, which actually turns out there's an awful lot of overlap between those two, I can imagine. So we're gonna hang you in a minute here, we're gonna hit you with, uh, we're gonna hit you with the thing we're gonna talk about that's gonna have a lot of touch points view boys Wyoming public lands. So you're gonna like it, looking forward to it. Quick note, Dave and I actually still work together a ton on issues. Dave's organization and my organization both sit on a w c P American Wildlife Conservation Partnership and uh, interestingly enough, you know we were joking about this when we both nuts on a dog man you just can't get, can't get. In fact, he was talking about Pittman Robertson UM. Our organizations are members where the folks that worked with NWF at the time, and of course, you know, we want to make sure people know like our membership are the guys that stroke the Pittman Robertson check. You guys should get a little duplex and just live there and we may have them. I don't want to talk about it. Do you guys influence the legislation as in lobbying for what happens in the United States Congress? Uh? Yeah, so for both of our organizations have a government affairs I don't do that personally. We have a government affairs team that works with with Congress and d C our affiliates do the work in at the at locally at the state level, and I'm I work more on the advocacy policy legal side and and help provide those folks with the right information right when they need it to to to ask make the right asks. And occasionally, yeah, occasionally I'll go to I don't go to a Republican Governments Association meetings. We'll go to Western Governors Association and uh go to a lot of the left conferences where state wildlife agencies come in. Really it's important to have those relationships with state wildlife agencies. In particular, I've had exposure to state legislatures in Michigan as a home inspector. I was president of the association. Not to bogus thing down, but it's amazing to me how stupid and I don't have any other word. State legislatures can be that's about bringing out laws that you mentioned. I think they're extremely intelligent, and every state legislator is handsome. These guys are just throwing out nothing but olive branches over here. Anyway. Well, I'm just speaking from my experience, and it's a different. Yeah, I've been in hearing where I have and some of these legislators, now are you know and senators they went from state legislatures to the federal level. And I'm thinking, this person has no clue. And I always I'm amazed that how are they there? How do they do what they do and not know what's going on around them? Bad lobbying, that's why. Because if you're a good because uh, for here's the thing this, this would be a good one for you because uh, our our our colleague Sam James, say hello everybody, Sam, Hello, everybody, to everybody. What you do around here? My role here is the general merchandise manager, UH. And what I do is UH I build and cultivate an assortment of products for the Mediator web store. And this assortment of products is based on the products that our team of content contributors uses in their pursuits. Whether that's our hunting team or fishing team, and our culinary team. So I work very closely with our content teams and then are My goal is to provide the product, bring the products to the people so that you can uh for our followers, our listeners and our viewers, they can learn about the products that our team is using and then come to our site and uh and understand why we use that product, why we think it's the best and and um and why they should consider buying it for their own purposes. But today Sam is here, He's gonna tell us about I don't know how I found out about this. Sam's great great uncle Otto yep invented a this. I gotta know if when if I knows about this invented and promoted a instead of a ground a triangle bullet, a triangle shaped bullet which I which never took off. Correct Now you say it never took off? Over multiple meanings on that. No, No, I guess I'm guessing it took off. It flew, but it flew but didn't take off it Uh yeah, yeah, what walk us through it here? This is this is a good story. So my great great great grand uncle, his name is Otto Schnaylock, he was one of So he was a great great great grand uncle. Yeah, so that you could probably him without even getting in trouble like that distant the brother of my great great great grandfather. So oh that makes sense. I believe that's called a grand uncle. Um Otto Schneylock was his name, and he was one of three boys. Their parents were killed in a runaway carriage accident in Germany in the mid eighteen hundreds made they were made orphans, and they traveled each individually carriage at Yeah, that's that's part of the research that I did for today. They were killed in a runaway carriage accident. Both the parents tragically killed. The boys were made orphans along with their sister in each one of them. Were they in the carriage too? That's a good question, I assume not. Mm hmm. Man. That might be a good time machine token right there. If I had like a lot of tokens, I might take one to go see that happen. Yeah, I don't know. If I had one token, That's not what I would do with it. We you do. Oh, I'd go back to see the first Americans enter the Western hemisphere, and I'd ask him some questions. That sounds great and maybe the next time I'd go find out what happened on that with that runaway carriage accent. Well, the three boys and their sisters were made orphans. They eventually all came to America independently, and the three boys, Auto, Hugo, and Emil began working in the firearms business. And Otto was the inventor. He was the one. Did you say already what year they came? Uh? They came around, uh, eighteen fifties, eighteen sixties. So German orphaned kids. German orphaned kids. Um and the three boys. So Otto is my great great great grand uncle, and his brother Hugo is my great great great grandfather. Now, Otto was the one who patented the three oh seven triangular round and revolver, and Hugo interestingly as well, he worked for the Winchester Company in New Haven, Connecticut for fifty years, and he is said in our family lore to be the designer of the Winchester Model ninety four. Now that's not what's in in in the history books and online, so I don't want to mistake, but that's what's said the family lower family records. Ye, Man, I can't tell you a quick story about that. My one of my childhood mentors, my dad's close friends with a fellow name Eugene grons Uh. He had in his place he had built these overhead gun racks, and he had he liked to have a gun for every year he'd been alive. I like this guy. So yeah, he's like in his eighties, you know, and the guns just like the roof is like I want to say, it's the ceiling is basically carpeted in firearms. But he one day I was too young to realize how what an act of generosity is he one day in my presence, when I was turning legal firearm age, which is twelve in Michigan, he one day, Uh acts as though he just made a discovery that he's eighty but there's eighty one guns. Could I do him the favor? I've taken one of them, and he gives me a uh model with a peep site, And I went out to shoot not a bunch, I want to went out to shoot deer with this thing. And then one day took it down to the wood stove store which had like a gun counter, and sold that son of a bit man for three d fifty bucks. You couldn't buy it now for you if you wanted to go find that gun again. I want that one back. I'm just saying, like, when you find that gun, because somebody's got that somebody listening to this, Like somebody listening to this podcast has that gun. Twin Lake. I think it was called I can't remember as a wood stove gun store in my hometown's going by three. It was the best selling high powered rifle in history. I think they sold over seven million of them. So they're out there. So your family needs a good lawyer to get some of that money back. Yeah. So in family they're like so they're like yeah, yeah, yeah. The history books say one thing, but everybody knows that. Yeah. Apparently Hugo was according to our family history books, Uh, he was hired by Winchester in his mid twenties. He was a gunsmith in New Orleans at the time. Um, and he was brought onto to be to Winchester to become their chief of design. That's what's in the history book in family history book. Excuse me, but but if you look it up, it was um John Browning. Yeah, that guy in the Browning left. Yeah, it's as soon as he said that I was gonna ask, you know, I think that I recognized another name associate with that, and Browning of course is amazing. I have not heard of the triangular bullet. Um. I saw first pictures of the patents yesterday. They Karine shared him with me. So it's very interesting. And uh yeah, it's interesting how some of that stuff. There's some really fascinating stuff out there. When you go back in history and look at some of the firearms in history. Um, some of the other you know, Lewis and Clark just comes to mind immediately. No packing around him, BOLTI shot air gun exactly, you know, in the early you know, things like that that people would just never imagine we're invented. It's just really fascinating. I agree, we'll get to auto, all right, get to auto or whoever whatever then you got it. Um. Basically, the focus of auto snails eight seventy two triangular bore triangular revolver invention was to create a more effective personal protection firearm because the public at that time was becoming increasingly interested in in carrying their own pistol for personal protection, and the battlefield weapons of the time were too heavy and too large for concealed carry, and so the major gun manufacturers started designing and developing personal protection revolvers, and most of them, I believe. The first one was created by Um Smith and Wesson their Model one, and it was a twenty two rim fire pistol revolver and it shot eight rounds eight round capacity. Ah. Eventually the public wanted to have greater firepower above and so Smith and Weston created a thirty two caliber revolver, but it only held six shots. And then the the public wanted The challenge became that the public wanted higher capacity revolver with greater stopping power, with greater bullet um bullet weight. So Um this was where Snail came in. He wanted to create a revolver that had heavier bullet and also had the higher capacity. So his triangular idea triangular bullet idea was basically like if you cut an orange in half and you look at the sections in the orange, the nature of the triangular bullets, they fit together in a tighter cylinder within that revolver. Oh that's what he was driving at. Yeah, So he could wasn't like lining up a bunch of circles. Was just touched edge to edge and create a lot of metal exactly. So his concept in the invention was he took the same cylinder out of a twenty two revolver and was able to fit uh, seven thirties I believe it was seven thirty two caliber bullets within the same cylinder as a twenty two caliber. So what was previously the twenty two revolver shot eight bullets, the the existing thirty two caliber revolvers from Smith and Wesson shot seven. He could he could shoot eight of the same caliber in the smaller package if they were shaped like a triangle. If they were shaped like a triangle, and uh, it never really got off the ground. He got the patent, and interestingly, he got a secondary patent a few years later for an improvement on a breech loader gun, and that patent was about UM creating an attachment to go within the breech loader that could adapt the breech loader to shoot rim fire bullets because they were just center fire at the time. So that was kind of interesting too. So do you guys have around in any of these old triangle pistols and triangle ammal I don't, we don't. UM to my knowledge, there's only one that exists. That's that's got the triangular boar as well. Um, but um that I'm not sure about. Um that the word from my grandmother that she knows at one point there was one person who had bought this revolver and uh, they're looking for it. But but beats me, did you guys have this conversation just to make me happy? Because like, honestly, like I'm such a geek about this kind of talking about this for a long time, and I thought you might enjoy it. No, it's awesome. It's super super interesting because like you look at the advancements that people were making in like the eighteen fifties and some of the stuff that you were talking about, and then the technology at the times, how they basically I mean you just described firearms design and changes in farms, and I mean you're talking about eighteen fifties. You could have been talking about any time in the last two hundred years, because that's I mean, that's that is the like, that's how it works in this country. Like it's typically a lot of people don't know, but innovations and firearms designs almost always come from the civilian market and it's driven by people who have real world concerns and real world needs, and then it goes back to some engineer who's a guy who's working at a company like Browning or like Winchester, or or like Cult and then they're faced with trying to figure out, you know, why Stephen Ronnella wanted this thing in his gun, and then figuring out a way to make it work. And then they test it and then they roll it out to the public and they see who likes it, and then you know, uh, somebody does like it, and then it becomes popular and then interestingly enough, like a lot of times you hear people think that like these advancements come from kind of this military direction and they drive down the civilian market. That's just not the case. It actually goes the other direction. It's civilians like was Lewis and Clark who come up with you know, the Hawkins rifle, you know, better guns, and then ultimately, you know, these things are proven out that their workable technologies, then they make their way the other direction to where you know, military guys will will start using some of those products to improve the stuff that they have access to. And it's just it's really a fascinating aspect of American firearms culture. This back and forth in interaction that's always occurred in our country since a guy, you know, put rifling in a in a long rifle on the banks of Wylom Missing Creek, you know, in the six hundreds. Uh, we'll come of Uncle Otto. Did he ever, like come up with the great idea and struck it rich? You know what happened? He was actually killed in a shooting competition by a careless companion. Uh yeah, he really Yeah, And you guys might find this interesting that after he after he enlisted in a two year term in the Union Army as a volunteer, and he got through the war, wasn't injured. So civil War veterans Civil War veteran the n r A was starting upright about the same time, I believe that was eighteen seventy eighteen seventy one, and a couple of years after they founded d n r A, they started holding shooting competitions and he got into these and um, according to n r a's annual reports from eighteen seventy three eighteen seventy six, Otto did pretty well in these and even one of the one one of the Sportsman's competitions. So he was a competitive shooter and it was actually lie Um it was it was competitive shooting that was ultimately his demise. He was killed on the shooting range accidentally shooting. Like, uh, firearms accidents and firearms incidents seemed to be so much higher in those days. When you read Life and Death at the Mouth of the Muscle Shell, which I recently read, I mean people just I think it's like people just trying to figure stuff out. But man shooting themselves on accident, shooting each other on accident. A lot of the things you take for like, a lot of the sort of behaviors we take for granted around safety just was not baked in the hunter. Safety wasn't around yet. No, it's like it's interesting today it's shooting sports are safer than any high school sport that you can pull up, Safer than soccer, safer than softball, safer than you name it. You know where it lines up. I was looking at some statistics, Uh, billiards. Yeah, in terms of injuries per hour, it's like a right around. But there's a lot of severe a lot of severe injuries on the billiards table. There are a lot of reasons rates rates like it was like, oh like nobody blah blah, and you look at like the rates and when you get down to like rate of injury per hours spent per practitioner, I think it lines up with pool and billiards. It's super low. And that's like Jannest hit it on the nail on the head. It's has to do with I mean, it has to do with where we've come to. You know, firearms related accidents are near all time lows right now. They've um like it really is. It's it's a safe endeavor to get into it. That said, it's because people need to follow the rules. You know, there are certain rules of firearms safety. We all know what they are, right Number one, and we may talk about these again because they're super important. Number one, every gun is always loaded, even if you have decided in your head you don't think it's loaded, even if the guy that hands the gun to you says it's not loaded. Every gun is always loaded. Every gun is always loaded. You treat it like it's always loaded no matter what. Even if you just check the chamber and you think it's not loaded, you treat it like it's always loaded. You know, you know what book I bought recently I couldn't finish reading. It's that it's called Dying to Hunt in Montana, and it's a a exhaustive catalog broken down by cause of death of everyone they can find in the history who has died hunting. Here, all the people that have died from grizzly bears exposure, anything you could like the fact that someone took the time to put this together is amazing. Did they write a story about each person? And it's like two sentences. It could be longer, be really interesting if you had the whole backstory of a lot of some of them have got. But you're back in the when you're back in the thirties, forties, fifties, and you're in the hunting accident section, you can't it just like there was a sort of mental shift that occurred about um firearm handling. Well that that like that kicked in some point between then and now. We're just the amount of things we're like what what like crossing offense, crossing offense, crossing offense, handing the gun to someone under the fence, just on and on and on, and I think that there's like we've somehow got to a point where you just walk around a little more paranoid. Let's it's like, it doesn't have to be paranoia, it has to be habit And I think that that's what we've gotten into now. And to be frank, this is one of the challenges that you see, Like go to a shooting sports competition now right, you're you're your girl Taylor, Right, you watch somebody like that handle a gun at arrange. What never happens. The gun never points at anybody. Why because there's a practice. If that gun's ever pointed at anybody, if it's ever pointed in the wrong direction, you're done for the day. You're gonna go home and buy ice cream. You're not welcome here because you're you're handling practices aren't correct. Other the other things, you know, rules of firearm safety also obeyed. There's uh, you know, you never point in firearm and anything you're not willing to destroy. Why because it's always loaded. You never have your finger on the trigger and the manual safety disengaged until you're ready to shoot. Why because the firearm is always loaded, even if you're not putting anything you don't want to destroy. And then last you never ever point a firearm that's something to shoot it, put your safety off and figure on the trigger. Unless you know exactly what you're gonna shoot and exactly where the bolt's gonna go. Be sure if your targets beyond it. Why because you're responsible for every bolt that comes out of the gun. And through shooting sports, like, none of that is negotitionable. It all happens all the time. And so when you go to places where people are participating in the shooting sports, those safety things are baked in. Unfortunately, if you when people become you know, if we see this actually in the hunting community way too much, where people become they can decide that they can be lackadaisical with the rules of firearm safety. Because I've been doing it since i was ten years old and now I'm you know, this age or whatever. I've always done it this way, right where guys they take shortcuts, they don't obey the rules, They put the gun, they carry it in a weird way. They think it's okay to you know, do certain things. And what you see is when you see competitors and you see you know, and I've heard had people say to some of the silliest things I've ever heard somebody say, well, look at guys who are like an elite military units, they point guns at each other all the time. No, they don't, you know, I know, you know, Kyle amb some of the best shooters, best people in the entire world. There's zero tolerance for breaking the rules of firearms safety. And it's baked in, and that's something that we need to do as sportsman. We need to bake this. We just have to insist on that because you know, you take I take, you take new guys hunting all the time. I'm sure I do the same thing. It stinks to have to yell at a guy, So first of all, don't yell at him literally, but it's not fun to have to be the guy to have to remind him the sixth time don't point that at me, you know. But through doing that, if you do that enough days in a row, guess what, he doesn't point at you, and he doesn't point it in anybody else, and then it's his turn to tell somebody else not to you know, to be to be muzzle aware. But if we don't do that as a community like it's it's that it's having, it's caring about somebody enough to make sure that they have good firearms handling skills. That has made it so that we're not the nineteen twenties anymore, so that you can go to a shooting competition and not worry about your physical safety and like it's just something we have to do, oh, real quick, and they'll do this other real quick thing. I have noticed that this might be anecdotal, I have noticed in my lifetime a different attitude about chambering rounds. Now we used to change in high school. It was like part of stepping out of the truck, you throw one in the chain because no one want to be caught with their pants down, right, so it was always ready to roll and then you just have the safety, you know, standing between you. And that I've noticed in my rather extensive social circle the people are a little more deliberate about when it might make sense to rack one in and walking out and setting decoys. Maybe maybe you rack it when you're all set up and not just kind of like habitually have it racked at all times during all activities. Like we're more careful about that. Now. Yeah, you get set up, you get the blind made out, then you might throw one in the tube. I'm gonna I'm not that guy you step out of the truck. Yeah. Like, and it's I've watched friends that do what you're talking about, Like they don't rack into the last second, like on an l count for example, And I watched him forget and pull up and just like, well there's the last second and then there's just being deliberate. I mean it's it's not like I'm riding down the road racked up. But you know, like when I go set up a my I get my gun loaded, put it in the in the blind, and then I set everything up because what if something comes in in case you got a barrel rollback and probably overly cautious. Um, but all those things are gonna be like those are gonna be personal decisions, are gonna be cultural decisions, are gonna be family decisions. And the one thing I would say, because I don't think all of us here we could argue about that until we're blue in the face, obey the four Fundamental Rules of firearms Safety. If you obey the four Fundamental Rules of firearms safety, literally every other incident that you're going to talk about or imagine, your head goes away. They don't exist if you obey those four rules. Okay, are we done with Otto and the triang your bullets? The other tragedies happened in his family? Well, uh, there are actually two more things I wanted to mention. And one of the reasons that Auto didn't make it his his invention didn't make it as because Colt began producing the single action army revolver a K the Colt five in eighteen seventy three, and that really blew up in the following years when they started creating shorter barrel options for civilian carry. So that was that was one of the big reasons, not just his death, that it didn't go anywhere. Um. And then the other thing that just to mention is that the third brother, my other great great great grand uncle, he worked for Springfield Armory in Massachusetts for fifty years. So these were three orphans from Germany. They came to America on their own independently and then ended up being innovators and UH and developers within the firearms trade in the eighteen fifties to the early bring this full circle again, Yeah, go for it. Friday, meaning the day after Thanksgiving, just a couple of days ago. My son, my eleven year old son took possession of his great grandfathers Springfield Mark one which was manufactured in nineteen nineteen, and that now sits in my gun safe. That's pretty cool. That's awesome. It's got that little red red something Redfield. Little Pete he bought. So he was in Whiskey Whiskey two in the Pacific Theater and came home and just bought a gun like what he was issued when he was training in the military, and that's what he bought. He bought it used for twelve bucks and they still have the receipt. That's awesome. Yeah, my kids real fired up to shoot something with it. Real fired up. He's really he's excited. It was cool. Okay. So auction House oft is Group six again auction sty to support our access initiatives here at Mediator, we have a New York's Met a New York Mets baseball bat signed by our our buddy polar Bear, Pete Alonso, So you can go get that bat signed by him and use the thump fish in the head after you catch them. We have two Trampled by Turtle concert Trampled by Turtles concert tickets. That's Dave Simonette who's been on the show as well. So Pete Alonso has been on this podcast. Dave Simon that's been on this podcast. Um if you want to go find the one that Dave was on. It was episode called Sex, Guns and Bluegrass. So Dave has the tickets and when you buy this package, you go to the concert and you go backstage to attend the meet and greet with Dave. It will be playing. This one is good for Colorado's Red Rocks Amphitheater in July. So you can get tickets for Colorado Red Rocks Amphitheater, go back meet Dave. Um all paid. Here's another weird one, uh you can get so Spencer, Seth, and Chester have all volunteered to let you pick what you want them to have tattooed on their arm. They're giving you a quarter so it's the size of a piece. They're giving you a quarter sized portion of the real estate on their arm. You pick a tattoo design, they will get it. This will be Seth's first tattoo. So you select a design and then three people, the flip Flop Flasher, Spencer and Chester the Divester all will bear your Designs says here Phil too. Oh no, no, no, no, no, Phil, that was part of the internet. Should care about conservation. We can talk about that later. But no, it was just why does it say you jumped on board? I thought it was referring to on board, like getting a tattoo train, not not this specific tattoo. What's wrong with this plan? It sounds like a great plan. I just don't know if I'm you know, I mean, those boys are gonna bring in a little bit of money sting, those boys are being like not smart. I support it totally, but come on, man, So you just explained why I'm not going to be a part of that's why. That's why. Hell no, But I'm just thinking, you know, a quarter on your arm would really bring in the box. Yeah, but I don't want a tattoo on my arm. Me and my wife are the last untattooed couple in America. But I'm gonna get uh. I am gonna get that world Slam Turkey tattoo I'm talking about if you get it too, you know I'm not. I'm gonna get an outline outline of like uh, North America on my arm and then a dot where all the turkeys from my Turkey world Slam came from. And that suite my kids. When I told my little boy that, my six year old boy, he almost started to cry. He like thinks tattoos are very like just not a good idea. He doesn't understand him. What would it take? Maybe he really understand them, he might understand the better wells money would it take? Like, let's just say, if if we just had that person that could should just shell out whatever number you put you pick, probably would be real careful about. Oh, like what amount of money? Yeah, for you to do a quarter sized tattoos so that all that money would go to land access. Five thousand dollars, that's it. But how long do you have to keep the tattoos? Because I understand that thing right, So you could get the tattoos some period of time like a permanent easy. Yeah, we haven't gotten to that level yet, but yeah they can do. So they could pull a fast one like that. I don't think they're gonna pull a fast one. And every think Spencer's getting his whole damn arm tattooed. So it's just gonna be in the midst talking else I was talking for you. I was talking for you, that's your sort of extending off what they might do for me. It would take five unless it was what I want. If they were just gonna pick what I want anyways, and I would just do it. But I don't know if I want it, Like my wife doesn't want me to my wife doesn't want me tattooed. It's like a lot of familiar resistance against this whole idea. But like our friend Pat Durkin, he started getting tattooed in his sixties because he thinks by the time he's sick of him, he'll be dead. So that dude's covered in new tattoos because he doesn't have enough time to regret it. He says he's just gonna die and think they're still cool. Who's that guy that? Uh I don't On a Saturday Night Live, he's like, all he has all those tattoos, and he said he's going through the process of having them all removed right now. Yeah, and he's talking about it being like the most painful experience of it. That's one dude, I don't understand how anyone like it's baffling, Like he's the least funny person on the planet. He's like the it's like the least funny funny person. Yeah, and he's he's dating some mega famous model, like a different one every single month. It's just it's wild. I don't understand it. How you could be that unfunny? Have you wanted? He did some roasts on on Comedy Central that we're really pretty good. I only see him coming on and like screwing up Saturday Night Live skits, but not even in a funny way. Well, anyhow, welcome to middle aged Mr. I gotta keep moving. No, it's not a middle aged thing. I think allows that's funny, just not him. Uh oh, so you get the Yeah, you pick the tattoo, they get it on their arm. So those guys are, you know, putting their arm out for access my personal spear gun, which I've been shooting for a few years now. And if you successfully uh so Season ten um our next episodes the drop for season ten on Netflix, you'll see that spear gun in their Me and Yanni's super famous spear gun YouTube video. That's the gun in there. I've used it Mexico, Hawaii, America, all over damn place. That gun is up for auction. Mark's tree saddle from back forty. So Mark kenyans tethered mantis tree saddle that he used to kill the wide eight I meetators back forty, signed and donated by Mark Kenyon. We got some arts and crafts type stuff, a lot of it, and then Karn's crystal critter collection. So they're sitting from you right now. These are handmade red squirrel sterling silver, Herkimer diamond jewelry. Set includes earrings, a necklace, pendant, and a ring, all made of sterling silver and squirrel feet, sterling silver and squirrel fast. These bad boys around, beautiful work. My daughter shitter pants. I can tell you, like legitimately right now, like this is literally I'm holding a napkin like this tissue paper, buddy, don't don't mean, don't degrade its tiny little feet. Beautiful squirrel foot earrings, all kinds of squirrel foot jewelry. Brodie's turkey foot which is flipping the bird, which is a great I love making those things. You make a little plaque, it's a turkey giving you the finger. Brody's got one of those. Now here's a weird one in the auction house of oodities, and we've I have one in my personal collection. Now you gotta hear me out because we've checked into this. This is legit. It's a brick, Okay, Red You look at these bricks and you know these sons of bitches are old. It's a brick from the general store that Jim Bridger owned in Kansas City, Missouri. We have three of them. I rad hold one way. It's in my it's on display in my house. I rad hold one away me. Spencer has one, and Spencer has given the third brick from Jim Bridgers General Store in Kansas City, Missouri in the auction housbodies and you can check into the pedigree of this brick and everything is legit. Check this one out. Here's a good item. A guided tour of the Duran family farm. You get to go spend the day doing a tour. I think Duran is gonna donate four hours. You spend four hours touring Dug with Doug Durn, getting a tour of Doug Durn's farm, to talk about wildlife management, habitat management, how a family farm pays the bills and provides access and does the right thing by wildlife. You talk about all this with Doug. I could spend four years driving around with Doug talking about stuff on Doug's farm. He's a wonderful tour guide. Um, He'll take you to get some cheese kurds. He will even throw in a whole jar of Buckman juice. You do not need to worry about the authenticity of the Buckman juice because you can watch Doug. Dog is willing to let you watch him emit the de Buckman juice throughout the four hours, and he will fill that jar up. Take across the line here. That's a that's a wonderful idea if you're into his Buckman juice. But I've got even a maybe a better idea. I think we should go national with that. I think you could have a Wisconsin version of Buckman Juice and then you could set up franchises all over the country. Yeah, but they have to like, like do whatever. They'd have to have the same diet as Dug. Dougget has to lay out a regiment for them of how he produces such a potent juice. I'm gonna tell you the Latinan Eagles version works too well. I mean, you feel like you got I don't know a lot of deer came by my stand this we are in Wisconsin. Well that's true. What we'd have have to do is put up a trail cam. You take a whiz on a tree, and Doug takes a whiz on a tree, and then we wait and see it would be continent revenue. What I'm saying, oh no, yeah, because because the problem with Buckman juices is not scalable, but we don't know that we haven't tested it. If it has to market and it's all over, and someone starts to get to calculate and how much year in one man can produce, it might be like an expose Like do you remember when there was an expose on dough and heat urine and someone went and looked at and all the sporting stories around the country how much dough and heat urine was for sale. And then they went and looked at how many captive does are there? How long is a dough and heat for? How much does she urinate while she's in heat? And they're like, there's a lot of stuff out there that says do and heat urine that there's no way is urine collected from a dough in heat? I agree, And that was like a big scandal. So if we do Buckman Juice and someone gets doing some math, it might turn out that they're like, you know, buck Man juice. Let me just introduce the next level, and that level is that you go to all these you make it Buckman brand, but then you have localized versions of it and you go to all these small breweries. You know, you just have a thing aside. Hey, like we'll pay you, and juice becomes like a brand. There's like sick dog signature, like the Doug signature lying and then yeah across stop peeing in the alley and pee in this cut. That's good. There could be a legal aspect to it, though, because if you turned it over to the cops, you know, I feel like it's going to hurt the value of the though if your original you're trying to oh yeah, but here's the deal man, this this is going on now and that so like if you want to get on the ground floor, you can get your during family farm tour, this farm tour with Doug during Dude, it better go for high dollar. I met. I became friends with Doug during because a long time agoen I didn't get a lot of mail. I got a letter from Dug, and the letter was so touching, and I was so drawn to him and so moved by his story of his family's property that I went out and visited him. He could have chopped me up and buried me in a hole, but he didn't. We became like friends, and I'm one of his biggest cheerleaders. And to go and spend time talking about landscape and in relationships with the land with Doug during is a um quite a prize. There's a here's the free item giveaway. So this way all this other junk we're talking about. You got a bid on, like you want those squirrel feet, jewelry, you got a bit on you want to hang out with Doug. You got a bit on it. This is for free. It's a giveaway item. Soft sided yetie cooler, so yettie hopper, signed by a bunch of folks. Here at meter, stuffed to the gills full of merch, tease caps, cup spices, et cetera. We also got a bunch of other stuff, lots of art, a guided fishing trip in Arkansas, Genuine gator scoots, so cured taxidermied gator scoots that you lay out on the counter, which I kind of want a bid on myself. Check it all out. It's all on the auction block. All right, you boys ready to get get brass tacks on some Wylming public land stuff. Let's do it. Okay, we're gonna avoid rabbit holes on this one and lay the groundwork right. Well, Yanni's gonna lay the groundwork first, Yanni explain for the eighteenth time. Oh, you know, we talked about corner crossing so much that there was a Yellowstone Public Radio story that someone sent to me and then laying out when trying to like define corner crossing, the journalists pointed out that we talked about it all the time on this podcast. What does that make this podcast in the place where people talk about corner crossing all the time, but it's like reference material you might know it from this pop is like a popular Bowsman based podcast where they're always yam or on about corner crossing. So layout for me, so I can drink my coffee. What it means, what it means, Why it's why, why it matters succinctly. Yeah, out West, a lot of places we have what's called checkerboarded lands. I'm not gonna get into how they got that way because I'm doing the abridged versions that okay, but it is a good story. It is I don't worry about. But basically, if you think about a checkerboard, and if all the black pieces were public and all the red pieces were private, and you were able to hunt the public just the black pieces, you would have to hop corner to corner to make it across the checker field and access all of the public land that technically you and all of us here owned and should be able to hunt. But because of rules and states basically saying that the landowners that own the adjoining land the red pieces, when they come to a corner, they own that air space above their two corners as well. So even though you don't touch their land as you cross over from corner to corner, you're trespassing through the air space above their land, thus making it illegal. Let me ask you a question, Johnnie, what would you imagine? Would you imagine that they're not actually concerned about your shoulders passing over their airspace? What do you think they really are after control of said public lands? Like it's just it's all for you, So it's like a proxy. Is this airspace issue. Like, I don't think anyone's like Tom, I'm worried about my air sprace. I think they're like, man, I'm worried about a bunch of holders walking through land at time. Immemorial has just been available to me in my family. Nay, taxes on a very small rabbit hole. I apologize. Why is there so much checkerboarded land? Because they when they put the railroads in, that's how they gave away the land. The railroads would encourage settlement and they did all kinds of transaction through land. So the railroads come in and to incentivize railroad construction, they would give like for every t as as the as the railroad company was laying track. They were subsidized by land grants. Okay, so you would get like it could be different deals. You might get fifty miles on either side of the train tracks if you build the tracks. Then those people needed to encourage settlement to have something, to to have freight. I'm just going very general here. The railroad companies wanted to encourage settlement, and they had the land. They could dispose of what they will, But oftentimes they would give them every other section and they issued it out on these corner to corner touching pieces. So in some areas it's literally like you might look at an area that you might look at an area that could be let's say a township size, so thirty six square miles. The entire thirty six square miles might be like literally checkerboarded miles squares touching on the corners, maybe two million acres. Sometimes you'll get into a situation like this where let's say you have a chunk of BLM. We'll just take BLM for instance, because what I'm gonna get to I think is a BLM story. But let's say have a chunk of BLM and there's a road cut through it. So there's a county road and you have access to that BLM. If you could jump one corner, it might not just open up a bunch of more checkerboard, it might open up a huge contiguous block. There are areas where jumping one corner, the ability to jump one corner would open up ten thousand contiguous acres of land. So there's some boys in Whiloming that are in trouble right now because lot of states like it's unclear in a lot of states, like what the actual thing is Montana. They've often recommended against it. Their policy is, we recommend against it. We recommend that you get landowner permission because of the airspace issue. Four guys, they were non residents. I feel like they should have been residents. Four non residents in Wyoming right now are up for criminal trespass because they corner hopped. Okay, there's a lot of interest in these fellers prevailing because if they prevail and they're found not guilty of criminal trespass for corner crossings precedent, people would be less likely. Dave shaking his head vigorously. No, yeah, that's why you're here, Dave. Oh no, No, it's not your turn yet. Dave says, no that I'm to say, like, we got to take a lawyer from Wyoming. He's got to take off his professional hat really quick. So this doesn't represent as Dave, you go talk to us. All talk to you is Dave, old Dave. Dave. Let me tell you something I have. Of all the names I have the best luck with, Dave's an incredibly long line of Dave's that i've we go back generation are names I have trouble with. I don't want to say him and so forth. There are names I have trouble with historically, and there's names I do well with historically. And Dave, And whenever someone's having a kid and they say like, we can't think of the name, I'm like, I'll tell what your name is, Dave, because then I'll be friends with him. So I'm trusting you, and I want to hear from Dave, not some crazy asked lawyer. All right, what if I'm both not some tight ass lawyer. So let me lay a little more groundwork. Yeah, for sure in your answer or in your analysis of this situation. Oh, at first I got to get into this. There's a go fund me to help these to help these fellers fight their legal battle. Where is that? What is the fund? Keep finding? Oh? Holy count like all go fund me, it's like horrible, uh www dot go fund me, dot com, slash f slash, corner dash crossing dash legal dash fee fundraiser. But I bet if you typed in a bunch of stuff like go fund me corner crossing fundraise, that you will find the thing, which is people raising money to help these corner crossers with their legal fees. Here's my the final thing I canna say about this with corner crossing, I personally, personally and professionally would love to see a solution to corner crossing where uh we could work out a way for people to corner cross but it would need to involve some like careful survey work, and it would need to involve like I've seen that actually seen in some places. A imagine two adjoining step ladders that had so you pick these these like key areas, survey them, mark it out. You have two adjoining step ladders, so people are able to go up a step ladder laying on a platform, walk across the platform down the step ladder, and sportsman, I'm sure would I would. I would. I would take every dime we raise with our Access initiative, that's to check with cal By bet Caldy into it, and we would put all of the money we raised with our Access initiative, if cal is okay with it into said surveying and said step ladder apparatus is in strategic locations, we would pay for all of that and start strategically going in and being like, here's another thousand acres for public hunters, here's another two thousand acres. Here's another five acres survey it mark the corner, put the step ladders in if we could resolve the airspace issue. So, now, Dave, what comes to your mind when you hear all this? Okay, so I'll start with I like that throat clear, sorry that we're gonna get it right. Yeah. Um, so I'll start with this. I don't know the particulars of this case. Forget that this particular Um no, I mean to forget it, but it can inform it. But let's just talk about it in general, just corner crossing genil. So, because this is Wyoming, I'll talk to you in the context of Wyoming, right, but I can I can be a little bit broader, right like, So for example, let's start with with the basics of there's no law at the federal level that specifically allows or disallows corner crossing. So there's no there's no statute on the books. What would a law like that, say it would if you were to have one that allows it or disallows it? I mean like what, yeah, like, what would the law be? You know it would it be like an airspace issue or so? I it might be right like, so right now, the FA it controls the airspace and navigable air space and it and the way that that the f A defines it is, you know, in urban areas, the navigable airspace, which is the public domain for air space, starts at a thousand feet. In more rural and unpopulated areas, it's at fiet um. That's the f A A right. But there's been some some Supreme Court case law that actually has said, well, you know, maybe that actually extends even closer to the ground than that. Um So, but you know, at the time those regulations were started, I don't think people we really thinking about corner crossing for hunting, your accessing public land. So so you'd write a law that if you were doing at the federal level, that says, you know, for purposes of accessing used BLM, for example, you know that it would be legal for for stepping from one corner at a survey pin right cut stepping over the survey pin to another UH piece of adjacent UH federal land. That's very simple. So you could be like nuts and bolts about it. For a purpose of public foot travel, public access, it is legal to blank yep, absolutely, you could do something like that. Um Okay, So the federal level. At the state level. Now, this is where I'll get a little uh may get out of my lane just slightly, because I haven't done a survey of every state, right, but um, and I might. So I'm because I know, like in I might get this wrong because in like South Dakota, right, you can walk section lines, uh, and that's a means of access. But places like Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Uh, some of those inner Mountain West states that you think of with the big chunks of public lands, there's no I don't know if any law on the books in those states that either permits or specifically prohibits corner crossing. So you start with this fundamental premise of there's actually no law on the book that expressly prohibits that activity or expressly permits it. So then you have to dive a little bit deeper to figure it out. So here's here's Wyoming, for example, And so that's where I'll go to Wyoming because it's sort of what I know. Yeah, that's what that's what this cases cases. Right. So in Wyoming, we do have a law on the books, uh, and it's ten four Wyoming Statute ten dash forward dash three O two uh and three oh three, which defines the ownership or gives the ownership of the space above the lands and waters of the state. It's vested in the owners of the surface beneath that air. So basically, you own the surface, you own the air above it. And there's an exemption carved out for aircraft so long as it's not so low that it interferes with the existing use of the land. So theoretically it could come pretty low if you're not interfering with the existing use or enjoyment of the private land. Uh. I mean, if you're scaring the hell out of someone's cattle, that might be interfering. Might be interfering. Yeah, exactly, so, So that's where the art you hear that the argument come up at. Okay, um, if you own everything, if you have a law in the books that says the lander owns everything from the the ground up, and you have these and you have laws of surveying, right that the principles of surveying property lines says you have a your property line is infinitely thin that when you get to these corners, there's no way of actually stepping across a corner, even if you know the survey pin is there without to your point, without your shoulders entering the airspace? Where which is where the argument is that you can't corner across because you have this law on the books saying they own the airspace. I think, and I'm not taking like, I don't take a position right, I'm like not taking a huge position here. I'm just trying to lay out with the So here are a couple of supposed to be Dave, let me ask you this. Okay. Let's say our whole system of government and rules and everything changed. It just became where now. And then we decide that we're just gonna ask Dave if it's okay, and that becomes the rule of the land. And we come to you and we're like, this one's in your court, Dave. It's corner crossing okay or not okay? What would you say, as do I want it to be okay? Or is it legally? You get you're the man you're putting on putting me on it. Man, the final the constitution needs this. It's like the Constitution says on this issue, Dave will decide, Yeah, I want us to figure out a way to be able to access our public lands. Right, and and so that it's evasive. But you're there, yeah, I'm feeling. So there are here two examples i'd give you of where this if there's a principle in the law when you're interpreting a statute, so I look at this one of ownership of airspace. There's a principle in the law called, uh, you know when you're doing statutory construction, which is, you know, a court is interpreting a statute, and you you start with the plane meaning of the words on the page. You start with, Okay, what's the plane meaning of the law, say, and if plain meaning is clear, you don't go any farther. That's what you apply. But there's another principle in statutory construction that says you can't read a statute to create an absurd result. Uh that yep, yep, and so and so I'd like so i'd propose this. Here's two examples i'd proposed to you that I throw that I'd throw out there in Wyoming right of examples where if you read the letter of the law, you'd be trespassing every time. But I've never heard of anybody's sided for trespassing. These two examples because it would be an absurd result. One of them is if the property line is infinitely thin. We have laws for for building fences. For example, if you put a fence up on your property line that's not infinitely thin, you are by definition trespassing on your neighbor's property by putting up that fence. But we allow you to do that, and we want, we encourage people to do that. Um. And in fact, we're a fence out states. So if you don't want neighbors livestock coming onto your property, you're encouraged to put up a fence and keep them out right. UM. So there's an example where I have never seen somebody sided. You follow the statute for how to construct a legal fence, and as long as you do that, you can put a fence on a surveyed property line that's your property line, and even though that fence is half half on their property, it's not a trespass. You can do that can give you an example. I was good. So here's my second example before I forget it because I freaked. I'm sorry. My second example is so in Wyoming, water is the properties of the state, and it's if you want to float on. So the landowner may own the In Wyoming, they may own the bed and the banks of the river. You can't put your foot on the on the bottom of the river and you're trespassing. But as long as you're on that water, you're not trespassing. So you're sitting on public water but over private land, therefore in private airspace. But I've never heard anybody gets sited for trespass. You're floating along in your tube, right, You're technically everything underneath you is private land. Yeah, why don't they make the airspace argument there? I've never heard it made, right because I think it would be an absurd result. We said those are navigable waterways, and that the public is entitled to use those navigable waterways as long as they don't put their anchor down or or or get out and wait on the That's the first time I've ever heard that point raised, because you haven't talked to me about it. Yeah, he's a good attorney. You're floating in shallow water. You're closer to their land than you would be stepping over it. Right. What I was a good point out was, let's say you get out to take a leak on the side of the road and you walk down and you point out something over the fence. You're never gonna get a ticket for your arm pointing over the fence, right, I thought you're gonna say, and you have a little bit of wind draft with your pee. I was saying like like, if you're staying there, and I'm like, you know whatever, I jest you're over fence and someone says I'm going to give you a citation for having your him over that offense, there's no way you're gonna wind up walking out of that courthouse. So to find like you're you're right, my arm waved over the fence, so you can can I make a couple of other points on okay, so so you get to let me let me talk about this specific point because I think you're honestly you were making that when you're introducing this, you're saying, well, maybe it'll set a precedent or something. The way that the judicial system works. So this is in a circuit court, right, it's a misdemeanor offense. The penalty for a criminal trespassing wyming is maximum seven fifty dollars and up to six months in jail u for for this misdemeanor. It's not gonna origin open jail. Yeah, Like if I could pick between these two seven fifty bucks sounds better, it's yeah. Uh, So it's a misdemeanor offense. Right if if the defendants here are are acquitted at the circuit court level, there's no legal precedence set so that because it's just just down that the facts of the situation showed there there either wasn't enough to convict, there wasn't enough to show that they actually trespassed, or or the facts show that they in fact did not trespass. But there's not a legal interpretation of uh in that situation about whether that uh, whether the application of like ten four three oh two the airspace law, whether that creates this uh, whether they breached the invisible barrier, And there's no interpretation as a matter of law. They're on a on an acquittal. Now, if they're found guilty, then there is a process to appeal that to the district court and the Supreme Court, and then at that point they could make arguments on matter of law and do this this interpretation and talk about you know, maybe you're you're creating an absurd result here or whatever, and then you could potentially get to the point of having um something that sets precedent. But if at the circuit court level, if if they aren't, if they are not convicted at the circuit court level, it's not it's not going to can you can you plead guilty and then if you wanted to advance, like let's say you really wanted to push for a test case, it doesn't work that way. You can't plead guilty and then appeal. No, you just plat out. I mean, I'm not a criminal lawyer. I remember. This reminds me of another wildlife issue that I used to follow. There was a on the Flathead Reservation in northwest Montana. There was a rule that, like UM, at some point in time, tribal members were able to sell land to non tribal members. So you had a lot of non tribal members who owned land within the reservation boundaries, but because they weren't tribal members, they didn't enjoy certain hunting privileges on their own land because it was governed. The hunting was governed for tribal members. Remember this guy when I was when I was living over that neck of the woods, this guy would make a big scene out of every year, inviting a bunch of people out to do a pheasant hunt. And he'd always be come arrest me, please, because he wanted to get it pushed to the right court. And he would be frustrated because they wouldn't do anything, and he just wanted to get it to a point where it could be clarified law. He wanted to challenge the law, but they never would take de bait with him because they knew what he was after. Is there a chance that someone would just be like, Okay, you're not guilty in order to not do precedent or does the world not working like conspirators conspiratorial ways like that, you know? And I don't know the answer to that. I'm not like, that's not something I could speculate about. I would hope that I would hope that our judicial system works in a way, um that the facts of the situation in the law are applied fairly to everybody and nobody's trying to use it as a way to game a system, right, especially in the criminal context, which this is, you know, in the civil context, I've definitely have seen exam pults of trying to to game figure out a way to gain this instant but in the criminal context, I really hope that that I really hope that doesn't happen. So does it seem like the go fund me is getting ahead of itself, like they should maybe not fund these feathers yet so they don't have like like have them going with a poor legal defense. They get convicted, then you pour the money to them and they go to the next state supreme US Supreme Yeah, it wouldn't be. It would go state Supreme Um. It's a state statute and so never wind up. It could never go to a it could never go to a federal thing. You know. I don't think they'd be making a constitutional argument here. I suspect that this stays at an interpretation of state law, and it it would go to the state Supreme Court, and that would probably be the end of it for that because we're talking about the application of of a of a state statute, criminal trespass statute. Are you tempted right now to do like um? You know, sometimes like big shot lawyers come in and do like so they do some grand standing by doing like a pro bone o deal and all that are you is that? Are you drawn? Are you are you feeling there's a lot of these cases, a lot of situations like this that are tempting. Yeah, for sure, tempting just to get in there and see what's going on. I haven't been asked, right, I haven't been asked. I don't know if I would be asked, but uh, yeah, it's interesting there. It's there are a couple other things on this that I think are worth knowing, right as far as why I'm in specific law and corner crossing, so this they're they're being prosecuting it, or criminal trespass statute. We have two different We always several different trespass statutes. The criminal trespass is one that, uh, the only way you get cited for that is if you know you have so either the landowner themselves or law enforcement UM have told you you can't be here, you're trespassing, you can't be here, or the landowner has posted signs making it very clear that you are not allowed to be there um. So it's it's incumbent upon the landowner to notify the person potentially entering the property that it's uh that they're violating. You know, that they don't want them to trespass in that case they can be cited in Wyoming, just his corner fence isn't enough. There might there might not have been a fencer. So what I understand my understanding of this particular one, and I might have the facts around, but I've been briefed a little bit on it, right, was that there's a survey pin but no fence, and that he actually used a step ladder like you're talking about right, uh, and so never touched the ground on that's yeah, supercrafty, right, And if it's the spot I think it is. There there had been some tea posts jammed into the ground with no no trespassing on the private side to make it impossible to squeeze through, so you actually the only way you could do it was to go over the top. So it was actually it may have taken a little forethought to to do this. Um, but why do you seem like you seem mildly uncomfortable? Are you just not at all? I love it? Like you're like you're so you've dealt a lot with water stuff. Yes, okay, hit me with the water thing that like floating down the river. Oh, there's it's different in every state. No, I mean, let's stick with Wylming. What you do? You do a lot of water rights issues. So why has no one ever since my disclaimer, I can't speak on behalf of like, First of all, I'm not on Turney. Second of all, like as I can give you opinions, let me ask you some yes or no questions. Okay, are you or are you not an expert in water rights? I'm gonna say no, bullshit? Man. You know I actually I actually practiced water loft for like eight years. But I thought that your whole deals that'sfferent rights. That's different like waters of the US and things like that. I can talk about waters of the state, waters the US, I can talk about the arguments in but when you're talking about water rights, you're typically talking about an individual's right to pull water. That is that what I meant? I meant floating down the river? Yeah, no one's challenged. Why has no old landowner said, um, those people coming down my river are in my airspace. Please give them a ticket. Why have they not done? What I think has happened is I think we've carved out an exception the way we did for that the f a A A did for for navigable airspace and we did the same thing for navigable water, so we've effectively created an exception navigable waters. They belonged to the waters of the US, and we've the reason that we've made that hook is the fact that they are navigable waters. Could you really say, well, we're calling them navigable waters, but we're gonna tell you can't navi I'm saying that that little lens of water negates the little lens of water you're in the waters airspace. That's exactly right, Right, that's that's the theories. But but right, could you say, could you say there that there is he was being coy. He doesn't know a thing. The thing is Dave, Honestly, Like I'll say this, Dave is better at the stuff than anybody I know on Earth. And like there's some of these issues that like you haven't even touched on yet that I'm hoping, like I'm sitting here with a kind of a grand waiting for the chance to get you to talk about a different legal issue in Wyoming that Dave is really really good at. But like, Dave is the man on this stuff, and so I could I can tell you what I think and what I know and half of what I know comes from sitting in a car and with Dave talking about suppressors while he tells me about trespassing. Do you guys do it at the same time? Basic probably just talking right over each other, all right, So go on, all right. So the last piece I was gonna say is Okay, so water, we've created this exception for navigability, like this navigable waterway, right, that creates an exception. We've done it for airspace. Um, there's a quite there's still a question about how far that air space comes down, right, And you know there's some Supreme Court case law from the nineteen forties, uh that that kind of suggests that. And it's specific to airplanes, right, but as long as you don't and I mentioned it earlier, as long as you don't disrupt the enjoyment of that private land, meaning you're not harassing livestock or you're causing major problems uh to the landowner. Uh that if you're in that airspace, Uh, you're not violating that property. Right now, that hasn't been fully played out. This was very specific to airplanes. That wasn't to foot traffic, and it was you know, seventy five years ago. UM. But I do have a question that I think and I don't have an answer to this, but like we've carved out a space for airplanes for navigable water or for air we've carved out a space for navigable water. Um, we haven't talked about foot traffic as a means of navigability of public of a public trust resource. Because what we're talking about here is a public trust resource of airspace to move commerce and so forth, a public trust resource of water, uh to move on. And we have a public trust resource of land uh so air water and land, and we haven't decided that land piece yet. UM. But it gets back to the sort of come back to that, you know, interpret a statute with absurd results. And I you know, if if I were making an argument and I'm not providing right, I'm not providing legal advice or just having a conversation about you know what ifs right? Uh, which is another day, but yeah, just another day. But I'd consider making that case that uh, it's another form of navigability of a UM of a public resource, right of a public trust resource. I want people to understand. I want to put I want to put some superlatives on here. Sure this is not to degrade or de mean any of the work done by conservation pro access organizations that do a lot of great land acquisitions. Like in a minute, need I was going to tell us about this eight thousand acre property in Utah, which is super cool. Okay, um, Rocky Mountain ELK Foundation is set aside. I don't know whether the hell they at now. I mean absurd millions numbers of acres that the Rocky Mountain Olk Foundation, Yeah, has like raise money to bo I and to open to public access ducks unlimited enormous amounts of acreage that they've bought and handed over to public access. Like all that's that's great, But in terms of a single act that would increase public access, there's nothing that would come close. In the next ten generations of humans, Nothing would come close to a broad scale clarification of the ownership of that airspace. In terms of foot traffic, you would be opening up literally hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of acres, millions literally millions of acres. You just have to find the right person and the right case. You have to find the right opportunity, the right attorney, right person, it's interesting. There's another issue a lot like this in Wyoming. Go on, Well, in Wyoming, you can't hunt willderness areas if you're not a president without a guide. Oh man, I got a lot to say on that. We've covered that one and I've even explored it with Dave, but not not on your podcast. No, I know. But you know what I did. I summed up a thing you explained to me once I was asking you. We talked about this recently and I mentioned I don't think I mentioned you by name. I mentioned something you explained to me where I was always going to like with certain rules, I'm like, well, why what were the arguments for and against? And you had explained to me that when it comes to legislative action, they don't memorialize all of the wise then memorialize the outcome. But no one like puts down like here's the pros that someone so raised and here's so when you go back to something that's been in existence for a long time, you don't have an accurate record of who argued, what point, and what were they really getting at. It's just you just know what they came up with. I was explaining that might I might mutilated that that's right because I was asked you like, why what was the argument for and you're like, I can't go tell you the arguments. Yeah. Yeah, we did talk about that at some point. If you want, we can talk about what I think the legal vulnerabilities to that law are. I know you think it's vulnerable. I've I've got a couple now, I think I've talked to you before about at least one. But I know if I've got a couple of legal vulnerabilities to that law, um, explain the law. When do you explain the law? And then when you explain the vulnerable be done with corner crossing if you are I mean, I was trying to lay a huge superlative on it. Yeah. Oh. The other part is they're there. They are partly that I think that that the the the sporting community, the access community needs to be prepared for, is they need to be prepared for the fact that UM fences are often laid down in terms of people eyeballing things. They're laid down in terms of convenience. You might if you have like a finger ridge coming off a ridge hundred and thirty years ago, some guy might have run his fences down the finger ridge because it was an approximate, It was approximately right, and it was a hell of a lot of easier than running it down some rocky you draw where you couldn't put a post in. Uh, if this became a thing, we need to be prepared for, like I said, and overcoming a lot of issues around like marking surveying. It doesn't mean that you just jump up to any two fences that come together. Those fences could literally those fences could be a hundred feet off. So it's not just a matter if you hopping fences everywhere. It would take some like educated doing to avoid conflict. That was my last point I was gonna you made that. It made me think of something that would create I can create a little hyperbole out of this something. Uh if you do this, you said, we'd go out there and survey every corner and we know right. Um. One consequence of that is when you do when you just described what you described of all of these fences running in different places, like you may just open a can of worms on adverse possession claims and just pitt like just people fighting over like hey, you know what your neighbor is grazing section, Like you start doing that and find out where these corners actually are, like like just can open worms everywhere across poem about the dudes building the fence, it's called fence building or something. There's two guys like did it come together every year and rebuild the stone fence between their properties. People should revisit that poem in the line he's like old stone. He like basically they're like friendly thing. And as you get into the poem, it's like he he puts it like these old stone savages still out there, you know, wielding their stone weapons. But yeah, fence building. Anyways, there could be a lot of people who got over it a hundred years ago, and then you'd reinvigorate the dispute. The only the very last thing I'd say is at least in wy I mean, and I think Montana tried this two years ago. Legislature actually tried to introduce a bill to legalized formally legalized teen in Montana. Um both failed. Both efforts failed. There was a reverse effort effort in Wyoming at one point to formally ban it, to make it illegal. That also failed. So everybody's everybody's like, we don't don't really politically nobody wants to touch it. If that came back. If that came back up now in this state, I bet you could tip it the other direction because it was that voting like in the legislature was it wasn't a ballot and ship not every state has access to that, and even then it could be very problematic to pass them through the ballot initiatives. You could tip it through public education because you have a lot of people who, um, you have a lot of people who are deeply incentivized financially and otherwise that they want that land for themselves. And I can imagine if something like that came up, you'd have a lot of people who were felt like acutely very personally threatened, and a lot of other people who were sort of vaguely supportive. But you're gonna have people who are really gonna want to fight because they might be um basically running you know, outfitter businesses on what would be public land because they no one can get to it except them because they lease a joining parcel. You're gonna have some people they're gonna fight tooth and nail to block that, and you're gonna have a lot of hunters who are just sort of like, oh, that'd be cool, like a corner hop, but I'm not gonna get all involved. Yeah, and that's a hard thing to do to write. You're you're talking about something that is going to inherently put the hunting community against the landowner community, where the hunting community in most of the country really depends on the landowner community for accessing opportunity. And even in the West where you have a lot of public land, still some of the best places can be on private lands too, and you depend on those relationships. And you're you're talking about something that is some of the best places, I mean the best place well yeah, yeah, right, And so you're it goes to that, You're I think there's some political reluctance to do that because you're you're creating attention with those that you want to be natural allies. You want the lander community of the hunting community be on the same page with conservation and land owners to be supportive of hunting and allow access an opportunity. And you could be putting this, you know, creating a situation. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying, there's that's why, that's why people are afraid. I think afraid to afraid is not the right right word, but maybe it is. It's there's a discomfort with taking on that issue at a legislative level. Oh, I feel I feel uncofortable talking about it. And the reason I feel uncomfortable talking about it um and I had and I have to like psyche myself up to talk about it. The reason I feel uncomfortable talking about it is I have um cordial, very respectful relationships with a lot of landowners who would look at that and probably feel threatened. And so I'm like, man, I don't want to Like, I mean, that dude's a good dude. Let's it's on his place. I don't want to piss them off by talking about it. But I also feel like in terms of if I have like an obligation to um, if I have an obligation to my audience, it would be to um explain to them things that are that matter to them a lot. And and I feel like I have an obligation to talk about it. But it's Thorny's ship. Yeah, I have a question, and I don't know that it directly relates to this, but I noticed that on X, which we use a lot of in Wisconsin, and I use it in Michigan for hunting. Why is it that the on X map, which I assume is very accurate up to a meter or less, shows that where the property lines were, they are no longer Because I noticed that some of our property has expanded and on one of our neighbors who used to have thought he had ten acres now has like seven point four acres. Yeah, so this is a so I mean that pre political world, Like I actually worked doing mapping work for U s c A, n RCS for a long time and that's like my background. And the reality is because on X isn't perfect, and so when you look at on X, what you're looking at is on X goes out when they get that mapping information. They're collecting that mapping information from a host of different entities, people, counties, federal agencies. And what ONYX did that's magical is they're putting it all on one database. So you can pull it all from one database. But you can't. And this is the other problem. You can assume that that database is right because it isn't. So it's not reliable. It's not foot I'm putting my left foot on public in my right foot is not. So that's what people to think that that's the issue is it has to do with the accuracy level of the mapping. And that's the other problem with this is because even your phone, unless you have a like a base station in a pickup truck that's kicking out sub you know, inch level accuracy, your phone is going to be off by a couple of meters. The guy who went out did the map may have been off by a couple of meters. So it's not just the map, right, I mean, it's the map could be totally accurate, map could be a hundred like make this assumption. The map could be a d accurate, but the satellites aren't. Ye. The satellites telling you where you are on that map might be within a meter whenever you look at the six inches you need to be. Every map is an abstraction of reality, right though the Earth is a circle with hills and everything else like that on and you're getting a different called a projection of that. Every time you're you're looking at a map, you're looking at a false representation of what it really exists in reality. And that's why this gets to like all these infinitely, like you just can't be perfect, and that's why you've got to really watch yourself. You can't just be like, oh, yeah, I've got this handheld unit now, so I must be fine. So you tell the game warden, I'm okay to be here. I've got my GPS unit. You can't do that because how depends. So that's the next question. We're actually corner pretty act, they're pretty good. Everything's gonna everything has. Any landownership claim is going to default to something. So if it's like survey and you put a corner pin, there has been like a baseline understanding which you can stop arguing when your legal descriptions are based on a professional survey. Like the legal descriptions that you put in the contracts when you sell a piece of property are based on the surveys that are done out in the pin that's stuck in the ground and the projection that that pin was basing all in there, and so it's all part of legal d The problem is, like when you get it on your phone, you're not often working in the same project. You're not. It's just an assumption. We'll have to realize that in this world where we think everything is your fingertips. It's not as cut and dried as you appreciate that answer, because that's always puzzled me. And I didn't know what to tell the neighbor. I said, well, you just lost it, you know on fence thing. Uh, we're recently out on the place a rancher, I know when he's got I know he had two fences with his boundary with the neighbor. I don't know. There's like six ft apart for long ass ways. And I later said to him, Uh, what's what's up with you in your neighbor having the double fence? This is a trivia question. Why do you think they got a double defence? It was because of the Eastman or because they could drive cattle on mortar more easily, bulls breeding cows through the fence. Oh well, and they needed six ft of space. I didn't know. I didn't go over there and measure it, but I was like, why do you guys have Like did you like each put your own? Like what what's up with that? And he goes, oh, no, it was an issue with they were putting whatever and I had I traditionally ran my one or the other, like I ran my bulls and they had something going on over there, and blah blah blah, and they just put a buffer there to reduce some of the tensions, the tensions between the herds like neighbors right there. All right, if I break down this, there's we started with a sad story where people are in trouble. Now we'll start Now we'll move to a happy access story. Access. Hey, you know what, hunter's access is the number one the number one thing and petty impeding people from participating in hunting or the shooting sports is access even shooting sports, nowhere to shoot, Yes, nowhere to shoot. So you don't have access to either the expertise, you don't have somebody to teach you to do it right. That's a huge impediment. You don't have access to a community to be involved in. That leads people to leave it. So you may, you know, live in a community like you're you're the guy outside. Nobody likes you anymore. Um. Access is access to ranges, access to ammunition, access to you know all that stuff. But yeah, in Utah, kind of a good access story. Um, same guy that we worked with to do the US right to hunt fish, he also Casey Snyder last year did a random bill to um make it illegal debate big game animals on public lands. Awesome, Billy, Yep, he crushed it, and he had lots of support from a variety of public lands. So in Utah until last year, it was legally you could take a box of apples. You could throw it on the ground in the middle of the sage brush in Utah, you could set a trail camera over at the talk to your cell phone. You could sit there and wait for animals to show up at that bait site and then go out and shoot the animal this is a mule deer or a trophy elk. And at the same time you could also sell that location information and so trade. You know. Casey, to his credit, took on a lot of you know, a lot of flak and interest. No, dude, he is he is a he's the man. He's a real champion those issues. Well, he also took on in Utah this eight thousand acres. So the use of state lands is a big issue. You know, are they public lands? Aren't they in a variety of states, And in Utah they faced a lot of challenges there and they had a eight thousand acres in the Cinnamon Cree Drange is what it was called, and it's one of the few real public accessible areas in northern Utah. It's in Casey's district. Was going up for at least sale and quota, and Casey was able to put together a to work with a bunch of other people, including the Department of Natural Resources there in Utah, to um win that lease so that eight thousand acres now will be a wildlife management unit that where people can where the public can go hunt. When you say at least how long is the lease, I don't know the answer to that question. I'd be speculating. Uh, it's you know, so I'm not going to but they're still working on the issues. It's you know, so for people who live in Utah and who are interested in these issues, they need your support at the legislative level. And so this is a pitch is a lobbyist, and I'm gonna make a lot to people, which is, if these are issues you care about, respectfully, call your legislators and talk with them respectfully about these issues, because you know, nothing poisons your issues more than calling and yelling at somebody, and nothing helps them better than hearing that you have actually care and you know that they're a real person and for in this case that you know as cases putting together the stuff to you know, carry this through the legislature in the spring, you know, call your legislators and tell them to support you know, that effort, support those bills. Here's who all kicked in significant funding meal to your foundation, Sportsman for Fish and Wildlife, Rocky Mountain, Elk Foundation, Nature Conservancy, State of Utah, and US Fish and Wildlife Service. Pretty cool. So if you live in Utah, congratulations. Yes, all right, okay, here's one for you. I don't know if you want to answer this as your job or answered as you well, so we'll see what it is first and then we'll later on I'll tell you what you want it was after I get in trouble for it or don't. Yeah, so next next week I'll be like, oh, by the way, that was ni Fi. Yeah, has nothing to do In fact, it wasn't. It was some other guy, some guy like them. Uh. What was your being into the firearms industry um and working on policy and also you know, public opinion? What was your take on the Alec Baldwin movie set shooting? I mean it was stretched in every imaginable What a terrible tragedy direct, I mean, that's the most the thing to say, is what a terrible tragedy? Uh, none of us, I don't think sitting around this table certainly know all the details. I'm sure that it's an ongoing legal issue with lots of stuff going on there, and I think that everybody ought to be able to just step back from that and say, like, what a sad thing that changed a bunch of people's lives permanently. And I think the best thing that you can possibly say about it is there are rules of firearms safety, and if everybody obeys those rules, this doesn't happen. And that's just reality, and you can just take that to the bank. You know, there's a level of education there and I'm not saying these you know everybody that was there was or was not educated. I have no idea, But what's the first rule of firearm safety? Every gun is always loaded. You never point a firearm at anything you're not willing to destroy. You keep your finger off the trigger. You don't shoot unless you're sure of what you're shooting at and what's beyond it. And so I think that rather, you know, if there's I can't say anything about that situation because I don't know all the particulars, but I can say for everyone listening, for all of us involved, no matter what we're doing with guns, obey the safety rules. And this has been thing, you know, a big thing NSSF. You know, if if I could brag about us just for a second, like safety issues are things that were huge on Project Child Safe Operations, secure store, own it, secure it, respect that those are all these are all initiatives that we have where we put big time work and money into trying to educate people on firearms, safe be on safe stories, on all these things because really, uh, we all ought to be able to play in this firearms space safely. And that's we've demonstrated it since the nineteen fifties or furies, whatever you said, Like you can see it in the rates of how we've gotten better at this and we can continue to do that if we're all willing to just you know, have a discussion about it, an educational discussion about it. It's you know, absent the political undertones, and so you know, it's again super sad, and it's ought to be an example to all of us to take a look at what our everyday practices are and just be better. I was surprised that that in those scenes you're using functioning firearms, and even that the same firearm might be used like for real and then later that day used as a prop. I you know, I can't And there are guys who are experts in the industry who have talked about this and have didn't articles about all that says naught. Yeah, and it is one of those things again, like you know, I'm not exactly sure other than hearsay like exactly what happened on that set. But I do know the industry honestly has best practices that mirror what we're talking about with the with the rules of firearms safety. They obeyed those rules in the industry, they obeyed best practices when you go to the right sets with the right people. And so I don't think it would be fair. You know a lot of people have been like, oh, they need to quit, they need to use cartoon guns and stuff like that now, And I just think, you know, I'm not enough and an expert to say, uh, what everybody should or should not do. But I can certainly say that you know, there's a reason that you know, they have really good armors that they have. You know, a lot of these movies like you know, dudes who are like former guys from you know, the highest and military, or they're doing on site making sure that people are following these rules, and so I just think, like all of us just again, I'm not going to criticize you know, what happened there, but I'm going to say, like it's for me, I have to think about, Okay, how do I work with the firearms that are in my safe, around my kids, around my friends, around my job, around the things that I'm doing, and just make sure that I'm doing the best practices that I can when I'm doing that. There was a lot of turmoil on that movie set aside from the day like there are walk offs and in the days before, like corners are being cut everywhere. It was just a horrible commation of things that came together in that one moment. But Steve that what you said, how you know guns are used for you know, shooting real bullets with like casings and powder and actual projectiles are then brought to a movie set to be loaded with blanks, and somehow there was a live round with a casing and a bullet and powder in there. I that's that's how. I don't understand how that happened at all, it seems because normally they use blanks with with you know, a casing and powder that but no projectile and I I've used those on in movies and plays before. Well, reading about that, there's like a roll in tray that had AMMO plus unidentified AMMO, loose AMMO and a Fannie pack in the just like no. I mean some people know now because they're investigating it, Like I don't want to come in and like comment like this, that and there, I think, but the impression one gets from reading about it from a law enforcement perspective, there were plenty of reasons to come in and say no harm it what like that seemed to be kind of them. From the people that I saw speak about it, We're like, it's very hard to untangle what exactly was going on here and with what was being used, how it was being managed, a lot of questions. But I have like two things. One I felt that I had some commentary on two ways it was received. I think that maybe we're at a safe distance now. I was alarmed by the way in which the victim, someone would like a mother and husband died who had nothing to do in any of this ship right, are you talking about the cinematographer, Yeah, the director guy hit in the shoulder. He survived though, well okay, yeah, but I'm just saying he a mother like young children was killed. So it's like to me in a way when when everyone when it became so politicized, I looked at it and I kept thinking like, man, this there is not enough space. The way it was being utilized and weaponized. I felt people weren't taken the time to think, like, here's a person like at work for a paycheck who has young children who just died, and I don't know what her opinions are about any of this, but that needs to be paid attention to. Um. The other thing is I found on the other side of stuff? Is it? I think a lot of people had a lot of people who were struggling with why all this this from from the gun rights community, Why all this kind of you know, vehemency toward uh Alec Baldwin or towards the industry. It would be a little bit like I kind of like, in some ways like demonstrated hypocrisy where you have someone who questions, why why is anybody need these guns? Anyways? It's like, oh, unless they're making a movie, then it's cool, right, but then you would have one for something else is ridicular, You don't people don't need those things? Why do they need these things? But oh but no, I'm I'm a movie maker. It's it's fine for us, storyteller. That's good for us. People. We gottam laying out. We got somebody laying around. We don't know what the hell they are. No, no, no, no, no. That was a little I think that's where a lot of that just that's where a lot of that frustration came from. Was sort of there's that's kind of like glaring hypocrisy, which in people don't like there couldn't have been an easier target than Alec Baldwin either, like couldn't have been like a more so it's like for both both sides, it was just in insanity. Yeah, setting setting you know, that specific situation aside, like hey, teach your kids firearm safety, you know, don't don't hide from that, you know, take the opportunity to not just and you should be you know if you've got young kids in the home, you know, get a safe and if but also teach them firearms safety, you know, talk about these things and have a real discussion because um, not a lot of people in the world today want to do that. You know, these you know, guns are tabboo. We're not going to talk about guns. You know, we're not gonna deal with that. And like, the more we can do to like have you know, conversations that are intelligent about firearms and firearms safety, like we're just every day we do that, we live in a better country. I just finished a book like it's done done now about kids. Like it's called Outdoor Kids, Inside World, So it's about raising outdoor kids. And in the hunting section, I'll talk about, um, how you communicate about guns with kids. And one of the things that uh, I've just really strive to do is we have never taken the attitude that these are that that guns are like these magical things. Right, They're they're not capable of magical acts. It's like it's a thing you can understand very well, and we're gonna talk about how they function, how you handle them safe. We're not going to create like they're not fetishized. They're not attributed with magical powers. If you look at them wrong, something will happen. It's like like a functional, practical understanding of what it is, what's safe, what's not safe. How it would be that you would hurt someone with one, and talk about in a very realistic sense. Yeah, my I have an eight year old and eleven year old, both little boys, and both you know, have been to the range so many times I can't even count, and have been. You know, my eleven year old now has gone on his first hunts, and you know, like those kids, like they know, and so it makes it much easier because they've got that familiarity and they've seen what a firearm can do, and so this, you know, they know when they go to somebody's house, like it's much easier. They've had those conversations. They know why they're supposed to walk away, they know why they why these things aren't toys, they know why they call grown ups. They know all those things, And I just think those are healthy conversations to have. They shouldn't be we shouldn't hide from them. Okay, we're gonna do uh, We're gonna jump into some quick hitter stuff. Not everything we're gonna bring up as quick hitters is as important and warrants as much discussion as we've already done anyway. But just an interest of time, I want to do some quick hitter stuff. I'm gonna bounce some more ears to the other. There'll be contests who can do it quick as hit ni fi? What? Why? Why is there no AMMO? Yeah? Is a giant? Is it a vast conspiracy? Twelve million people bought fire arms for the first time since the beginning of that have never owned a gun before in their entire lives. They tend to train more than people who traditionally owned guns. And if those twelve million people each bought a box with a hundred rounds of ammunition, and that's a billion new rounds of ammunition in demand on the market in the last two years that didn't exist before. The reason you can't find AMMO is because America changed significantly in the last two years, and the and the people that bought those guns were increasing minorities, women, they were Republicans, they were Democrats, and it's changed, and it's taken the company's time to be able to to to ratchet up to match to match the demand. That was phenomenal. I'm gonna get you another quick hit, okay, but I have a question on that. How many people buy six at least look at looking around the table, because here's here's what's been explaining. Let me do, let me try, and then you tell me where I'm right and wrong. This doesn't kind of gets my time, do you don't? Ammunition manufacturer needs to tool up and they run runs of certain loads and calibers, calibers and there's like huge demand and huge deficits and certain things, and so they're running those things that have the greatest need from the greatest amount of retailers. People are clamoring for it, and it makes it that you don't have the luxury of stopping to tool up for what might be regarded as a more esoteric round. How is that very good? If you want to know what guns Americans own, look at the shelf and the ammal you can see back on the shelf. That's what guns Americans is, not what they don't own. You want to look like, why is no one by? Why why can't I find Wheeland? Nobody has a thirty six anymore? I haven't been I haven't seen one of those on the shelves, And like, my kid just took possession one on Friday. You guys grainy ammo to use with it. We're worried about that, but he's got some um okay uh the next one, Dave, Oh, I had a like a second second, well, I had kind of another quick hitter. Am a quick hitter thing. Never mind, it's too it's too well, Okay, you open up around. Is there a worry that if they do all the steps to ramp up production that the market will drop out and they'll be left like with this new facility that's half finished. I can't answer that question. I think yes and no, Like they're there. They are ratcheting, get up, but there like is this for real enough? Or we'd go and build a new plant. Yeah, but you know, but I can tell you that they are building the new plants, Dave. Uh, big infrastructure bill. Everybody fighting about it, getting mad at each other. They won't vote it if they can't vote for this, and they won't vote if they can't vote for that. But in the end, the infrastructure bill, I gather people in the conservation world had some cause for enthusiasm and excitement about the infrastructure bill. Wildlife enthusiasts they did. Why, uh, well, this is a quick hitter, right, So not to say that these aren't rich issues, but just in the interest of time, yeah, uh so their biggest things. So this passed, right, be clear that the infrastructure Bill was bipartisan and it passed UH in November, sometime in November, right, so it's it's done, it's happening. One of the biggest things in there is it created a grant program million dollar uh federal grant program for wildlife crossings, so competitive grant program around the country. States can use too. You know. So many states have been identifying places of get us like three crossings. Well so a crossing, so crossings can be underpasses, overpasses, and I believe overpasses are in that twelve to thirteen million dollar range apiece roughly now, so it actually gets you quite a lot um. Some overpasses cost a lot more. There's one that we're working on organizationally in California in the Los Angeles area, uh, for mountain lions actually, because there's this urban lion population. Calan's favorite subject, right, they get smacked by vehicles there. So fundraising for that right now. But but this will create resources for projects all over the country. UH. There's also a lot of of money available for forest restoration projects. So think about cheat grass and forest grassland UM sage brush, right, so cheat grass mitigation, UH forest uh you know, fire mitigation and things like that. A lot of money for that. UM there are there were things like UH force Legacy Road program funded. So there's money now to maintain forest roads, you know, some of the two track inventory roads that are out there. There's also money to decommission roads and restore that habitat. There's also money for culverts. And you don't think you think, well, culverts, what does that do well? Creating fish habitat and and helping fish movement. There's millions of dollars in there for culvert removal and replacement to allow in its particularly targeting fish movement UH too for largely for threatening endangered species fish species that have had their uh their movement cut off, but also for other UH species of fish as well game species that we might like to catch. Right that that that program is there for. So there's there's just there's all sorts of stuff that's as quick as I can be without going into lots of details, but there there are hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in the infrastructure package that go back directly to projects on the ground that will benefit uh, wildlife habitat and opportunities for hunters and anglers. Yeah, the next time you're sitting there making blanket statements about how terrible lobbyists are, keep in mind that when they were debating that bill, wildlife people were in the room saying, I understand, you need to cut a bunch of stuff out, but here's why you can't cut out the fish and wildlife stuff. Don't touch the fish and wildlife stuff. This is why it's important. If not if no one was putting a bag in their ear, they would have acted it. They would have acted and in favor of whoever was putting a bug in their ear about some other aspect that they cared about. And it was a lot of bugs in a lot of ears, right, I mean it was. It was the entire not just the hunting and fishing community, but the broader conservation community. Everybody rallied around this idea, especially around wildlife crossings, but a lot of these other pieces too. Uh, you know, it was an economic thing for wildlife crossings, like it was costing. I think the last report I saw was vehicle collisions with wildlife for costing the economy something like six billion dollars a year. So just from an economic standpoint of three fifty million dollar investment in addressing a six billion dollar annual problem makes good business there. But also when you look at the sheer numbers of animals vehicle collisions that animals lost, you know, you think about that from an opportunity standpoint. As a hunter, you can't help but think, well, you know that Ford tourist smashed that deer, and then it goes some opportunity for somebody right to um food on the table, all that kind of stuff. So really, really some good stuff in that bill. So whether you they're gonna be, it's like any legislation that has a lot of things, and if they're gonna be things that make people angry and things that make people happy. But at the end of the day, the beauty of the bipartisanship is like, you know, I don't like this bill, but I like of it, so I'll support it. Then a lot of people get a lot of things out of it. Uh, need five. What will Pittman Robertson funding? Was that going to come in at? And like how long does that money take to hit the ground. Uh, it's gonna be a lot this last year. The money that we're getting at the end of this year is going to be over a billion dollars just from firearms and ammunition. It's the first time that doesn't include the Dingle Johnson stuff. It doesn't include anything but the firearms supportion. Over one billion dollars from from yes and so the and and and again. It's like, yeah, from this, can you imagine if it was all manage, if the shells are fully stocked. Did you know the largest contributor to Pittman Robertson is federal Oh yeah, yeah, the federal federal premium. Man. Yeah, I'm sorry the Feds not They're just huge and it's but yeah, it's uh, federal ammunition for sure. Yeah, it's it's over a billion dollars. That The big challenge is going to be, you know, for fish and wildlife agencies is going to making sure that they can meet the match because people always forget about this. So that money that comes in, that billion dollars eighty percent of that is from non hunters. It's from people who are buying who are sports shooters and people who are buying a defensive handgun just like they did in the eighteen fifties. And so those triangle shape bulls, triangle shape of the market are those folks. And so yeah, that's the thing that like, that's an interesting point we've talked about before. We're hunters almost like to over recognize their pr contributions, and when you get down to like where that money is coming from is coming from shooters. But the caveat is that hunters or the match because you have to match that money. So hunters also by tags. So are you and I make up a smaller portion maybe as hunters we may make up You may make up a small portion state matching portion, yes, because you've got to bring for that billion dollars if we want to see that billion dollars on the ground, and conservation states have to pony up a billion dollars, they have to come. You have to get somebody else. You know, all of us at this table have to get one of our friends to buy a tag, whether or not they feel it or not, because if we want that money to then be able to be used that federal money. You got to match it, and there's some states that have done that in other ways. It doesn't have to be licenses, right, you can pass you know, Missouri has a one percent um sales uh. You know there's a tax that they put towards conservation recreation issues. So there are other ways to do it um. But states need to be really inventive and they need to get on the ball because we don't see that it hasn't slowed down. David, I'm gonna let you pick a pick and choose here. Do you want to do a quick hit on restoring America's Wildlife Act? Which one is more more titilating to you that or revisiting legal issues around wolves and bears, or you could do it too for it too for. I'd love to touch on both of them. So recovering America's Wildlife Act, we're talking about Pittman Robertson. And you know I told you about at the very beginning this, I told you about the founding of of National Wildlife Federation and how one of the first things was addressing this need for more resources to help him these species that were struggling well, the refrain, you know, eighty years later is it's similar. Right, we have Pittman Robertson and we have license fees, and we still have twelve thousand species of what are species of special concern that I I had been identified by states through what are called State Widelife Action Plans, where every ten years they're identifying the species in their state that are of the most concern, that need the most investment, and and where you can do some conservation work to to help support those species. Doesn't mean they're threatened or endangered or threatened with becoming endangered a federally listed species. It just means the state views them as at risk and there needs to be an investment. Well, we don't have the money for sports. Sportsmen and women are been paying Pittman Robertson fees for UH for eighty years, right, and and we don't have the resources you know that that that's supposed to go to not only the species we hunt and fish, but everything else. Right, So enter Recovering acas Wildlife Act, which the idea was to amend the Pittman Robertson Act to create this new fund UH that would be used to help states implement those uh state wildlife action plans to help conserve the non game species. And then so that would free up a bunch of money, uh for hunter and angler dollars to put, you know, to take out of that pot potentially that right now we're paying to manage all species through our hunter tags. And maybe now that'll come back in and be able to dump more into mule deer and pronghorn conservation, moose conservation, and then you know, we have this new pot of money that could be used for uh, everything else, right and uh and so right now, like in the Senate, it's been it was this bill was introduced earlier this year in the Senate. It has thirty two co sponsors right now as we're talking, sixteen Republicans, fifteen Democrats and an independent and you listen. Is one of those cases where with Fosberg from TRCP is explained to us during like highly partisan nothing can get done times, sometimes real good common sense conservation work gets taken care of because it lets you have it gives them a chance to have a win. Yeah, And this is a the biggest hang up on this, I think for the longest time on getting this passed was how are we going to pay for it? And I think there's identified in a way to pay for it, which uh, which comes out of UM federal revenues generating from violations of environmental and natural resource laws and regulations. So it's so it's programs administered by the e P a environmental protection agency, you know, they levy fines for for violations environmental violations, goes into this big pot. And now we're saying we're gonna take part of that that's not already going to the general treasury to funds you know, schools, highways, whatever, and we're gonna say, you know what, maybe what this should be used for. They created the problem by violating the law and creating these cleanups that we need to do it. Maybe maybe having some of that money diverted to going back into wildlife conservation isn't a bad way to do this, right, So that's sort of the the pay for and and it seems to have pretty broad support. I mean, you have real politically diverse senators that have signed onto this UM, and like I said, it's got momentum, it's got you equal number, you know, the one independent typically caucuses with with Democrats. So you really have sixteen and sixteen, you have this. This really it's as bipartisan as you can get. And so the question is it is it going to happen? And Uh, hopefully, like you said, maybe one of these common sense things that just lines up and happens. And and uh that's one of the things that we we've been working on as an organization for years and and a lot of other organizations, you know, I know uh ni FIS with National Shooting Sports Foundation has been engaged in this too, and they're like that this is something that the entire UH conservation community, from the sporting groups to trade associations to broader conservation organizations that like they're they're all rallying around this. It's in it. It'll be a game changer, an infusion of something at one point four billion dollars a year into UH into the States to manage these species that right now are just woefully underfunded. Yeah, bears and wolves, bears and wolves. So how do we want to talk so that there's just a lot going on around that right now, right that could that could just open up rabbit holes. Uh, you know, you've got the so you've got the state of Wyoming's petitioned now to delist grizzly bears in the in the Greater Yellstone area. Um, well, this is yeah, well I think this is the first time they've actually formally petitioned. Every other time it was the Fish and Wildlife Service that initiated a rulemaking process and formally proposed delisting. Uh. In this this is the first time that what happened that the State of Wyoming has actually taken the initiative to petition the Fish and Wildlife Service. So there's two ways, the petitioning the Fish and Wilife Service to do something that the Fishing Walafe Service already tried to do twice. They tried to do the health differences that make that you petition to do it. They already tried to do it. I agree. I'm just no, I I agree, uh right. But perhaps the maybe the state was thinking, we don't know if this administration is going to try again. And the only two ways under the Act to to start a process are either on the initiative of the Fish and Wildlife Service or somebody some geting a petition that requires the Subfishing Walize Service to act. And so if they suspected that the Fishing Wilife Service wasn't going to be interested in doing it, or what might delay might take a long time. Maybe the state said all right, well we're going to do it and force them to do something. All right. The other thing that could you know, there's a legal calculus to it. Right, So in the past, when the Fishing Wilife Service does it, it means that any lawsuit arising out of that is typically filed in Washington, d c. Or in Montana. It goes to that court in Missoula, which will yeah, yeah, right. So so here the state of Wyoming submits the petition, if their petition is declined, then maybe they initiate the lawsuit in Wyoming Federal District court. Friend and who right, because the judge of Missoula always like they always find a way to say, ah, right, that seems to happen. Strange seems to happen. So that's the that's sort of where we are with Grizzly Bears. I'm just should you see that big list of that letter that went to um Deb Island and it was signed by what it was, Bernie Sanders is on there, I don't know, sixteen seventeen senators signed a letter calling for like instant re enlisting of the Gray Wolf. The Wolf. Yeah, yeah, I saw that. That's happened before. I know. I sent it to someone who kind of analyzes that stuff, and he said, I'm sure they're currying favor with the animal rights community who donated some money to them, and they're doing like a pointless thing that will lead nowhere so they can be like, see, I tried, I tried. Yeah, you know, that's happened before. There are other times where you know, members of Congress have done that. A little surprised to see old burn on there, man like being from like Vermont and everything. Really, she seems like you were really wasn't cretic wants to get Bernie Sanders on the show. And I'm like, tell me why and we'll do it. And maybe now she's got her in because he's on this letter. H that's funny. Uh. Yeah. So there's a ton going on with wolves though, right, And that's sort of a weird one to un weird web to unravel about all the different things going on with wolves. Uh you have so you have, uh, all the different state laws that are getting a lot drawing a lot of attention in Montana and Idaho on wolf hunding. Right, they're gonna kill them? Yeah? Right, that in your journal, I don't It's not like and then come back to it in a year too. We've covered it. We've covered it. We've covered quite heavily the discrepancy between what the rules are and how one would sum them up in a headline on USA Today. Right, So you've been through all that we've covered. Yeah. Um, but what you do have is like this now a really interesting situation where wolves in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, Panhandle of Utah, like, that whole population was delisted prior to the prior administration doing a nationwide delisting rule that effectively delisted everything else nationwide, right, except for those that were already delisted in Mexican wolves and red wolves, but delisted everything else. I think that what that did is it created a little bit of an opening here. Uh. And so now you have this petition to relist gray wolves in the Western United States. Only instead of calling them a like right now, they were delisted as a distinct population segment in those in that area geographic area. I described. Since then, you've had movement of those wolves. Those wolves are you know, genetically you can find genetic connectivity between those wolves and wolves in western Oregon. We just got killed on I five after he walked across the Golden Gate Bridge in California near Yosemite, right like fifteen miles north of Yosemite National Parks something like that. Like these you're having this genetic interchange, be mixing up two wolves. There's a famous wolf running around California's got hit on the side of the road. That's the one I'm talking about. Um So, but what you have now is at the time wolves are reintroduced to Idaho and Wyoming, Central Idaho and Wyoming, like there was no genetic connectivity between any other worlds because there weren't wolves other places. Now those wolves have dispersed, You've had some other wolves dispersed from Canada, and you have these more genetically connected population and so now this petition to to realist is saying, you can't draw this distinct population segment the same way. It can't be Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Eastern Oregon, and eastern Washington, northern Utah. It can't be that anymore. It has to be the west and by the way, when you draw that big, it hasn't recovered westwide. And so by delisting them nationwide actually created this opening to make a push to relist wolves in the entire Western United States. Um, and they can use your success again right right and then, and so what you're left with is, okay, so you have a petition out there, and the Service has to act on it in with any year under the endangers you sees act And so what's going to happen, right If what's gonna happen is whether they say yes they're warranted for listing or no, they're not warranted for listing. There's going to be a lawsuit filed. So next year this time, that's this you can write in the journal too. There's now going to be a lawsuit in the forum of whomever is choosing, whoever is filing it in somewhere in the Western United States, maybe Montana, to say you say that service says not warranted, that lawsuit will be filed in front of judge of their choosing, and we're just we just hit the reset button on wolves. My my opinion is we've hit the reset button on wolves and we're looking at probably in you know, another decade long fight. Uh, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see. That's my crystal ball, like you know, crystal ball and tin tin hat at the same time. Right, it is sort of what I'm thinking we're looking at with That was one of the primary um we talked this last week where I was just talking about the the EBB and flow of things and like the ways of which is hard to find a win because I was disappointed when President Trump removed um the role this rule for tongas and opened up more of Congress National Forest for road building. I was disappointed by that, and I was happy to hear that the Biden administration is putting those rules back into place. At the same time. One of the things I've worried a lot about the Dan Biden administrations. I've worried that just some crazy wolf bear stuff is gonna come down. Um. But then other people say, like, well, it's not really like the way that those rules work. It's not really susceptible to four year administration changes. It plays out in a more slow way. Do you feel that that's safe to say or not safe to say, or let me let you put it in a more clear question, does having like if you have like Democrats hold Senate Democrats all the White House, is it a foregone conclusion that they're gonna walk back state management of wolves and bears or is it not something that they can just put their hands on the dial. I don't think, because it's so rarely happens. I don't think that Congress jumps in here and does anything. I think you have. You'll you'll see political statement bills that you've already seen. You'll see political statement bills saying grizzly bears should be delisted, you know, a grizzly Bear Delisting Act, and you'll see statement bills of a grizzly Bear Protection Act that that would be along the lines of a bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. I don't think under the current current construction of Congress, even with with Democrats controlling both bodies of Congress, that either like that that effort could go anywhere, or if Republicans took control, that that effort could go anywhere. The place where where I think you have to watch it's what happens at the administration level. So and that process can play out quicker because you have timelines prescribed in the Endangered Species Act to respond to petitions, and then you have litigation. That's the part that gets protracted. But you have a petition, the Biden administration, by law, is required to respond to that petition in a statutorially prescribed period of time and do an analysis best based on the best available science as to whether wolves should be listed or not. And they'll have to answer that question, and that answer half of the people really like in the other half won't. And that's going to create a fight. And that's just that's just how our system works and why we have these perpetual fights about predators and almost no other federally listed species. It's always the charismatic species and typically predators. And uh yeah, so that's kind of where I think we are. I will tell you we should talk again in a few months, right because I'm finishing up a helping somebody write a book, and I'm finishing a book chapter where it's called Dave on wolves. No, it's on grizzly Bara. No, it's it's a it's a it's an uh, it's an analysis of My contribution to it is is, uh, how to use the Act in a different way to empower states or encourage states to be able to take on more of a leadership role in managing threatening endangered species. Um and uh, like my case study is grizzly bears, and I propose a solution for how you get grizzly bears back in state management even if they're listed. Okay, one last quick hit for you fellers. Uh your mountain podcast hit. Oh my goodness, Yeah, there is. For the next hour. This is what we're gonna talk. We were gonna be able to hide all of that. No one was ever going to find it, and it was gonna be to our better men. Know what better teaser, What better teaser than what we've been doing. Yeah, No, that's that's pretty much what Sonifine I and another buddy of ours, Mike McGrady. You know, three years ago, just just because we were leaving the Governor's office, we've been listening to a bunch of different podcasts and we thought, you know, there's one they're all STUDI right, No, there's a lot of there's a lot of great podcasts out there. Um, but we actually did feel like there was one space that that wasn't completely occupied where we we could step in and provide value. And that was really providing from from a boots on the ground, like a guys in the trenches kind of approach of let's talk about the law and policy around a lot of these conservation issues at a state level and federal level. Uh. And so we we created this. You know, basically our tagline is, you know, every day things happen that affect your land, water and wildlife, and you should know about them. And that's where we come in and talk about all the policy nuances. So it's really kind of a walkout kind of nerdy podcast called Your Mountain. And I don't know why we keep doing it. And yeah, you were gracious enough to be our first guest on that podcast three years ago and forty we've done a hundred forty plus now geez, yeah, we've we have as many episodes as listeners. Yeah. Yeah, we're moving up those charts. Available everywhere, come out. Yeah, that's the deal, available everywhere. When someone gives you a chance to plug yourself that. Yeah, it's been super fun. It's given us an opportunity. Before we left the Governor's office, we said, like, we want to stay in touch, we want to keep doing stuff together. And so this has been an excuse for us to sit down in a in a you know, in an office once a week at night and like spend an hour talking about like we had a whole episode you talked about corner crossing and it's kind of funny, Like we had an episode one eighteen we spent an hour in like forty minutes talking about that specific issue, you know, the wilderness rule. We talk about, you know, breaking down, pr breaking down, wot's breaking down, you know, E s A and in you know, four different episodes and stuff like you're welcome, and it's it's it's it's been super it's been super fun as friends to be able to I'm sure you get it. Like if you want to become the kind of person when you're driving down the road with your friends, you can be like, no, that's not how it works. Listen to your show, that's what you should do, and then you can tell people that's not what happens. Man. What happens is this first, it goes to the Supreme Court. Yeah, Like, if you want a nerdy podcast, this is understand trying to make it seem nerdy. I'm trying to make it to understand the nuts and bolts of everything, like that's that's what. It's a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of law and policy. Rather than being the kind of person who's like, well, no, they wanna it was like home, who who's they? It kind of gives you like an understanding of what is the what? It's been super fun and you were super cool, like it was funny you've been here ten years like it was again, it's just super it's been super fun for us to have that friendship and keep that connection. And you know, graciously you were, like Dave said, like our first episode, we flew out to visit you and we're like, we think we're going to do this podcast. Would you would you be our first guest? And so we went and sat down. That was very kind of you. And it's been how many years ago? Was at three and a half three and a half. I think three and a half. We started here left in me we started in May of nine. I don't even know. It's been three over three years now. So your Mountain podcast, Availa where podcasts are given away, that's right, Spotify, guys on Spotify. We are everywhere too. We're on Yeah, you should definitely subscribe to it no matter what, because that's really good for our egos. We don't monitor, so we do it for no monetization, zero zero. I'm gonna subscribe. What. No, I don't think it's I think it's great America. Actually, for for all you lawyers listening out there, there are a number of episodes where if you're a lawyer in Wyoming, you can get a CLI, a continuing legal education credit for your live license, exactly right, and you could probably apply for those in other states as well. A former senator used to make his staff listen to our podcast. Really yeah, and we've got we've got different Senate offices, or we know there are folks in the office that that listen to our podcast. Dare I say it's an insider's look? You may, you might, you may? You guys need to get you guys, Gonna put that, By the way, we're terrible marketers. If we knew how to market, we would we would say we would quote you now like Stephen and Ranella. Dare I say, dare I say an insider's podcast? But we haven't posted anything on our end of our social channels, and we don't even know I don't know who the passwords are. Forgot. It is there. It's up every wee there. We check it and we respond to all the emails and everything we get. But it's there almost every week. We've been kind of busy. Your Mountain podcast. Yeah, I appreciate that last thing. Next week, so listen, I know what happens to you people Christmas holiday because they're not you're not at work and all that. You don't listen to your podcast. But next week is our Christmas Holiday Extravaganza Extraordinary episode. So Christmas time all hectic, everybody's unhappy, arguing, trying to get your kids in the car to go see Grandma. Listen, don't forget us. We're there. Our Christmas gift to you. We have a Christmas gift to you. We're doing a double episode drop where you get your regular podcast, which is the Christmas Extraordinaire. But then we're gonna we're gonna throw down and have a Monster Trivia showdown episodes. Right, I can't wait. Episode It means two episodes, two episodes in one week. Phil, he's not gonna have any time. I guess Spencer's running trivia. Spencer gonna run trivia. Wow, and you're we have a special guest Matt Runella for the Christmas specially Yeah, and he might be in on trivia. I don't know. But we're gonna we're gonna debate social media, so a family argument, eggnog, ohole, kid caboodle. I can't wait, seem
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