Ryan Callaghan details the defeat of the "Big Beautiful Bill," a 20-year push by Sen. Mike Lee—backed by Mormon doctrine—to sell U.S. public lands, despite 115 Montana testimonies opposing it and $3.3T debt ties. Sagebrush grasslands vanish at 2M acres/year; bison’s absence worsens biodiversity loss. Callaghan warns privatization risks water shortages (97% of winter veggies depend on Colorado River flows) and cultural freedom, while highlighting regenerative agriculture successes like Will Harris’s farm. Advocacy groups and brands united to block the bill, proving grassroots impact. The fight isn’t over—habitat destruction and political manipulation demand vigilance. [Automatically generated summary]
And I don't think people in other countries understand this.
I don't think people in America even understand how unique it is.
Like our public lands, what they did when they set that up, not just national parks, but all the public lands, we created this insane resource, this beautiful resource where we can go into the mountains, into the woods, and enjoy nature.
And I get, I mean, the amount of response from listeners that live outside the country and to a person, they're like, are you guys really going to screw this up?
They're like, how do people not know?
How do people not appreciate what you guys have?
Don't turn into this country or this country or this country.
Basically, any other country outside of Canada and the U.S. I think the real issue is the people in America that don't experience it and don't go there and don't know how insanely unique this situation is.
Like, I don't know how to say Chamas' last name, Polyhoptia.
Is that how you say it?
Even he was tweeting that this is a great deal.
Sell the land and, you know, we'll make some money.
Like, what the fuck are you talking about, man?
Like, you don't, you don't understand.
Like, this was an incredible gift that they gave us when they set America up this way.
Well, there's development, but also encroachment of tree species.
So cedars, junipers, stuff like that, working their way back out on to the prairie, to the plain.
And we used to have all these natural deforesters out there, bison, that wouldn't allow those trees to grow because they like rubbing up on stuff and they'll destroy them.
So, you know, millions of bison out there physically removing or preventing that tree encroachment onto the plain.
Those trees are sucking water out of the ground, making it more arid and more dry.
Water table goes down.
You lose a lot of species diversification.
And people just do not know, Joe.
They just don't know.
And they look at it and they're like, it's just grass.
And so we talk as far as like the public estate, right?
We have 640 million acres is the number that you hear all the time.
83 million of those are national parks.
But thanks to the great state of Alaska, you can hunt inside the boundary of some national parks up there to the tune of about like 43 million acres, big, big chunks, right?
And then you, you know, remove a little for structures, Roads, you know, we have over 400,000 miles of road on Forest Service and BLM ground.
And then when we get into like talking about like the budgeting of things, like BLM, Forest Service, they're maintaining a lot of stuff that people take for granted.
And then, you know, so we're down to like 580 million acres of what I would consider like usable.
And then you consider what those acres can actually produce, right?
Which, you know, if you go to a super arid state, you need a lot more land to support like mammal ungulate type life than you do in a state that's got a lot more water.
I swear to God, Joe, man, when it was time to go to bed and it started out like bed was at 10.30 and then bed was at 2.30 in the morning and then bed was at 3 a.m because you would get as that sun's kind of like making this low orbit um i'm sure you've seen like the time lapses of the sun like kind of does a little dip yeah you get this like hazy gorgeous light that you just wanted to stay up and and see um but
I'd close my eyes and I could see like the sun going down to darkness and in my brain because it was just time to go to bed.
It was really bizarre.
And then if I had to wake up for something, it was bright light and I couldn't figure out why.
Yeah.
But I mean, it was so cathartic, man.
Like we've been running so hard.
And because of this public lands battle that we've been in, I think most people are like, oh, yeah, it just popped up last week.
And then we crushed it and big win.
And a little larger group of people or a smaller group of people is like, oh, it started in the House about six weeks ago.
And then there's a real small group of people who are like, August 24th, the state of Utah submitted a lawsuit for the United States Supreme Court to take 18 and a half million acres of acres of BLM land in Utah.
August 2024 is when we were like, oh my God, we got to be on top of this.
This is what's coming.
Trump's going to win the election.
It's going to set all these things up and we're going to be in this fight.
And people were like, I don't even know why you're talking about this.
And I swear to God, people didn't pay attention to this Utah lawsuit.
We were, I went back to D.C. for, you know, Steve's on the board for Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, TRCP.
They have a policy meeting that I try to go to twice, two or three times a year.
And I was in there with all these people that are super smart and went to school for all this stuff.
And a couple of us were like, why is nobody talking about this?
Why is nobody concerned about this?
And then this idea of selling public lands got really conflated with like, oh my God, if you talk about anything that's going on with the federal government, you're anti-Trump.
And it was just this ultra-politicized hot potato.
And we're like, no, no, no.
Public lands, they're for everybody.
Like, this is a nonpartisan thing.
We've been talking about it since August.
Here's this lawsuit.
Like, they're selling land that belongs to everybody.
It doesn't matter what state you're in.
And then, like, the next domino fell, and a bunch of states and counties signed on an amicus brief for that Utah lawsuit, which is like a friend of the court filing, because they wanted to get in.
Like, stuff's going up for free or cheap fire sale.
They wanted to be in on it.
And then the next domino fell, which was, oh, Mike Lee's getting pulled into the White House and he's cutting deals.
And we know exactly what's on his mind.
And it was literally just like this opening in the world where nobody's talking about 18.5 million acres.
So what if we started talking about 200 million acres or 500 million acres?
And it just like totally kicked the door open to this whole enchilada fire sale.
And had the dude not been as greedy, people may not have gotten as fired up about it.
So on the Mormon church side of things, there's, you know, there's some doctrine, some church doctrine that says that the land is put here for the benefit of the people.
And you're basically, and I'm very much paraphrasing here, you're spiting God if you're not developing that land for profit, like for the profit of the people.
And so, but again, like, that doesn't have to be representative of the entire religion.
And to the people that I hang out with that are Mormon, it's absolutely not.
Right.
They, They're like public lands that are set aside for multiple use, don't get locked up, don't get developed in certain ways, are the best thing.
Right?
But, and this is something that just like has got to get talked about, Mike Lee is like very much in power.
He is the chair.
He's a senior senator.
He is the chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the Senate.
And like I said, he starts getting drug into the White House.
He starts consolidating power and he starts telling everybody, hey, I'm going to put this amendment in and you better not go against it or else for the next six years, which is technical, as long as Republicans stay in power, he's not going to lose his chairmanship of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
As long as he's there, none of their stuff is going to be read because it's the chair that decides what they're going to review, what they're going to look at, and what they're going to pass.
So here's this dude who is leveraging everything for his personal thing.
And he had his shot and he took it.
And fortunately, people started cluing in.
And there was enough of an on-ramp that there was a blowback literally in every state, all 50 states.
People wrote in to first their representatives, then their senators, and it created enough of a, oh my God, this is going to set back the entire Big Beautiful bill.
This is only one part of the dumpster fire that is the Big Beautiful bill, but it's going to take this whole thing off the tracks.
And that's why it's killed.
Now, Lee issued a statement, which is like a gut shot, if you're in my position who've been like tracking this thing, you know, since August.
And, you know, it said, oh, I listened to the American people, right?
Well, he rewrote the language.
He and his team, his staff, rewrote the language four different times to get it passed the Senate parliamentarian.
It did pass.
And you don't do that if you're listening to the American people, right?
The American people, by the end of this, were very united in saying, not one acre.
It started as not one acre in the budget reconciliation process, which is part of what they're doing here in the Big Beautiful Bill, or is what they're doing.
And the phrasing there really matters, right?
Like we have systems in place for land sales, legal framework, both of those, you know, it's acronyms, government acronyms, Flipma, Flipna.
And the revenues from land sales go back into acquiring land of greater value.
There's all these acts since 1781, all of these acts for the disposal of federally managed land.
And those two that I named are the most recent.
And they're designed to maybe not retain the same acreage, but provide the most value to the American people.
And what Lee was doing in this reconciliation process was completely circumventing that.
And as you mentioned, like nobody, no citizen of the United States is going to feel any change from dumping $100 million into the federal treasury right now.
I mean, and that's the best thing that could have come out of this.
Like, we are going to make, we made this huge stink, right?
From all the different buckets that politicians pay attention to, right?
All the different user groups, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, everybody came together.
And more than likely, a shitload of people, the 36% of Americans who didn't vote in the last election, probably chose to speak up, some large percentage of them, and said no public land sales.
Hopefully that created enough of, you know, what they call in Washington is like a third rail issue.
It's like, it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're on, you can't have this as part of your agenda because you're going to get shot down, right?
That's like the near-term win because that feeling won't last forever.
There's a piece of legislation out of Ryan Zinke's office, who's our Montana congressman, and he was actually started as Secretary of the Interior under Trump in his first term.
Zinke has this Public Lands and Public Hands Act, and it would not have prevented what just happened, this budget reconciliation thing, but it does put some more guardrails around the sale of federally managed land, and that would be like a really positive thing.
However, just like I explained, like Mike Lee's position in the Senate, it would have to get through him.
He's got to be circumvented.
There's no way he's going to vote for something like this.
And it's got to go through the House.
And everything I've heard about on the House committees is there's some people there that don't want to see this thing happen.
So more people are signing on to the Public Lands and Public Hands Act, which is awesome show of support.
Senator Heinrich out of New Mexico has got it written for the Senate.
No Republican co-sponsors.
He needs Republican co-sponsors in the Senate just to get the ball rolling there.
But we still have like these knuckleheads that are saying, if you didn't vote for my thing, I won't let a single good thing happen for the next six years.
That goes, you know, provided they don't get removed somehow, some way.
Just like, who's, how are you signing off on things that I know you're not reading?
Like, how crazy is that that this is a part of our process of government is that they pass these bills that have all sorts of weird shit piled into them.
I mean, I got that text, the official text, you know, essentially as soon as it came out.
And public land sales were page 202.
So I just went straight to page 202 and read through the new language to see what, because it was another revision by Mike Lee to see if he could get that thing passed.
And the language of the text, even on the very last revision where you're supposed to be listening to American peoples, and he did throw in the word hunters there, hunters, I'm listening to you.
It says, like, bullet point one must be near existing infrastructure.
And then bullet point number seven, I think it was, was like, or very far away and hard to manage.
And then there's super fun language in there too, where it's like, okay, right if your first refusal is going to be state, then local government, through tribes in there.
And then the only other group would have been landowners within the checkerboard pattern, how we have like that, you know, grid system of federal land ownership and private land ownership.
Those landowners could also purchase more than anybody else would have been allowed to purchase.
So state, local, then your tribes and local landowners.
So basically like a huge handout to, you know, like, you know, the corner crossing case that we've been talking about, right?
Iron Bar Holdings.
They would have just purchased all those checkered board pieces and would have been legally allowed to do that.
So what corner crossing is, is like, say if there's an enormous piece of public land, but the only way you can get to it is to cross over a very small corner of private land.
For the longest time, that was prohibited, and you would get arrested.
And now, currently in the state of Wyoming, and I got to give a shout out to Wyoming backcountry hunters and anglers for having the spine and the backbone to bring this, help bring the people who were caught and prosecuted for corner crossing, you know, and support them financially.
We did a ton at Meat Eater 2 to help that legal case.
It went to the state court, then the Supreme Court, and then the 9th District Court.
And the last I heard is Iron Bar now wants to take it to the Supreme Court of the United States, SCODUS, and have, which is ultimately really good.
We always joke that we're going to send old Fred Eshelman, the owner of Iron Bar, like a public landowner t-shirt, because he's going to make this stuff public for everybody.
Because it's going to be, right now there's only two federal cases that have defined corner crossing.
They're both in favor of the people of the United States.
So you can legally step across, shocking, I know, from one piece of public to the next piece of public.
And then if and when this thing makes it to the Supreme Court, the only reason he hasn't filed is because of this stuff with Mike Lee, right?
It would have solved all of his problems.
He would have just purchased those checkerboard pieces of BLM land within his ranch boundaries and just been done with it.
And that's a really, there's a lot of those pieces in a lot of states, and states actually fund the ability to trespass for hunting on a lot of those landlocked pieces.
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Well, it's also today, I could imagine how a long time ago you would get a lot of confusion and it would lead to people trespassing accidentally on public land or on private land rather because we're looking at maps, you know, and people would be, you know, 100 yards to the left, 100 yards to the right, and maybe not good navigators.
But now when you have things like GoHunt, OnX, SpartanForge, all these apps that hunters use now that use GPS, you're 100% accurate.
And then, I mean, there's absolutely wonderful humans on the spectrum.
Oh, yeah.
This dude that I grew up with, we guided on parts of his place growing up.
Right when I got my first ever GPS and the ONX was a card that you inserted into your GPS, he used to come pick me up so I could open the gates for him.
And then he'd just BS and it was amazing.
And we'd drive all over eastern Montana, all on his property.
And his name was Leo Solph, Leo Solph.
And we came up to this fence line and I was like, Leo, did you know that this brand new fence is 100 feet on your side of the property line?
And this was a whole section, right?
So it ran for a mile.
And he goes, Ryan, can't own the whole world and just didn't say another thing about it.
You know, and that's like that old rancher mentality of like, you know what?
There's going to be a fire and we're all going to need to get together and help each other out.
And maybe I'll talk to him then about it.
Or, you know, whatever, calving season, harvest season, all the things that bring those communities together, these very independent people, they got to work together at different times of the year.
And that's like kind of a beautiful thing.
You can only be so much of a dick.
Right.
But then there's that other side now where it's like, I'm going to patrol my property from Florida via drone.
And it's that community breakdown, which is horrifying to me.
But also, man, like people don't understand the jobs that these lands do, right?
And like you're saying, like the urban folks, where that state comes from, where their groceries come from, it's not the grocery store.
Like there should be an instructional video before you can enter the supermarket.
You know?
Because it takes space.
It takes this land.
And we think, people think in terms of like, oh, a million is a big number.
Let's say we do have 640 million acres of public land, right?
Well, there's like 1.2 billion acres of land in the U.S. set aside specifically for agriculture.
And I think some like private timberland falls in that too, right?
So that's private land, 1.2 billion where the bulk of our food's coming off, ideally.
On the public land side of the fence, we have grazing leases.
So you can run cattle and sheep on public ground.
You pay a minimal, I would say a very minimal fee for that, right?
And it's based off of an animal on that ground for a month, animal unit month AUM.
And on our public ground, that's like a dollar, I want to say it's $1.35 per animal unit month.
And just in the state of Montana, it just got dropped again, but it hit as high as $24 animal unit month.
So if you have those federal leases, it's a big thing that you want to protect too, right?
So you have to, in theory, show that stewardship aspect out there on the public land because everybody can come check it out to retain your ability to keep running cattle out there or sheep or whatever it is.
Yeah, so basically the fear is it's going to be a privatized national park that people aren't going to be able to go out on.
Well, I don't think that's true.
It might be a bunch of private philanthropic dollars, a lot of which is coming from overseas.
I think the Dutch have somehow, some way, dumped a bunch of cash in there.
And it is to connect a bunch of private land and Bureau of Land Management land out there, BLM, into one contiguous chunk,
remove as many fences as you can, and allow that chunk of prairie to basically revert back to its natural state with natural species, the American buffalo being like their big goal species.
They've done an incredible job raising cash to get this done.
They're purchasing these places.
They would say at fair market value, there's a big argument there because they have so much money, they're going to win a bidding process.
So is it really fair?
Is what the local ranchers would say.
But right now, and knock on wood, for as long as they exist, they're going to keep providing public access.
And they have a really good public access program.
So they can work with the state of Montana for our private land public access program where you can sign up either at just like a kiosk type deal, sign-in box, and walk out on their place.
No, I mean, the state of Montana want to ask for your license plate number and your home address and phone number, and that's it.
So, and then it's, I mean, they have a lot of gorgeous ground.
Honestly, you know, when we did our big float in Montana, they own some of that property now that runs right up to the Missouri, right there around Cow Island is kind of where we took out real close to there.
And they own, I mean, they own some of the stuff that we hiked around on.
So yes to allowing the existing animals to breed and yes to bringing the animals in.
So they're coming out of the, I think the Yellowstone population more than anything.
And then they work with the local tribes up there to kind of bring those animals in and some go to the tribe and then some go stay on the prairie, I think is how it goes.
And then the reason that they're allowing for these old bulls to be shot is because they're no longer breeding.
His theory is, and I think it's valid, that the time where they saw millions of buffalo was because the Native Americans had been wiped out by disease.
This is the idea, is that there was never a time where there were that many bison.
And that the reason why there were that many bison was because the Native Americans weren't hunting them anymore because they were 90% of them were wiped out by disease.
That's why when they made their way across and I guess it was like the early 1800s.
And there was obviously some sort of an imbalance that led to these enormous populations of bison.
And I think Dan Flores is an incredibly brilliant guy.
I think he makes a really compelling argument because we do know that the Native Americans were wiped out, that 90% of them were killed off by disease.
We know that we're talking about millions of people.
And if millions of people were subsistence hunters and, you know, they were riding around, living off the buffalo, following them around, which we know they did, completely makes sense.
Especially when you take into account the long gestation period, bison, I think they have to be pregnant for a long time, right?
I went there a few years back with my family, and it's really beautiful, and I enjoyed it.
But I did not like the fact that all the elk were hanging out at the visitor station because they know they can't be hunted there and they know the wolves won't go there.
It was real weird.
They're like so domesticated.
They're just like 30 yards away from a fucking vending machine.
You see this big herd of elk just laying down on the ground, staring at people and people taking selfies with the animals.
I went up to watch the bison hunting season there in Yellowstone in the gardener entrance, south entrance, or north entrance to the park.
And a bunch of the tribes were down doing their harvest.
And I was riding with Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks.
Got to do a little ride along.
And it was the most successful hunt they've ever had.
So this was three years ago now.
Tons of snow in the park.
Some old cow bison decided to just lead everybody out.
And there's like hunt rosters.
So you draw your bison tag, but then you can also be on a list in case those tags get filled, which they never do.
But this year it did happen.
And then all the tribes came up for their harvest.
And it was amazing.
Like there were people knocking buffalo down everywhere.
And in fact, so many that they had to come up with a system to where they'd be like, okay, between daylight and like 9 a.m., nobody's going to walk beyond this line.
Because let everybody shoot and then we'll all go out together and start cutting up bison and get them out of there.
And then the next round of hunters can have at it.
So this is, it's called the zone of tolerance, which is a creepy, creepy name, if you're asking me.
Zone of tolerance.
So all the states, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, that's around Yellowstone National Park, the cattle producers have real fears of brucellosis, which is a disease that bison and elk pack around, and it causes domestic cattle to abort calves.
So hurts them in the pocketbook, bad deal.
Well, they want slash need to reduce bison populations within the park.
Can't hunt inside the park.
But at the same time, all the cattlemen associations, they don't want those bison coming out of the park.
So what do you do?
Well, they came up with the zone of tolerance idea, which is a hunting perimeter around the park.
They remove all the domestic cattle from within that zone.
And then the bison, if they come out of the park into that zone, they're fair game for hunters.
If they make it beyond that zone somehow, some way, then anybody can shoot one.
But typically there's like a brand inspector there to take care of any bison that make it beyond the border of the zone of tolerance.
And he is there to, in this particular case, like protect the interest of the cattlemen's associations, cattle ranchers.
Right.
And so, yeah, somehow, someway, he's authorized to whack those bison if they make it beyond.
But really what...
It gets donated to any one of those tribal members that's there probably has right of first refusal at least.
If not, it would go straight to the food pantry.
Yeah, I mean, no waste.
And in years past, there's been groups that go up there just to go pull anything that's left in the field, the bones, stuff like that for making stock.
There's groups that go up there and literally take the carcasses off the ground because it is highly sought after food stuff, right?
It's a lot of bone broth you can make with a 2,000-pound critter.
And like the each tribe brings their own tribal game warden with them.
They're kind of like in charge of their people.
They're coordinating to maximize the harvest.
And so they're helping, very willing to help people like coordinate to get their animal and get out of the field so they can get the next person in there.
And that's part of the system outside of trapping.
So they trap inside the park and then they'll take those animals, move them to a separate facility where they go through, I can't remember how long of a period of monitoring for brucellosis.
And then once that herd is, the trapped herd is considered brucellosis-free, then they can be given to the tribes or sold.
And there's no real explanation of why there's such a population of dead animals in this one spot.
And he thinks it's connected to the Younger Dry's impact theory because there's a very clear, distinct line of carbon in his ground.
Like that, when you go deep, deep, deep into the ground, which represents where these, like a lot of these things that he's pulling, they're plus 10,000 years old.
Like that step bison head.
We didn't get it checked.
We didn't have it sent off.
But a lot of the stuff he has dated, you know, older than 10,000 years.
And so what he thinks is that this is one of the areas where there was an impact.
You know, this younger dryest impact theory, there's two time periods.
One is around 11,800 years ago, and then there's another one somewhere around 10,000 plus years ago.
And he thinks one of those areas is where he was, or where his spot in Alaska is.
And this deep, rich layer of carbon seems to indicate some massive burn that happened through that area.
And it coincides with this immense pile of bones and ivory and, you know, mammoth skeletons and cave bears and all this shit.
Like, it's just a small area.
You know, his area is only like, the area where they're pulling these bones from is only a few acres.
So with the impact came this immediate melting of a lot of the ice caps.
You know, and this is what they think happened that ended the ice age in North America.
You know, 10,000 plus years ago, you're looking at more than a mile high ice in a giant chunk of North America.
And then almost instantaneously, that stuff gets melted.
And this coincides with Randall Carlson's theories about this too, which also was unsubstantiated until they came up with the core samples for the Younger Dry Ice Impact Theory.
And they go, no, this happened.
Like there was a fucking massive impact.
Somewhere around 30% of the entire world was hit by comets.
And this area where John has, look at this, 2.1 to 2.3 acres.
So if you look at the amount of stuff that he has, I mean, 2.3 acres is like a nice yard, right?
It's like a nice, a person's really, oh, you got a nice piece of land here, nice yard.
That's where he's pulling thousands of dead animals.
And look back at the other picture when you, right before, look at that truck filled with heads.
I mean, this is nuts, man.
And this is like a day's haul.
This is crazy, man.
It's really crazy.
It's really pretty extraordinary.
And thankfully, John has both the resources and the desire to blast the permafrost with these high-pressure hoses to get all the stuff out of there.
But, I mean, he's trying to set up a legitimate research facility out there.
You know, these scientists, they want to take the stuff and bring it somewhere.
He's like, fuck off.
If you want to do it, you're going to do it right here.
This is my land.
We're not.
He already had a problem with the Museum of Natural History.
Is that what it was?
Yeah.
In New York.
They dumped tons of his bones into the East River.
So the property that he owned before he owned it, someone else owned it.
That is his property.
They took it.
They were supposed to do research on it, but they had so many bones that they dumped a lot of it in the East River.
And the museum denied it.
And so he got divers to go look for it.
And they found it exactly where they and they found steppe bison bones and all kinds of crazy shit that's not supposed to be there in a pile in the East River.
Well, listen, I think it's just bad for all of us because if people think that your food can come from someplace other than the land, then there's no value to that land.
It's not like, you know, you're eating an eggplant.
You know, you're not eating a squash.
You're eating something that's gone through this insane process to make pretend that it's a burger.
And, you know, there's a lot of investors who lost a shit ton of money because they were lied to.
They were told that this is going to be easy to make and it's going to be really convenient and people are going to love it.
And people are looking for an alternative to meat.
No, actually they're not.
And this is the only thing that was...
And when COVID came and, you know, there was a lot of shortages in the supermarkets and the lockdowns and all that jazz, he's like, the only shit that's available here is this fucking bullshit fake meat.
Like fake meat was the only, he sent a picture.
It was the only thing left on the shelf was like Beyond Meat or Beyond Burger or whatever the fuck it's called.
I know one of my biggest pet peeves in life, a buddy of mine was like going down the vegan train and we had to stop in all these towns that had like the best vegan restaurant.
And I'm like, they're stealing our names for food.
Well, and then there's the problem of what actually happens when you have monocrop agriculture, because a lot of this stuff is coming from that.
And by the way, there's way more death per calorie of food that you get from monocrop agriculture, from growing just one crop in an area than you're ever going to get from meat.
Like there's thousands of animals, millions of animals have to get killed in order you to grow this food.
Well, you used the word convenience earlier, right?
Like convenience is like the killer of conservation because it's hard work, man.
It's not convenient.
Like these animals on the landscape that have been doing things for ever, like they just don't adjust to things.
You know, I was talking about like the prairie, how we're losing 2 million acres of prairie a year.
Well, there's this super badass little chicken, lesser prairie chicken, super charismatic little dude, dances, puts his tail fan up, big cheek flares, and game bird.
Used to be in the, possibly into the millions in that time that you described when Lewis and Clark were coming out onto the prairie.
It is a prairie bird to the point where it will not nest within, God, I want to say six acres of a vertical structure of any size.
There's this awesome group of ranchers kind of in the Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico zone.
And they formed the Lesser Prairie Chicken Landowner Alliance.
And what they've been trying to do is get, because there's this huge conservation bill, biggest conservation package in the world called the Farm Bill.
And it has a lot of incentive, subsidy for farmers.
And so what this group, the Lesser Prairie Chicken Landowner Alliance, is doing is, you know, they're trying to Get folks in the Department of Ag to set up some funding specifically for grassland ecosystems that are used for grazing.
So it's going to be good for the rancher and good for the grouse in this case, too, right?
And that funding doesn't exist, but there's lots of programs to take like monocrop agriculture and turn it into CRP, which, you know, mixed grass, basically like rest that ground.
That was one of the programs that came out of the Dust Bowl era.
So instead of turning the ground over and all that dirt dries out and can get blown away, we lose that topsoil, plant it with grass and let it rest for like a three-year period, a five-year period.
Part of our like big ag incentive structures, balance out markets and all that fun stuff.
Yeah, monocrop agriculture is such a problem and industrial agricultural in general.
I had Will Harris on a couple of times from White Oaks Pastures.
Yeah.
And so his family farm was an industrial farm forever.
And then when he took it over, it was like a 20-year period of converting it to become regenerative.
And in that process, what's really, if you look outside in our lobby area, we have two jars of soil that were given to us by Will.
And one of them is from his neighbor's property.
That's an industrial farm.
And it's just like this weird, pale looking fucking, just, you know, it's all industrial fertilizer that they have to use and pesticides and all that shit.
And his is like this rich, dark soil that he's like super proud of, like what they've turned it and converted it over to just this natural process that's supposed to exist when animals graze, the undulates, they poop and they make manure and then the grasses grow and the animals eat the grass.
Oh, but we were just, I was like, okay, well, tell me about this.
Tell me about, you know, Longhorn and what Wagoo means on his menu and all the pigs and the things that he's seeking out and like the breed of chicken that they have.
But like you were saying, like it's not just the breed.
What's that chicken doing?
Right.
And it's insane.
It is so freaking cool, man.
Like it's a heartwarming place to eat.
And it was just like, knock your freaking socks off.
I mean, they got nominated for James Beard on his turkey book, which is super awesome.
The people down there just, you know, his employees stay there.
They've been there for, like, everybody in that house has been there for a decade.
And they're just loving the stuff that they're doing and putting out and the stories that he can tell on that menu, right?
Like the bread is, he's like, yeah, I went and picked grapes out of the alley across the street, which doesn't sound all that great, but that's how he like started the yeast for the bread.
And that's been going for six years.
They got yogurt that came from a culture that's been going from for 200 years from one of their employees whose family's from India and they brought it over.
And I swear to God, when I go back to DC and I'm talking to people, like they are so disconnected from this stuff.
And I just often think, I'm like, God, if you guys just knew where the food comes from, what the land actually provides, we wouldn't be having these conversations.
I mean, the economics of food I've gotten really into recently because there is a real inability in certain areas of the country where the cost of getting anywhere near an actual grocery store is prohibitive to a lot of people.
And so, you know, they're just like, they're shit out of luck for a real food.
And then it's a cultural thing of Mom didn't know what real food was, dad didn't know what real food was, so I don't, and my kids won't.
And they're like, why is it that when we do cross sections of these bones, they're so much more unhealthy than the cross-sections of the bones from 4,000 years earlier.
You know, and that gave me like really, really made me feel good.
I'm like, okay, things are starting to go our way now because all the other people who were afraid to say the same thing were like, oh, thank God some other people with a big microphone came out and said it.
So now I feel emboldened to stand up publicly for what I believe in.
Like, one of the things I feel when I go back to D.C. is there's a lot of people spending time on making sure, not that America is better, but that that system persists.
So the next generation of short, short little boat shoe, no sock wearing people can have jobs.
A long time ago, you told me, you're like, dude, don't read the comment section.
And you're 1,000% right.
I can't say how right you are, but during this time of like, why aren't people clicking into this?
I was getting real depressed, like shaken pissed, tears at times over feeling so underrepresented.
And then when we started gaining momentum, I was like, okay, what the hell else can I do?
I'm calling my senators.
I'm calling my representatives.
I'm establishing contacts with their staff.
I'm talking to them about how important this is.
I'm asking them what else we can do.
Trying to build these bridges for this goal of protecting my public lands that I love.
We're working with all these nonprofit groups, are coming together, even groups that traditionally don't focus on public land access issues, you know, like your Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, who has done a bunch of stuff for access, but you know, they have an elk on their logo.
They're the elk people.
And then Pheasants and Quail Forever, they're the Pheasants and Quail people.
National Wild Turkey Federation, they're the turkey people.
But they started being like, uh-oh, this is real serious.
And then we started getting all these people in the same room together, sharing information instead of being competitive.
And then businesses started coming out and saying, well, what can we do?
Little breweries down in Arizona.
This guy Ren House Brewing called me and he's like, hey, what can I do?
I have a brewery.
What can I do?
And we came out with a beer that has a QR code on the label and it's just called rep because at that time the fight was in the house.
So call your representative and you hit the QR code.
You put in your zip code and it connects you with your representative.
Right?
It's like crush beers and crush the phone lines, whatever tag you want, up to, I'm on a steering committee that has REI, Patagonia, Rivian, all like big, big companies, right?
That are like, we want to put some muscle behind this.
We want public lands to stay public.
Then we launched a Hunt Brands for Public Lands Coalition and had a huge name.
Sig Sauer is on there, right?
They have military contracts and they had the guts to stand up and be like, we don't want to see public lands get sold off.
Weather be another firearms manufacturer, you know, first light meteor, obviously.
But we started like building all these bridges and unifying groups and people and businesses around this common cause.
And it's that public persistence, that we the people part that folks kind of tend to forget, that is literally saving public lands about like being out there public and loud.
And it's working, but we need to take it to the next step, right?
And maintain the momentum and stay unified.
And the thing that was really interesting, right, is like we're up to the date, up to the absolute second that language is polled.
Before it's officially polled, Mike Lee's team has his statement out on I listened.
I still want to sell public land, but I listened to everybody.
So I'm not going to do it right now, is really what it says.
And he's completely fabricating this story.
He was told, like, this is going to get pulled.
So you can do it now and save some face, or we can pull it, and you're going to look like a loser, right?
And unfortunately, he got the option to, like, fight again another day, which is brutal.
But I get that information and I get to announce it to this awesome group of people at this off-road rally trash pickup deal that I'm out at called the Gambler 500, which is super cool.
And then I put that online.
And I'm like, hey, thank you to the Democrats and thank you to the Republicans and thank you for all the voices that came out and the businesses and all this stuff.
And then I was just like, set my clock as to when people were going to just start tearing each other apart.
No, we voted because we felt like the country was moving in a terrible direction.
It doesn't mean that they can't also move in a terrible direction once you get them in.
The important thing is people stood up, people like you, luckily, that are very invested in this and used the considerable resources you have access to and got a lot of other people involved like Cam and Josh Smith and everybody else.
And I jumped in too.
We're just lucky that a lot of people care and recognize that this is a slippery slope and that if they got through with this and they did this, this is just one step.
And if you let them sell one acre, that's why just not one acre was the best motto.
It really was.
Not one acre was the best motto.
You can't.
It's not yours.
It's ours.
It's everyone's.
And if you sell it, you should make zero profit.
It should go, literally, if you did sell it, it should have to go to every fucking person that lives on the planet or in this country, rather.
And that's like the thing that I keep coming back to.
I'm like, all they're doing is being like, oh, see, we did something.
They're not doing the hard work, right?
And this particular thing would divest the American people of, in my mind, and we started doing it as a slogan for backcountry hunters and anglers, is like public land freedom.
Like you are divesting the American people of the ability to be free.
Like these places represent like a lot of goofballs, man.
Unstructured fun.
And I feel like there's a lot of people in the lawmaking side of things that get very nervous about American people out there having unstructured fun.
They're like, we're going to maybe hold on to the national parks, but there's another play there where we're going to turn those over to the states or privatize them completely.
Get full control of, like I said, like Colorado River, right?
Like we're going to control the pipes for the watersheds.
Like there's a lot happening in between elections.
And you got to know if you weighed in during this, you made a difference.
Like everybody who jumped in and wrote to their representatives and senators and told their buddies about this and asked businesses, why aren't you on that list?
And now that this has happened and we've had some success and it worked, now people know it'll work.
And so now all the Randy Newbergs and all the people that were really enthusiastic about this, that really did their job, they're getting more support now.
And it's going to build.
And then we'll be much more aware of whether one of these things is trying to get snuck through in the future.
I got sucked in, though, because I'm like, I don't know.
I was like, I was so desperate to make an impact, right?
At the end, I'm like, I'm feeling like I've pulled every freaking lever that I can.
I'm asking the experts.
I'm like, could we get, and this is a screwed up piece of information.
I was like, okay, I want to do a Freedom of Information Act request, sue for information for all the senators' offices and find out how many people called on behalf of public lands and how many people called to sell them off.
And I want that information to be public.
Well, those offices, they don't have to give over that information, I found out.
So like, where the hell's the accountability on that?
But anyway, I'm going nuts trying to figure out what other levers I could pull.
And I would just sit there and be like, okay, I'm going to find one person on the feed and just understand their side of things and see if I can pull them over to my side of things.
And maybe that butterfly wing effect will do some sort of good.
And people that, for whatever reason, thought Kamala Harris would be a good president.
And then there's also people that I don't even know if they're real humans.
I think there's a lot of this stuff that we have to understand about social media is coordinated bot farms.
And so anytime you have a hot-button topic that could, you know, maybe get a bill rejected or get a bill passed, it's not organic, the comments.
There's some organic comments.
Some of these people that are negative, you voted for this, they're just a real fucking loser who doesn't like people that have public profiles, doesn't like people that are successful, doesn't like people, and they just want to find some way to call you out.
There's a lot of that.
But then there's a lot of coordinated artificial interaction.
And we've highlighted that and we've been on that for quite a while because we found out through this one former FBI guy that 80%, his estimation was 80% of Twitter is bots.
I don't know if it's 80%, but I do know that it's an enormous number because I don't interact.
And I'm now, I've since separated myself so far that I'm kind of not even on social media anymore.
I might check it in the morning.
I check Twitter in the morning to see whatever he's mad at.
And then I usually feel bad after I check it.
I'm like, why am I even looking at this?
Jesus Christ.
And I just get off.
And when you do that, you feel better.
You just feel healthier.
You feel better.
But when I do check and there's any sort of a hot button issue, I'll look at someone as saying something outrageous and I'll click on their profile.
And then I'm like, it's like a bunch of letters and a few numbers.
And then I look at their profile.
I'm like, oh, you're not even a real fucking person.
And then you see, oh, this is like half of the people in this aren't real people.
And there's no laws.
Like, there's no, I'm, first of all, I'm going to be real clear.
I'm against a law where it says you have to post under your name, your social security number has to be registered to this account so we know you're a real human being.
The reason why I'm opposed to that is because I think whistleblowers are essential because I think corruption is real.
And I think if you hold someone accountable for everything they post, man, you're going down a dark road.
You're going down a dark road where you could possibly get people fired for posts that, you know, like England is out of control right now.
Like, I don't know if you know this, but England, I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood.
How many people got arrested for social media posts in England this year?
We've looked this up before.
I forget the number.
It's in the thousands.
Arrested for saying immigration is a real problem.
We've got to stop these grooming gangs.
We've got to stop these Muslims from illegally immigrating into England.
You know, you're really like, this is too dangerous.
I'm not going to say anything.
And that's how they get things passed because then you don't have any criticism.
And then you don't have any people that are opposing you.
It's very scary because, again, a lot of this stuff that you're seeing that's causing people to self-center is not real self-censor, is not real human beings.
Great group of people, but there's no financial incentive to support or deny birdwatching.
So if you go to the birdwatcher group on Twitter, yeah, it's probably 5% bots because they're fucking everywhere.
But if you, I guarantee if you go to abortion or if you go to immigration or if you go to anything that's a hot button control, ICE RAIDS, whatever it is, anything.
Anything.
Any hot-button controversial subject, there's a shit ton of them, man.
And it's kind of creepy because who is paying for it?
Who's paying for it?
And why do we don't, how come we don't have any laws to stop that from happening?
Because it's not real.
You're getting this artificial sense of what the general public wants because they've monetized it and they've figured out a way to artificially inflate these numbers.
Yeah, and I think it gives this illusion of this consensus amongst people.
And they can do that even with ridiculous conclusions.
And I think consensus, though, is so dangerous to any political party, right?
Like what we just saw, there was an agenda and everybody had to stand up and say something because of one freaking person who wanted to make this happen.
Right.
And I guarantee you, I guarantee you that what they're thinking about right now is, holy shit, how do we break up this consensus?
Like, what do we need to do?
We can't have birdwatchers agreeing with off-road users and bow hunters.
We can't win that.
We need them to be only birdwatchers, only bow hunters, only off-road users.
And I think we were with this, which is beautiful.
So the Democrats, the Republicans, and the people like me that are fucking politically homeless, they all came together on this and said, no, this is stupid.
And all these people, oh, you voted for this.
Fuck you.
Nobody voted for that.
Fuck you.
Like, this is one guy.
And if history, if that didn't work, if we didn't have an impact, and if nobody stepped up and people like you weren't so steadfast, that would be in the history books.
That Mike Lee guy would be the guy that you see, you know, your kids see in 40, 50 years, and they read the history books.
there's a line item in here for, I think it's a few billion bucks for our next big birthday, America's next big birthday, which I always think of affordable housing when I think of it.
I bet the folks like having their own little individual parties and might think it's okay to throw that couple hundred million at an issue versus fireworks and parades.
I told that group I was with up in the Arctic, man, I'm like, I read them because I want to understand the argument and see if that's really the argument.
Like, is this really where people are coming from or is it just an asshole?
There's mostly just an asshole, and even their argument probably sucks, but also a lot of it's artificial.
You got to think about how much money is involved in selling off this public land and how much of an interest do people have in pushing a narrative that would say that selling this public land is a good thing.
Whenever there's money involved in this, you can pay for it.
There's services where you can start a campaign.
Like, it's not real.
There's services where if you want to push a narrative, you can use their service and they will incorporate this bot farm and they will push it towards whatever you want to do.
Again, I'm wearing the same shirt that I wore on this show talking about this same stuff six years ago or whenever we decided it was, right?
And I do, I feel really, really good.
Like a lot of people came out.
They threw political baggage aside and they talked about how important this stuff is and it's incredibly important to me.
And I thank them all from the bottom of my heart because it is so important and one voice is just not going to do this, right?
So that does feel good.
That does feel good.
I just kind of wanted there to be a vote on this amendment so all the American people can see exactly who voted for it and exactly who voted against it.
I mean, just we need a higher, and most people won't do this even if we had the ability, but we need more peeks behind the curtain, right?
We need more accountability.
Like, so just a great example.
I'm up at the state capitol in Montana.
We just, our legislative session just ended at the beginning of the year.
And there's some knucklehead brings this judicial amendment up to join, for the state of Montana to join Utah's lawsuit to sell off 18.5 million acres of public land.
And 115 people showed up to testify against the state.
This is during work hours in a Montana winter.
115 people show up to testify against this.
And there's some online two there, to be fair.
Originally, there were 10 people signed up to testify in favor of joining the lawsuit.
All 10 of those people drop off.
They only give everybody two minutes to testify in front of committee.
Everybody testifies, don't do this, bad for Montana, bad for all these other reasons.
Professional people, some lobbyists, nonprofit people, but just a lot of people being like, yeah, I'm a dad and this is where I take my kids.
So John Tester, who was an awesome public lands guy, Democrat, farmer out of Big Sandy, Montana.
That's the only political donation I've ever made in my life was to his campaign because he was awesome on public lands.
He got, he lost this year.
So we have Tim Shees, our freshman senator in Montana.
So he's brand new.
He won John Tester's seat.
And then we have Steve Daines, who's been in for a long time.
He's a senior Republican, also on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
And Republicans, and they said, not in as strong a words as I would want, that they're not for the sale of public lands during this fight, during the House, and then during the Senate fight again, we're not going to sell public lands.
Our Republican Ryan Zinke, also, he's a representative in the House.
You know, he said, that's my San Juan Hill.
He's like, I'm going to die on San Juan Hill before I vote to sell off America's public lands, right?
So I think for everybody else who's naysaying whether a Republican can do this or it's just the Democrats that are willing, I think we have a good example in Montana right now.
And I'm not saying give up.
I'm going to hold these people accountable and I think everybody else should too, that these Republicans are willing to go to bat for public lands right now.
And we're making it that like third rail issue where it's like, if you want to win in the state of Montana, you better be good on public lands.