Ep. 873: Clovis First, Saving The Great Lakes, and the World’s Largest Wildlife Crossing

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en, Brian Lynn of the Sportsmen’s Alliance https://sportsmensalliance.org/, and the MeatEater crew discuss: Washington’s crooked Game Commission; Idaho hunting tech bans; the biggest and most hated wildlife crossing in the world; a plan to save Great Lakes whitefish; Clovis first; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 0:49Steven Rinella?

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• 1:31Steven Rinella?

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• 2:14Steven Rinella?

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• 2:24Steven Rinella?

  Welcome to the news show, everybody. This week, we've got news from Washington's Crooked Game Commission. Did a Secret Service canine handler get caught with his pants down? Hanoi Randall reports on Idaho hunting tech bans, which I'm generally sympathetic to. The most hated wildlife crossing in the world, which is in California. A plan to save Great Lakes whitefish, and Clovis first is back, baby. Plus more.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Clovis what?

• 2:56Steven Rinella?

  Clovis first. It's a theory on the peopling of the Americas. Clovis first. Clovis first was there, then they killed it, and it's risen from the dead.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Those people can't make up their minds, man.

• 3:11Speaker 04

  It's like the sea lechance.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  That fell flat.

• 3:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, no, I got it. It's good. That was a good joke. It's like a Lazarus species. Yanni's back fishing in Key West. What's going on, Yannis?

• 3:23Speaker 02

  It's funny, the like the second or third night after fishing, I was on FaceTime with my gal and she's like, how are you not burned up? I'm like, man, I'm just, I've just learned after 47 years, you put a bunch of SPF 50 on and you can just stay not red. Randall and Max are a little bit charrier.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  I put on SPF 100 on Sunday. I thought it would balance out.

• 3:48Steven Rinella?

  I feel like at a point it tapers off, doesn't it? Isn't that like, like, there's like a sunscreen scandal that maybe I'm not aware of?

• 3:56Speaker 04

  I, I, I'm not quite sure the science behind it all, but I, retroactively applying strong sunscreen after not having sunscreen doesn't actually, in fact.

• 4:06Steven Rinella?

  Like, you're like, I got burnt bad. I'm gonna put it on.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  You need to invest in a 10 gallon hat, man.

• 4:11Steven Rinella?

  So is that the best? Is that, that's what you got? That you got sun? That you didn't get sunburnt?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Uh, Mark King and I went down to Key West to do a little fishing with our good buddy, Jake Grim, that I think most of us here in this room know. Randall, you know him?

• 4:25Speaker 04

  No, it always makes me feel left out when you say things like that. Still feel like the new guy.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Well, that's good. It's fresh. Uh, Jake's the guy that, uh, took me under his wing for some hound hunting. I've had forgotten this. The whole way that we met Jake is that he was like an early meat eater fan and was emailing us about going rabbit hunting with beagles in Montana. Do you remember that?

• 4:49Steven Rinella?

  Like that's not how I know.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  That's our first contact.

• 4:51Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  It's not?

• 4:53Steven Rinella?

  No, it's not how I know him. His, his, his wife used to work with us.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  I know, but that is after.

• 5:00Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was like Clay Newcomb. That's how we came about Clay Newcomb too. He sent an email being like, y'all need to come to Arkansas to hunt squirrels and bears and deer.

• 5:10Steven Rinella?

  And we're like, how that turned out.

• 5:13Steven Rinella?

  And, and you caught a tarpon?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Mark and I.

• 5:16Steven Rinella?

  Almost caught a tarpon, right?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Uh, depend, yeah. Catching.

• 5:20Steven Rinella?

  You had a hand on the leader.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Catch, catching tarpon comes in many different versions and yes, uh, uh, is, is unfortunate but fortunate. I've, I've spent probably seven full days of my life standing on the bow of a boat looking for, casting at tarpon. I've hooked one, jumped one, um, nowhere near catching one. Literally the third cast of the trip. So first morning, it's still dark outside, kinda like it's, there's not enough, the sun's not high enough where you can actually see in the water. And all of a sudden, we're like kinda getting ready, cause we're filming, so we're getting ready to do like an intro scene. And all of a sudden, somebody looks over and goes, oh my God, they're right there. And like literally already within casting range and they're just,

• 6:02Speaker 02

  when tarpon, when they call tarpon happy, they're almost not even moving. They're just kinda sitting in one spot and bobbing in a way, like in the current, you know? And so, you know, the yelling starts and, you know, Jake's like, get the rod, but be quiet. Don't make a lot of noise when you move to the bow of the boat. And so I grab a rod, get on the bow and literally the third cast, um, I'd never done this, Brody. Have you done this much where you cast and then instead of stripping with one hand? You put the rod in your armpit and then strip with both hands?

• 6:34Speaker 03

  You know what that works good?

• 6:35Steven Rinella?

  I, I'm familiar, but I've never had occasion to do that.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  It's good because you won't screw up and trout set.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:41Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  If you set with a rod on a tarpon, it's not gonna end.

• 6:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I've hooked three and I've never got past the part where they jump out of the water.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's how it goes for most people.

• 6:50Steven Rinella?

  And, and, and I didn't even, I wasn't even, I only became, I was, it happened so fast. I was only aware that it happened after it happened.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:58Steven Rinella?

  It sort of dawned on me and I'm like, after it was already gone, it was dawning on me.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  The fish in the key, the tarpon in the keys, I mean, Yanis can tell you, but there's like, the tarpon in the keys are hard, man. And I would love for someone to explain why they're so much harder to catch on fly in the Keys than they are in Mexico or Belize. Cause I've caught shitloads of them in Mexico and Belize. Never landed one in the Keys.

• 7:22Steven Rinella?

  Go on Yanis, tell us.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Um, the rea- another reason for the two-handed strip is because it keeps the fly moving. There's never this, this.

• 7:32Steven Rinella?

  It's not going.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, you don't like let go and then have to reach up and pull again. Um, but yeah, that moment when that fish, we, it takes the fly and then, you know, Jake's yelling at me to strip and you strip and you feel it come tight. From there, the next three seconds, I think it's like the most like violent and exciting and chaotic three seconds of fishing that I have ever experienced because like you know that you would attach yourself to something big. It's right there. It's in shallow water. You've got 50 feet of fly line that are, it's like half wrapped around your toes. And you're just hoping that as the fish runs and jumps that the line clears the deck and gets on the reel before it, you know, binds up. Cause then the later that same morning, Mark fed one, got him on.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  And we had a loop go around the reel and I tried to do everything I could to, you know, I'm trying to pull against a hundred pound fish to make a loop to, you know, bring it around the reel. And I just, I couldn't do it for him and it broke. And it's just over. Mine ended this way. I fought it for an hour. It jumped twice. The big ones, he's Jake said they don't jump too much. He, he guesstimated it. He's like, it was a solid hundred. He's like, I don't know if it was 110 or 130, but it was a really big tarpon in his mind. Fight him for an hour, which I was a little disappointed that I didn't fight him better. I had read all the Stu Apt articles and books. Do you know that name?

• 8:57Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Brody knows it.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Down and dirty.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  Down and dirty.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Stu Apt taught down and dirty, basically meaning that anytime you fight any fish, but for this instance, tarpon, is that anytime that fish's head goes left, you bring your rod tip down into the right. And when he, when you turn him to the right, you bring your rod tip down into the left. And you're basically not only tiring him out, but you're breaking the fish's will, is what he thought. And so that.

• 9:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  He always.

• 9:24Steven Rinella?

  You're like in a psychological battle with him.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  He felt that like in 15 minutes, he could pretty much land any single tarpon by, by doing that.

• 9:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  So I didn't, I thought I was gonna do that. I didn't do it. But yeah, we chased him all across this basin, like a mile or something. And we get to the back of this basin, the water's getting shallow. We probably hooked him in five or six feet of water. And we're in like two to three feet of water now. And there's this little bridge that's kind of like in our periphery. We're not really paying attention to it. And there's a creek, you know, leaving the basin going out. I guess depending on what the tide's doing, going in or out, but at this moment, it's going out into the creek. And uh, somehow the tarpon just slowly moves and moves that direction. And we're kind of like, Jake's like off the polling platform and he's getting ready to anchor. And we're getting ready to literally like put our hands on the fish.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  And I honestly think that there was just enough suction from that creek that that hundred pounds of weight in the water gets pulled to that, to that creek mouth and he goes under the bridge. So we pull the boat right up to it. The entire boat will fit under the bridge, including the polling platform, except for the sort of holder bracket deal that sits on top of the polling platform that holds the, um, the pole itself.

• 10:46Steven Rinella?

  We'll just snap that off.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  We discussed it and we thought that it might cause more damage to the platform if we just went for the snap. And um, so Jake just told me to hold the reel and bust him off.

• 10:58Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. You never got a scale off it.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  No, I wasn't gonna take a scale. Steve's, if you don't know, that's a thing they used to do like, I don't know.

• 11:06Steven Rinella?

  Well, they used to take his whole life in the dark ages.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  I've got a tarpon scale in my house.

• 11:10Steven Rinella?

  They used to take his whole life.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you wouldn't take another one.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  No.

• 11:13Steven Rinella?

  And then they take a scale and now you just let it go and a shark eats it.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  That is the thing you worry about. Yeah. We actually, so we went offshore too a day. And um, where we fish these wrecks, like Jake was like, look, don't fight them fast just to be a tough guy. Like we, you're literally gonna get more fillets if you guys can get these fish in as fast as possible. So don't F around. And we still, luckily we were mostly catching bonita, which aren't really, you know, nobody really eats those anyways. But uh, we probably pulled in half dozen bonita where there was only the front half of the fish left, you know?

• 11:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  But uh, yeah, Jake had a great trip for us. We went dawn to dusk, uh, three days in a row. Offshore day, we caught mahi, blackfin tuna, uh, the bonitas. And then we ended on a mutton snapper and uh, we each got to catch one big old giant, like 15 to 20 pound mutton snapper, which was sweet.

• 12:11Steven Rinella?

  I thought it was weird that I didn't even get, not only not invited, but didn't know.

• 12:16Steven Rinella?

  I think, I mean, there's like, not invited and just didn't know.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  There's a lot of things that happen around here. I don't think you know about.

• 12:22Steven Rinella?

  Didn't even know.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Did you know Brody and I are both training for big uh, running races?

• 12:28Steven Rinella?

  Quick note from the last episode.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:32Steven Rinella?

  So the, the, the, the last episode of the news show, we reported on a chimp civil war.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:40Steven Rinella?

  Randall reported on a chimp civil war.

• 12:44Steven Rinella?

  Randall and Phil had made a Ken Burns spoof video.

• 12:51Steven Rinella?

  About a chimp civil war. I think it's funny.

• 12:57Steven Rinella?

  We put in the show, I think it's funny. I go home and I'm laying in bed with my wife and I show my wife the video. She thinks it's funny. I send the video to Ken Burns, who's been on the show before. And I've said, thought you'd get a kick out of this. He replies, oh, I just did one of those for the Colbert show.

• 13:19Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 13:19Steven Rinella?

  Who, as I explained before the show, I think does too much facial humor.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 13:25Steven Rinella?

  Uh. So then I'm like.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Wait a minute, like, he didn't do a chimp video for the Colbert show.

• 13:31Steven Rinella?

  He did.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  He did.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Really?

• 13:32Steven Rinella?

  Chimp civil war.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:34Steven Rinella?

  Write down.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:36Steven Rinella?

  People haven't seen Randall's video yet. Write down to like banana jokes to like a handwriting a letter. And I then thought. I wasn't aware, it seems like those guys would have mentioned that they stole the joke.

• 13:53Steven Rinella?

  From. A TV show. And then I was pissed.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Did they steal it?

• 14:00Steven Rinella?

  They claim no. I, I'd like, so Ken Burns is like, oh, yeah, here's the link to the, to the thing. And I'm like, oh my God, I had no idea. And he's like, hey, the more the merrier. And I'm like, dude, I had no idea. That they stole your joke.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  You know Spencer always claims that Jeopardy is stealing questions from him.

• 14:21Steven Rinella?

  The New York Times steals all of our reporting.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I, I would like to point out just how obviously linear this is.

• 14:28Steven Rinella?

  Can I finish my story?

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, please, please.

• 14:31Steven Rinella?

  Then you can take it away.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:34Steven Rinella?

  Then Randall produces for me, it's not dated. But he produces for me a text. Dating back well before. The Colbert thing in which he says him and filler texting. And he says, I want to do it like a Ken Burns Civil War.

• 14:53Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 14:56Steven Rinella?

  But there's no date on it. So now I'm so embarrassed, I'm sending this to Burns. I'm trying to validate.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  You sent that to Burns too?

• 15:04Steven Rinella?

  Yes, I was embarrassed. And he sent me exclamation points.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  It made me laugh, well.

• 15:12Steven Rinella?

  It made me laugh too. But then I'm like, you can't run it.

• 15:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:16Steven Rinella?

  And then as they're convincing me that they didn't steal the joke and that it was, it was like. It was the, the two people and my wife's like, I don't think they stole it.

• 15:27Steven Rinella?

  I'm like.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  Who?

• 15:28Speaker 03

  They is, is Phil and Randall.

• 15:31Steven Rinella?

  Of course they didn't.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  Steal it.

• 15:33Speaker 05

  Can we let Randall talk now?

• 15:34Steven Rinella?

  How is that, of course? I'm like, if there's two guys that watch Colbert, it's these two. That's what I said to my wife.

• 15:39Speaker 05

  I haven't watched Colbert.

• 15:41Steven Rinella?

  No, when you. And she said, no one watches Colbert.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  When you sent me the email saying Colbert had done it, I thought the Colbert report isn't on the air anymore. I forgot that he was doing late night.

• 15:53Steven Rinella?

  He's got four more shows or something.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  I forgot. Well, I forgot that he was doing late night now.

• 15:56Steven Rinella?

  Or two more shows.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  I was thinking about the comedy, the old Comedy Central show.

• 15:59Steven Rinella?

  Pretend to be a right wing guy?

• 16:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:00Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  Um, so I will point out that, yeah, like, one, this news story was from about a month ago and it kept getting booted. I texted Phil about covering this as Ken Burns. It kept getting booted because the administration kept doing more horrible things with the Forest Service and, and then the Boundary Waters. And so I think in that text, I did say like, shit, we've got to cover the Boundary Waters. We'll punt on the chimp.

• 16:25Steven Rinella?

  You did.

• 16:25Speaker 04

  Brody said, it seems like something our audience wouldn't be aware of, so it'll still be fresh.

• 16:30Steven Rinella?

  Okay, but here's, here's his proof. I mean, there's no date.

• 16:34Speaker 06

  We're looking at.

• 16:34Steven Rinella?

  We know that at some point at 10:53 a.m.

• 16:38Speaker 06

  Oh, I can find the date.

• 16:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:40Steven Rinella?

  Randall says, if we had more time, I'd prefer to do it Ken Burns style. And read a bunch of fake chimp letters over some mournful fiddle music. Definitely need to talk Boundary Waters.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  And, and I'd like to say, I need to read a text from Phil. Well, there's a bunch of texts I'd love to read.

• 17:02Speaker 06

  That was on April.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  So, okay.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  He says, Phil says.

• 17:05Speaker 05

  Hold, hold on, Randall, for a quick timeline. I had no idea Steve and Ken Burns were having this conversation about like, oh, well, you, we should probably pull it.

• 17:13Steven Rinella?

  Like, are my guys frauds or not?

• 17:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. So we, so we published the podcast episodes. Some of you may have heard it in the audio only version. We published a podcast episode. I immediately, I get a text from Randall and our content guy at like six in the morning saying, hey, did you guys know Colbert did this two weeks ago? Randall and I start panicking and texting each other. It was my decision to pull the segment and Randall can.

• 17:35Speaker 04

  I wanted to pull it too, because I was like, I texted Phil and I said, effing Colbert beat us to it. And then he said, this is.

• 17:43Steven Rinella?

  About two weeks.

• 17:43Speaker 04

  This is crazy. I said, I know, blah, blah, blah. Phil said, I've seen this happen with comedy writers and every time I think, yeah, right, you totally stole this. And I pointed out. There's this, there's a news story about a civil war among animals. If you want to make a spoof, you make a Ken Burns spoof.

• 18:03Steven Rinella?

  That's what my wife said. I don't think that's true.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  And if you want to make a Ken Burns spoof, your only options are gray and white, like, like sepia toned images, and then you fake writing a letter. Phil, this is my favorite text. Phil says, I'd like to think he knows we're not so blatantly dumb as to rip something off from an incredibly well-known and popular show where it lives on the internet for everyone to easily find and seen. And the fact that we gave the thumbs up to send it to Ken Burns, when he was part of the Colbert one.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  So we went on and on about this.

• 18:37Steven Rinella?

  I'm starting to believe you.

• 18:40Speaker 05

  I'm glad we're making some headway.

• 18:41Steven Rinella?

  But isn't it nice to know that my wife believed you all along?

• 18:44Speaker 03

  You know what we should do?

• 18:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was horrified by this.

• 18:48Steven Rinella?

  Can you play the, can you play the joke?

• 18:49Speaker 03

  I think we should play them both and see who, which one wins.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  I think copyright law.

• 18:54Steven Rinella?

  Hundred times better.

• 18:54Speaker 05

  It's Randall, it's so much better.

• 18:56Steven Rinella?

  In all fairness.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  We saw there's.

• 18:58Steven Rinella?

  In all fairness, Randall is a thousand times better.

• 19:01Speaker 04

  There we go.

• 19:02Steven Rinella?

  Randall's is, his is, his, it's a thousand times better.

• 19:07Steven Rinella?

  Just listeners, go find the Colbert one.

• 19:11Steven Rinella?

  Watch that.

• 19:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Be disappointed.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  When you know, the funny thing was.

• 19:14Steven Rinella?

  It makes the same joke a bunch of times.

• 19:16Speaker 04

  Phil and I were, when we were texting with, we're texting with Barge about this that morning, and we're both like, 100%, we have to pull it. This just looks so stupid. Then I was talking to Barge later and he goes, he goes, what convinces me that you didn't steal this is that if you'd stolen it, you would have been pointing out the differences between the two, and you would have been like, oh, I still think we could keep. But Phil and I were both just like so stunned by it. Our initial reaction was, pull the whole thing, I'm going to crawl into a hole. And then after I watched the, after I watched the Colbert one, I was like, you know what? I actually think like, ours is. Good enough.

• 19:57Steven Rinella?

  It's better.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  Ours is better.

• 19:59Steven Rinella?

  And different.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  You know why Barge told me he knew you were telling the truth?

• 20:01Steven Rinella?

  What's that?

• 20:02Speaker 04

  He said, people aren't that good at lying.

• 20:05Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:06Speaker 04

  Well, he said they would have to be like pathologically good at lying. This is like my worst nightmare.

• 20:12Speaker 05

  The fact that you guys are having side conversations without my knowledge about whether or not we lied is like I want to stay in that hole that I crawled into.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, because because I will.

• 20:21Speaker 05

  I know, I'm offended too, Phil.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  It was all happening at the same time, Phil. I I will.

• 20:27Steven Rinella?

  I'm like, hold up, because I'll just to come clean. I'm saying to Barge, hold on a minute, there's the same joke. There's a banana, there's the, there's like a hand writing a letter. And he's like, but that's a Ken Burns documentary.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:42Steven Rinella?

  It's just.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  He said they'd have to be pathologically good at lying to like lie about this. And I I my probably one of my favorite parts of the day was when I said to you, like, it's the most obvious spoof in the world. Civil War, Ken Burns. And and you said, I wouldn't have gotten there. I would have thought Guns N' Roses, Civil War.

• 21:03Steven Rinella?

  I would have written the whole song.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  I don't need your chip war. But, uh, yeah, because.

• 21:10Steven Rinella?

  It feeds the furry.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  I woke up and saw the email from Ken Burns on my phone and I thought to myself.

• 21:15Steven Rinella?

  Bears the little dead chip babies.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  In in what world is something that I produced? Like what, like some piece of content, when what world does Ken Burns watch that? Like, that's a wild thing to me.

• 21:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so the only thing he's ever watched that he made. Was you stealing his idea.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  And now I found out he's also read one of my texts.

• 21:41Steven Rinella?

  Someday, he's gonna hear something else you did and he's like, why do I know that name?

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 21:46Steven Rinella?

  He's gonna search back through.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  That's the son of a bitch who stole my joke.

• 21:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 05

  So anyway, this goes back to last week when we found out, when we found out Colbert had done it, we had, I I thought we had three options. One was to just run it without saying anything. And then I thought, well, people are gonna think we stole their, someone's gonna make the connection and leave a comment and say, hey, Colbert just did this. Second option was to like, do, record a quick disclaimer beforehand and be like, hey, so.

• 22:06Steven Rinella?

  I swear, I came up with this.

• 22:08Speaker 05

  Steal it, uh, but enjoy, I guess. And I didn't want to do that either. So like, the third option was, we just pull it and we'll address it later. So that's what we're doing. I think we should show it. It's better than Colbert's, you can go watch his on your own time. But here's, here's the one that we ran, uh, last week.

• 22:26Speaker 07

  My dearest Bubbles, I write to you from beneath a forest canopy that no longer feels like home. The rainy season has come and gone eight times now since I last held your hand, and still this ruinous conflict shows no signs of relenting. What once seemed a temporary rift among brothers now portends, as the primatologists say, in a permanent fission of our community. The Western Forces Ngogo press on with a ferocity that defies comprehension. Twenty-eight of our number have now fallen, twenty-eight souls. The reports from the front are not fit for juvenile eyes. Chimp genitals torn from their chimp genital places.

• 23:12Speaker 07

  How awful that the opposable thumbs we have been blessed with by our Creator are now used for such unspeakable acts. The men now whisper of infants struck down in their innocence. The white tufts of hair on their rumps will never darken as they typically do among our kind in their fifth year of life. At night, when the moon hangs low over the forests of Kibale, I close my eyes and I am home. I hear the screeches of our brood and I feel your sagittal crest under my elongated fingers. Our family, swinging peacefully amongst the trees in a behavior known as brockiation. In those moments, I imagine that none of this is real.

• 23:57Speaker 07

  I am merely living in a nightmare of war and I shall awake with you lying in the dirt beside me. First Sergeant Knuckles, Third Canopy Regiment, Central Ngogo Forces.

• 24:13Speaker 05

  It really is, it's, it's...

• 24:16Speaker 05

  Listen.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Randall, you deserve a raise.

• 24:20Steven Rinella?

  A big part of being a man is admitting when you're wrong.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  I wasn't wrong.

• 24:25Steven Rinella?

  No, no, I was wrong.

• 24:26Speaker 04

  Oh, oh, okay.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  I like after 24 hours had passed.

• 24:31Steven Rinella?

  No, no, I'm trying to apologize.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  No, no, no, but like I, I felt like after my blood pressure went down 24 hours later, I thought, maybe we should have just done it. Maybe we should have just played it. Maybe we overreacted.

• 24:41Steven Rinella?

  I never thought that you weren't being truthful. I just thought that Ivan was saying to Katie.

• 24:49Steven Rinella?

  When she's like, there's no way they know about that. I'm like, there's no way they don't know about it. And I said, there's a thing with younger people. That you'll come up like someone will come up with an Instagram joke, for instance, or the example I used. Making it April Fool's joke that your company has a product that they don't actually have.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:08Steven Rinella?

  Someone did that. It was funny. People now feel it's like people are very free and easy. With just doing the joke over and over and over and over, like the new generations don't mind just stealing everything. So I said, I think that they're from like the generation when that's actually okay. And she's like, that's dumb that you think that. But this is all happened very fast. I just, so I never thought that you were fibbing. I thought that you just thought it was okay.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  No, absolutely. That's the thing. I was like horrified by it and just thought the world is ending. I have like a fear in the back of my mind sometimes that like. There's, you know, like that, that unintentionally, you know, you get.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  Something like this happens and you're just like, this is my worst nightmare.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  So thanks for, thanks for standing by us and uh. Thanks to the internet for all the good facts about chimpanzees that I learned while researching that. I just wanted to search for like fun things about infant chimpanzees.

• 26:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you really mixed the vegetables with the meat on that one.

• 26:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I learned about the, the rump of the, the tuft of fur, you know, and.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Did, uh, did Katie think it was weird that you thought that that was a thing? That, that the, the new generation will just repeat the same joke or the fact that.

• 26:31Steven Rinella?

  No, she got, she understood that it's okay to steal jokes. And if someone has a funny joke on internet, like if you're like. Me every time I hear whatever.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 26:41Steven Rinella?

  And then everybody's like, hey, I'm gonna do that too. She recognizes that that's the thing that you used to not do, but people do now.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:48Steven Rinella?

  Like the people steal stuff now in a way that they don't even feel guilty about it.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  And I don't even think it's stealing. I think that like what the kids do now so often is there's a trend and like if you don't do your version of that trend and post it like you're not in the game.

• 27:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but you're stealing other people's jokes.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  I don't know if it's a stealing. I think it's a participation.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Like you have to do it.

• 27:11Steven Rinella?

  The auction house of oddities is coming back up.

• 27:16Steven Rinella?

  In military families, service is more than a job, it's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. Every successful hunt eventually leads to the workbench or the kitchen counter. The deer is broken down, the meat is trimmed, and it's time to grind burger, make sausage, prepare jerky, and package everything for the freezer.

• 27:59Steven Rinella?

  It's an important part of the field to table process. L E M Products makes the equipment designed to help you get the job done. From big bite grinders, which are phenomenal, and sausage stuffers, to slicers, dehydrators, vacuum sealers, and more, L E M offers professional-grade equipment built for home meat processing. For more than 30 years, L E M has been helping hunters, anglers, and field-to-table enthusiasts process and preserve their harvest with confidence. Visit lemproducts.com and use promo code STEVE15 to get 15% off plus free shipping. That's lemproducts.com promo code STEVE15.

• 28:44Steven Rinella?

  L E M, built for the work, there for the journey. Cold mornings spent outside and long days of hard work can really take a toll on your hands. Whether you're outside cleaning fish, digging around in your garden, or grinding through a long day of your day job, your hands take a beating. That is why. O'Keefe's Working Hands Hand Cream is an essential part of any daily routine. It provides guaranteed relief for extremely dry, cracked hands with a concentrated, unscented formula designed to deliver serious hydration where it's needed most. Here's the best thing about this stuff. It doesn't leave your hands all greasy. I've been using it. It's like I've always looked for sort of the right hand cream. My hands get kind of cooked at our place up in Alaska for some reason. This

• 29:27Steven Rinella?

  stuff, you put it on and your hands are ready to work. Your hands are not greasy. They're not slippery. It works really good. A little goes a long way. Making O'Keefe's Working Hands Hand Cream effective, dependable, and economical. For hands that work hard every day, it's great to have something that works hard for them. O'Keefe's Working Hands. It really does really work. Keep your hands hydrated, comfortable, and smooth all season long. Visit O'Keefe's company.com. That's O-K-E-E-F-F-E-S company.com for guaranteed relief. O'Keefe's Working Hands. It works for real. The Auction House of Oddities is gonna be very good this time around.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  Could have been better.

• 30:09Steven Rinella?

  What would happen?

• 30:10Speaker 03

  That raccoon.

• 30:11Steven Rinella?

  Oh, almost. The Auction House of Oddities is almost great. We had a guy in Pennsylvania find a albino raccoon.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Roadkill.

• 30:21Steven Rinella?

  Roadkill. On the side of the road. He reports to Brody. Hey, there's a pure white raccoon dead on the road. Brody's like, grab it. We'll use it for the Auction House of Oddities. The guy then lets eight hours pass. Eighty degrees laying on the asphalt. By the time it gets to our guys, it's got maggots coming out of it. So that's not in the auction house. But here's an interesting thing that is in the auction house. My old man had a, I think it was an 89 Ford F-150. When he died, I drove it for a while. Then I sold it to my buddy Matt Droste, who I had no idea is still driving that thing. He's done with it. We just bought it from him.

• 31:06Steven Rinella?

  We're gonna, we're gonna have an auction item called Steve's dad's shitty old truck filled with great new hunting gear.

• 31:16Steven Rinella?

  We're gonna fill that truck full of hunting gear, new, brand new hunting gear. And Mark Kenyon's gonna drive it to your house.

• 31:23Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 31:24Steven Rinella?

  Did I say how much he bought it for? Wish I would have done that. Can you bleep out when I said how much he bought it for?

• 31:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll make a note. Are you gonna do a little tune up and paint job on that thing?

• 31:33Steven Rinella?

  Already been done, not paint. Already tuned up, tuned up. I have photos of me and the old man doing grip and grins with rough grouse on the tailgate. It's like, yeah, that's in the auction house. What's not the auction house is our punt guns. We're selling that on the same auction we bought it from.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Is it a stick or an automatic?

• 31:51Steven Rinella?

  Auto loader. I'll tell you something, my second date with my wife, that truck.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Single bench seat?

• 31:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 32:00Steven Rinella?

  No, it's got extended cab.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  Oh, it does. I'm looking at pictures, I don't see the extended cab.

• 32:04Steven Rinella?

  It's got an extended cab. You call me a liar?

• 32:06Speaker 03

  No, I'm just seeing, I'm telling you what I'm looking at.

• 32:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh, it doesn't have an extended cab?

• 32:10Speaker 03

  The ones I see.

• 32:11Steven Rinella?

  No, you're looking at my old man's?

• 32:12Speaker 03

  No, I'm looking at pictures of eighty nine Ford F-150s.

• 32:16Steven Rinella?

  Green?

• 32:18Steven Rinella?

  Was.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  What, like, we're gonna stuff it full of?

• 32:25Steven Rinella?

  Hunting gear.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, all of our, all the stuff that's under the media umbrella or way more?

• 32:30Steven Rinella?

  Well, we're gonna, Mark's gonna dig deeper than that.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  You might want to put a few fifty five gallon drums of gasoline.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, maybe a.

• 32:37Steven Rinella?

  Maybe we'll put a gallon of drug, drug of fuel in there.

• 32:39Speaker 04

  Couple jugs of motor oil.

• 32:40Steven Rinella?

  And Mark's gonna drive it to your house. This is a great auction item. We got tons of auction items in the auction house this year. It's gonna be a great auction. Trying to think of some other highlights from that thing. Oh, when we redid the new studio, all the leftover barn board, we got a one hundred and fifty horsepower Honda outboard with about three hours on it. That's going in the auction house.

• 33:06Steven Rinella?

  You got to pay shipping. It's palletized. You just got to pay shipping. We'll ship it to you.

• 33:13Steven Rinella?

  It's gonna be, it's gonna be hot. Uh, we gotta keep moving. Brody?

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Oh, my kid, my little kid got his first gobbler this past weekend. Yeah. Um, speaking of Jake Gribb.

• 33:25Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:25Speaker 03

  He's got a little, little, small chunk of land in central Montana that we went out and hunted and, uh, Steve told me there was never any birds there.

• 33:34Steven Rinella?

  That's not what I said. I killed a bird there.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  I'm just, you were like, it's the kind of place that doesn't have birds regularly.

• 33:40Steven Rinella?

  But that said.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  It's he's.

• 33:42Steven Rinella?

  But they might be on the neighbors.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Anyway.

• 33:46Steven Rinella?

  When I got one there, we called it off the neighbors. I said, there might not be one on it.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 33:51Steven Rinella?

  But there might be one on the neighbors.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Anyway, he got one after.

• 33:55Steven Rinella?

  Is that of bad?

• 33:57Speaker 03

  I told him the same thing.

• 33:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  Um, we had a long morning of like, listening to turkeys and not killing them. No, they were close. They just wouldn't cross the creek. So we had to do a big loop and get around them and we got in, got into their zone and, uh, it was very strange cause like, we, I could hear one strutting, like spitting and stuff, drumming. Like could not see him and he was like, kind of behind us and I didn't want to turn. Anyway, we made another little move. And where that bird was, the grass was like, almost hip high, very thick grass, like, kind of stuff you don't really see turkeys like moving around in.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  And then like six inches of neck and head pop up out of that grass and that was that. But the highlight of the trip was.

• 34:48Steven Rinella?

  Did he four ten it?

• 34:50Speaker 03

  No, I'm, I got him on the 20. I'm over those four 10s, man. It's like limited capabilities. Um, the highlight was maybe not that. It was the fight we had about seeing a wolf the night before. Um.

• 35:02Steven Rinella?

  Like he saw a wolf and you didn't?

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Well, it wa, it was a coyote, a very white fluffy coyote. He was, and we got in a big fight because he would not believe that it was not a wolf.

• 35:13Steven Rinella?

  Did you make him cry?

• 35:14Speaker 03

  No.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Anyway.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Steve said that you were angry about getting that, uh, boy a turkey.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  What do you mean?

• 35:23Steven Rinella?

  You had a passion.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  You're so fired up.

• 35:26Steven Rinella?

  You had a passion.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  Here's the thing, it's like.

• 35:28Steven Rinella?

  It was, I have to.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  I, I do because he, he didn't get one last year, which is his first available year to do so.

• 35:35Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  And like, both of my boys are playing baseball and I'm training for that race that Steve doesn't want to talk about. And I'm like, dudes, you guys have limited availability. Like, we gotta make it happen. So it was perfect. We got our chance.

• 35:49Steven Rinella?

  You got it done.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:51Steven Rinella?

  Uh, joined now by, uh, we're joined remotely with Brian Lynn, VP of Marketing and Communications with the Sportsman's Alliance. If you're not aware of Sportsman's Alliance, it's a very good organization that does a lot to, uh, defend, protect, hunter rights, trapper rights. Like you have different,

• 36:16Steven Rinella?

  different organizations do different things. Like you have a lot of conservation organizations that do stuff to preserve habitat. They do wildlife work. Sportsman's Alliance does a lot of work to, to defend your rights as a hunter, as a fisherman, um, from attacks coming from the animal rights world and other things. And just also, just kind of just generally making sure that sportsman interests are being represented on the political, in the political sphere. And he's here to talk to us about something we've alluded to a bunch over the years. Um, is what exactly, what in the world is going on with the state of Washington's game commission?

• 36:59Steven Rinella?

  And why has there been so much distressing news coming out of the state of Washington? Such as that they lost their spring bear season, um, back in 21, that there's new talk of, uh, bumping the start of the fall bear season because of this sort of fictitious idea that there's conflict in Washington between wildlife viewers and bear hunters, which is, is not a true thing. So, over to Brian. Uh, thanks for joining us, man.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  You betcha. Happy to be here.

• 37:38Steven Rinella?

  So, tell us real quick, like a high level, like, why is there so much, um?

• 37:45Steven Rinella?

  Why is there so much talk about Washington's game commission? Like, what's going on with Washington's game commission? Why have we been talking about this for four years, it seems?

• 37:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's been longer than four years. It's been about six now. And it all goes back to Jay Inslee, our former governor. He and his wife were, this was their pet project is to dismantle the game commission and bring in the animal rights movement and let them run things here. And he did years and years worth of planting those seeds. And this is what we're reaping.

• 38:19Steven Rinella?

  And so what are some of the things that, what are some of the things that happened that have led to the current situation where we actually have some of these commissioners being investigated for a host of, I don't think it's, um, maybe you can correct me. I don't think it's criminal activity, but it's definitely malfeasance and, and, um, you know, a mild level of corruption, at least.

• 38:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, I would push it beyond a mild level. It's, uh, there's definite corruption and collusion going on with the animal rights movement. We have the documents. We have the, we've put them out there. It's on the public page out there that we have. Uh, there's even potential felonies being committed by the former chairman, or chairwoman of the commission about deleting records, uh, text messages between commissioners. We, we put out there that they violated the Open Meetings Act in Washington, uh, by Daisy chaining emails together and basically coming up with a game plan on how game commission meetings are going to run, who's going to introduce what, uh, where everybody stands

• 39:24Speaker 07

  on the vote while leaving other game commissioners out. They don't do it all on one email. That would be a quorum, but they'll do it with, uh, you know, three or four, and then forward it on to another one and say, here's the plan.

• 39:40Steven Rinella?

  How many game commissioners does Washington have?

• 39:43Speaker 07

  They have nine.

• 39:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And how many were there to represent the animal rights or the, how many were there to represent the animal rights movement or the anti-hunting movement? Like, what was the split?

• 39:54Speaker 07

  Uh, well, right now it's well, when it all happened, when this all went down, spring bear kind of was the impetus for it all. And at the time, there was only eight on, on the commission.

• 40:08Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 40:08Speaker 07

  And the spring bear hunt is a special regulation hunt that had to be approved every year. When they voted on it, it was a four-four split. Therefore, it didn't pass. It wasn't approved.

• 40:21Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 40:22Speaker 07

  That's why it was canceled. It didn't actually get canceled. It just didn't get reinstated.

• 40:27Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 40:28Speaker 07

  And that's what kind of kicked it all off. Fast forward from there about a year, and they wanted to make that permanent. Well, by that time, Jay Inslee had put people back into place and reappointed or not reappointed. And it's about, it was about a five-four split then. And that's what it went into was, uh, they made a permanent change to cancel it about a year after that first initial pass. And so now it's canceled unless there's a biological reason. And they try to make this weird distinction between uh, recreation and wildlife management, which is, if you know, you know, everybody looks at that and is like, what are you talking about? Um.

• 41:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that, we, we reported on that last week, or I talked about that at length last week, where they put their, this, this idea that they're saying

• 41:17Steven Rinella?

  there's no demonstrated management need, meaning they're saying there's no need to hunt black bears. I would say, but there's no need to fish walleye.

• 41:32Speaker 07

  I would even argue that there is.

• 41:34Steven Rinella?

  To hunt turkeys, like, that, that's not the, that's not the standard that a wildlife species needs to hold up to. It's like, we, we only hunt things that are deleterious.

• 41:45Speaker 07

  No, and and even this, the spring bear hunt actually even breaks that idea even more because the whole piece of it, why they held it for the major reason, yes, recreation, but the biggest piece, it was only available in like three units, three areas, and that's where timber harvest took place because the bears were waking up and shredding the trees, up to like seventy-five trees a day, I think they were shredding. And so there's a need, there's an economic need, there's a resource need right there, if that's the argument.

• 42:19Steven Rinella?

  Got it, got it. So, tell me some of the things that the commissioners were doing around, like, like I've seen references to destruction of government property, of having basically side meetings outside of the formal meetings, removing, uh, public, removing public input, planning on disregarding public input. Can you get us, hit us with a couple of examples?

• 42:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, they're, they, they were working, I mean, even, they were working behind the scenes, communicating with each other, and working with, uh, Washington Wildlife First, which is an offshoot of Wildlife for All, and their whole purpose is to cause this disruption and to change, uh, game commissions nationwide to be quote unquote more representative and, uh, get other people's interest and use basically the popular vote, uh, to, to run game management. And so they would collude, they would, they had a list of, uh, commissioners when they were filling empty seats that they wanted in the place, in place, ones they

• 43:28Speaker 07

  didn't, ones they'd put out there for decoys, uh, they colluded with each other on votes and, uh, and, yeah, they, they were just basically anything and everything to do with advancing their ideology, they were pushing. They would even say, this is an ethics issue for me, I don't care, I don't like it, what the science says, it doesn't matter. Melanie Rowland said that.

• 43:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and you guys put out, uh, you, you guys put out some information where the commissioners will be discussing official business on official emails, and they would literally just say, let's take this over. And then take commissioned business over to their private emails.

• 44:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. And they were, they were told, I mean, the Noel memo came out and they were told not to use private emails. I think, uh, Lorna Smith was even using her husband's emails. So you're using private emails, you're using your spouse's emails. You're discussing official business offline, uh, in chat rooms, you know, over text messages, phone calls, whatever. This is not how good government operates. I mean, you can even step back in Washington state and say, this isn't even about spring bear hunting. We have appealed to our PRA lawsuit, you know, to, to the appellate court.

• 44:48Speaker 07

  If it's, if this standard of government is upheld, all transparency and accountability in Washington is gone. Like, good government is shot because the ruling in our case was as long as they give you a couple of records and tell you every three to nine months that they're still working on it, they can take as long as they want to, to give you any public record request. In our case, it would have taken 5,000 years to get all of our records.

• 45:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I remember, I remember reading that at the, yeah, at their proposed rate, yeah, you'd have been 5,000 years to get the record. And then frankly, like a lot of the, a lot of the records are gone, right? Like, no one's ever gonna see them.

• 45:26Speaker 07

  I mean, we don't know, I guess. That's what happens when you can't get into it, you know? And again, the Noel memo showed that they were, uh, Lorna and Melanie especially were delaying things, pretending they couldn't find it, didn't know how to search their emails, couldn't look this up or that up, had deleted it. Oh, that's destruction of property. Oh, let me find it then. Then they found it.

• 45:50Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 45:50Speaker 07

  But when the animal rights movement would put in a PRA request, they were on it, just like that. Got it within days. For us, it took weeks and months.

• 46:00Steven Rinella?

  So what's the next thing that's gonna happen here?

• 46:03Speaker 07

  Oh, there's a, there's a lot going on. Like, that's all what's happened. We have the PRA lawsuit that's going to appeal. The Noel memo that came out, you know, kind of last fall or, or so, that, that popped out. Well, they didn't give that to us in discovery when we filed our PRA lawsuit. So we filed sanctions against the department for doing that. And that hearing was moved from May 1st to, I'm not sure when it got kicked to, but that got moved back. So got those two lawsuits. Washington Wildlife First and Lorna Smith, who's on the commission, have filed a first, first amendment

• 46:44Speaker 07

  federal lawsuit against Kelly Susswind and Deputy Director Amy Windro for first amendment violations. And saying that they chilled her speech and silenced her, which I don't know what they silenced because she hasn't quit talking in the five years she's been on there. And, you know, that they're intimidating her. When our records show the exact opposite, she was bullying staff. And, you know, there was people trying to stick up for the staff. So they have that lawsuit going on. They've also sued Washington Wildlife First, has also sued the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife over

• 47:25Speaker 07

  their game management plan. Sportsman's Alliance just stepped in as an intervenor to make sure when that goes to trial and there's discussions, that sportsmen are represented. It's not just the department in Washington Wildlife First doing this. We're gonna watch out, make sure that hunters' interests are represented.

• 47:44Steven Rinella?

  And then where does, what's your level of optimism about the commission getting back,

• 47:53Steven Rinella?

  the commission getting back into like a firm footing where it's gonna do a better job of managing wildlife as a renewable natural resource?

• 48:03Speaker 07

  That depends wholly upon Governor Bob Ferguson. You know, if it was Jay Inslee, I'd say zero.

• 48:10Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 48:10Speaker 07

  But Ferguson, he pulled back to, you know, 11:59, 11 hour and 59 second, be right before Inslee left, he appointed two fish and game commissioners who would have really tilted the balance. Ferguson, to his credit, came in, kicked those guys to the curb, put in two new ones who are fair and balanced and good and, and whatever. They, they listened to both sides.

• 48:38Speaker 07

  So we'll see. The investigation has been taking place. There's been an internal investigation going on for nine months now. It was due, well, it got extended four times, was hit the governor's desk April 13th. And so the rumor is that it got sent back for revisions. I don't know what that means. So supposedly sometime in mid to late May, that internal investigation is supposed to come out. And we'll see what Governor Ferguson does. Hopefully he removes at the minimum Lorna Smith and Melanie Rowland. And we'll see what happens with Barbara Baker and John Lemkell.

• 49:20Speaker 07

  But if we can get those four who have colluded and done other things off of there and just put people in there who understand and want to see wildlife do well and balance it all between the different competing forces, we'd be okay. But we'll see.

• 49:38Steven Rinella?

  All right, man. Thank you for coming on and talking about it.

• 49:41Speaker 07

  You bet.

• 49:42Steven Rinella?

  Brian Lynn, VP of Marketing Communications at Sportsman's Alliance. If you want to find out more about Sportsman's Alliance, you can find them online and see about the different ways they engage on your behalf all around the country. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.

• 49:55Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 49:57Steven Rinella?

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• 50:39Steven Rinella?

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• 51:23Steven Rinella?

  O'Keefe's Working Hands. It really does really work. Keep your hands hydrated, comfortable, and smooth all season long. Visit okeffescompany.com, that's O-K-E-E-F-F-E-S company.com for guaranteed relief. O'Keefe's Working Hands, it works for real. If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. That way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off, and you're back to being good as new.

• 52:08Steven Rinella?

  I'm telling you, if you've got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com.

• 52:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay, uh, oh, Phil, can we pull that video up real quick? Uh, yeah. So here's a video everybody's seen a thousand times. Um, it's, you might have to fast forward it. This is like, if you, on the news, if you've seen the video of the, of the would be political assassin who came into the White House Correspondents Dinner? So I watched this video four or five times. I'm exaggerating. I watched it three times. I watched it three times without ever realizing what I was looking at. Then a, a, a recent podcast guest texted me. If, if you listen to the show, we recently had on a canine handler, an LAP, he trains,

• 53:03Steven Rinella?

  uh, apprehension dogs and other kinds of canine unit dogs for police departments. He was just on the podcast. This video comes out of the guy of the would be assassin barging in to, you know, yank it up? Oh, yep.

• 53:21Steven Rinella?

  Breaking in through security. And the guy's like, watch this. The canine handler isn't trusting the dog's instinct.

• 53:33Steven Rinella?

  And if you see this.

• 53:34Speaker 06

  It's crazy.

• 53:35Steven Rinella?

  This, when that suspect, he, he comes in, he's trying to find his way in.

• 53:42Steven Rinella?

  Here he comes to and he fires at one of the Secret Service guys with a shotgun. When that guy walks by, you see him walk by in the back, background? He has a canine.

• 53:53Steven Rinella?

  Like basically with its nose in his back pocket and the handler is just walking along with the dog and the dog's like, this guy, this guy, this guy. And the dude's just like missing it. Go back and play it.

• 54:08Steven Rinella?

  Watch, there, that's the suspect. Yep. Now watch that dog. That dog's like, hey, him, him, him. It could have cost that dude his life.

• 54:16Speaker 06

  And then his handler walks him back and then two seconds later.

• 54:20Steven Rinella?

  Yep, the dog's like, no, no, check this out, check this out, check this out. The dog's like, check it out.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  The handler's looking in there.

• 54:26Speaker 06

  Two seconds later, the guy emerges.

• 54:29Steven Rinella?

  Then the guy busts out of there with a shotgun. Isn't that wild? I would have never noticed that.

• 54:32Speaker 04

  And the, I guess like the, the dog is going off fear or, or.

• 54:38Steven Rinella?

  No, he said that's a, he says it's a, he goes, he's, he's not sure, but he said almost certainly it's a bomb dog.

• 54:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:45Steven Rinella?

  And he's smelling certain like, he's, he's like vapor trailing residues and gunpowder. But the interesting thing is, everybody there is armed. So it's kind of funny that the dog is like, no, no, him, him, him.

• 54:55Speaker 04

  That's what I thought was weird. It's like, yeah.

• 54:57Steven Rinella?

  But the dog is like glued to the guy. Isn't that wild?

• 55:00Speaker 06

  It's crazy because two seconds later, he just emerges.

• 55:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, two seconds later, there he is, pulls, pulls his gun out. The dog's like, hey, check him out.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  That handler was looking at something longer.

• 55:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  Like he was interested in something in that room, but then.

• 55:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he said, the guy says, I feel like he was slow to pick up the cue. He was slow to pick up the cue. Cause his thing was, the guessing was, you might doubt, he had a lot of examples of where the dog's like, no, that's it. But people, people miss it. Meaning a dog comes into your room and he goes to a corner of a room and he hangs out. But you don't realize that what he's talking about is the suspects in the drop ceiling. He's like, he's like, the dog's not wrong. It's just, right? The dog's like, no, right here. Here's a spot. Cause the dog can't be like in the drop ceiling. But the dogs, and people look and be like, oh, there's nothing in here.

• 55:49Steven Rinella?

  You know, so he's just talking about like knowing your dog so well that, that you know what he's getting at.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, you see it, this is a lot different, but you see it even with hunting dogs, like bird dogs. When they like get birdie and you're like, ah, there's nothing there and you don't trust.

• 56:05Speaker 04

  Or when your dog goes and sits by the door and you're like, he just went out. There's no way he needs to take a shit again. And then five minutes later, you have a mess.

• 56:15Steven Rinella?

  Ted Turner died, um,

• 56:18Steven Rinella?

  fourth largest landowner.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  Just down the road here.

• 56:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So depending on how his will worked.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  It's a lot of land.

• 56:27Steven Rinella?

  His heir.

• 56:30Steven Rinella?

  It could be that who's number five?

• 56:34Steven Rinella?

  Um, it could be that.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  Oh, you're saying if it gets broken up somehow, he'll be.

• 56:43Steven Rinella?

  Number one landowner in America, Stan Kronke. Sportsman Channel, outdoor channel, right? Stan Kronke, number one land at 2,700,000 acres. The Emerson family, 2,440,000 acres. John Malone, 2,200,000 acres.

• 57:03Steven Rinella?

  Ted Turner. 2 million acres. The Reed family, 1,615,000 acres is number five. So there could be a little disturbance. This article just came out the other day. There could be a little disturbance in the force here.

• 57:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was asking earlier, I want to know, like, if he's got, because he's, you know, conservation minded, whether you like him or not.

• 57:26Steven Rinella?

  Very controversial figure.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  Whether he like, had it written up so that land remains.

• 57:34Steven Rinella?

  I don't know.

• 57:34Speaker 03

  As a conservation trust or whatever.

• 57:36Steven Rinella?

  There's no way it will not because that was of high priority to him. Controversial figure. Had a lot of lady troubles and whatnot, but a big conservationist.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 57:45Steven Rinella?

  When you're at Jordan Budd's place, you're looking over at one of his properties.

• 57:48Speaker 03

  I've never been there.

• 57:50Steven Rinella?

  You've never been to Jordan's?

• 57:51Speaker 03

  No.

• 57:51Steven Rinella?

  Her neighbor, of, of, of the 2 million blankety blank acres the dude owns, some of it is next to Jordan Budd's.

• 57:58Speaker 03

  Neighbor's with him.

• 57:59Steven Rinella?

  What's that?

• 57:59Speaker 03

  Corinne's neighbor's with him.

• 58:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, a couple of weekends ago, uh, his bison herd was like just right behind River Road. They were all hanging out. Pretty cute.

• 58:09Steven Rinella?

  There you go.

• 58:10Speaker 06

  Hundreds of them.

• 58:11Steven Rinella?

  Randall?

• 58:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a story. It's been in the headlines the past week or two. Idaho just spent about two years working through one of the most comprehensive overhauls of hunting technology regulation across the country.

• 58:29Steven Rinella?

  That's good.

• 58:30Speaker 04

  And so last month, Governor Little signed HB 939 into law. And that all got started with a public process. I think that started in 2024 with a working group made up of hunters, conservationists, wildlife managers, who then produced a set of recommendations to the Fish and Game Commission. And then that, through a bunch of political input and all this stuff, they decided that that needed to be laws rather than just regs, I guess. So the final law restricts drones, thermal imaging, night vision, and transmitting cell

• 59:12Speaker 04

  cams for hunting and scouting big game and upland birds from August 30th to December 31st each year. There's a carve out for wolves and mountain lions.

• 59:23Steven Rinella?

  Private and public? No, it's got to be just private or just public, right?

• 59:27Speaker 04

  I believe so. And so there's this carve out for these technologies for predator management and for recovery of wounded game. One of the interesting things is that this working group, they were unanimous in their recommendations for drone restrictions. And they were one vote short of unanimity for the recommendations on thermal night vision and cell cams. So like they came to pretty strong conclusions, all the stakeholders, and then the end result is this bill.

• 1:00:03Speaker 04

  For one of the interesting things is Idaho is one of the the last states to um regulate thermals for hunting ungulates. You know, they had obviously restrictions against hunting at night, but um the best of my knowledge, they you could still use a thermal like at at dawn or whatever to to locate animals on the mountain. But that's now out. Drones, there's forty five of fifty states already that have restrictions on drone use. And actually, the the carve out for game recovery kind of puts Idaho and I guess you'd call it more of like a liberal positioning compared to other states that that don't allow drone recovery.

• 1:00:45Steven Rinella?

  Meaning you can put a thermal unit on a drone.

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Steven Rinella?

  And then go be like, well, I'm trying to find the buck I lost.

• 1:00:52Speaker 04

  Right. And so the one of the things with these technology bans, when they have these carve outs, it comes down to what you can prove in court and what the intentions are like as far as if a a conservation officer runs across someone flying a drone. Did they wound a deer? Did they see a deer and then um not get a shot and then use their drone to locate it, right? The same thing for like the wolves. You know, if if if you come across someone who has a thermal in their possession, they say they're wolf hunting. You know, as I understand it from talking to a former Idaho uh game warden yesterday, you know, what you have to do as a as a warden is sort of ask them questions, oh, hey, how's it going? What are you doing?

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  Uh, you know, and and sort of make a circumstantial argument.

• 1:01:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  About what they're using that thermal for, based on where they are, what time of year, what kind of equipment they have, all that stuff. But um, you know, it's good. I think that they're they're being proactive, even if on some of this stuff, they're a little late. But I feel like as a hunting community, there's been kind of a a need for some record reconciliation around all these emergent technologies. Um, and.

• 1:02:09Speaker 04

  It's cool that the working group, I think, too, was was hunters and all different stakeholders, and they were on the same page.

• 1:02:18Steven Rinella?

  They came, yeah, they had a that it wasn't a split.

• 1:02:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:22Steven Rinella?

  Down the middle.

• 1:02:23Speaker 04

  And I think, too, like, a lot of this stuff, you know, when you when you look at the considerations in terms of enforcement and whatever loopholes there are enforcing them, a lot of it will come down to social pressure and hunters sort of agreeing on what's fair chase and what's not, and the fact that the working group was on the same page, I think bodes well for that. So, yeah, I mean, obviously, like, if you look 10, 15 years ago, the idea that you would have real-time camera traffic, keeping track of wildlife in places is sort of hard to fathom. Thermals have come a long way, drones have come a long way, obviously. So there's always kind of a an arms race between enforcement and fair chase principles

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  and whatever technology is coming down the pipe. So in Idaho, they they got they got together and they came to agreement and they got it done.

• 1:03:15Steven Rinella?

  I've I've heard two interesting stories about, one was told to me about drone use for hunting. One was told to me and one I read about. The one that was told me was a guy was saying that they were using they would use drones. This is in a drone legal state. What was a drone legal state? They would use a drone to when they had a target buck, they would use a thermal on a drone to find out where the buck bedded, which would influence how they set up on it. Because once they knew where it was bedded in its bedding area, then they could pick where best to sit to spend the evening. So that's how they were using it. The article I was reading was some guys got busted for tracking a deer with a drone. And when reading the article, neighbors kept saying, these guys

• 1:04:00Steven Rinella?

  have that drone over that buck all the time during hunting seasons, like a buck that a bunch of people knew about. When the game warden came out, they they were doing it when the game warden came out.

• 1:04:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Steven Rinella?

  That was in a drone not legal state and they were sighted and the game word came out and sure enough it's like there's a drone over a wood lot.

• 1:04:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:04:19Steven Rinella?

  And they were like tracking, following this deer around to figure out where it was.

• 1:04:25Speaker 04

  Well, that's, I mean, that's the funny thing is like if you have these carve outs for game recovery and I understand you want to recover animals if you, if you wound them or whatever, but had the warden come out and seen the drone flying, they could have just said, oh yeah, we just got a bad shot on a doe. It just so happens there's this big buck in the area, right?

• 1:04:43Steven Rinella?

  It's tricky, man.

• 1:04:44Speaker 04

  It is.

• 1:04:47Steven Rinella?

  I usually have such certainty about what I'll do if I was emperor of the world.

• 1:04:53Steven Rinella?

  Like I'm supportive of, for instance, I'm supportive of being able to use a dog for recovery.

• 1:04:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59Steven Rinella?

  I don't think that that's, I don't think that that's really a thing that's going to get abused.

• 1:05:06Steven Rinella?

  You know, I, I don't think guys are going to be running deer with dogs.

• 1:05:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:10Steven Rinella?

  In states where it's not allowed and pretending that they're using a dog to track a wounded deer at night. I just like, it's, it's, that's not an issue.

• 1:05:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Steven Rinella?

  I don't believe, I'm very supportive of those rules where you allow a guy to track a dog, to track a wounded deer or the dog. Man, I would have to sit long and hard and think about my thoughts on the drone recovery.

• 1:05:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  What's like the main reason that they're doing this? Like, why do they think that they needed to do this?

• 1:05:41Speaker 04

  I think just, I think just public pressure. You know, I think it's just a talking, I think like, there's a lot of states where, I was just at a, a Boone and Crockett event last summer and that was a main topic of conversation was emergent technologies and fair chase.

• 1:05:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, why not? If you, why not go to like a north facing slope and like, go to a north facing slope and buzz a drone around and be like, oh, the elk are bedded right there.

• 1:06:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and all. I mean, like, plenty of people are gonna do it. I, I already, I already talked to guys, like even guys I'm friendly with, I already talked to guys that, that, that elk hunting, they start a lot earlier now because they just thermal scan.

• 1:06:20Steven Rinella?

  They thermal scan in the morning.

• 1:06:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, and any, anything that tips the balance in terms of efficacy then down the road is going to result, result in reduced opportunity.

• 1:06:29Steven Rinella?

  Latvians, Latvians, all thermal scan.

• 1:06:34Speaker 04

  In Latvia.

• 1:06:35Steven Rinella?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:06:38Steven Rinella?

  Yanni says, in Latvia,

• 1:06:41Steven Rinella?

  you don't like even start hunting till you've done a thermal scan.

• 1:06:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Steven Rinella?

  They like scan the area, be like, nope, next spot.

• 1:06:53Speaker 04

  I mean, I get it. I just.

• 1:06:55Steven Rinella?

  That's why the Russians don't like them.

• 1:07:01Speaker 04

  No comment.

• 1:07:04Speaker 04

  I was just waiting to read the room before I said anything there.

• 1:07:10Steven Rinella?

  Thank you, Randall.

• 1:07:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. Is it?

• 1:07:14Speaker 04

  Okay, segment?

• 1:07:17Steven Rinella?

  What I didn't like is you never really said, like, what are the rules?

• 1:07:21Speaker 04

  Sure did.

• 1:07:22Steven Rinella?

  Did he? Like, what are the rules?

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  Uh, restrict stone thermal imaging, night vision, transmitting trail cameras for hunting and scouting big game in

• 1:07:30Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you didn't know?

• 1:07:31Speaker 04

  August 30th to December 31st.

• 1:07:33Steven Rinella?

  Great job.

• 1:07:34Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:07:34Steven Rinella?

  You said it right off top. I just got confused.

• 1:07:36Speaker 04

  Well, I had it further down, but then I thought I should just get it out of the way up top. Maybe I should have returned to the end.

• 1:07:42Steven Rinella?

  Saved it till it. No, because in classic journalism,

• 1:07:46Steven Rinella?

  all the main pertinent, you load, you top load it with the main pertinent stuff. And then if you want like weird details.

• 1:07:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:53Steven Rinella?

  Like, if you're reading about a politician being in a sex scandal and like they're sending bad text messages. And you're like, well, what was the text message? You'll often find the actual substance of the text messages in the end of the article.

• 1:08:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:06Steven Rinella?

  Right? Because they're sort of like most important to descending importance. So you wind up being like, well, where's the part about what he wrote?

• 1:08:15Steven Rinella?

  And sometimes at the very bottom of the article, what I would be like, well, I'll just put that right up top. Because that's what everybody's wondering.

• 1:08:20Speaker 04

  The lurid.

• 1:08:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, everybody's wondering that.

• 1:08:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Steven Rinella?

  But they'd be like, well, that's of descending importance. So like in traditional newspaper journalism, it's like the main thing is here's the rules. Here's the new rules.

• 1:08:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Steven Rinella?

  And as you go down, it'd be like, here's how they put the group together and here's their findings.

• 1:08:37Speaker 05

  These days, they want you to scroll past as many ads as possible before you get to the thing you want to see.

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  I'm gonna try to apply that in my segment.

• 1:08:43Steven Rinella?

  Do it. You're gonna go old school journalism or like?

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  Uh, old school.

• 1:08:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Steven Rinella?

  Uh, okay, go ahead, Yanni.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, my turn?

• 1:08:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, or I can, I can, I can talk about my thing.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  Oh, I'll just wait. Yeah, I'm fine going.

• 1:08:59Steven Rinella?

  Hit it, man.

• 1:09:00Speaker 02

  My dad sent us an article. Michigan lawmakers made fun last ditch effort to save whitefish. I was like, oh, that's interesting. Started digging into it. My God, those poor whitefish.

• 1:09:13Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  Like, bad, bad, bad, bad.

• 1:09:18Steven Rinella?

  This is a 225 year old story or so.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know what caused the, the declines prior to the eighties. Do you know?

• 1:09:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Oh, well, please speak to that.

• 1:09:30Steven Rinella?

  The biggest, the, the most cataclysmic thing to happen to, to a lot of these native Great Lakes species is during the logging era.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:09:40Steven Rinella?

  When they were making, when they were booming all of the logs. So when they came in and logged the Great Lakes.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:09:50Steven Rinella?

  They would boom all those logs out in the water.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:09:53Steven Rinella?

  And they would shed their bark.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 1:09:55Steven Rinella?

  And so all the bays, the river mouths, the spawning stuff was buried in sometimes 10 feet of bark.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  Then later came industrial pollution.

• 1:10:09Steven Rinella?

  And, uh, that was a big early hit, industrial pollutants, and then the non-natives.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  Right. So the non-natives, this is kind of where I'm going to pick up. Uh, zebra mussels and quagga mussels, both kind of came in the same, uh, period of time, eighties, uh, mid eighties, one quagga mussels, late eighties. I guess let me back, back up. So the slash ditch effort that I read about, i- it's a good, uh, website. If, if anybody wants to read more, these guys have really covered this for years now, um, and done a good job. It's called, uh, bridgemichigan.com. Really, really did an excellent job covering all this stuff. But, uh, the Michigan State Senate is, is trying to get some money. An appropriations bill was right now, they just have like a placeholder amount of like a hundred bucks. And like, if it goes through or it goes farther, they'll like actually put a number to it.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  And something I, one number I heard is like 50 million over the next 10 years. So they're looking for a lot of money to do some, to do some research on this. Um. Research and their idea of how to save them now, or at least part of it. Cause there's, I guess there's specific strains within the Great Lakes that are doing uh worse than others. And they're thinking of actually taking them out and then rearing them in hatcheries and then being able to hold on to some stock. To then be able to repopulate the Great Lakes once. The issue that I'm going to tell you about now is taken care of, which is the mussels.

• 1:11:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like a, like a seed bank.

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:39Steven Rinella?

  Like the same way you'd put, you'd store seeds in a cave. I think the seed bank is in Norway. The global seed bank.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  Sounds like a good place.

• 1:11:48Steven Rinella?

  It's somewhere around there. Anyways, that you'd store these propagate and store these fish.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:55Steven Rinella?

  For later.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  So the mussels that are the big problem right now. They're, uh, one guy I talked to pretty much said that if it's not sand. And it's in less than 50 feet of water. And here on or Michigan, it's probably got a muscle on it.

• 1:12:13Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  And not like a muscle, but covering like it's a coating of mussels. What these mussels do is that they filter the entire volume of Lake Huron, Lake Michigan every two weeks.

• 1:12:27Speaker 06

  Geez.

• 1:12:27Steven Rinella?

  That's incredible.

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  It's incredible to think of it that way, right? And what they're doing when they're filtering, they're feeding on phytoplankton. And then all the other little microorganisms that would then eat phytoplankton don't have anything to eat. So you're basically like cutting out the bottom of the food web, right? Or the bottom of the food chain.

• 1:12:45Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  And stuff just can't move forward from there, right? So when, so the whitefish have two issues with that. One is if they're spawning grounds or these reefs where they like to spawn, if they're covered in mussels, they can't spawn there. It just doesn't work. And two, because this water is uh filtered and somewhat clarified. It's brighter, right? And so the more sun gets down in there and literally the young fish, when they're just little minnows on the beaches. They're literally getting sunburns that kill them.

• 1:13:19Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Because they're, they should have a more turbid water, right? Um, the Great Lakes, like even now, I don't know if you've noticed it when the last time you went to Lake Michigan, but last time I was there a few years ago. It, it's a.

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  Like a, a very stark difference in the clarity.

• 1:13:36Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  Compared to when we were kids.

• 1:13:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like all the microscopic food out, then the sun penetrates more. Causes more vegetation growth. The, the vegetation decomposes, makes the water oxygen poor. Some fish are winners, like wal- walleyes.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, some, some fish are, it's a. I think it's a little short sighted to look at it tha- that way that, you know, I mean, they're, they're winning right now.

• 1:14:03Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  It seems like it's not something that's sustainable. Um, that was a word that was thrown a lot around with the people that I talked to that just like we, they, we have to start thinking about sustainability if we have, if we want to keep this thing going.

• 1:14:15Steven Rinella?

  I often describe the Great Lakes as they have become. An experimental aquarium.

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  Yes. As one fisheries biologist I talked to, he said, we're trying to basically manage an ocean.

• 1:14:30Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:31Speaker 02

  Like it, it's, it's just, it's a giant piece of, so it's very hard to do is, is what I'm trying to say, you know, what he was trying to say by saying that is that it's just such a giant. Piece of water and you're trying to manage it. And yes, in some ways it's like an experiment, but I think that. It's like you can't really control the experiment.

• 1:14:48Speaker 03

  You also got like anglers who are way more interested in walleye, small mouth bass, salmon, steelhead. Than whitefish at this point, right? Like.

• 1:15:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:00Speaker 03

  The sport fishing demand for whitefish, I think even if they're around, probably wouldn't be that high, you know?

• 1:15:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, th- those lakes, like if you go back, if you go back to the eighteen hundreds, seventeen hundreds, eighteen hundreds. The commercial fisheries in those lakes are things you, like huge sturgeon.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:15:18Steven Rinella?

  Commercial fishery, whitefish, commercial fishery.

• 1:15:22Steven Rinella?

  Like different Ciscos and other whitefish species driving the commercial history and then the big one lake trout. What, what, what, what smoked the lake trout was l wives coming in? Or sorry, not l wives coming in, uh, lamp rays.

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  Lamp rays, yeah.

• 1:15:35Steven Rinella?

  Once lamp rays made it over Niagara Falls, boom.

• 1:15:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Steven Rinella?

  You know, so it's just like things come in, they shuffle everything. They got that whole effort underway to keep the Asiatic carp species out of the Great Lakes.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:48Steven Rinella?

  That like the Chicago sanitation canal has an electric barrier.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:15:52Steven Rinella?

  To try to keep those out. If those jump, I don't know.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  It's, yeah, it's, it's interesting because I think it was like a penny per dollar, dollar spent on those carp. One penny is spent on trying to deal with the mussels. So it's just like, for whatever reason, it's not top of mind.

• 1:16:10Steven Rinella?

  Because I don't know how like

• 1:16:14Steven Rinella?

  short of like they're talking about, so they're talking about banking these whitefish species.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  This is just, yeah, this is one idea.

• 1:16:21Steven Rinella?

  One, yeah, like bank, like bank them. And, and this is not a new idea. You remember that, uh, Mike Rule?

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26Steven Rinella?

  He's a fisheries biologist. So he's gone in like they had big in, in New Mexico, big forest fires where you have unique strains of cutthroat.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:36Steven Rinella?

  And when a big fire goes, you know that when it rains, it's going to send all that silt and it's going to kill the river.

• 1:16:43Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:44Steven Rinella?

  They have gone in ahead of that occurrence to get strains of cutthroats to basically just go hold them.

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:54Steven Rinella?

  Cause you know that you're going to, that the, the whole river's going to get nuked by ash. Let it, let the river clean up. Let the vegetation come back with the thinking that you could then put the fish back, some of them back.

• 1:17:09Steven Rinella?

  When the habitat comes back, or else you're going to lose yet another river's worth of cuts.

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:16Steven Rinella?

  So I, I get the idea. It's like just genetic banking. But the, the, the part where I get skeptical and I don't understand is I don't even know what the rough idea would be to get mussels under control in the Great Lakes, short of that someone develops a virus or a pathogen, but that

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  Which is being discussed.

• 1:17:40Steven Rinella?

  But that trick doesn't get played.

• 1:17:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Playing God can go wrong.

• 1:17:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Cause that's already. So many of the Great Lakes problems are already come from people being like, I got an idea.

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's introduce this fish that'll eat that fish.

• 1:17:56Steven Rinella?

  The common carp, the common carp was intentionally introduced into the Great Lakes when the other, when the native fisheries collapsed. They were like, maybe these guys want to eat carp and they put them in on purpose. And then people just never adopted it as a food source. And now they have a huge carp problem, spend tons of money trying to get rid of carp. And there you can get rid of carp with targeted poisoning. I don't, and I don't know, maybe someone has sort of the basic idea of what you do, but I just don't know how you fix it.

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  Well, a couple of the other things that they're, that they're testing and researching now as far as getting rid of these mussels is,

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  one is a, they're literally, they have a, like they're developing these scraping machines. We'll literally go in and scrape these reefs clean to create, so that they hopefully can have habitat where these whitefish can do their spawning. Scrape and crush. The other thing that's getting, that's getting, thrown out there and messed with and they're researching if it works is suffocating. They're like going down in there with tarps and covering, you know, large areas with tarps. Because they produce carbon dioxide. And so if they can't get that fresh water in there, it literally, it suffocates them.

• 1:19:15Steven Rinella?

  It's like the headache you get when you fall asleep down in your sleeping bag.

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  I, I guess, I haven't had that. I know that it's a thing that you get, but I haven't had that.

• 1:19:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I get like carbon dioxide poisoning.

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, like I, I, so I, I talked to some fisheries biologists. I also talked to a guy that, Pat Durkin and I, um, are fished with when we did the Fur hat ice fishing tour, J J Malvitz. And then the fish processor, Dan Lindahl, who's, they're all in the same area, which is Green Bay. Green Bay is like this, like really weird stronghold where the rest of the lakes have gone down something crazy from 2000 to 24. They went from 1.6 million pounds in 2000. This is like commercial catch of whitefish down to 200,000 in 2024. Well, in that same time period, Green Bay has gone from 100,000 to 800,000.

• 1:20:11Speaker 02

  It's going up.

• 1:20:13Steven Rinella?

  What do they attribute that to?

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  Well, Green Bay has a ton of rivers flowing into it. The Fox, the Menominee, and so that is providing those nutrients.

• 1:20:25Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  That we need. So the fisheries biologist was like, yeah, we basically need to figure out how to either produce that base level of the food web.

• 1:20:36Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:20:36Speaker 02

  Or how to, you know, keep the, you know, mussels from disrupting it, but that's what those fish need, you know? That being said, it's even in Green Bay, it's like they're saying it's on the decline. And again, I didn't know how bad it was, but Dan was like, whitefish in the main lake, in Main Lake, Michigan are all but extinct.

• 1:20:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  It's like.

• 1:20:58Steven Rinella?

  What an amazing fish to you, man. I used to love fishing those things, just like a great eating fish.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04Steven Rinella?

  Beautiful fish.

• 1:21:05Speaker 03

  I know a place here we can go get them.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  So he is a commercial fisherman now, is only catching 20% of his quota. J.J. Malvitz, where the, the sports limit per day is 10, which is what it was when Pat and I were there. He's now recommending to clients, like, look, they don't freeze all that well.

• 1:21:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  Like, take what you only need. Like, how about five, you know, instead of doing 10? So hopefully, everybody was kind of surprised that the DNR hat and dropped. You know, limits over in Michigan, they had really dropped the commercial limits. But according to Danny's, like, a little bit too, too little, too late, because he's like, there's no fish to catch anyways. So dropping commercial limits is not going to do anything at this point. But he wishes that Wisconsin, and especially in that Green Bay area, would, you know, reduce harvests a little bit overall.

• 1:21:59Steven Rinella?

  The caviar on those fish for a while, I'm not sure now, but I had some friends that were native fishermen, and they were doing better on the caviar than the meat. You know what they call that caviar? American gold. Yep, they were exporting it. It's good, man.

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:16Steven Rinella?

  I had a whole tub of it, man. We were dipping Cool Ranch Doritos into that stuff. I had that much of it. Yeah.

• 1:22:25Steven Rinella?

  Not no more.

• 1:22:26Speaker 02

  It's like a king.

• 1:22:28Steven Rinella?

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• 1:23:08Steven Rinella?

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• 1:23:50Steven Rinella?

  For hands that work hard every day, it's great to have something that works hard for them. O'Keefe's Working Hands. It really does really work. Keep your hands hydrated, comfortable, and smooth all season long. Visit o'keefescompany.com. That's O-K-E-E-F-F-E-S company.com for guaranteed relief. O'Keefe's Working Hands. It works for real. If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have in my household, if you go Look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. That way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's

• 1:24:32Steven Rinella?

  fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off, and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com.

• 1:24:54Speaker 04

  I know we have stuff to get to. I have breaking news, though, to my mind.

• 1:24:58Steven Rinella?

  To Turner's back alive?

• 1:24:59Speaker 04

  No. I clicked on this link that Yanni shared about the whitefish, and I saw in the right-hand column, the next article, most read. It says, "After 89 years, Michigan Hunting and Fishing Group is done." And I thought, surely, it's not the Michigan-

• 1:25:14Steven Rinella?

  Michigan Conservation Clubs.

• 1:25:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, they dissolved on Monday. I had no idea. That's-

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Oh, that's sad.

• 1:25:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. We met some of those guys when we were in Ann Arbor.

• 1:25:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's been a while.

• 1:25:23Speaker 02

  I hope we will end on some brighter news. But I did-

• 1:25:26Steven Rinella?

  Well, Club's first is back, baby.

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  I asked everybody, like, what do you, what can you do? Or what do you wish, you know, people could do? And everybody kind of said, "Look, it's about showing that you care." So whether it's like calling, you know, you say, so if you're in Michigan, you know, you want to, you know, tell your state reps to, you know, pass the funding. And I think any Great Lakes state, just like, talk about it and make everybody know of this issue. The Fishers' Biologist said there's a ton of people working on it. NOAA, USGS, tribes, all the state wildlife agencies that touch the lake, a bunch of universities. And so there's people out there working on it. And I think that the more people know, hopefully, the more they care.

• 1:26:11Steven Rinella?

  I have a feeling that every federal agency you just named, when the next budget process is done, they will be just nothing but like a little smoke poof. And that money will be, maybe they'll fight and keep some of it, but most of that money will be stripped.

• 1:26:30Speaker 04

  I think you're right.

• 1:26:31Steven Rinella?

  These dudes and these dudes in DC right now ain't gonna care. They're gonna be like, "Homet- what? Whitefish? Screw that."

• 1:26:40Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  Got to war to fight instead.

• 1:26:45Steven Rinella?

  Club's first is back, baby. Third time I said that. This is okay, so.

• 1:26:53Steven Rinella?

  Big news here out of the breaking news out of the Monteverde site in southern Chile unexplained this whole thing.

• 1:27:01Steven Rinella?

  Or bad news for the Monteverde site in Chile, depending on your perspective. In March 2026, so just recently. Um, a guy that was on the podcast for Todd Serval from University of Wyoming, he's an archaeologist. He published a piece and that there are two premier scientific journals, the two premier scientific journals are nature and science. Okay. They published in science.

• 1:27:29Steven Rinella?

  A paper called a mid hollow, I'll interpret all this, so don't worry if this doesn't make any sense. A mid Holocene age for Monteverde challenges the timeline of human colonization of South America. All right, Phil's gonna pull up some images for me. There is a site. In Chile. Where they have very good roast beef sandwiches with French cut green beans on them. I recommend to anybody that gets down there. There's a site in Chile called Monteverde. We have a map pulled up showing people it's down in it's down in Chilean Patagonia.

• 1:28:07Steven Rinella?

  It sits on at the base of a little peninsula coming out of the Pacific Ocean. So way like pay attention to all this way, way, way south in South America. Getting to the point where you're as far away from Siberia.

• 1:28:25Steven Rinella?

  As you can get in the Western Hemisphere. And we know. That the first humans that entered the new that entered North America came through Siberia. This, this in my mind is not a debatable point. No serious person is debating this. They were Siberians. That came in. So here we have. We thought we had, or we have one of the oldest known sites of human occupation being as far away as you can get from where they entered the continent. The southern tip of South America. Monteverde has a bunch of sites, but there's one site called Monteverde two.

• 1:29:03Steven Rinella?

  We should look at a couple more pictures.

• 1:29:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not sure the order you want these.

• 1:29:06Steven Rinella?

  But I put them in order. This is the Monteverde site. Okay, it's a creek bottom.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  It's fantastic.

• 1:29:12Steven Rinella?

  It's a lush creek bottom in Chilean Patagonia.

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  How far is that from the ocean?

• 1:29:18Steven Rinella?

  Thirty-six miles.

• 1:29:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:29:22Steven Rinella?

  There's an overhead view. Looks like a great place to hang out.

• 1:29:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:26Steven Rinella?

  You could picture getting some ducks there. You could picture getting some trout.

• 1:29:29Speaker 03

  Turkeys, maybe? Not trout.

• 1:29:32Steven Rinella?

  They started digging this site in the 1970s and they found that there were tent structures built there. The tent structures were wrapped in leather. Meaning that they were using leather cordage. They found some remains of Pleistocene megafauna. They found hearths where like they found campfire sites. Okay? They dated it at fourteen thousand five hundred years ago. Okay? Which puts us at one thousand five hundred years earlier than Clovis sites.

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  What's it before? What's the general like margin for error and that kind of dating?

• 1:30:17Steven Rinella?

  Oh, there is one. I'm not sure what those margins are there.

• 1:30:20Speaker 03

  That's outside.

• 1:30:21Steven Rinella?

  What's funny is the margins are, the margins are flexible. Meaning there are areas, there are eras where it's the margin is wide and there are areas where the margin is close, but when you get a bunch of samples and you date a whole bunch of samples, you get tighter and tighter margins. So they were throwing dates here. One thousand five hundred years earlier than Clovis sites. Now Clovis sites, there are many Clovis sites from all over the country. When I talked earlier about like the, the humans that came into North America came out of Siberia. That's like, that, that's scientifically established. No serious person argues that point. Another point that no serious person is going to argue is that there is a Clovis culture. He jumped my next picture.

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  The next one I have is just is the T-shirt.

• 1:31:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, pull it up.

• 1:31:10Speaker 03

  Great.

• 1:31:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay, here's one of our own, very own T-shirts at Meat Eater.

• 1:31:13Speaker 03

  I was wearing this this weekend.

• 1:31:15Steven Rinella?

  The Clovis hunters T-shirt. Those are Clovis projectile points. These Clovis projectile points. Hell, let's go to the next picture.

• 1:31:22Speaker 05

  Is that, I think that that one didn't transfer, Steve. Is that the hand?

• 1:31:26Steven Rinella?

  It's my, it's my house.

• 1:31:28Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, it was in the, the wrong photo format.

• 1:31:30Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:31:30Speaker 05

  I can, I can bring it up a different way, though.

• 1:31:32Steven Rinella?

  Bring it up a different way. Hell.

• 1:31:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:31:33Steven Rinella?

  I'll keep talking.

• 1:31:34Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:31:35Steven Rinella?

  Clovis points have come from all over the country. You got Clovis points from Washington State. You got Clovis points coming out of Florida. You got Clovis points coming out of New York. Clo, the Clovis culture was everywhere. That's a clo, that's a, that's a Clovis point hanging on my wall in my house, drawn by an archaeologist, and that was, that's the actual size of that point. That is a honkin' Clovis point.

• 1:31:59Speaker 05

  Nice job, Phil.

• 1:32:01Steven Rinella?

  Great job, Phil.

• 1:32:02Speaker 05

  Improvis.

• 1:32:02Steven Rinella?

  Working in a bind over there.

• 1:32:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05Steven Rinella?

  Now, we know that we have Clovis sites all over the place. And there's always been this, this, this leading debate in like Ice Age archaeology and anthropology is, did the Clovis culture show up from somewhere?

• 1:32:23Steven Rinella?

  Or was the Clovis culture an American-born phenomenon? Meaning, did Clovis hunters making these Clovis points, these big, these like mammoth hunters, did they walk into the Lower 48 as like a people? With a technology, with a hunting lifestyle? Did they walk in here as them and then explode across the continent? Or was there some trickling of people a long time earlier that came into the continent? And lived here for 2,000 years, 1,000 years? And out of that culture emerged this widespread Clovis culture?

• 1:33:08Steven Rinella?

  Cause after Clovis, you see in the country, like Native American cultures after Clovis split into all these different societies. But it's like this idea that at a time across the whole country was a culture of people that were unified in their technologies. And then over time, they like evolved and split apart and developed all these different ways of living. But at a time, there was like these big game hunters making these big honkin' points and they settled everything. Okay? This debate is called like.

• 1:33:46Steven Rinella?

  This debate would be was there was it Clovis first or was there a pre Clovis culture? And here's why this this Monteverde site is kind of interesting.

• 1:33:59Steven Rinella?

  Ask yourself, what are the odds that you found the actual oldest site ever? There's no way, right? There's no way. So if you find one that's 14,500 years old, what are you missing?

• 1:34:14Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like, we didn't find the first one, and it wouldn't in the first one, the oldest site wouldn't be as far away as you can get from the entry point. Meaning if that is legit, what do we not know about? In terms of who was running around here? And when did they get here? Can you jump to my Alaska images?

• 1:34:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:34Steven Rinella?

  Here, this is here. I am. This is a long time ago. I spent some time up at what would have been the entry point. So this is the Western Brooks Range. This is what would have been the entry point to the first Americans as they entered our continent. As they entered the Western Hemisphere, I'm standing with a French Canadian archaeologist, and we're standing in a tent ring.

• 1:34:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay, flip to the next image.

• 1:35:01Steven Rinella?

  Nope, not Mad Mel Campbell.

• 1:35:03Speaker 04

  We'll get to him.

• 1:35:03Steven Rinella?

  I'll get to him.

• 1:35:04Speaker 04

  Good pose.

• 1:35:05Steven Rinella?

  Here is this arrowhead hunting in the Western Brooks Range is the best possible place to arrowhead hunt because there's no one around to pick anything up. That's a that's a paleo point just laying there.

• 1:35:19Steven Rinella?

  Look at that thing. Look at that thing. And we would walk away.

• 1:35:24Steven Rinella?

  We would walk away.

• 1:35:27Steven Rinella?

  Go to Mad Mel Campbell. This is our helicopter pilot. After I wrote about this, a private investigator reached out to be trying to find that man.

• 1:35:35Speaker 04

  He's got some heavy, he's got some heavy bear.

• 1:35:38Speaker 07

  Ordnance there, it looks like.

• 1:35:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he didn't like bears. So I'd be flying around this dude. I told the story, but he they would take a cargo plane and kick fuel drums out on parachutes because you're so far you can't get a helicopter there. They'd kick fuel drums out on parachutes and parachute field. So we had fuel drums here and there out on the tundra. And me and that dude to land that helicopter and we'd get out and roll those fuel drums back up to the, you know, and then hand pump the gas into the helicopter. And he was scared to get attacked by a bear while he was pumping gas. So that's why he carried that.

• 1:36:11Speaker 07

  It's like a Ruger super red hawk.

• 1:36:14Steven Rinella?

  Yep. Yeah. And a private investigator was like, really trying to find that man. Um.

• 1:36:19Speaker 07

  Any idea what for?

• 1:36:21Steven Rinella?

  I do. Don't care to get into it.

• 1:36:24Speaker 07

  We'll chat afterwards.

• 1:36:27Steven Rinella?

  Of these pre Clovis sites, the archaeologist Todd Searle from University of Wyoming. Um, he has always been a little suspicious. Here he is in this studio. Saying how, how come all of these really old crazy sites, he said, he's explained to me. They're always weird. Why can't anyone find one of these really old pre Clovis sites that is just normal? I said to him, what is a normal site? Here he is back on the walls were white.

• 1:37:05Speaker 07

  And they're normal.

• 1:37:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and they're normal.

• 1:37:08Speaker 07

  It's not weird shit. It's like chip stone around hearth features, butchered animal bone. It's normal stuff. And what we call the street discreet stratigraphic levels, meaning they're just like really clear occupations. If you're to look through them.

• 1:37:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:20Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:37:22Steven Rinella?

  What he's saying is, so you heard him, a normal site. You have hearth features mean campfire features. So you got dateable charcoal. Stone where they're making arrowheads or spear points. You got animal bones and he's saying you have layers that are not disturbed. If you go back to that site that I just had from the Western Brooks range, you're looking at a tent ring.

• 1:37:46Steven Rinella?

  Like you can see the tent ring. Okay, so you have a fairly undisturbed like that's not all buckled under five feet of ground and it's been washed away by a river. Right that that surface right there is like a clean surface that hasn't been jostled around. So what he's talking about is he wants sites where it hasn't been disturbed. You have stratigraphic layers. All right. He went down to this Mesa site, this the Monteverde is not the Mesa, the Mesa sites in Western Brooks, sorry. They just went down and applied a bunch of new dating technologies that guess down to the Monteverde site.

• 1:38:27Steven Rinella?

  Guess what dates he's come back with? And this is advanced techniques published in science.

• 1:38:34Speaker 03

  20,000 years.

• 1:38:37Steven Rinella?

  No, no.

• 1:38:38Speaker 03

  Nine.

• 1:38:39Steven Rinella?

  He's coming back saying it's not a normal site. It's a messed up site. You got a bunch of stuff all mixed up. His dates from Monteverde and I want to back up a point I didn't make about Monteverde. We had one of the leading art, the one of the leading anthropologists on the peopling of the Americas is a guy named David Meltzer. And, and I love him. God bless you, David Meltzer. Meltzer went down with other people down to the Monteverde site and the scientific community put their like stamp of approval on Monteverde. Your kids' history books may have been rewritten based on the Monteverde dates.

• 1:39:14Speaker 03

  Can I ask, is there the people that believe it's that old? Is there exclamation a Kelp Highway theory that?

• 1:39:22Steven Rinella?

  Yes, great point. I should have brought this up. I meant to bring that I think I had my notes, but I skipped it. If you've ever heard us talk about or people talk about a thing called the Kelp Highway, here's what people are talking about.

• 1:39:35Steven Rinella?

  Humans, if humans were here 14,500 years ago, down in Southern Chile, 14,500 years ago, they couldn't have walked in. Because their path would have been blocked by glaciers. You could have been in the Brooks Range. You could have been up and you could have crossed from Siberia and entered Alaska, but you could not have walked south because you would have been blocked by glaciers. So then people had to go like, but they were here because Monteverde. So we know they were here since we know they were here. How did they get here? They had to have taken boats. How could they have survived?

• 1:40:13Steven Rinella?

  Well, the kelp, the band of kelp in these inner coastal marine environments were so rich in fish and shellfish that people up in Japan and the Aleutians and Siberia would have built boats. And they must have just boated the shoreline. And they were up against shorelines that were glaciated, but somehow they were out and they were able to survive off marine resources and make their way south of the ice sheets because we know they were there because we have these really old sites. The Clovis first idea was people showed up the minute the glaciers melted and they walked in. Basically, there was a thing called the ice free corridor. So the theory goes there was ice free corridor.

• 1:40:57Steven Rinella?

  People came down from Alaska, entered the Great Plains, right around Edmonton, Alberta, through a narrow opening in the glaciers and spilled on the Great Plains, rained hell on megafauna, killed all the mammoths, spread around the whole country instantaneously. The richest hunting ground ever discovered by man gradually split apart into all these different cultures and languages. And, and that's the, how the story went. But sites like Monteverde shot it all to hell. And then it entered this idea, they must have boated down. Well, this new thing, and I'm not way, I'm done weighing in on this whole thing. I'm just trying to deliver the facts or I'm just trying to deliver the debate. I'm done weighing in on it. I bought into Clovis first. I bought into the kelp highway.

• 1:41:42Steven Rinella?

  Now I'm done. I don't have any opinions.

• 1:41:47Steven Rinella?

  This new crew, and it wasn't just the University of Wyoming, people from Chile, all over the place. 4,200, they're saying that site isn't 14-5, it's 42 to 82, and it's all mixed up. It's all mixed up.

• 1:42:07Speaker 03

  Meaning it was disturbed.

• 1:42:08Steven Rinella?

  I, I had a great, I thought of it this morning. I was out turning over part of my garden.

• 1:42:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I got the old dirt. I put down compost. I put down grass clippings, and in the spring I turn it. So if you were to go down and dig down 12 inches down in my garden and be like, huh, look at this piece of grass clipping.

• 1:42:33Steven Rinella?

  It's as old as this other stuff laying next to it. Is it? Or did it get turned over the course of thousands of years? It got turned.

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  Floods or whatever.

• 1:42:45Steven Rinella?

  Flooding.

• 1:42:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:46Steven Rinella?

  And then imagine that there was a flood and it washes stuff that doesn't belong there into there. Also, when you get into like, when you get into, and I'm doing a, any archaeologist would, would hate everything I'm saying. I'm just trying to demonstrate some points. I'm not an expert in the field, but picture that out in your yard, you're digging around in your garden and you find some old bone laying there. And you're like, huh, look at that.

• 1:43:15Steven Rinella?

  And you deposited it on the ground. And then later someone comes and finds your gardening area. They find your skin cells all over. And they're like, good God, this man had a mammoth.

• 1:43:29Steven Rinella?

  Here's the mammoth bone right next to his garden tool.

• 1:43:35Steven Rinella?

  And then they date the mammoth bone. Good God, he was using a steel gardening tool 14,000 years ago.

• 1:43:43Speaker 03

  And a cellphone.

• 1:43:45Steven Rinella?

  Meaning stuff just gets mixed up. So in this paper they put out, in, in, in explaining some of the things there is an idea that I don't know, maybe it was reworking.

• 1:43:58Steven Rinella?

  People probably picked up fossils.

• 1:44:02Steven Rinella?

  Like if you were alive 8,000 years ago, would you have thought a mammoth fossil was interesting?

• 1:44:09Steven Rinella?

  And brought it home with you?

• 1:44:11Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:44:13Steven Rinella?

  I don't know.

• 1:44:14Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 1:44:14Steven Rinella?

  I don't know.

• 1:44:16Speaker 04

  It's like when I find a beer bottle from the sixties or seventies.

• 1:44:20Speaker 03

  Or an old thirty odd six shell.

• 1:44:22Steven Rinella?

  I found a really old beer one time and drank it. Remember that, Yanis? I got sick.

• 1:44:25Speaker 02

  It wasn't quite that old, but.

• 1:44:27Speaker 04

  I drank a.

• 1:44:28Steven Rinella?

  It was a roading out of a bank.

• 1:44:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:30Speaker 04

  I drank a White Claw that was unopened at the range cleanup last year.

• 1:44:34Speaker 03

  You guys are gross.

• 1:44:35Speaker 06

  Oh, I remember that.

• 1:44:36Speaker 04

  Terrible mistake.

• 1:44:37Steven Rinella?

  Did you get sick?

• 1:44:38Speaker 04

  I didn't finish it.

• 1:44:40Steven Rinella?

  Anyhow, Clovis first might be back. That's what these guys, if you go back and listen to that episode. These guys were like, I, I, in terms of people coming here fourteen thousand, fifteen thousand, sixteen thousand years ago. They're like, uh, just generally paraphrasing a very complicated conversation. They're generally like.

• 1:45:03Steven Rinella?

  Show me a normal site that's really old. Show me a great site. Why do we have so many great Clovis sites? And everything older is, is wishy washy. Or weird.

• 1:45:21Steven Rinella?

  Now.

• 1:45:22Speaker 02

  I mean, I feel, I feel like they have some explanations for that, just because the older stuff is, the more likely it's. You know.

• 1:45:30Steven Rinella?

  Sure. It's very complicated.

• 1:45:32Speaker 02

  Time, time is rough on stuff.

• 1:45:34Steven Rinella?

  Very, yeah. The older it is, the less likely it's still around. But why do you see such an explosion of sites?

• 1:45:42Steven Rinella?

  At thirteen thousand?

• 1:45:45Steven Rinella?

  All of a sudden, it's like, I don't know. Why are there tons of thirteen thousand year old Clovis sites? But no one can show me a normal fifteen thousand year old site. When there's normal thirteen thousand year old sites all over. Uh, point out, this is the last point I forgot to make it. This picture of us staying by this tent ring. I was invited here by a pre Clovis enthusiast. Named Tony Baker invited me on this Bureau of Land Management survey, cultural survey.

• 1:46:18Steven Rinella?

  He volunteers for this and he was, he spent a, a, a good part of his career. He retired as an oil executive and became obsessed with pre Clovis. He became obsessed with who really were the first Americans. So he was always interested in finding, he thought that someone up here was gonna find, you know, a 25,000 year old site, a 30,000 year old site, something really old. Because it stands to reason, wouldn't the oldest stuff be closest to where you entered?

• 1:46:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:55Steven Rinella?

  The continent.

• 1:46:56Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:46:57Steven Rinella?

  Picture your kids come in the room with muddy shoes. Where is most the mud?

• 1:47:03Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. At the door.

• 1:47:06Steven Rinella?

  It's an imperfect analogy. That's all. Clovis first spag baby.

• 1:47:13Steven Rinella?

  I don't know.

• 1:47:15Speaker 03

  I like it. I like it.

• 1:47:16Steven Rinella?

  I'm done having opinions about it.

• 1:47:18Speaker 03

  Well, I don't believe that.

• 1:47:19Steven Rinella?

  I've been burned too many times.

• 1:47:20Speaker 03

  I don't believe that.

• 1:47:22Speaker 04

  Can't chase the headlines.

• 1:47:23Steven Rinella?

  I'm too global. I was a big Kelp Highway guy. Not like a fool.

• 1:47:27Speaker 03

  But, but why can't it be that the Kelp Highway existed and the other one, like, you know what I'm?

• 1:47:33Steven Rinella?

  The Kelp Highway, without really old sites, the Kelp Highway becomes a lot less interesting.

• 1:47:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm just saying like, couldn't it have happened concurrently? Not that it happened way before, but that the same thing, that some of them went through the middle of the continent and some of them went down the coast.

• 1:47:51Steven Rinella?

  Yanni, before we started recording, was all excited about a woman being the first to win a race. Some race.

• 1:47:59Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:47:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay, there's a thing about being first.

• 1:48:02Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:48:03Steven Rinella?

  I'm interested. Who was the first?

• 1:48:07Speaker 03

  What if it was a tie?

• 1:48:11Speaker 06

  Just like Yanni and Brody running.

• 1:48:14Steven Rinella?

  The first American.

• 1:48:17Steven Rinella?

  And it was probably a little cluster, it was, it was, it, I'm gonna go and say, I'm gonna say a thing that I know to be true. It was not 100 people.

• 1:48:28Speaker 03

  Little family group.

• 1:48:29Steven Rinella?

  It was 30, 20, 30. The first Americans, it was 20 or 30 people.

• 1:48:37Steven Rinella?

  They walked in killing mammoths or they boated in eating clams.

• 1:48:41Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:48:43Speaker 04

  Should we all be so lucky someday?

• 1:48:46Steven Rinella?

  I gotta know. I gotta know.

• 1:48:49Speaker 03

  You're gonna have to wait for that time machine to get built.

• 1:48:52Steven Rinella?

  I want to be with them when they do it.

• 1:48:53Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:48:54Steven Rinella?

  I want to be like, you boys don't even appreciate this. We just crossed into America.

• 1:49:02Steven Rinella?

  Let's crack a champagne.

• 1:49:03Speaker 03

  They didn't know they crossed anywhere.

• 1:49:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:07Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:49:08Steven Rinella?

  This is the last point I'll make about the peopling of the Americas.

• 1:49:14Steven Rinella?

  Generations, generations would have been born and died in what is now the Bering Sea and not known they were going anywhere.

• 1:49:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:49:25Steven Rinella?

  Right? You were born there, you died. Maybe you died.

• 1:49:31Steven Rinella?

  200 miles east or east, southeast of where you were born, maybe. Cause you're always curious, like what's over the next hill.

• 1:49:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:49:40Steven Rinella?

  But you weren't like, Bob, let's go to America.

• 1:49:45Steven Rinella?

  I just got a feeling.

• 1:49:48Steven Rinella?

  They were just being like, it's always better hunting when we go kind of that way.

• 1:49:54Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:49:56Steven Rinella?

  Cause over there, like he's like, just watch, if we go into the next valley, you watch, if there's something there, I bet I can walk up and stab it. But in our valley, shit keeps running away. Cause we've been here for two years. Let's go over there. He's like, sure enough. Look, watch, I'll walk up and stab it. Bob.

• 1:50:14Speaker 03

  Drops.

• 1:50:15Steven Rinella?

  And, and, and like that, like that, people found Chilean Patagonia.

• 1:50:21Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:50:22Steven Rinella?

  Because it's always better over that direction.

• 1:50:25Speaker 03

  Somebody probably said, my dad told me, if you go to the next valley.

• 1:50:29Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:50:30Speaker 03

  You can kill more stuff.

• 1:50:31Steven Rinella?

  Like, you know what dad always said?

• 1:50:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:33Steven Rinella?

  If you can't kill anything, go a ways, south, southeast.

• 1:50:40Steven Rinella?

  He says it's always better.

• 1:50:45Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:50:47Steven Rinella?

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• 1:53:00Steven Rinella?

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• 1:53:13Steven Rinella?

  Thanks for joining the news show.

• 1:53:15Speaker 03

  We're not doing the wildlife crossings?

• 1:53:17Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:18Speaker 03

  You skipped right over me.

• 1:53:19Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:53:19Speaker 03

  I thought you were mad at me or something.

• 1:53:21Steven Rinella?

  No, I skipped it?

• 1:53:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:23Steven Rinella?

  Sorry.

• 1:53:24Speaker 03

  A little ways back.

• 1:53:25Steven Rinella?

  No, I want to hear all about it.

• 1:53:25Speaker 03

  You skipped it way back before Yanis went.

• 1:53:27Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:53:28Steven Rinella?

  Oh, my fault.

• 1:53:29Speaker 02

  That's why I was caught off guard.

• 1:53:30Steven Rinella?

  Oh, it's right there. Twice, sorry. I didn't mean to do that.

• 1:53:32Speaker 03

  So, jump in now?

• 1:53:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:53:34Speaker 03

  All right, it's not the end of the show, guys.

• 1:53:36Steven Rinella?

  No, we'll clean it up.

• 1:53:37Speaker 03

  The, uh...

• 1:53:38Steven Rinella?

  Club's first back, baby.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  Yep. The headline is world's largest wildlife highway bridge crossing in California is nearly complete. That's not where I'm going to start. Um, that's the recent headline. Um, if you jump back to the 1990s, uh, scientists identified Liberty Canyon in western Los Angeles County as a critical wildlife corridor that linked the Santa Monica Mountains to other, other ranges. Um, couple decades pass and there's a lot of concern over habitat fragmentation, especially, um, concerning mountain lions. And that, this is something we've talked about in the past.

• 1:54:21Speaker 03

  Um, the mountain lions in, in Los Angeles County, Southern California.

• 1:54:25Steven Rinella?

  Just pulled up that iconic image of that mountain lion under the Hollywood sign.

• 1:54:29Speaker 03

  Um, they, they, a lot of problems. One of the huge problems was they're getting hit by cars a lot. Um, and in this particular spot, this like pinch point in Liberty Canyon, 300,000 vehicles, uh, daily go through this, this canyon.

• 1:54:48Steven Rinella?

  What?

• 1:54:48Speaker 03

  On Highway 101. Yep.

• 1:54:52Steven Rinella?

  My God.

• 1:54:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:53Steven Rinella?

  Considering a lot of those are going through twice there and back.

• 1:54:56Speaker 03

  Sure, but it's a lot. And it's, uh, it's several lanes on each side, the highway there. Um, so this idea starts to germinate about a wildlife overpass, which is kind of like when the idea of wildlife overpasses really started getting popular all over the place. Um, and the reason you build these things are habitat connectivity, because interstates are like walls, basically, to a lot of wildlife.

• 1:55:22Steven Rinella?

  Sometimes literally, because you got a fence on each side and then you got a barrier down the center.

• 1:55:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Um, another reason is critical, uh, to maintain critical migration corridors like, uh...

• 1:55:34Speaker 03

  We've talked about the Hoback to Red Desert mule deer migration in Western Wyoming. And I'll circle back to that, but that's, that's an example where wildlife overpasses have been used. And then obviously it's, it's to reduce roadkill mortality. So this idea kind of germinates and the concept evolves into a large vegetated overpass spanning Liberty Canyon on US 101 and the Agoura Hills, which is a western Los Angeles County, I believe. And so the idea comes and then bang, some major private funding kicks in, which was just going

• 1:56:15Speaker 03

  to allow the construction of this overpass. And that, that money came from the Annenberg Foundation mostly and some other private partners. So April 22 on Earth Day, groundbreaking begins on the Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Crossing. A couple of years go by, there's like heavy structural work going on, millions of pounds of concrete gets poured, the deck of the bridge gets built over 10 lanes of the highway and the expected completion is

• 1:56:46Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:56:47Speaker 03

  2025.

• 1:56:48Steven Rinella?

  How big is that sucker side to side?

• 1:56:50Speaker 03

  I'm gonna, I'll get, I'll get there. So a couple of years go by, they're building, building, building, expected completion is 2025 to early 2026.

• 1:57:03Speaker 03

  So 2025 was the final construction phase, which was, you know, what you see there, like habitat shaping and soil placements, things like native vegetation. A million local seeds were planted and it's described as the world's wildlife, largest wildlife crossing, which we'll get, we'll get to that. And again, as far as size, Steve, 210 feet long, 170 feet wide, largest of its kind globally.

• 1:57:33Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:57:34Speaker 03

  You can see that it's made to like, look natural, not just like a dirt bridge. Eight acres.

• 1:57:43Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:57:45Speaker 03

  Doesn't look like eight acres. Eight acres.

• 1:57:49Steven Rinella?

  Well, because they're not done with it.

• 1:57:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, species, the species that that they believe it will support will be mountain lions, deer, coyotes, bobcats, reptiles, says birds. Well, I guess some birds, yeah.

• 1:58:00Steven Rinella?

  That big old turk out there strutting?

• 1:58:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. So anyway, they're building and in 2025, as as happens with construction projects, there starts to be delays and cost overruns. Um, there was flooding that delayed it, inflation, labor, supply chain stuff. So the budget uh goes up by about $21 million to $114 million total.

• 1:58:27Steven Rinella?

  Oh, what, what?

• 1:58:29Speaker 03

  114 million dollars.

• 1:58:30Steven Rinella?

  From what to what?

• 1:58:31Speaker 03

  Well, when oh, it got to 114 million with a $21 million overrun.

• 1:58:39Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:58:39Speaker 03

  So it was whatever around 90 was the original budget. Um, so this year, um, it's nearing completion and wildlife are already appearing on the bridge, pollinators and reptiles, birds, things like that. The planned opening is now December 2nd, 2026. So, you know, it's six or seven months from now. Um, it's developed a little controversy throughout the years as it's been built and it it it was coined the bridge to nowhere by some right wing media and and and politicians.

• 1:59:20Steven Rinella?

  Stealing that term from the bridge in Ketchikan, Alaska, that would have connected the town to the airport.

• 1:59:25Speaker 03

  There's a lot of bridges.

• 1:59:26Steven Rinella?

  Are there a lot of bridges in nowhere?

• 1:59:28Speaker 03

  Um, but.

• 1:59:30Steven Rinella?

  That's a common thing?

• 1:59:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:31Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:59:32Speaker 03

  But this is like cost delays, like time overrun, cost overrun. And the fact that it's not critical, this is a a detail that kind of tells you a lot, I think, about the attitude towards wildlife, which is it's not critical infrastructure that benefits people. Um, but the thing is, is most of the money came from private and philanthropic funding. So it's not like the taxpayers are on the hook for the cost of this thing.

• 2:00:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:06Speaker 03

  Um, so I'm not, I'm not sure why.

• 2:00:08Steven Rinella?

  But it's, it's in some people's minds, including some friends of mine. It's become like in their mind, emblematic of everything wrong with California.

• 2:00:17Speaker 03

  Right, sure.

• 2:00:18Steven Rinella?

  And you know, which, and I think, cause like they, they look at the amount of money. They look at that you're, you're basically connecting to overdeveloped.

• 2:00:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:00:29Steven Rinella?

  Pieces of habitat that are beyond repair.

• 2:00:31Speaker 03

  For a handful of mountain lions.

• 2:00:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they point that it wouldn't happen if it wasn't for this would, like it's, it's happening because of the mountain lions.

• 2:00:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:43Steven Rinella?

  All of which I, that doesn't rile me up.

• 2:00:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:00:46Steven Rinella?

  If people want to spend their money, make a giant overpasses for wildlife, I'm like, great.

• 2:00:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And we're going to talk about some other ones. Um, the, until this one is finished, the, in Colorado, there's one called the I-25 Greenland Wildlife Overpass. Do we have that, Phil?

• 2:01:04Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 2:01:05Speaker 03

  That's it there.

• 2:01:06Steven Rinella?

  That's nice, Phil.

• 2:01:08Speaker 03

  That was completed last year and they were calling that one the largest in the world for a little while. But that one is completed in use, I-25 just south of Denver. So again, probably hundreds of thousands of vehicles a day. Um, and already thousands of animals crossings have been recorded there, significant drop in collisions.

• 2:01:30Steven Rinella?

  Um, really?

• 2:01:31Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:01:32Steven Rinella?

  What if you could trap that?

• 2:01:34Speaker 03

  I don't think people are allowed on those things.

• 2:01:36Steven Rinella?

  Can't string snares on those trails and see what comes through.

• 2:01:39Speaker 03

  Um, another real, real famous one is the Banff Wildlife Crossing System.

• 2:01:44Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 2:01:45Speaker 03

  Um, and this is, they have like 40 of these things and it's overpasses and underpasses. Um, 80, 90% reduction in wildlife collisions there.

• 2:01:55Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 2:01:56Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:01:56Steven Rinella?

  Over how many miles of road though?

• 2:01:58Speaker 03

  Well.

• 2:01:59Steven Rinella?

  Like over that patch of road?

• 2:02:01Speaker 03

  I I mean, I'm I'm sure it's my with forty crossings. It's miles and miles and miles.

• 2:02:07Steven Rinella?

  They made forty of those.

• 2:02:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, in the Banff area.

• 2:02:11Steven Rinella?

  Damn.

• 2:02:11Speaker 03

  Um, so like these things work. They're becoming more popular and uh like for a comparison, I wanted to the show like actual numbers for reductions in in roadkill. There's there's a a Yanis might remember these. There's a highway nine between Breckenridge, Colorado and Kremlin, Colorado. About ten to fifteen years ago, they started building a series of overpasses there. Can you pull those up, Phil?

• 2:02:42Steven Rinella?

  Nice.

• 2:02:42Speaker 03

  Um.

• 2:02:43Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 2:02:44Speaker 03

  And you can pull up the second.

• 2:02:45Steven Rinella?

  Phil's kicking ass, man.

• 2:02:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's there's a cool one. Um, this was like a real bad spot for particularly for mule deer mortality in the winter, but also elk. Um, lot of car crashes, lot of animals getting killed. So within five years of the these um wildlife overpasses being completed, reduced vehicle, mule deer and elk collisions by ninety percent over a ten mile stretch.

• 2:03:13Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 2:03:13Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 2:03:14Speaker 03

  Crashes from over thirty annually to nearly zero.

• 2:03:18Steven Rinella?

  No kidding.

• 2:03:19Speaker 03

  Prevented hundreds of potential collisions and effectively reduced carcass counts by ninety percent.

• 2:03:25Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 2:03:25Speaker 03

  Um, and.

• 2:03:27Steven Rinella?

  We should do.

• 2:03:30Steven Rinella?

  I don't want to have an essay contest, but a bullet pointed email contest.

• 2:03:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:03:35Steven Rinella?

  If you hate, if you're one of the people that hates wildlife overpasses and you and you think it demonstrates everything that's wrong with the world, send us a bullet pointed email and we'll have a contest.

• 2:03:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:03:48Steven Rinella?

  Who can have the best bullet pointed email that's so that it better explains why it's so bad to have wildlife.

• 2:03:55Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:03:55Steven Rinella?

  Crossing.

• 2:03:56Speaker 03

  Before before you send that that was bullet pointed emails, watch this video.

• 2:04:02Speaker 03

  Going back to these previous ones, uh, crossing structure, the, the, the structures were crossed more than forty-five thousand times by elk, moose, black bears, mountain lions and other species. Do you have that video? So this is, this is a video from a wildlife crossing in Utah. Um, and I wish we could fast.

• 2:04:23Steven Rinella?

  I don't like how they decorated it.

• 2:04:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, this, this one's kinda, you know, not.

• 2:04:28Steven Rinella?

  I would have done it way different than that.

• 2:04:29Speaker 04

  Like I can scrub through it.

• 2:04:30Steven Rinella?

  That looks so, it looks suspicious.

• 2:04:32Speaker 03

  Like, if you start, this is one wildlife crossing.

• 2:04:36Steven Rinella?

  Pine squirrel, moose.

• 2:04:37Speaker 03

  Porcupine.

• 2:04:39Steven Rinella?

  Marmot. Elk. Cougar.

• 2:04:43Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:04:46Speaker 03

  Some kind of ground squirrel.

• 2:04:47Steven Rinella?

  Ground squirrel.

• 2:04:48Speaker 03

  Little baby mule deer.

• 2:04:50Steven Rinella?

  Man, they did a terrible job decorating it.

• 2:04:52Speaker 03

  Um, but still, I mean, like the things getting used, I think.

• 2:04:56Steven Rinella?

  It looks like if you gave your kid an aquarium and he put some sticks and rocks in there. It just, I'm not buying it. Um, the animals obviously are, there goes a coyote cutting through there, black bear cutting through there.

• 2:05:07Speaker 03

  So you get the picture, like this is just one small overpass in Utah.

• 2:05:12Steven Rinella?

  Bobcat. Oh, good. Back up.

• 2:05:14Speaker 03

  Cotton tail? What is that?

• 2:05:17Steven Rinella?

  That's like, not a pika, but, huh, I saw, oh, there he is. Is he carrying something?

• 2:05:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was carrying something.

• 2:05:25Steven Rinella?

  He's carrying some shit he found dead on the road.

• 2:05:28Speaker 04

  He went down the road and carried it up.

• 2:05:32Steven Rinella?

  Wow, look at that thing.

• 2:05:34Speaker 03

  You get the picture.

• 2:05:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a, uh, a former colleague of mine at TRCP.

• 2:05:38Steven Rinella?

  There's another bear, daylight hours.

• 2:05:40Speaker 04

  Is on a, the Colorado Wildlife and Transportation Alliance. He's a co-chair of it. And he actually sent me a video a couple of months ago that I watched. They have on YouTube. That explains how effective these are and the need for additional funding.

• 2:05:53Steven Rinella?

  Back up, Brody missed something important.

• 2:05:55Speaker 03

  What did I miss?

• 2:05:55Steven Rinella?

  Watch, something spooks this bear. Here he's going. He sees it. He stands up and boogies the other direction.

• 2:06:00Speaker 03

  A bigger bear on the other side of the bridge.

• 2:06:02Steven Rinella?

  Is it?

• 2:06:03Speaker 03

  I don't know. Just saying.

• 2:06:04Steven Rinella?

  Like he winded Yanni. Oh no, he's going back.

• 2:06:07Speaker 04

  Ground blind.

• 2:06:09Steven Rinella?

  He changes mind.

• 2:06:10Speaker 06

  That's really cool.

• 2:06:12Steven Rinella?

  That's really cool.

• 2:06:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, you kind of dig into one and find all kinds of cool stuff about others.

• 2:06:18Steven Rinella?

  Why does it bring so much right wing hatred about wildlife crossings? Porcupine.

• 2:06:28Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 2:06:32Speaker 03

  I mean, I think it's what you said is very true. It's just like a reaction to something going on in California. Right? It's just like, that's, that's the attitude.

• 2:06:40Steven Rinella?

  It's like a money thing too, but you know what?

• 2:06:44Speaker 03

  But if some private donor wants to kick down a hundred million of their own money, like, come on.

• 2:06:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Wildlife costs money.

• 2:06:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:53Steven Rinella?

  It costs money to have. In world of history, it was like, we had wild places because we hadn't gotten around to destroying them all yet. And now we have wild places because we've tried to have them.

• 2:07:06Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:07:06Steven Rinella?

  It's just switched. It's switched. You have them now because you're willing to make sacrifices for them. You used to have them because everybody was lucky.

• 2:07:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:14Steven Rinella?

  Now you have them because you try hard.

• 2:07:18Speaker 03

  There we go. That's the news, folks.

• 2:07:20Steven Rinella?

  Good job, Brody. That was a hell of a, hell of a deal there. I want to go and redo that. Yeah, I'll let it sit. The animals obviously like it.

• 2:07:30Speaker 03

  Steve wants to draw a tag for that one.

• 2:07:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:32Speaker 03

  For that wildlife crossing.

• 2:07:35Steven Rinella?

  I drew the I-40 tag.

• 2:07:39Steven Rinella?

  Weapons restricted. All right. Thanks for joining the news show. I know it was a long one, ladies and gentlemen, but that's how it goes.

• 2:08:12Steven Rinella?

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