Ep. 930: The Helicopter Elk Hunt Debacle

Steven Rinella and the MeatEater Crew Discuss: Outdoor Life’s public land helicopter debacle; Etsy is the Devil (maybe); does fishing save you money; will MT send a smoke-jumper to Congress; 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

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:41Steven Rinella?

  Welcome to the news show, everybody. This week, we've got a market report on halibut prices and what those prices mean for dudes who fish. Former smoke jumper and public lands advocate Sam Forstag is here to give us an update on his US House of Representatives race. Helicopter hunting in Wyoming goes all wrong for an Outdoor Life editor. Etsy becomes the devil incarnate. That's hyperbolic. And more. Not really, though. But first, onto our news.

• 2:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I'll tell you about our news. Quick, quickly.

• 2:22Steven Rinella?

  I was trying to explain something to Seth before the show, but I didn't get time, so I'm gonna tell him now.

• 2:28Steven Rinella?

  Are you aware that there's this whole thing going? There's this whole thing right now of freeze drying beef guts and making dog treats out of them?

• 2:37Speaker 05

  I'm not aware.

• 2:38Steven Rinella?

  Are you aware?

• 2:39Speaker 06

  I've seen it. Liver, I've seen. Dried liver.

• 2:41Steven Rinella?

  Lung, liver, kidney.

• 2:45Speaker 05

  Okay, I mean, I've seen all sorts of dried stuff in, in like the pet store, but it's, I don't think it's freeze dried.

• 2:50Steven Rinella?

  Freeze dried.

• 2:51Speaker 07

  Freeze dried for cats, there's minnows and chicken hearts.

• 2:54Steven Rinella?

  Well, great.

• 2:55Speaker 05

  Big cat guy.

• 2:57Speaker 07

  And Seth, big cat guys.

• 2:59Steven Rinella?

  There's a thing I know about that I'm not even gonna talk about, because I don't want to spoil it. But anyhow, I just seconds ago, ordered us up a freeze dryer for the office here.

• 3:10Speaker 05

  Oh, so we can make our dogs treats?

• 3:13Steven Rinella?

  You know how we make videos where we have people try stuff? We're gonna, we're gonna save all the weirdest junk we can think of, freeze dry it, and then have dogs eat it and see what the dogs say about it.

• 3:24Speaker 07

  This is a good idea.

• 3:26Steven Rinella?

  But I'm gonna like picture that you have all this junk you freeze dried. And you let a dog smell it, so he knows, you give him a whiff. Then you bring the dog out of the room and you lay all, we set up cameras and you lay it all around and we see what guts.

• 3:42Steven Rinella?

  What freeze dried guts do dogs really want?

• 3:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:45Steven Rinella?

  And then you like ask the dog about it.

• 3:47Speaker 05

  You could do like eyeballs and.

• 3:48Steven Rinella?

  Telling you what.

• 3:49Speaker 05

  Kinds of things.

• 3:49Steven Rinella?

  And now that you can, I'm gonna start making my own freeze dried backpacking food now and then.

• 3:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't say that first and then do the dog thing, but I see where your priorities are.

• 3:59Steven Rinella?

  I know, but I had to find a way to justify it.

• 4:01Speaker 05

  When, when, when our dogs die, when our dogs die, we can freeze dry them.

• 4:05Steven Rinella?

  Oh, it's never ending, yeah. So this freeze dryer is gonna become like a major YouTube fixture.

• 4:11Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's probably a good investment.

• 4:13Speaker 07

  Do you have a dog in mind?

• 4:14Steven Rinella?

  That I'm gonna freeze dry?

• 4:15Speaker 07

  No, no, it's gonna be your tester. You're sitting in all dogs.

• 4:19Steven Rinella?

  All this place is is dogs.

• 4:21Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:21Steven Rinella?

  I'm bringing all those dogs.

• 4:23Speaker 07

  But there's some I would like put in tiers as like these I trust more than this other batch of dogs.

• 4:28Steven Rinella?

  Oh, elaborate.

• 4:29Speaker 07

  I'd have to think about it.

• 4:30Speaker 06

  Well, like your dog is dumb.

• 4:32Speaker 05

  Very.

• 4:33Speaker 07

  He got, he was two to three.

• 4:35Speaker 05

  He was hell on grouse on Monday, though.

• 4:37Speaker 06

  There you go.

• 4:38Steven Rinella?

  It'll be two to three weeks before we take possession of this freeze dryer. This is the most exciting thing I could think of ever happened to me. Getting a freeze dryer.

• 4:46Speaker 05

  I'm glad you're.

• 4:46Steven Rinella?

  I gotta think I'm gonna freeze dry, dude, I'm not even telling nobody about it.

• 4:52Speaker 05

  Is it, is it an animal product?

• 4:54Steven Rinella?

  It is. But I didn't know about doing minnows, man.

• 4:58Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:59Speaker 07

  Old Bay.

• 5:00Steven Rinella?

  We've got a new, so, so stay tuned for that coming up down the road. I was mainly just filling Seth in on this development. This is gonna be the world's greatest video.

• 5:11Speaker 05

  I've several times in my life Googled freeze dryers and just see how much they are, and then that's about as far as I get.

• 5:18Steven Rinella?

  I was pleasantly surprised to see they got a massive sale right now going.

• 5:21Speaker 07

  Oh, guess what Steve paid?

• 5:23Speaker 05

  What'd you pay?

• 5:24Steven Rinella?

  I could tell you what I paid.

• 5:25Speaker 07

  Well, I thought it was for the office. You can't just, we talked about our punt gun that we bought. That was a stupid price.

• 5:30Steven Rinella?

  I don't want to talk about it yet, because it was more than I figured.

• 5:34Steven Rinella?

  But it wasn't like that much.

• 5:36Speaker 05

  Was it more than the punt gun?

• 5:37Speaker 07

  No.

• 5:38Speaker 05

  How about the Warner Bratzler machine? Where's it fall?

• 5:41Steven Rinella?

  Probably in that ballpark. That was a waste of money ultimately, but I think I'm more optimistic about this.

• 5:46Speaker 05

  This time it'll be different.

• 5:48Steven Rinella?

  No, no, it's, that was a dumb, ultimately like a dumb purchase. We've got a new segment today called The Market Report. It's premiering today called The Market Report, where we're gonna examine weird price increases and decreases and other things of interest regarding wildlife resources and commodities. So think of the 2025 explosion in skunk tail prices. Or the black market boom for American eel elvers about a decade ago. Looking at when you see wildlife resources have, have a moment of weirdness. And we're gonna talk about what drives those moments of weirdness. But today, we're just gonna, we're kicking off the segment.

• 6:35Steven Rinella?

  Brody's gonna share something with us, and this came from, we, we came back from Alaska, big, you know, annual fishing trip. And then, I can't remember who it was.

• 6:44Speaker 06

  I was in Costco, I was like, holy shit.

• 6:46Steven Rinella?

  Well, that was, you initiated it. All of a sudden, someone sends, Brody sends a, a photo of Costco halibut.

• 6:56Speaker 06

  The price, yeah.

• 6:56Steven Rinella?

  I was like, good lord. And I always like seeing that kind of stuff, because it makes me feel like I'm.

• 7:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:03Steven Rinella?

  Being frugal.

• 7:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:05Steven Rinella?

  When I go fishing.

• 7:06Speaker 05

  But this is one thing Kelsey says this whole time. Like, she, she brings up the price of the fish that we bring home and like to justify it as like, we spent a bunch of money to go to Alaska and catch all these fish.

• 7:18Speaker 06

  I'm gonna get to that later, there's something to it.

• 7:20Speaker 05

  I tell her, we wouldn't buy that fish anyway.

• 7:24Speaker 06

  It's true.

• 7:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but it's all just in your mind.

• 7:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:28Steven Rinella?

  I don't, I'm not gonna go down to Costco and buy a halibut.

• 7:30Speaker 05

  Like, if I didn't go to Alaska ever again, I still wouldn't go buy halibut.

• 7:34Steven Rinella?

  They might get me a couple of big old jugs that I'll boil down there, but I'm not gonna go down there and buy. Or you know those things, those peanut butter pretzels everybody's?

• 7:41Speaker 05

  I just bought those yesterday.

• 7:43Steven Rinella?

  Buy a bucket of them, but I could buy, I could buy their damn fish. Anyways, let her rip.

• 7:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, um, you got the, the beginning of the story of me going to Costco after we got back from, from the shack. But this year, we caught so many fish. The fishing was so good at Steve's shack that we drove up the price of Costco halibut to 29 bucks a pound. The thing that was surprising to me about this.

• 8:11Steven Rinella?

  I thought it was more than that. Okino's a two pound piece.

• 8:14Speaker 06

  Yeah. Like I, normally at halibut, you'll see like a, like a square block of meat from a big old like worm infested 150 pounder, like they don't get the good stuff at Costco. I think you might have something to say about that.

• 8:29Steven Rinella?

  Tell that story?

• 8:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:30Steven Rinella?

  I don't want to name, I don't want to name the guy, because I don't want, because he's in the biz, but I got a friend who is a, he charters, but also does some commercial fishing. He one day sends me a picture of just like one of those giants, you know, like a 300 pound halibut. And I said, well, that'll fill, I text, he texts me the photo, I text him, well, that'll fill your freezer. He says, are you kidding me? That's the kind of stuff they have down at Costco. Meaning, the quality of a halibut is in, the, the quality of a halibut's flesh sits in an inverse relationship to its size. Size goes up, quality goes down.

• 9:14Steven Rinella?

  So he was just making a comment that Costco buys.

• 9:19Steven Rinella?

  Big, cheap.

• 9:20Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 9:21Steven Rinella?

  Bad halibut.

• 9:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:23Steven Rinella?

  So you're not even looking at premium halibut.

• 9:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, and that's what was surprising is that these, these were packaged like two to three pound filets. That the pro- I'm guessing from halibut that were like 12 to 15 pounds alive, like the ones we catch a lot.

• 9:39Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 9:39Speaker 06

  I was very surprised.

• 9:40Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so it wasn't like chunks that looked like firewood?

• 9:43Speaker 06

  No, it was like, you know, the stuff, the stuff that's going across the fish cleaning the table.

• 9:47Steven Rinella?

  Good halibut, good halibut. Okay, I take it back about Costco, because I was just sitting here thinking how they're gonna send us a cease and desist letter.

• 9:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:52Steven Rinella?

  But we're already clear.

• 9:53Speaker 06

  Um, but it was still spendy, right? Like, still spendy for, for halibut. Um, the, another surprising thing I saw there, I didn't send you guys the picture, but same day, they had, uh, chunks of troll, it said right on the label, troll caught king salmon for 18 bucks a pound. I was like, holy crap, that's cheap. Um, so I don't know if that was like.

• 10:16Steven Rinella?

  That seems very cheap.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  I don't know if that was like lower grade stuff, or it had been sitting in a freezer for a long time and they just broke it out and they were saying, you know, it was, that's why it was cheaper. Cause that's like, very cheap for, for, uh, for king salmon. Um, and we saw a bunch of those power trollers this summer.

• 10:35Steven Rinella?

  Target, yeah, chasing kings.

• 10:36Speaker 06

  Chasing kings. Um, and the thing about Costco fish is like, it's flash frozen. In some cases, they have, I think they have their own processing facilities in Alaska.

• 10:47Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 10:47Speaker 06

  Where they package and, and freeze the stuff and then they thaw it out for display in the store.

• 10:52Steven Rinella?

  Well, they do.

• 10:53Speaker 06

  I think, I'm pretty sure that's how it works.

• 10:55Steven Rinella?

  Well, that would make totals, yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 06

  For like a place like this.

• 10:57Steven Rinella?

  Cause in this display case, it's always sitting there thawed, you know?

• 11:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. Um, so if you want like the really good stuff, like we got good, fresh caught stuff, um, you either gotta like catch it yourself like we did, live close to where it lives or order it online. And, uh, this past weekend, I was in Seattle with my family going to a baseball game, doing some other stuff. And we were down checking out the waterfront and there's several fish markets, like touristy fish markets down there.

• 11:26Steven Rinella?

  Where they throw the fish back and forth.

• 11:27Speaker 06

  That's the one. There's a few other ones. Yeah. Um, but it's fun, like people watching and stuff. Um, and so the prices there were, were kinda what you'd expect. Like if you were gonna order stuff online and have it overnighted to your house. Um, halibut, 4250 a pound. And this is what you were talking Seth, because like I brought back a couple of fish boxes worth of halibut, so close to a hundred pounds. So like the math is pretty easy, 42 times a hundred. So like people ask.

• 12:00Steven Rinella?

  It's not easy for me.

• 12:01Speaker 06

  Well, it's like four grand. It's like four grand. Um, so like people are always asking us like, does wild game meat like offset the price of hunting?

• 12:11Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:12Speaker 06

  And it usually doesn't, but I don't know. There's an argument to be made here that maybe it does.

• 12:16Steven Rinella?

  It can't, my, my boy was pointing this out to me the other day where I had him pick up a, what used to be called in Montana, the single, single region antlerless whitetail tag.

• 12:29Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:30Steven Rinella?

  It's got a different name now, but it's the same thing.

• 12:31Speaker 06

  Right.

• 12:32Steven Rinella?

  And it's, it's a, a resident tag.

• 12:36Speaker 06

  It's like five bucks or something.

• 12:37Steven Rinella?

  It was $10 for a white, a resident tag for a whitetail doe.

• 12:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:43Steven Rinella?

  That, like if you just shot the doe out your window or something.

• 12:47Speaker 06

  Or five of them.

• 12:48Steven Rinella?

  Or, or, or, yeah. And you don't go far and you hunt and he got one very local.

• 12:54Speaker 06

  Right.

• 12:55Steven Rinella?

  It's like, then you can be like, man, look at all this money I'm saving.

• 12:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:00Steven Rinella?

  Cause I just shot hundreds of dollars worth of venison for the cost of an expandable broadhead and a $10 tag.

• 13:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:07Steven Rinella?

  But.

• 13:08Speaker 05

  But when I drive nine hours to go kill a mule deer buck in Montana.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  Well, in another state, that's how I justified my Colorado tag to my wife. It came out without gear I'd already bought. It was like two grand for the tag, the gas, everything.

• 13:21Speaker 06

  You're not gonna get there, man.

• 13:23Speaker 05

  What do you mean? No, it came out, it came, I got about 200 pounds. It came out to about 10 bucks a pound. And I told her, hey, listen, if you go down to Whole Foods to buy organic, whatever, it's gonna be 10 bucks a pound. And I got an experience.

• 13:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you should tell her, say, listen, man, I either go on this hunt, okay, or I'm gonna go down and buy 200 pounds of halibut. At the fish market in Seattle.

• 13:46Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 13:46Steven Rinella?

  And then we'll see who's, but what I'm interested in.

• 13:49Speaker 05

  And then we'll see who's right. What's the, I've never been to Alaska. What's the cost of like getting up there? Like what are you in to get up there and get a big old box of them?

• 13:57Steven Rinella?

  We don't talk about money things.

• 13:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:59Speaker 05

  Couple dollars.

• 14:01Speaker 06

  Um, anyway, 4250 for halibut, king salmon, also 4250, ling cod, and I don't understand this commercial fishery for ling cod, because you can't put gear out for them.

• 14:12Steven Rinella?

  No, no, no, no. There's a whole commercial ling cod fishery in, in Oregon, Washington.

• 14:18Speaker 06

  Just rod and reel.

• 14:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but it's like, no, there's like specific gear they use.

• 14:21Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 14:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but there's, there's ling cod.

• 14:22Speaker 06

  I was a little confused.

• 14:23Steven Rinella?

  And then there's ling cod from Buy Catch to Make It in the market, yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 06

  There, speaking of Buy Catch, there was yelloweye there, 30 bucks a pound. Pacific cod, 25 bucks a pound, which seemed a little spendy for Pacific cod.

• 14:33Steven Rinella?

  These people got it all wrong though, on the market, because Pacific cod, that's the son of a bitch you want.

• 14:38Speaker 06

  Should be the most. Yep.

• 14:41Steven Rinella?

  But it's just got a reputation as being like, like the fact that you can get twice as much, almost tw- that, that you can get twice as much cod.

• 14:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:50Steven Rinella?

  Is halibut for your dollar, should leave you leaving the fish store laughing in the fish store's face.

• 14:56Speaker 06

  Yep. But meanwhile, they're like, meanwhile, those commercial crab fishermen are using that stuff for bait, peacock, you know?

• 15:04Steven Rinella?

  Oh, what was the tub of cheap heads and collars?

• 15:06Speaker 06

  Uh, heads were a dollar a pound, collars were $5 a pound. And it was just like a random selection of.

• 15:14Steven Rinella?

  Look at that tub.

• 15:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:15Steven Rinella?

  Brody's got a great photo of the tub.

• 15:18Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:18Steven Rinella?

  It's like the gut tub.

• 15:19Speaker 06

  Yep. I don't know how much they sell that stuff, but I'd be buying some of it if I lived there.

• 15:25Steven Rinella?

  Can I tell you a quick favorite story of mine? We were cleaning, um, um, I wanna say jaguar sharks, but that's from Life Aquatic. We were cleaning leopard sharks. We were cleaning leopard sharks one time in, in, in San Francisco Bay. And we were at a boat ramp cleaning leopard sharks.

• 15:41Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 15:42Steven Rinella?

  And there's this guy, there's this guy, the p- like I, I feel, I don't know, but my, from, from my conversation with them, which we weren't really able to have, I feel like he was Chinese.

• 15:54Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:55Steven Rinella?

  He is, he's going through all the bins of guts. Everybody's cleaning all their fish. And he's going through the bins of guts, getting out the fins from the leopard sharks. And that, this is a long time ago and I wasn't like hip to the whole fin market.

• 16:08Speaker 06

  Right.

• 16:09Steven Rinella?

  So I, I go to him and I'm like, hey, man. And I'm trying to give him a big leopard shark flay, like the whole side off a leopard shark. To which he's, he, because we can't speak, to which he conveys like, nah.

• 16:23Speaker 06

  Zero interest, yeah.

• 16:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I thought, I'm like, oh geez, man, he's digging through the trash, poor guy. And I'm like, here's a big old chunk of leopard sharks. Like nah.

• 16:31Speaker 06

  He's getting what he wanted and he was getting it for free.

• 16:32Steven Rinella?

  Dude was not interested in a flay. He knew what he wanted. And maybe he'd be, um, and it was different with shark fins, but when, when we clean fish, when we clean fish in the Bahamas, the Bahamians will come down and they just come down with their tools.

• 16:50Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 16:51Steven Rinella?

  And they stand there and they shoot the breeze at everybody, but they got their tools and they just are cleaning fish heads.

• 16:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, they wait for you to clean them.

• 16:59Steven Rinella?

  As you clean, they're standing there being like, may I?

• 17:02Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 17:02Steven Rinella?

  Split them, degill them, quarter them, and this cleaning them and bagging them up.

• 17:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, we do all right keeping some collars at, at your shack, but.

• 17:12Steven Rinella?

  Not the heads.

• 17:12Speaker 06

  Not the heads.

• 17:13Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 17:13Speaker 06

  Um, and finally, the last thing in this fish market that I saw, it's for, for Steve, is the fish he likes the most, but just can't seem to ever catch them, is black cod, which was 2650 a pound. And they had.

• 17:26Steven Rinella?

  How could that be that cheap?

• 17:27Speaker 06

  They had some big ones there, man. I was thinking to you.

• 17:30Speaker 05

  That seems cheap.

• 17:31Steven Rinella?

  Dude, just, just the other day, I'm talking to Justin, Kimmy Werner's husband, Justin.

• 17:35Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 17:36Steven Rinella?

  And they have a family place just north of us. I mean, same water, same water. They are knocking the piss out of them. I'm like, show me how to chart what you're fishing.

• 17:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 17:45Steven Rinella?

  He's fishing the same shit I'm fishing.

• 17:47Speaker 06

  You should explain black cod a little bit for what.

• 17:49Steven Rinella?

  It's a sable fish.

• 17:50Speaker 06

  Yeah. Sushi, like expensive.

• 17:52Steven Rinella?

  It's like a fish made out of butter.

• 17:53Speaker 06

  Butter, fatty.

• 17:55Steven Rinella?

  Oh, it's good.

• 17:56Speaker 06

  Um, yeah, so that, that was that. That's our market report for, for kinda like Alaska Northwest seafood.

• 18:03Steven Rinella?

  The, the next one I'd like to do, just to keep this in your, in your little noodle there, is, um, let's do a roundup on what, uh, bluegill flays, perch flays, walleye flays, the, the normal freshwater take, what does that market look like?

• 18:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:20Steven Rinella?

  All that stuff has a commercial market.

• 18:21Speaker 06

  Yep, definitely.

• 18:22Steven Rinella?

  What is a dude paying for a pound of bluegill flays?

• 18:25Speaker 06

  Or a pound of Canadian perch.

• 18:26Steven Rinella?

  You know, pound or wally dogs. Like, are you making money when you fish walleyes?

• 18:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 18:31Steven Rinella?

  Seth ain't.

• 18:33Speaker 05

  No, especially me throwing back.

• 18:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he's just, he's basically sat up there just throwing $20 bills, throwing $20 bills into the, into the lake.

• 18:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay, now over to your news.

• 18:50Steven Rinella?

  Terrible.

• 18:52Speaker 05

  You know, I I wasn't happy with that one either.

• 18:54Steven Rinella?

  Shouldn't be. Shouldn't be. Some Phil's worse work.

• 18:59Steven Rinella?

  A man of normal genius. But just not.

• 19:05Steven Rinella?

  Great work.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  I'll do better.

• 19:08Steven Rinella?

  Your news is brought to you by Banish Suppressors, which I'm holding right here in my hot little hand. Let her rip.

• 19:16Speaker 05

  We had a listener write in and he says, Dear Stephen Rinella and the Meat Eater Crew. My school has a policy for the amount of school someone can miss before they lose the credits for a class. That amount is 10 days in the entire semester. Then you are ineligible for the credit in the class. I was writing to ask Mr. Rinella if he could write a doctor's note so that I can skip school and go on a pack trip to go elk hunting. Because I know he's got some sort of decorate doctorate of some kind. Please let me know before November 1st. This is when my tag opens.

• 19:47Steven Rinella?

  I'd be more than happy to write him a note.

• 19:49Speaker 05

  I will.

• 19:50Steven Rinella?

  We could do it one better. Because if they catch that mine's honorary, they might throw him out of school. But Randall's is real.

• 19:57Speaker 05

  We'll get two doctors.

• 20:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 07

  He got a second opinion.

• 20:02Steven Rinella?

  You know, like, you know, we use the notary public next door.

• 20:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:05Steven Rinella?

  And she, I think she charges like 10 bucks. I'll probably, it's probably gonna be like a, like a $10 fee to sign doctor's notices.

• 20:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I, the point is, we will rubber stamp your doctor's notes.

• 20:18Speaker 05

  For to go hunting.

• 20:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:19Speaker 05

  I'll, I will, I'll create a form.

• 20:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you write whatever you want and I'll sign it.

• 20:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. No, no, we'll have, we'll have a, we'll have a form that people request. It is pre-signed about emotional health, being in touch with nature, et cetera, et cetera. And I'll just plug your name in and you can take that to your professor. It'll be signed by Steven Rinella, doctor.

• 20:38Steven Rinella?

  And they, you know what, maybe, maybe what we do then, instead of charging them 10 bucks, is they should just kick in on that little kitty we got going to get that dude's bison school age.

• 20:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, there you go. You know, when you max that out, it just goes to the.

• 20:52Steven Rinella?

  LAI.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  LAI, there you go.

• 20:53Steven Rinella?

  No, I'd be happy to sign him a note. We'll have Randall sign it too. So it's like a double doctor.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  They can't refuse that.

• 20:58Speaker 07

  And Madison's on top of it, two months ahead of time. He's writing in to ask for this.

• 21:03Steven Rinella?

  Uh.

• 21:04Speaker 07

  Or she.

• 21:04Steven Rinella?

  I, I, I ran up in this wall. When I was in, in college, I ran up against this problem where if I missed another day, it was November 15th, if I missed another day, I would, I could do no better than a C. And I went hunting anyway.

• 21:20Speaker 05

  Yes, these are great.

• 21:21Steven Rinella?

  Well, I went, listen to what happened though. Like, in hindsight, I don't, there was probably no way, this is a long time ago, in hindsight, there's probably no way it was legal light. But I'm sitting there in the dark, waiting for it to get light, and a buck is coming. And I'm, I'm not kidding you, man, this is terrible. I got down on the ground and put my cheek against the dirt, trying to skylight his antlers.

• 21:47Speaker 07

  That's too dark.

• 21:48Steven Rinella?

  Was able to find his throat patch in my scope. It was early to class. But in hindsight, but we didn't really like know about that kind of, it just wasn't a thing that was on our radar.

• 22:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:02Steven Rinella?

  But there was shooting light and all that, but there was, dude, there was no way it was legal shooting light. And only like, like, it just wasn't a thing that my dad talked about.

• 22:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:13Steven Rinella?

  Like legal, it just was not, no one talked about legal.

• 22:16Speaker 07

  It wasn't printed in the reg book.

• 22:18Steven Rinella?

  Oh, absolutely, but it was also not a place I spent any time doing casual reading in the reg books.

• 22:25Speaker 07

  I recently, I recently heard someone say the best, um, get out of class email that you can write to a professor is say you got sprayed by a skunk.

• 22:33Steven Rinella?

  It's great.

• 22:33Speaker 07

  What are they gonna do? There's no proof, they're not gonna ask you to come in, um, that like, that, that should work. There's gonna be a lot of people getting sprayed by skunks, I think, this year.

• 22:43Steven Rinella?

  Unless I'm the professor. Then I'm gonna say, no, it's cool, come on down.

• 22:47Speaker 07

  I love that smell.

• 22:48Steven Rinella?

  Come on down, in fact, come to my office early. I'd like to visit you about this. You want to be on the news show?

• 22:53Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 05

  So write in, subject line, doctor's note, include the dates and your name.

• 22:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, happy to write those and we'll double doctor them.

• 23:02Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 23:02Steven Rinella?

  We'll double dock them.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  911, what's your emergency?

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Please help us, they're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  911 Nashville returns.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  It's a homicide detective down here. Three bodies on the ground.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  With emergencies of biblical proportions. Oh, since swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues of the Bible. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville. Brian Phillippe, 2911 Nashville, all new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

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• 24:35Speaker 05

  Okay, over to Spencer Newhart now, helicopter hunting, lay it out.

• 24:39Speaker 07

  Uh, I, I've got this story broken up into like three parts. And so I, I'm gonna try to answer all your questions, uh, before you get to them, but just like trust that if something hasn't come up yet, hopefully it's going to.

• 24:50Steven Rinella?

  I'm just gonna sit back and enjoy.

• 24:52Speaker 07

  About two weeks ago, this is why we're talking about this now, on August 26, 2026, Outdoor Life publishes an article from their Hunting and Conservation Editor, Andrew McKean. Title, I was convicted of trespassing after covering public land access issues on our controversial Wyoming elk hunt. Subheader, we helicoptered into otherwise inaccessible public land to hunt elk and highlight landlocked issues in the West, but I made a terrible mistake. Those are all Andrew's words. The hunt Andrew is referring to took place in Wyoming, November 2025. Andrew is there with three buddies, David, Ben, and Ryan, plus a film crew.

• 25:34Speaker 07

  They are recording the whole thing and using this as an example of how there are 16 million acres that we, the public, own, but we, the public, can't get to. 16 million is the number from OnX that's been thrown around. David, uh, one of the hunting buddies, has been planning this hunt for quite a while. Uh, it's a special piece of public land that the public can't get to without crossing a little bit of private land. Thus, it gives this rancher control of a whole bunch of public lands, uh, that he has paying hunters access via him.

• 26:07Steven Rinella?

  Got it. So he's outfitting.

• 26:09Speaker 07

  He's outfitting his land, but you can also reach, uh, this other public land.

• 26:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he's not doing nothing wrong.

• 26:15Speaker 07

  Nope, nope, everything is, is legal that he's doing. It's something he's been doing for quite a while.

• 26:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Speaker 07

  So the only way to get at this public, again, is by paying for a guided hunt or do what David and Ryan and Andrew did. Uh, and that's having a helicopter fly you in. David spent over 100 hours planning this hunt. Uh, one of the biggest obstacles was just simply finding a pilot to fly them in. At one point, he actually called a hot air balloon company and started asking them logistical questions about like if they thought he could pull this off. And at one point, the guy was like, uh, David, you know, you can't like stir these things, steer these things, right? Like, you're just going with the wind and it kind of brought the, the hot air balloon fantasy to an end.

• 26:55Steven Rinella?

  Well, how are those guys all still alive?

• 26:57Speaker 07

  The hot air balloon folks?

• 26:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 26:59Speaker 07

  I don't know. I suppose they just like have a general idea about what the wind is doing that day or where they're gonna come down at.

• 27:04Steven Rinella?

  Come on. They just land wherever?

• 27:07Speaker 07

  I don't think it's that simple, but I think there's some amount of mystery about where a hot, the, the point is to make this journey from a public road to the public land, the guy talking to David is like, I don't think a hot air.

• 27:20Steven Rinella?

  He's not that precise, he can't be that precise.

• 27:21Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 27:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay, sure.

• 27:22Speaker 07

  So finally, on the 27th pilot that David calls, he found someone willing to take their business. And for about $2,000 per person, these guys could take a four-minute helicopter ride into public land. That's how far it was. $2,000 to get four minutes from a road to the public land.

• 27:40Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 27:41Speaker 07

  To be legal beagle. Uh, now, to go through the rancher to hunt there, as of 2024 pricing, I found on his website, $6,500. So you're, you're saving $4,500 doing the helicopter route. That's, that's what they decided on.

• 27:55Steven Rinella?

  But that's, he's not just charging an access fee. It's gotta be that it's a, that it's a guided hunt.

• 28:00Speaker 07

  I don't, his, his website is vague on details. You contact him, but he doesn't even really mention the public land on his website. He talks about all the acres of private he has access to. And how, you know, we kill this many trophy bulls, um, and, and these are your sleeping accommodations. Uh, but $6,500 versus 2,000, just, just if you want to get to this public land. So I'm, I'm gonna tell this story in three parts. This is not how it happened in real time, but this is how this information was released to the public. So this is how I consume this story as was happening over the last nine months. And if you're someone who isn't familiar with any part of the story at all, then you're gonna consume it the same way that, that me and the rest of the public who was following this did.

• 28:40Steven Rinella?

  Great.

• 28:41Speaker 07

  Part one. Uh, this hunt's got a lot of national attention right after it happened, but for a different reason than Andrew McKean's trespassing. Uh, this was the elk hunt where a rancher went onto public land to the kill site of a bull and that rancher tried hiding the elk's skull that he found there. To be clear, this was not Andrew's elk that we're gonna talk about in a little bit. This was a different elk that was legally killed by another member of the hunting party. We covered this on our website. Uh, we had a Meat Eater Radio Live interview with David Fabian about this exact story. Uh, he works for Guns and Ammo Magazine, uh, and he was the, he was one of the hunters there when this happened. He was holding the cell phone that sort of, uh, captured this encounter.

• 29:26Speaker 07

  Here's, here's a quick recap, recap of that encounter. That was day two of this helicopter elk hunt. Uh, David, who we see here, and Ryan both killed really good bulls on day two. On day three, they're still working on getting all the meat back to their camp. Uh, and while David and Ben are at David's kill site, they happened to spot someone at Ryan's kill site, which is a couple hundred yards away, uh, and it's not anyone from their hunting party. They watch this person through their minnows as this person carries the elk skull into a ravine. Ben and David, they rush over there and they confront this man as he emerges from the timber.

• 30:06Speaker 07

  This leads to what David Fabian called, quote, "The strangest hunting encounter of my life." It turns out that this guy is the rancher who controls the access to this landlocked land. He was a 70-year-old rancher. It's not clear to me if that's his exact age or just estimated, but he's an old-time rancher. And he is busted in the act of stealing their elk skull.

• 30:29Steven Rinella?

  On public land?

• 30:30Speaker 07

  On public land, firmly in public land.

• 30:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 30:33Speaker 07

  David gets out his phone. He starts filming the interaction between them. The rancher starts off by just like straight up lying and being deceitful. And he says something like, "I don't know what bull you guys are talking about." And eventually he does fess up to it and Ben says something like, "Why'd this happen?" And the rancher answers, quote, "Because I don't want you guys hunting this outfit." So this is like the viral moment of this whole experience, sort of until now, that we'll get to in a little bit. David said in our interview on Radio Live that the elk skull was hidden in a way that you basically had to be on top of it to see it. And the rancher watches them crawl into this ditch where he hid the skull.

• 31:14Speaker 07

  They get their antlers back and everyone kind of goes their separate ways. And after these guys-

• 31:19Steven Rinella?

  I see these guys don't skin their skulls. That always kind of bothers me.

• 31:23Speaker 07

  They did at camp because it still goes back. Couple photos, I think we see them skinned out. But at that point in the hunt, they were butchering two elk that day.

• 31:31Steven Rinella?

  Minor detail.

• 31:32Speaker 07

  It seemed like they just hadn't gotten around to it yet. So they go back to camp. They get their meat and their skull back. They get service at that point. They call the game warden. Game warden is very interested in their story. He says-

• 31:44Steven Rinella?

  I got a question here. Who's creepy hand is in the top left corner of that?

• 31:49Speaker 07

  I think it's either David or Ben handing down to get the skull from the guy from where he hid it at. So this is like showing us the place where he placed his skull.

• 32:02Steven Rinella?

  This is him giving it back?

• 32:04Speaker 07

  Yes, this is the rancher handing it back.

• 32:06Steven Rinella?

  I understand.

• 32:07Speaker 07

  So they contact the game warden. Game warden says, "I'll meet you guys, you know, like tomorrow and we can talk about it then." So this interaction with the rancher went viral, like mega-viral between the videos, the national media coverage, podcast coverage. This story gets told to millions of people. We're looking at the original Facebook post here, which has been ripped off a million times, but just this first one, 10,000 likes, 700 comments, 300 shares. And if, like I said, this was like the defining moment of this whole thing. It was one of the defining moments of 2025. If the outdoors are something you're interested in, this probably came across your table at some point. If you want to hear more about this specific interaction,

• 32:51Speaker 07

  again, that was episode 813 of Media to Radio Live. We interviewed David for about 20 minutes. That's part one. Again, this happens on days two and three.

• 33:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 33:01Speaker 07

  Part two, we're going to back up to day one. Before the helicopter even picks these guys up, Andrew McKean delivers this message to a cameraman. He says, quote, "The thing that's really interesting about it and kind of catches in my throat a little bit is this feels like it's so aggressive, like a little bit kind of a thumb in the eye to the landowners who control the access and probably have for years. But this is kind of, but this is kind of like a measure of what's happened across the West really, between the corner crossing issue, between people exploiting the resource one way or the other, either because they've got the access or want the access, there's kind of a land grab going on right now.

• 33:42Speaker 07

  So this is our testing of, I think, a way to like create access or provide access or get access. I don't even know what the verb really is. We're grabbing access is the way it feels from people who have always had it for a long time." So that is what Andrew says before the chopper even arrives to pick them up.

• 33:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 33:59Speaker 07

  So some real foreshadowing going on there. It's the first day of the hunt and they could legally hunt on day one in Wyoming as long as they flew in and weren't doing any scouting. Again, the heli ride was four minutes, so no scouting done. Like they take off, land, set up camp, and they start hunting. That afternoon, they spot some bulls and they get into position to kill one. Here's a screen grab from the video of the bull that Andrew eventually kills. And as they're waiting for the right moment, Andrew delivers another very foreboding message to camera. Here's the quote. "So we're watching two bulls feed out of the timber. I'm pretty sure these are the two bulls we saw in the little clearing when we first got up above camp and glassed them.

• 34:42Speaker 07

  One's kind of junior varsity, but one is a stud. They're at 408 yards right now. We got some mule deer between us and them that kind of had got us pegged, so we're just being super chill to see what they do. But the wind's good. I don't know. Everything is going right until it doesn't. We kind of got a tippy-toe because there's some private, like a quarter section up here. So we just have to keep watching to see where we are, make sure that everything is good. But that just kind of adds one more little detail to it. We're on public, they're on public, but if they go a whole lot more south, they're going to be on private and there's no marker."

• 35:16Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 35:16Speaker 07

  Andrew's quote, it's like the last thing he says basically before he pulls the trigger. So Andrew gets slightly repositioned. He shoots the big bull three times. It looks like all three shots like land. We can't tell because of a camera cut, but it appears as though the bull runs about 50 yards between where shot one takes place and where the bull dies. And it's a whopper of an elk. This is a really big bull. So that's the end of day one. Day one, Andrew kills the giant elk. Day two, David and Ben kill good bulls. Day three, they have the encounter with the rancher who tries hiding the elk skull. And day four, they fly back to their pickups.

• 35:54Speaker 06

  I gotta, I gotta stop you.

• 35:55Speaker 07

  What do you got?

• 35:56Speaker 06

  They walk up to this bull that's dead. There's no like, oh shit moment or no like-

• 36:03Steven Rinella?

  Maybe that's in part three.

• 36:04Speaker 06

  I know.

• 36:07Speaker 07

  There, there are some disagreements or discrepancies between Andrew's account and the rancher who later gets interviewed by Cowboy Daily State News. I believe from like where the elk dies at and where you see some of the footage of them doing like the gripping grins and just like high-fiving and talking over the elk, the elk has now moved about 25 yards, I believe. Andrew says the elk died on a steep slope and they just naturally wanted to get down to the flat spot and it was easy to do. The rancher says that they moved it so fast that it's suspicious to him, that he thinks they moved that bull pretty quick and they knew something was up.

• 36:46Speaker 06

  Was he watching?

• 36:48Speaker 07

  No, but you, you watch the video and you see the elk die and they're still like, it appears as though you're still looking at legal shooting lights while they're standing over the elk. And it's slightly been moved. Again, Andrew says they were just sliding it down the hill to a more natural spot to gut. The rancher says they moved it so quickly that it seemed as though they knew there was a problem. Okay, so Outdoor Life, Outdoor Life, who Andrew works for, publishes a 25-minute video of the hunt on YouTube in March 2026, so about four months after the hunt takes place.

• 37:22Steven Rinella?

  Does that video get, is that video like widely viewed?

• 37:26Speaker 07

  230,000 people, I think. So yeah, it's a popular video. And again, this video was like being talked about before it ever came out because the helicopter thing was unique because of the interaction they had with the rancher who tries stealing the skull. So this was like, you know, set up to be viewed by people at that point. The rancher, the very same rancher who these guys interacted with on day three, watches the video and he recognizes that Andrew's bull is standing on his private land when he shoots it. And not only that, but the bull runs even farther into private land before dying. The rancher contacts a game warden. The warden comes out, compares the video with landmarks and person.

• 38:11Steven Rinella?

  Him having this realization when he watches the video.

• 38:18Steven Rinella?

  By this point, has he already been kind of like showcased and talked about?

• 38:23Speaker 07

  So the video comes out in March of the 25-minute hunt, the viral video of the rancher getting caught stealing the elk skull. That drops on like December 1.

• 38:33Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 38:34Speaker 07

  So it's been building for four months.

• 38:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so at this point, he for months-

• 38:38Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 38:39Steven Rinella?

  Has been called out, ridiculed

• 38:44Steven Rinella?

  about a thing that like, by all means, the guy should not have hid people's stuff, but- He's been dealing with this.

• 38:52Speaker 07

  We'll address this in act three.

• 38:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 38:54Speaker 07

  So the rancher contacts Warren, Warren comes out, he compares the video with landmarks in person. I read that he found like the, the land, the public land survey marker in the ground, just to be certain. And the, the game warden determines that in fact, Andrew McKean's bull was standing about 35 yards inside of private land when he shot it.

• 39:16Steven Rinella?

  How would he not have known this?

• 39:18Speaker 07

  How would McKean not know this?

• 39:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 39:19Speaker 07

  He didn't know. Marked. There's no fences on there.

• 39:23Steven Rinella?

  He's got, he's, he's definitely running a GPS mapping plan.

• 39:29Speaker 07

  Mm hmm. Understood.

• 39:31Steven Rinella?

  And he's talking about where the private land is.

• 39:33Speaker 07

  They, they said they felt confident in like the boundaries that they could identify in person. So, so McKean is now written a ticket for trespassing. He pled no contest on August 24th to one count of Title 23 trespass and one count of the use of a silencer to take big, to take a big game animal while trespassing. He was fined $1,270 and surrendered his skull to the state.

• 40:01Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 40:02Speaker 07

  So McKean pleads no contest, August 24th. It's then on August 26th, two days later, when Outdoor Life publishes the article that I referenced earlier. It's titled, I was convicted of trespassing after covering public land access issues on our controversial Wyoming elk hunt.

• 40:18Steven Rinella?

  Would, would you think that was mandated by the prosecutor? Or you think that was just trying to get out ahead of it?

• 40:25Speaker 07

  I'm guessing he had that in the can for weeks or months that this all didn't unfold for Andrew, you know, in the course of a week. If that rancher recognized it in March and the game wardens, you know, alerted immediately, I'm sure this was on Andrew's plate for, for months at this point.

• 40:41Steven Rinella?

  That's a lot of stress to live with, man.

• 40:43Speaker 07

  So in, in the article, McKean takes responsibility for trespassing. He says it was an honest mistake. He says they studied the digital maps in the field and they thought the bull was standing 30 yards inside of public rather than 35 yards inside of private. In the article, McKean says he's quote, deeply sorry. It was quote, a profound mistake. Another spot, he says, quote, "The most painful penalty is that in this case, I became part of the problem." Later in the article, he talks about following the rules and being an ethical hunter and how landowners deserve rights. And he says, quote, "To now publicly admit that I failed to uphold those values hurts beyond description." And as part of his conclusion, he says, quote, "I will resign from my 25 year tenure

• 41:25Speaker 07

  as a Montana hunter education instructor because I can't in good conscience teach prospective hunters about the importance of obtaining landowner permission. With this incident on my record, I will accept judgment from friends, hunting buddies, and a legion of online commentators who have never met me."

• 41:42Steven Rinella?

  Man.

• 41:43Speaker 07

  Alright, so that's part two.

• 41:44Steven Rinella?

  Man.

• 41:45Speaker 07

  Again, the McKean article. Here's part three. One week after McKean's article is published.

• 41:49Steven Rinella?

  Got bought in though.

• 41:53Steven Rinella?

  That, that was a noble acknowledgement. I know we're only into part two. But that was a full throated.

• 42:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, I, I assume you read the thing, Steve, but it's, it's ba-, okay. Yeah, he's, he like.

• 42:05Steven Rinella?

  I mean, I skimmed it.

• 42:06Speaker 06

  He's not trying to wiggle out of it.

• 42:08Speaker 07

  He owns it in the middle and he owns it at the end. The whole way through, he's like, man, I, I made a stupid mistake.

• 42:12Steven Rinella?

  Cause he could have been like, someone should have done a better job, you know what I mean?

• 42:15Speaker 07

  Yep. Okay, part three. One week after McKean's article is published on September 2nd, Cowboy State Daily posts an article about the whole situation. In the article, they provide an update on the rancher's own legal case and are able to interview him. So here's what we learned. Back in April, the rancher pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor theft charge for hiding the elk head. He was fined $220, so about $1,000 less than McKean's fine for his two trespassing violations. Regarding the elk thievery, the rancher told Cowboy State Daily, quote, "I saw where they had killed a big bull, I, I, I'm gonna start this over. I saw where they had killed a bull elk the day before on the BLM land

• 42:58Speaker 07

  within one half to three quarters mile from our buildings. I got upset and let my emotions get the best of me and took the elk head and packed it downhill and put it in a deep draw. I was in the wrong doing it. I eventually apologized. We shook hands and they got their horns back." So that was one of the rancher's quote in this article. The rancher said, "The fallout from the event led to harassment and death threats." He said he just stopped answering his phone this year if it was a phone number he didn't recognize. Another detail, McKean says in the article that he attempted to reach out to the landowner in an attempt to meet and mend fences, but the landowner did not respond. In the Cowboy State Daily article, the rancher confirms that he got the letter and a voicemail

• 43:43Speaker 07

  from McKean and decided not to respond. Here is the rancher's quote. "He put me through so much misery last fall and last winter, I don't have any desire to get together with him." And the last thing of note here is that the rancher says he's already aware of one group of hunters who have booked a helicopter to fly them in this fall and he suspects there will be more.

• 44:05Speaker 07

  I, I want to give my takeaway and then, then you guys have at it. I feel bad for everybody involved. Like, I don't think anybody came away from this feeling good or feeling like the winner. Like, both parties made pretty bad mistakes. Both parties apologized and both parties had like really severe consequences. It just ends up being a black eye for like the public land hunters and, and a black eye for this kind of landowner who, you know, uniquely controls public land access. This is just like a rare lose lose.

• 44:34Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:40Steven Rinella?

  Go ahead, Brody.

• 44:41Speaker 06

  I, I mean, it's real easy to judge Andrew from afar. Like, things happen in the heat of the moment. But God, it's just a good lesson to not mess with animals that are flirting the private property line. Like, that's such a small margin of error. Like, walk away and find one that's half a mile from the line. You know, that like, that's my takeaway. Like, I'd love to get in a helicopter and go hunt there. I, you know, if that's the only way you're gonna do it, great.

• 45:15Speaker 06

  But it's just too easy to screw up.

• 45:17Speaker 07

  And they say in the video that Andrew's like, we gotta be careful because there's a quarter section, 160 acres. I went to OnX and I feel like I've sussed out where this whole thing played out. And I'm, I'm sure like the frustrating part for Andrew and, and the others in his party is they are in kind of like a sea of public land. And this 160 acres is, it, when you look at it, you're like, oh, it's kind of meaningless. Like, they, they could just, you know, find that bull again tomorrow and I bet he's on the public. Or maybe they could wait 10 minutes. In this case, he was 35 yards inside the private. Yeah, but like Brody said, this is just like a familiar story. If you hunt in the West, you're used to being around unmarked boundaries.

• 45:57Speaker 07

  You're used to being around convenient fencing where the property line actually cuts across like a steep bank, but they move the fence 50 yards one direction or the other. And then that becomes like an unofficial property line. It's just something that like, you're always dealing with these legal boundaries. And it's, it's a frustrating and like scary part of hunting within the margins.

• 46:18Speaker 06

  I'm constantly doubting where I'm standing versus what OnX is telling me. And it like, OnX is probably dead nuts, right? But 30 yards, man, that's just like.

• 46:30Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 46:38Steven Rinella?

  You, you're right. The, the whole thing's painful. I.

• 46:44Steven Rinella?

  Applaud's not the right word because applause not the right word. I understand and would have no hesitation

• 46:59Steven Rinella?

  to do a hunt where you were accessing landlocked public land with a helicopter.

• 47:07Steven Rinella?

  Part of my comfort with it, right? Is that I do a lot of hunting in Alaska where you use fixed wing aircraft to access stuff. And when you're flying along in fixed wing aircraft, you're often flying over land you're not allowed to hunt. Right? Flying over native corporation land, whatever, and you land somewhere and you hunt and you don't even think about it. I think it seems surprising down here because it's just a thing that people hadn't thought of before. It's kind of a, it's this new idea, right? That you do something so sort of extravagant and expensive as hire, in this case rotary wing aircraft, which I'll point out would be illegal to do in Alaska because you have to use fixed wing aircraft for hunting in Alaska.

• 47:52Speaker 07

  I didn't know that detail.

• 47:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you can't use, you can't, in Alaska, you can't do nothing around hunting with a helicopter. You can't supply a hunting camp with a helicopter in Alaska, only fixed wing.

• 48:02Speaker 07

  Is that something you ever hear about them talking to change or is that just like part of the culture?

• 48:06Steven Rinella?

  No, because it would be, think about what it would mean for doll sheep. Think about what it would mean for everything. There's a, like, you can just land on anything.

• 48:15Speaker 07

  I assume they just loved airplanes up there.

• 48:17Steven Rinella?

  No, no, no. Picture what it would mean.

• 48:19Speaker 07

  I, I get it, yeah.

• 48:20Steven Rinella?

  You find a bull, you find a bull moose, you're just gonna land on it.

• 48:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 48:25Steven Rinella?

  You find a doll sheep, you're gonna land on it. There's no more hiking from the valley floor up to the top, you land at the top.

• 48:32Steven Rinella?

  It'd be, I don't want to be hyperbolic again and say that it would be the death of big game hunting in Alaska, but it would have enormous.

• 48:40Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 48:40Steven Rinella?

  Enormous implications.

• 48:42Speaker 06

  Even with fixed wings, they bake that day delay in because like you can still like land in the path of a caribou migration, right? So at least you give them a day buffer and, you know.

• 48:54Steven Rinella?

  But, yeah, wildlife resources in Alaska are often protected by the fact that you can't get a boat near it and there's not an airstrip near it. And there's not a road near it. The minute you can just hop out of a helicopter on some marshland and chase a bull, it's, I don't want to say it's done, but it's done. People are always debating about like this and that thing killed Alaska.

• 49:14Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 49:15Steven Rinella?

  You'd have a whole new, better argument about the helicopters killed Alaska. So, in that way, because I have like many decades of experience hunting in Alaska under those circumstances, the helicopter thing, I look at it, there's like an instinctive ickiness to helicopters because I have the Alaska parallel in my head. However.

• 49:41Steven Rinella?

  I, I, I don't view it as wrong at all to use a helicopter to go hunt some landlocked public land. At all. Wrong. There's, there's no question about it. The, the, the point I'll bring up is if you are in a situation where you are showcasing.

• 50:00Steven Rinella?

  The, the, you're, you're, you're making a point about public, private boundaries.

• 50:07Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 50:07Steven Rinella?

  You're making a point about access. You're making a point about landowner hunter relationships.

• 50:18Steven Rinella?

  The, the, like, you're, you're, you're selling your editors not on, hey, I want to go get a big bull real easy.

• 50:27Steven Rinella?

  Me and my buddies want an easy two, three day hunt where we all get bulls. You're going to your editor and you're saying, oh, we're going to do this whole showcase project and talk about land borders.

• 50:39Steven Rinella?

  It just seems, and this is so obvious, but it just seems you would be behaving in a way where you were bulletproof.

• 50:49Speaker 07

  You wouldn't give yourself a 35 yard.

• 50:52Steven Rinella?

  Come on.

• 50:52Speaker 07

  Potential.

• 50:53Steven Rinella?

  Come on. My kid has found, uh, not found, it's like, my daughter has the lawnmower around it. There's a giant buck in my neighborhood. It's like, scared the shit out of me the other day. There's a giant buck, not giant, but a big buck. Like drop.

• 51:09Speaker 07

  Oh, he's a giant. He's a giant buck. Does he actually have a drop time? Oh, yeah. One and a half of them, dude.

• 51:16Steven Rinella?

  A big drop time, why you tell you got to mow around.

• 51:19Speaker 06

  You know what they say, he's going to die old age. He's either going to die old age or get hit by a car.

• 51:24Steven Rinella?

  I know where he's going to die. I can tell you within 200 yards of where I'll find him someday. Headless on the road.

• 51:33Steven Rinella?

  Cause he just, he's doomed, but

• 51:38Steven Rinella?

  my, my kid has baked up these various plans, you know, not even seriously, but he's just, he's mused about these various plans and I have explained to him.

• 51:48Steven Rinella?

  Should that buck leave and, and go like, if on its route, it winds up out of city limits, you know, which is uncertain. And if you look at that area, I'm like, you'd have to get permission from a lot of people. Because where you put the arrow into it, isn't where it ends. As evidenced by a fact that a deer he got just recently with his bow was 130 yards from where the arrow hit it when we found it. And I'm trying to invite him to go like, let's go look at what 130 yards looks like.

• 52:23Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 52:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's not the neighbor. In some cases, that's not the neighbor's neighbor.

• 52:30Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 52:30Steven Rinella?

  All right. So if your whole thing is that you're doing a thing about land borders and all that, why are you messing around

• 52:41Steven Rinella?

  within 30 yards of an animal?

• 52:46Steven Rinella?

  That if you've hunted it a bunch, can really, really take a hit.

• 52:52Speaker 06

  And it's, it's 160 acres, right? So 400 by 400 yards, right? Quarter mile. The thing's not going to be in there forever. Right? Like.

• 53:02Steven Rinella?

  And you know, they can take a hit.

• 53:05Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 53:07Speaker 07

  And, and to be like, the thing you're talking about of making this, this like content around the idea of this is how difficult it can be to access 16 million of our acres. It involved outdoor life. It involved outdoor lives, like social media, um, their publishing team, their video team. It involved David Fabian, who works for a totally different outdoor company, uh, guns and ammo. So there's just like a lot of parties in, involved in, in making this thing just to show folks how big it, it was.

• 53:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And to be clear, um,

• 53:42Steven Rinella?

  I've got friends that have had this problem happen. The, the fact that I haven't had this happen to me is just that I've just been lucky at times, you know? I've played the fence game, like, you know what I mean? Oh, just jump the fence over on the place we're allowed to hunt. Get it?

• 53:57Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 53:58Steven Rinella?

  I'm just lucky that I haven't had this happen. So it's, it's not passing judgment that it happened. If, if I had a buddy that had that happen to him, I would, I would give it as much thought as it takes to go like, that's really too bad. You should be more careful next time. And they'd be like, yeah, no kidding. But it just, that, that, that, the point of what you're doing is that it just seems like you would have been so careful. So careful.

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• 55:56Speaker 05

  Wasn't there already a question about the legality of the helicopter involvement? Like if he was packing them in and he needed a guiding license?

• 56:04Steven Rinella?

  Well, that's the thing Spencer might be able to speak this better, but that is a thing that people are poking at legally now. And I think Guides and Outfitters Association in Wyoming perhaps is looking at this as when, what is a helicopter operator becoming a outfitter? I would also, but then I would ask this question. If I take an Uber out to my hunting spots, is the Uber guy in trouble? Of course not. If I said, no, I Ubered out to my buddy's farm and hunted, no one would ever say, let's check with that Uber operator, make sure he's a licensed outfitter. It's like, come on.

• 56:43Speaker 07

  David, who did most of the hunt planning here, um, he put the screws to like the planning portion of this, and that was something that he cleared with Wyoming officials ahead of time, like, we're good to do this, right? And this guy's going to be okay. And so they, they were confident going in that like everything involving the helicopter itself was, was totally kosher.

• 57:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Speaker 06

  I'll tell you one thing that could have happened also. And, and again, like, like, I don't want these guys to think I'm passing judgment, but there could have been a situation where they notified, like, obviously the landowner's going to see that helicopter, but months before the hunt, they could have been like, look, we're doing this, just so you know, we're going in there. And perhaps some of that tension would have been mitigated, like as it happened. You know?

• 57:33Steven Rinella?

  I don't think there, yeah. You, you, that would have been in hindsight, maybe a nice move. And I don't think there's any way on earth. There's no way on earth that McKean was like, oh, I know it's on private, but I'm just going to try my luck and drag it down. There's no way.

• 57:48Speaker 07

  They certainly would have put a video out about it.

• 57:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. He made a mistake. There's no way I think that he thought, I'll just be clever and drag it out of the way.

• 57:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 57:56Steven Rinella?

  Like he, it was a mistake. It was a mistake. And his apology

• 58:02Steven Rinella?

  is, like I said, it, it is a full apology.

• 58:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:07Steven Rinella?

  There is no, wow, you know, damn it. They should have moved the, you know, or someone should have put that marker more clear. You know, I mean, he didn't in any way try to put it off on somebody.

• 58:17Speaker 06

  Yeah. I wonder if it's a little bit of the, who says it? The Durkin, that big bucks make people stupid. Maybe that bull made him stupid for a minute, you know?

• 58:28Speaker 07

  Yeah. And like, like a lot of hunts in those final moments, it happens fast. Like McKean delivers the message to camera about like, we kind of got a tippy toe because of some of the boundaries. And then all of a sudden the bull is moving and McKean is moving. And like the shot happens and, and the whole thing, I, I don't know the real time of it, but you would figure just a couple of minutes.

• 58:47Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 58:48Speaker 07

  To like, make all of those calls. And I, I'm sure they were obviously aware when, when it happened and like, oh, this, this could be close.

• 58:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. The sad part too, is that the, the point they were, not sad part, or, or reality, happy or sad, I'm not going to weigh in on that. The reality is the point they were trying to make in the end, they obviously only, it only resulted in them creating more of a question around ethics and conflict, right? It didn't, it didn't clarify anything. It's like, you went to access some inaccessible public land and stirred some serious shit up and caused people to have opinions about it that probably didn't have opinions about it before.

• 59:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 59:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. In a state where the whole corner crossing thing kind of just got settled and now there's this to, this issue to deal with.

• 59:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, what's funny about stuff like that is the other day, I, I mentioned this before, but the other day we had a bear in our, we, we had a bear in our garage messing all around. And I'm trying to get him out of there. And I'm thinking in my head, I told my neighbor, I was like, if I wasn't me, I would have shot it.

• 1:00:03Steven Rinella?

  But like, I can't do that.

• 1:00:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, the stakes are.

• 1:00:06Steven Rinella?

  Because someone's gonna be like, well, he had this and that, and he attractants in his compost pile, and he had a, they were cleaning grouse and da, da, da, you know what I mean? So I'm like, I can't shoot it, but I would have shot it.

• 1:00:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, this, this isn't a lesson. It's just like an observation, the whole thing, but imagine if all of this would have went down with no cameras. Like, the rancher, he wouldn't have been charged with anything, because that would have been

• 1:00:32Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:00:32Speaker 07

  A totally different story being told by the hunters about like, what happened and it's, you know, there's just no proof. And, and obviously, McKean wouldn't have been seen shooting thirty-five yards in, inside of the boundary. Uh, it's just like, if, if that wasn't part of this whole thing, we wouldn't know any of this story at all. Nobody would have a charge. Uh, again, I don't, there's no lesson there. It's just, uh, like, twenty, twenty-five.

• 1:00:55Steven Rinella?

  I wonder what the pilot, if the pilot is interested in taking another call from another potential client, or if the pilot is like, man, y'all, y'all got too much heat.

• 1:01:10Speaker 06

  Well, the fact that it took them twenty-seven tries, so I think there must be a lot of helicopter pilots in Wyoming that are like, you know, I live in this town.

• 1:01:20Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:01:21Speaker 06

  I don't want to deal with that.

• 1:01:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they're like, yeah, I'm gonna stick to the flight scene and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:01:26Speaker 07

  But then Pilot Twenty-Seven's like, I don't know, a four-minute ride.

• 1:01:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Speaker 07

  Two thousand bucks a person.

• 1:01:30Speaker 05

  Two thousand bucks a person for four minutes. That's a lot of, that's a lot of money.

• 1:01:33Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm. Hmm. Hmm. It, it feels like this is wrapped up now. Like, I, I think this is the conclusion of it all. Um, which, uh, obviously, none of them wanted, um, but it's been playing out for nine months and it, and it feels like it's come to an end.

• 1:01:50Steven Rinella?

  I respect that, I respect stepping away as a, uh, hunting instructor. But I also think that there'd be room to, um,

• 1:02:05Steven Rinella?

  there'd be room to just be a, a, a hunting instructor who's a real guy that made a mistake.

• 1:02:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, and be like, let me tell you about this, kid.

• 1:02:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, he could, he could teach kids about that mistake.

• 1:02:14Steven Rinella?

  You know? Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm always talking about all the rules we broke as kids, man. Like, I don't know.

• 1:02:23Speaker 07

  No cameras.

• 1:02:24Steven Rinella?

  Well, I'm, I'm telling about, I mean, I've written about them. Like, we broke rules that we didn't even, we didn't, didn't feel like breaking them. We didn't know that they were, a lot of times, didn't know their rules. I don't know. Huh. What do you got, Seth?

• 1:02:41Speaker 05

  Etsy.

• 1:02:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, what, yeah, this burns, this, this, this burns my ass.

• 1:02:47Speaker 05

  Um, so the Etsy, the Etsy, uh, fly, so it's not, it's not a fly ban, it's a fur ban. And people are using fur to tie flies.

• 1:02:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 05

  Um, so Etsy has started deactivating listings that contain animal products. As of August eleventh, two thousand twenty-six, Etsy updated its animal products policy to no longer allow items made with real animal fur, including, um, common fly tying material, such as mink, fox, rabbit, badger, coyote, raccoon.

• 1:03:25Speaker 05

  So I, I looked at the Etsy animal products policy and, um,

• 1:03:33Speaker 05

  it says, note, this policy was updated on August eleventh, two thousand twenty-six, right at the top.

• 1:03:38Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:03:39Speaker 05

  And then, so the first thing you see is like endangered, threatened, and at-risk wildlife products, which is like a no-brainer.

• 1:03:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's table stakes. It's like, no, no kidding.

• 1:03:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, um, and it goes on to say like, you know, an important part of creating a sustainable future, protecting wildlife from extinction, uh, yada, yada. Basically saying, you can't sell anything that has anything to do with, um, like, sight these animals and, and stuff, like Endangered Species Act animals.

• 1:04:08Steven Rinella?

  As it should.

• 1:04:09Speaker 05

  As it should. And it, it lists, it, it, there's a big list of animals, bats, bears, um, chinchillas, corals, crocodilians, elephants, you know, all the things, pangolas, or pangolins. Um, and then, I don't, I don't know the, the old, um, I couldn't find the old, like, policy.

• 1:04:33Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:34Speaker 05

  But there's a, there's a part at the end that says, animal fur products. It says, in addition to, uh, prohibiting products made from endangered and threatened, and threatened species, Etsy prohibits products made from containing natural, uh, animal fur, regardless of age or origin. This include, includes products like raw pelts, uh, finished garments, accessories, and personal care items made with real fur from animals such as mink, fox, rabbit, badger, coyote, and raccoon dog. Um, this does not include taxidermy, by-product materials such as leather, sheepskin, uh, shearling,

• 1:05:18Speaker 05

  cowhide wool, or, uh, mohair.

• 1:05:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:05:23Speaker 05

  Or fur products, um, from sellers registered with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board.

• 1:05:29Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's an interesting distinction.

• 1:05:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Speaker 05

  Um, so I got, I got to doing some digging around and there's an organization called CAFT, um, the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade. Um, they conducted a fifty-eight day protest, um, campaign across seventeen cities that targeted Etsy's headquarters, headquarters, uh, board members and affiliates.

• 1:05:57Steven Rinella?

  And the chicken shit's caved.

• 1:05:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. This ban was announced after CAFT confronted the Etsy CEO, um, at a Morgan Stanley investor conference, saying that they continue, or that they are continuing to profit off the bloody fur trade in front of investors, investors. Um, so I went on Etsy to just look to see what's still there. And there are like, um, what, like, klausur minnows that have like deer hair and stuff?

• 1:06:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Speaker 05

  Still on there. I don't know if it's like, you know, stuff that they haven't, I was looking at descriptions too, and doesn't say like, you know, deer hair or anything like that. But there's still products on there that are made from, you know, animal products, but it's probably just stuff that hasn't been flagged.

• 1:06:48Steven Rinella?

  But we had a guy write in.

• 1:06:50Speaker 05

  But a guy wrote in that, that ties flies and sells them on there and said that a lot of his listings have been removed.

• 1:06:57Steven Rinella?

  What were some examples of flies that he's had removed?

• 1:07:01Speaker 05

  Um, I don't know. It just said, there was a screenshot of, you know, Etsy emailing him, just saying like, your listing has been removed. Um, it, it didn't say.

• 1:07:11Speaker 06

  He mentioned that it's just, if you're, if you mention the animal fur in it.

• 1:07:15Steven Rinella?

  Like elk hair cats.

• 1:07:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, like, or muskrat, whatever. And so him and a lot of his, his peers are just changing the descriptions. Hopefully the AI overlords don't catch it.

• 1:07:27Speaker 05

  I did find, I did find on their, um, pheasant tails, like the fly pheasant tail.

• 1:07:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Speaker 05

  Um, and that was in the description, and that was still up. So I don't, I don't know if they.

• 1:07:39Steven Rinella?

  Feather, not fur.

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, feather. But, but still, I don't, yeah, I don't know where they draw the line.

• 1:07:46Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:07:49Steven Rinella?

  I, I can't believe they would cave to something like that.

• 1:07:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:53Steven Rinella?

  Now, here's the other catch. Are they allowing people to sell, can you still buy beaver wool felt cowboy hats?

• 1:08:03Speaker 05

  Um, as far as I know, I, I, I don't think it's, I saw.

• 1:08:07Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, dude.

• 1:08:08Speaker 05

  Really?

• 1:08:09Speaker 06

  They got a whole ton of listings for them.

• 1:08:12Speaker 05

  I guess so.

• 1:08:13Steven Rinella?

  Bitches. But you can't buy a beaver fur hat, but you can buy a beaver felt hat. It's okay if you take the fur and turn it to felt.

• 1:08:21Speaker 05

  I'm sure there's all, I'm sure you could find, you'd go on there and just start looking around and find all sorts of examples like that.

• 1:08:27Speaker 06

  They also don't have a problem with like, domestic animal products, like they sell leather shoes and they sell jerky and like, it's like, why?

• 1:08:36Speaker 05

  I think it's just something that they, they got a lot of heat and pressure from this, this organization. They got called out in front of board members and investors and whatnot, and they're just trying to do something to shut them up.

• 1:08:51Steven Rinella?

  And then it capitulated. I bet you can buy Michael Jackson memorabilia on there.

• 1:08:55Speaker 05

  Probably.

• 1:08:55Steven Rinella?

  Why is that okay?

• 1:08:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Steven Rinella?

  That's the thing I wonder about all the time. Why is it okay to sell Michael Jackson memorabilia, but not a beaver fur hat?

• 1:09:09Speaker 05

  Hmm, yeah.

• 1:09:10Steven Rinella?

  Someone needs to make, this is, you know, this is, I, I'll never do this, so I'm gonna throw out a great idea for listeners. Someone needs to make a mo, a fake movie trailer. Okay? And it's like, from the producers of Michael, comes Jeffrey.

• 1:09:30Steven Rinella?

  And it tells the story of Epstein. Rags to riches, but it just ends with him kicking it on an island.

• 1:09:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, like he's made it.

• 1:09:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like he's made it, you know, and it's like, I had my struggles, but by God, now I'm a billionaire.

• 1:09:46Speaker 05

  And they leave out all the bad.

• 1:09:48Steven Rinella?

  And then it just ends.

• 1:09:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Steven Rinella?

  It'd be really funny. If I had time and expertise, I would make this fake trailer.

• 1:09:56Steven Rinella?

  But it'd be, I would just mimic the Michael trailer, but make it the Epstein, no Jeffrey, the movie Jeffrey. And it'll just end with him being like, I've arrived.

• 1:10:05Speaker 05

  Sell it on Etsy.

• 1:10:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that could sell, I could sell my movie on Etsy.

• 1:10:10Speaker 05

  Man, we covered this when they originally just banned fur, like pelts. And it's just, hey, all the fly fishermen, man, like, that's why you should have cared then.

• 1:10:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a squeaky wheel thing. When they were trying to plot, when they were plotting that fur sale ban

• 1:10:31Steven Rinella?

  for Colorado, just recently, they knew, they're like, the pushback from cowboy hat people. So like the pushback from tourists, the people that sell to tourists, and the pushback from fly fishermen, they like, that pushback is going to sink this initiative.

• 1:10:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, they carved out.

• 1:10:51Steven Rinella?

  So they said, oh, if you want to tie flies with beaver fur, cool. If you want to sell cowboy hats made from beaver fur, cool. But the rest of all y'all are out. And they, they anticipated the pushback because like, there's a specialness about a fly guy. Right? They're like, we don't want to mess with the fly fishermen. Cause that's kind of like, you know, a certain class of individual that we don't want to tangle with. But these like lower class ultra rednecks who would run around in like a fur hat. Screw those guys.

• 1:11:27Steven Rinella?

  But here Etsy were like, they didn't take that approach. They didn't say tourist shops selling cowboy hats, you're cool. Um, fly fishermen, you're cool. And now maybe they'll get the ire of the fly fishermen. And it will cause them to revisit.

• 1:11:45Steven Rinella?

  I don't know.

• 1:11:46Speaker 07

  In writing the intro for the show, Steve declared that they were the devil. And then he immediately backed off and said, well, maybe, maybe that was hyperbolic. So where do you land now? Are they still the devil? Are they not the devil?

• 1:11:57Steven Rinella?

  I think it's, it, I think it's terrible that you would cave to something like that. And it's especially terrible that you would equate

• 1:12:09Steven Rinella?

  the, that you would even equate the contemporary market for fur products with some kind of like biodiversity campaign or some kind of sustainability campaign. When we are talking about an industry that is tightly regulated. It's, we're talking about animals that are I U C N, species of least concern.

• 1:12:33Steven Rinella?

  The, the Wild West days of, of the fur trade, imperiling wildlife species, which was one, which was absolutely the reality a long time ago. In fact, I've spent many, many, many days and hours making products, our Meat Eaters American History Series, chronicling the destruction of the fur trade. Right? I'm not whitewashing it. But those days aren't just done, they've been done. Those days are done. It is a tightly, tightly regulated industry that has

• 1:13:12Steven Rinella?

  a, a, basically zero ecological impact. And there is no questions of sustainability around regulated fur bears in this country. There just isn't. It's like you're making an issue where there isn't one and you're catering to people that are just making like an emotional plea. And it opens you up to all the hypocrisy about the things that you therefore think are okay to sell.

• 1:13:36Speaker 07

  So verdict is that they are a demon, Etsy.

• 1:13:43Speaker 07

  They're not going to sponsor this show anytime soon if they come.

• 1:13:46Steven Rinella?

  I don't anticipate, I don't anticipate. I don't anticipate them sponsoring the show. I don't run around calling things like the devil and stuff like that. So it's a little, it's a little unusual for me. I would, I would say that, that, that what they're doing is short sighted and terrible. And really opens them up to some amazing, like, like incredible hypocrisies. That if they are morally, if they're deciding that they're morally policing all of the things sold on Etsy. It makes me very curious what kinds of things are sold on Etsy. And then I must assume that the owners and investors and managers at Etsy are morally okay with those products.

• 1:14:31Speaker 05

  Here's a Valentine's beef jerky flower bouquet for him.

• 1:14:37Speaker 07

  For him.

• 1:14:38Steven Rinella?

  All right, man. Sam Forstegs here. What's going on?

• 1:14:41Speaker 07

  Not too much. I'll tell you, I was stopping by U M not too long ago and I think there's lots of students showing up after getting sprayed by a skunk.

• 1:14:51Steven Rinella?

  Some, some that got sprayed by patchouli and some got sprayed by skunks.

• 1:14:54Speaker 07

  Well, I said that as a proud, proud griz. But yeah, Steve, thanks for having me again, man.

• 1:14:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we, I, I was so excited to see you, uh, the, the, before you came out here, you came out before and it was the primary season. So tell, tell everybody about, about what happened there.

• 1:15:09Speaker 07

  Well, I, I mean, I'm running for Congress in the first district, the western third of the state. And we had a crowded primary, more people running, um, you know, fellow who was the former Democratic nominee for governor. And we ended up pulling it out by just shy of five points. So pretty good margin.

• 1:15:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I mean, we were talking about this yesterday and politics today, that's, that's a, that's a margin.

• 1:15:29Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I'll tell you, the last poll before that had me at 13% and one of these fellows at 35. So it was an exercise and, and what's possible when you get people excited. And frankly, people are excited to just have a normal working person running for Congress because you don't see that very often nowadays.

• 1:15:42Steven Rinella?

  When you look at those polls, um, and I'm sure you, well, let me ask you, do you, do you obsess over them or you just kind of run your campaign?

• 1:15:50Speaker 07

  No, I, I don't. I mean, I got deep, deep frustrations with the way polling works in this country. And I mean, you look at the way some politicians talk and it's probably a string of 20 words that all poll tested really well. And when you put them together, it sounds like mush, you know, and they end up saying things like public lands and public hands. And what does that actually mean? Well, it doesn't mean much the way they're legislating right now.

• 1:16:08Steven Rinella?

  Got it. So when you say you're skeptical of polls, because a lot of these poll, a lot of polls people cite, they're generating their own polls. And I noticed a thing lately that, that seems like people in the political sphere are doing. Maybe you can comment on this, is they're running polls and then campaigning off polls that they make.

• 1:16:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:32Steven Rinella?

  It's, it's, it's weirdly deceptive.

• 1:16:33Speaker 07

  It is, it is. And I'll tell you, as far as polls go, the polling in this race right now has set a dead heat. Uh, for what it's worth, we're at 44, 44 right now with the, the other fellow in this race. But more than that, it's, I mean, what I'm seeing on the ground, uh, you know, last three days, we had about eight campaign events. Labor Day is big. I mean, I was a vice president, my union's local and we got crowds as big as 200 showing up in places like Whitefish. And, uh, really the thing I'm most excited about in this campaign, I don't know if you've seen it. We just had a former Republican governor endorse the campaign, five Republican legislators. And we're doing these civil discourse town halls across the district too. Where I co-host it with one of the Republican legislators. And we talk about the fact that kind of what we mentioned last time, you know, me and Brian Putnam in Columbia Falls, we don't agree on everything.

• 1:17:18Speaker 07

  But we agree on the basics. We agree you should be able to work one good job and get by and that. And there's nothing conservative about going into $40 trillion of debt, for example. And those are actually the most exciting part of a campaign to me, like civil discourse ain't sexy. But it, it seems just as important as any particular policy we're fighting for.

• 1:17:35Steven Rinella?

  That's what I find. Some of the old definitions, maybe that I was raised on, the old definitions about,

• 1:17:45Steven Rinella?

  like what conservatism meant, what liberalism meant.

• 1:17:49Steven Rinella?

  It, the, it's, it's muddy.

• 1:17:51Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Steven Rinella?

  It's become very muddy.

• 1:17:53Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, conservatism was supposed to be, as I understand it, about standing up for like our basic constitutional freedoms. About the fact that government should have no business dictating your private, personal decisions.

• 1:18:05Speaker 07

  I don't see a lot of that right now in the way the show is being run.

• 1:18:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Speaker 07

  And as far as I'm concerned, government's got no business telling you whether you can own guns or telling you how to make a decision with your doctor.

• 1:18:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:15Speaker 07

  Um, and government's got big jobs it should be doing, which I would offer is making sure you can meet your basic material needs when the market's not meeting them. And it's failing at those ones. So let's just get back to the basics here and talk about the fact that, you know, Debbie at King Arthur Mobile Home Park, just outside of town here. Well, Debbie's place was bought up by another private equity firm. And she's watched your lot rent double in the last five years and she's got nowhere to go. That's the role of government I'd offer is making sure that we don't have elderly folks getting forced out onto the streets in a place like Bozeman. Not as, you know, wasting its time trying to insert itself into private decisions where, well, they got no role. Where I don't want a politician having any say in how I, how I live my life.

• 1:18:56Steven Rinella?

  How do you feel that, that, that this time you spent talking about public lands issues and, and, and when we, well, let me back up. Look, because when you came out before, we talked a lot about what went on with land management agencies. And what's going on with land management agencies in terms of funding, in terms of staffing, public land management issues, in terms of the, the Doge, what, what turned into sort of a Doge debacle around public lands management. When you talk about these issues, how is it? How do you feel it's generally received by people? Because a lot of it's kind of.

• 1:19:34Steven Rinella?

  You know, the term wonky like, like a, a, a lot of it's very policy specific. Does, does your message about public lands and public lands management, does it resonate with people? Or are people, or do people have that way low in their priority list around the state? Do you follow me?

• 1:19:52Speaker 03

  I, I do. I, I think in, in Montana, this is pretty high on people's priorities. And the thing I get the most is surprise. I mean, I, you know, I worked as a smoke jumper till eight months ago. People are pretty surprised to learn that a smoke jumper makes 15 bucks an hour. You're a rookie here.

• 1:20:06Steven Rinella?

  Is that what it is?

• 1:20:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. People are surprised that, you know, when they fired 360 Montanans in the Forest Service, 85% of them were making 1970 an hour or less.

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  This is not the way that any of these cuts or that our public lands agencies are really being talked about is, you know, the fact that, well, our public lands are more than a bunch of lines on a map. It's a lot of people busting tail to actually maintain them. And make sure you can make it up a road to a trailhead or up a trail to actually access that forest. Um, and the, those people, often the lowest paid ones are the ones who've been taking the brunt of these cuts, these reorganizations. You know, I, I could go on all day about the fact that there are big inefficiencies in the federal government. Like the fact that, you know, job postings just closed three weeks ago for a firefighter position or forestry tech that's going to be starting this coming May. That is inefficient. Um, the inefficiencies are not, you know, the GS twos we, we saw get fired last year making 11 bucks an hour.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  That's actually how I would offer maybe inhumanely efficient if you're living in a place like Medulla.

• 1:21:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

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• 1:22:38Steven Rinella?

  What, uh, what, what's it been like on the, what's it like doing what you're doing? I mean, how, how, you're 35 years old, right?

• 1:22:44Speaker 03

  32, but my knees are in their 40s.

• 1:22:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So if I calculate your actual age and your knee age, it lands, I'm about right. 32 years old.

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  That's the mean.

• 1:22:53Steven Rinella?

  Couple of years ago, you had, you had no idea this is going to happen.

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:56Steven Rinella?

  No idea you're going to be in this situation.

• 1:22:57Speaker 03

  I thought I'd jump till 57, till mandatory retirement.

• 1:23:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So, so here you are. Lay out like what life, um, what is life like on the campaign trail now?

• 1:23:07Speaker 03

  It makes fire season look easy. I mean, fire season was when I started two weeks on, two days off. Um, it was a day off every two or three weeks. But it's also getting to hear people's, I mean, most inspiring and vulnerable and terrible stories. Cause a lot of people just want to be heard. And I mean, we're in a state right now where our congressperson in this seat has not had a town hall in more than three years. So people quite literally are not being heard.

• 1:23:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:33Speaker 03

  And people have big problems. I mean, it's, it's heartbreaking. You know, I was sitting down with Debbie. At the end of that conversation, she said, Sam, when I was your age, if old people had lived like this, I would be so angry.

• 1:23:44Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Yeah.

• 1:23:45Speaker 03

  And we should be so angry. Um, and we shouldn't just leave it of being angry because it feels like everybody's angry on social media and screaming into their cell phone screen about everything that's wrong. And complaining never solved a damn thing.

• 1:23:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  Like we actually, it's our turn to step up and do something about it and stand up for our neighbors.

• 1:24:00Steven Rinella?

  That's one of the things I've liked about watching, watching you, you do what you've been doing is that, um, you, you just like talk like a, you talk like a person. Do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  It's not kind of dumb. That's what you're saying.

• 1:24:14Steven Rinella?

  No, no, you just talk like a person who is sharing their thoughts, right? And, and just, and not so worried about being so damn safe.

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:25Steven Rinella?

  Which really starts to drive me crazy.

• 1:24:27Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, if I had to define what like modern politics feels like, it feels like, can I curse on it? It feels like everybody's BSing us.

• 1:24:33Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  Like if, especially the highest levels of office, like whatever side you look at, they're just walking the line of whatever's poll tested.

• 1:24:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  And then, and then it's no surprise when people get elected and nothing changes.

• 1:24:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  And if it does, it often is not changing for the better, right? Like we're in a country where half of America, half of Americans are making less than their parents were making at our age. Um, those are the kinds of changes we're actually seeing or on public lands, right? Since we spoke last, it's not just the cuts, it's not just the people being fired. Well, we've seen 3 million acres of protections rolled back down at Bears Ears in Grand Esalante. Uh, in Alaska, you saw 5 million acres rolled back where they're selling it off for oil leasing now. And it's not just the fact that they're rolling these back in a place like Alaska or Minnesota, they're selling it off at a discount. I mean, they slashed leasing fees, royalty rates by half.

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  Back in, back, what, uh, two February's ago, um, they're running our public lands agencies like a private equity firm. Like it's just like those mobile home parks, 4,000 of which are now owned by private equity in Montana. Um, and that is why you're seeing the rents double. I mean, the, the bunkhouse that I spent my first seasons, two through four, uh, for working wild in fire on, it's up in the Swan Valley in Condon, Montana. They are selling off those bunkhouses. And what I would offer is the most beautiful piece of property in the Swan. I mean, you got a view of Condon, Condon Peak and the Swan Mountains to the east. There's an airstrip across the way. They're selling that off and the people on that hand crew, well, they're probably living in the back of their trucks. And if there are bunkhouses, they're leasing them up in Big Fork.

• 1:26:07Speaker 03

  We're selling off properties across the board at our public lands agencies and then leasing those properties. Cause it's cheaper in the short term, but then we all end up paying so much more.

• 1:26:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15Speaker 03

  For so much less in the long term.

• 1:26:17Steven Rinella?

  The, I, I've been, I've been outspoken about this. People within the, uh, our organization have been outspoken about the roadless rule, rollback.

• 1:26:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:28Steven Rinella?

  Um, and the thing that's frustrating me about it is I find, this is going to be kind of in your, in particularly in your wheelhouse, is I find that people that are advocating on stripping the roadless rule away and, and opening up a lot of these areas to industrial development of various sorts. Tend to be a little less than honest about what the primary motivation is.

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:55Steven Rinella?

  And they cite motivations that are sort of what I would regard them to be side benefits, fringe benefits, but they cite it as the main issue. So people, they're like, we need to roll, we need to roll back the roadless rule. And open these lands up because of wildfires. And I'm just like, dude, please stop acting like that is the main thing you're interested in is, is wildfire.

• 1:27:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:21Steven Rinella?

  You have a career in wildfire. When, when they're saying that, like, how, how real is that? When they're citing that that is the motivation is fire prevention.

• 1:27:31Speaker 03

  Oh, it's an absolute red herring. I mean, 90% of fires that we see started are within, well, pretty damn close to a road. So we punch roads back 20 miles, you know, further in, well, that's just more fires. Most wildfires are human caused in the West nowadays.

• 1:27:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Speaker 03

  Um, and I mean, yeah, the real reason is development, but I would offer, there are places where reopening roads makes sense. Um, uh, going with a broad brush and rolling back the roadless rule does not make sense.

• 1:27:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:59Speaker 03

  And when I go talk to loggers too, or when I go to the, the mill in Deer Lodge a few weeks ago and take a tour. I mean, there are big problems we need to solve so that we aren't left with zero milling capacity in the state of Montana. The problem is not the roadless rule. And they have enough time staying in the black, uh, trying to get a timber contract in the front country, let alone trying to go 10 or 15 miles back. Like this is not going to be helpful for our sawmills, you know, six of which are left in a state that used to have 50.

• 1:28:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  Um, what this is, is people who are running the show and do not actually understand how this works on the ground.

• 1:28:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we have, we have thousands and thousands of square miles of road in country. That is not being properly timberly, that does not have proper timber management on it anyway.

• 1:28:39Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. We got a, a six to eight billion dollar backlog of road maintenance in the Forest Service. And I mean, if we got six to eight billion dollars to drop that I didn't know about, well, I I would love to see it.

• 1:28:49Steven Rinella?

  And that's maintenance for roads that are there.

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, the ones that are currently open.

• 1:28:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:53Speaker 03

  And I, I mean, again, like we, we are way behind on our forest management. Right? We have a backlog because of excessive fire suppression in part. Um, of fuel that needs burned. I mean, you know this, right? There's certain timber, timber models that should be burning every 15 to 20 years and have burned in 50 plus. Lodge pulled pine can't reproduce. Without exposure to fire. Um, the answer is not rolling back the roadless rule. The answer is not these categorical exclusions where you completely sweep away environmental protections. It's making sure that you can get a timber contract in a, a year if it's challenged in court, not in six years. It's actually fully investing in the public servants to do that work. Cause what we saw last year is you fire all the NIPA planners. You fire the soil scientists, you fire the people who do the science when you're trying to get an environmental impact statement.

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  And then the plans you produce actually do not pass muster. And so it takes longer to, longer in court. And when I sit down with a logger, they tell me these cuts in the last year and a half have been terrible for, for the timber industry.

• 1:29:47Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:48Speaker 03

  Because they're having a harder time actually getting a contract through in public, in federal public lands. Um, and, and I'd say that too. I mean, like wildfire always gets used as this excuse for these rollbacks.

• 1:30:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, always. It's, it, yeah, it drives me a little bit bananas, man.

• 1:30:03Speaker 03

  And the reason we need logging in this state responsible timber harvest is not wildfire. Like logging is not the answer to the wildfire crisis. The reason we need it is because we build homes with wood. Let's be honest about that. And wildfire, if we want to get ahead of a wildfire crisis, well, maybe there's a, there's a 10 to 20% role with responsible timber harvest in the front country. The real answer is investing in fire mitigation and fuels reduction work. And putting healthy fire on the landscape. And that's the sort of thing that you're not going to have a profit margin on. It's the sort of thing that you need to hire fuels crews and the sort of people they fired last year. And the example I give people is we had a, a fire last year outside of Helenville. It's, they called it the windy rock fires, 2,000 acres and Helenville is not the most populous corner of Montana. That 2,000 acre fire cost the state of Montana $56 million.

• 1:30:48Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 1:30:49Speaker 03

  56 million bucks by my napkin math, you could pay 2,000 people, 20 bucks an hour, 365 days a year to stomp around the woods with a chainsaw and actually actively manage our forests. And we don't pay our fuels crews 20 bucks an hour.

• 1:31:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:01Speaker 03

  Like that is the investment you can make to actually save a whole bunch of money on the backend and to start getting ahead of this thing. Um, and that would save us money or leave more money in the state of Montana and create good jobs. Cause we got these computers that can write their own code or legal briefs. They cannot stomp around the woods with a saw. Um, and you know, it wouldn't benefit someone who maybe owns a wild and fire contracting company. Uh, you know, someone like Senator Tim Sheehy, who just saw his first profit margin in the history of his company last year. But it would benefit us as taxpayers and it would save us money and it would help us to actually start managing our forests wisely and effectively.

• 1:31:34Steven Rinella?

  You know, when you, when you look back on, and you've been vocal about this, when you look back on

• 1:31:41Steven Rinella?

  some people saw it immediately. I, it took me a minute to see, it took me a minute to realize what some people saw instantly was how ham handed the Doge process was.

• 1:31:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:56Steven Rinella?

  It was like, I don't know, man. I just kind of weirdly for a minute tried to, I paused to try to understand it. Right? Because of course, like you said, inefficiency is bad. I paused and then, and then kind of very quickly like, oh no, no, this is totally ham handed.

• 1:32:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Steven Rinella?

  Especially when I was talking, especially when I started, we, we kind of interviewed a guy leaving the White River National Forest about what he had to do. According to Doge cuts and just how much it set his agenda back. How inefficient it was and became clear. It was just a debacle. And not only that, I think the greatest test testament to what a debacle it was, was that the people that were doing it all fled DC.

• 1:32:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. They ran away. You know? Is, do you see in the, do you see, if you look forward? Do you see that will gradually? Um, like correct all that? Or, or, or did things happen, even though it was sort of almost is, is is clearly is, is possible. It was declared a debacle. I mean, the, the, the, the formal understanding of what happened has become that it was crazy. And there aren't that many people who would argue otherwise.

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, they shut it down.

• 1:33:09Steven Rinella?

  And, and there aren't people going, there aren't people in the political sphere today citing it as an accomplishment. It's, it's either brushed under the, it's either brushed under the rug. Nothing to see here, or people that are vocal point out how stupid it was, or how poor the execution of the idea was. Do we gradually climb back out of that? In particular, I'm not talking about, I, I'm talking about the aspects of Doge that affected land management agencies and public land management agencies. Do we climb out of that? Or do you feel that there was a damage done that'll never be corrected?

• 1:33:44Speaker 03

  I think it's not a foregone conclusion, but I think we can climb out of it.

• 1:33:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:48Speaker 03

  And I think we, and people who actually do this work on the ground know where the investments would be to rebuild it in a way that works. Cause I, I want to be clear. This shit was not working perfectly before Doge.

• 1:34:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:00Speaker 03

  I mean, I ended the 2024 fire season on a fire in the middle of the Three Sisters Wilderness. Where we got a satellite call saying the Forest Service is 20 million in the red. And so half of the people on that fire are going to be out of pay status the second you leave that fire.

• 1:34:13Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:34:14Speaker 03

  You're not even going to have enough time to get paid to go clean out your locker at the smoke jumper base.

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  We need to rebuild this thing in a way that actually makes sense and does find efficiencies. And that means, well, it's largely the, the lower paid people in our lands, land management agencies. I think we should talk really openly about the fact that we should have a big reinvestment, expansive investment in fuels mitigation. And walking around the front, front country, making sure you have the people it takes to do a responsible prescribed fire in the fall and the spring, when it's safe to do so. Um, and actually clear out underbrush, that's going to take a lot of manpower and it's going to cost a lot of money, but it will save us so many hundreds of millions of dollars on the backend. So we do not have these mega fires like the ones I've been on in the last eight years where I've been on five fires that have all been the biggest fire in that state's history, just in the last five years.

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  And we all end up paying so much for it. I mean, it's like it says in scripture, I promise you'll pay every penny. Before we leave this place, we're paying every penny right now. We're just paying it in a crisis response mode of governance. And that's the, the least efficient way to govern.

• 1:35:17Steven Rinella?

  I've talked to so many people, friends of mine that work in, in different, different agencies that kind of impact the world that we explore through this show and others. Um, and so many of them are like, man, I would love to have a conversation about efficiency.

• 1:35:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:34Steven Rinella?

  And through my career, I've seen a lot of opportunities to clean up efficient, to, to help with efficiency. But boy, did they get it wrong.

• 1:35:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:42Steven Rinella?

  Again, and again, and again, they're like, it was, it was having someone taking a quick glimpse into a world that I understand really well. And declaring, oh, that should go and that should go and that should go. And them sitting back saying, man, did you miss the bullseye? You missed the target. When they did that stuff.

• 1:36:01Speaker 03

  I think we need a real effort of government efficiency after this, a good faith effort. If you want to tell people that this is still a country where we can make big investments and solve big problems. You need to actually show folks that you're going to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars. And use them efficiently. And we did this in the nineties. Last time we had a balanced budget as a country. And the Clinton administration had a, well, a government efficiency effort. And it worked pretty darn well. Um, we should do that again. If, if we are able to, to gain power and win seats like this. Talk about how do we make sure that the federal hiring process doesn't take nine months for a GS4 who makes 16 bucks an hour? Because that's so many man hours. That is so much lost talent. We return direct hire authority. That's one great example. How do you make sure that a workman's comp claim

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  for a smoke jumper who breaks their back on a practice jump, like my good buddy did out of Grangeville, does not take 18 months to chase down? Because again, we are all paying for the hundreds of man hours it takes to chase that down for an obvious claim. For somebody who broke their back in the line of duty. Um, beyond that, I mean, I'll tell you, I was filling out, I was looking at the federal job application three weeks ago, right before it closed. And we are adding questions like these four question loyalty test. Uh, if you're filling out an application for a GS4 forester, someone who's just, is going to be timber crews and you got to answer a question about what is, what are your favorite two executive orders? And how will you in this job further the advancement of that executive order? It's insanity.

• 1:37:24Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:37:26Speaker 03

  And I'll tell you what, I was a GS4 once. I had, would had no business filling out an essay question about my favorite executive order. Like I was drinking Monsters and wearing an American flag bandana.

• 1:37:38Speaker 03

  You want to talk about losing good talent? Like we're doing reverse civil service reform when we should actually be reforming how our civil service works and having less of political, less political appointees instead of expanding them.

• 1:37:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:48Speaker 03

  Like these are big efficiencies that we could find. The same goes for forest management, for making sure you can get a, a timber contract in the front country. Um, yes, let's talk about that. And I think the best ideas come from the people on the ground doing the work.

• 1:38:01Steven Rinella?

  Here's, here's a tough question for you. Let's say you get sent to D, let's say the voters of Montana, the voters of Western Montana send you to DC. And how do you? How do you save? Like, how do you salvage your purity?

• 1:38:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's a real.

• 1:38:19Steven Rinella?

  And how do you keep, how do you stay like, no, I'm here to talk about?

• 1:38:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. The things we're talking about right now. And there's gonna be so much pressure for you to, for you to take orders from someone who has a, who has a high position in the party and they, and they have the people they're beholden to. And all of a sudden, you, you wanna talk about, you know, you're here to talk about fire, land management, affordability, working class people. And all of a sudden, you're just talking about something dumb. Yeah. That no one in Montana asked you to go talk about. How do you like, what are you gonna do then? And they want you to spend your time on dumb stuff.

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  I'll tell you what helps is, is I've been to DC twice and I think I'm gonna hate it in that town.

• 1:39:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:39:06Speaker 03

  And so I, I'm not going there for a good time or a long time.

• 1:39:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:10Speaker 03

  Like I, I would love nothing better than to go win this seat, hold the people accountable, who fired hundreds of my coworkers and union members and turn people's lives upside down, working Montana's lives upside down. Um, and make sure that we still have a functioning Forest Service that I can go back to in four years.

• 1:39:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:26Speaker 03

  I mean, I live right outside the smoke jumper base in Missoula and I gotta watch the jump plane flying overhead and it kills me. I would love to be there. I'd love to be in their boots right now. Um, but yeah, after a year and a half of, of what people went through, like, I mean, I had a member Kara in the Bitter National Forest. Uh, she was 15 years into her service as a soil scientist. She, uh, got the news on Valentine's Day, two years ago, that she was losing her job. No notice, not for, for performance, but because she took a lateral transfer that year so that she could do more remote work while she underwent chemotherapy. Uh, I got a guy in Anis who was a member. He got a text in line at the airport to go to his grandmother's funeral, saying that he'd lost his job. He's already locked out of his government devices and he was only a GS5 in the first place. He was probably making 16 bucks an hour.

• 1:40:11Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:12Speaker 03

  And he was the guy, he's the guy who's making sure that your campgrounds are maintained. Um,

• 1:40:18Speaker 03

  these people, like, we deserve not just efficiency in our government, we actually deserve good, wise investment in our public lands. And frankly, the people who bent the knee and voted for all this, when we could have been the most powerful state in the country, there's a narrow majority in the House and a person who's a good representative in this seat should be standing up to either party when they're full of shit, which comes from both parties. We didn't get that.

• 1:40:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:41Speaker 03

  And like, well, if they're gonna come after my members' jobs, I'm gonna come and take his. And they need to know that there's a cost for this and that our democracy still works. And frankly, they need to know that working people can still actually attain these offices. Cause that is the most frustrating thing I see. Is you look at the, well, United States House of Representatives, the average member of Congress is worth four million bucks. Depending on the day and how good the stock market's doing.

• 1:41:04Steven Rinella?

  What are you worth right now?

• 1:41:05Speaker 03

  Me, I'm, well, I'm uninsured right now, cause I can't afford the damn health insurance.

• 1:41:09Steven Rinella?

  I've seen your place, man.

• 1:41:12Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm, I'm barely getting by like most people and you wonder why.

• 1:41:15Steven Rinella?

  I brought this up before, but this dude's got bookshelves in his kitchen.

• 1:41:20Speaker 03

  Well, you never know when you need a good book. That's an endorsement.

• 1:41:23Steven Rinella?

  No, Joey, I don't mean to ask you what you're worth, but yeah.

• 1:41:26Speaker 03

  So you, I mean.

• 1:41:27Steven Rinella?

  That's, that's part of what's drawn me, like, part of what's drawn me to like, uh, uh, personality matters to me. The way people talk matters to me and also I'm like, man, this dude's a legit guy. That like, has just been around and seen stuff and got motivated by what he's seen. And, and motivate, it's just like motivated by things that didn't work. And, I don't know, man, like, wanna, like, help. I like that stuff, man.

• 1:41:50Speaker 03

  Well, oh yeah. Thank you, Steve.

• 1:41:51Steven Rinella?

  It wasn't like a business, it's not a business move.

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

  No, no. Yeah, I, I was just getting the first shred of financial security that I'd ever had, frankly. Um, in my fourth year of jumping. I mean, your first year of jumping, you're a rookie. So, you know, it's not that fun because you're, you're taking all the shit and you're waking up early for coffee and you're making extra food and all the rest. And your second year, you're snooky and it's not much better. And, you know, your third, fourth year, it starts to be more fun. You start to be more comfortable under the parachute. And, um, frankly, I, I didn't have health insurance or a retirement plan until my sixth year of fire. Like I was finally on that path. But if people like us don't actually step up and run for office, then it's just these folks who are so disconnected that are making all the decisions.

• 1:42:31Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:42:32Speaker 03

  And that's how we end up in this hole that they're digging on both sides. And that's how they end up talking about shit that nobody's actually talking about on the ground here when you're just trying to meet your basic needs.

• 1:42:39Steven Rinella?

  You see a lot of people enter politics that do it, um, it's like a thing they wanna do kinda before they retire.

• 1:42:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:48Steven Rinella?

  It's like a, it's like a project they need to get taken care of.

• 1:42:51Speaker 03

  I made my millions.

• 1:42:52Steven Rinella?

  To really, sort of like to really fill out the old CV, you know, and, and your legacy move. And so to see someone come at it from the, uh, like the other end of the career thing. And from such a u- unusual position.

• 1:43:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, yeah, I, I hope we can, I hope we can save it. And I hope we can actually make the kind of reforms that we're talking about and make sure we don't, I mean, really lose what's left of the Forest Service in this state.

• 1:43:20Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:43:21Speaker 03

  I mean, this is a state, we got the first smoke jumper base in history, right in Missoula. Modern wildland firefighting largely began in Montana.

• 1:43:28Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:43:28Speaker 03

  Um, and we got national forests at the beginning of last year that were reduced to one trail crew member, for the entire Bitter, for example. Um, and they're selling it all off at a discount. So I, yeah, I, I feel hopeful right now that we can make the sort of change we need when I'm having those town halls with, with a Republican legislator and people are showing up and saying that they have either never been to a political event or that they voted the other way last year. It makes me feel hopeful.

• 1:43:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:53Speaker 03

  And, um, yeah, I, it sounds cliche, but like truly, I don't feel like the problem is in one party or the other. Part, the problem is, but is in both parties.

• 1:44:00Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:00Speaker 03

  I mean, there are corporate bought off politicians in both parties at the highest levels right now because that is the way that our system has been designed. And the only way we fix it is by actually stepping up and making sure that working people who know what it's like to be on the wrong end of this stuff are in positions of authority to make decisions so we can fight for ourselves.

• 1:44:18Steven Rinella?

  Well, keep being a person.

• 1:44:23Steven Rinella?

  Maybe you make a sign, Sam Forest Egg, a person.

• 1:44:27Speaker 03

  Well, I'm a person. I, I'd be there listening. My duty too. I mean, if anyone wants to look up any of the details too, I mean, the website, samformontana.com. The most inspiring thing is we got many thousands of volunteers who got us through that primary and who are helping us right now. Um, and I mean, we have something like 27,000 people who've pitched into the campaign.

• 1:44:47Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 1:44:48Speaker 03

  And it's, you know, it's people pitching in 25 bucks, cause that's what they can afford or 50 bucks. So that's what most of my friends can afford and, um, that's the only way any of this stuff works.

• 1:44:56Steven Rinella?

  All right. Well, thanks for coming on again. Thanks for checking in.

• 1:45:00Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:45:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You gotta make one promise though.

• 1:45:02Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45:03Steven Rinella?

  If you win, you gotta come back and do the final check in.

• 1:45:05Speaker 03

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 1:45:06Steven Rinella?

  We talked to you pre, we talked to you before the primary, we've talked to you after the primary. We gotta do a final check in.

• 1:45:11Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. And we can do one more two years later when I'm sick and tired of all this stuff.

• 1:45:15Steven Rinella?

  It'll be Sam Forest Egg signs off.

• 1:45:18Speaker 03

  That's right. Well, no, thank you for having me, Steve. Um, yeah, I'll be back. I'll, I'll tell everybody ballots drop in Montana, October 10th. Absentee ballots, voting is November 3rd. You can register to vote until 30 days before the election in this state.

• 1:45:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know what's funny? All this garb, not garbage, but all this like consternation about mailing ballots. Dude, I haven't been down. That's all I ever do. Does anybody here not mail? Do you, do you guys all do the mailing? Do you just show up and like wait in line?

• 1:45:42Speaker 03

  I hunt that week every single day.

• 1:45:44Speaker 05

  I do it in person, always.

• 1:45:45Steven Rinella?

  You go in person?

• 1:45:46Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:45:46Speaker 03

  You get the sticker.

• 1:45:47Steven Rinella?

  Is it fun?

• 1:45:48Speaker 05

  No. I have a very complicated relationship with voting.

• 1:45:52Steven Rinella?

  Well, do you not, you don't do the mailing because you, you, you, cause you don't trust it? Or you just like to go down?

• 1:45:57Speaker 05

  Well, uh, it's so complicated.

• 1:46:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay. We don't need to get into it.

• 1:46:02Speaker 05

  Uh,

• 1:46:03Steven Rinella?

  we don't need to get into it.

• 1:46:04Speaker 05

  Let's not get into it.

• 1:46:05Steven Rinella?

  Seth, do you do mailing?

• 1:46:06Speaker 05

  I've done both, but mostly mailing, cause I'm hunting.

• 1:46:09Speaker 06

  Same. I, I, I kinda like walking in there occasionally.

• 1:46:13Speaker 05

  You walk in it?

• 1:46:14Speaker 06

  I've done it, yeah.

• 1:46:15Speaker 05

  I think I've walked in like three or four times since I moved to Montana.

• 1:46:18Speaker 06

  It feels like more of a civil duty, but yeah, obviously it's not as convenient, you know?

• 1:46:23Steven Rinella?

  When I think of walking in there, all I can think about is all the times I had to go with my mom when I was a little kid and wait in line while she voted. And then also my mom used to work the thing.

• 1:46:32Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:46:33Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:46:34Speaker 05

  My mom took up working the thing lately. The last election, she, yeah, she volunteered.

• 1:46:39Steven Rinella?

  When I do the mailing though, I'm always worried like, what if something terrible comes out about one of these guys?

• 1:46:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:45Steven Rinella?

  And I already sent my thing in.

• 1:46:48Steven Rinella?

  If you walk in, you're operating on like, it's done. You can make the final assessment, but picture how embarrassing it'd be. You vote for some guy and then like you send it off and then meanwhile like it comes out, you know, oh my God, they found all these bodies in his yard. And you're like, dah.

• 1:47:04Speaker 05

  Oh no, they found Sam's.

• 1:47:06Speaker 06

  Was that like a sneaky way of giving Sam some kind of like?

• 1:47:10Speaker 03

  Story of modern politics.

• 1:47:11Steven Rinella?

  If you got bodies in your yard, tell me now.

• 1:47:13Speaker 03

  You got one month. We'll go take them up together. Yeah. Tell me now. By the time this is all done. Yeah.

• 1:47:18Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I do have one last question for you. Um, this is gonna be hard to answer this. But you know what people do? Like people find crazy stuff.

• 1:47:26Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47:28Steven Rinella?

  If I ever ran for office and I promise you, like I never will, I would start, I would announce my campaign with a list of every bad thing I ever said or did.

• 1:47:37Speaker 03

  Uh-huh. Yeah, just front load it.

• 1:47:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'd be like, listen, there's more than you'd guess.

• 1:47:43Speaker 03

  I have had social media since I was 12 years old, so it is all out there in the open.

• 1:47:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:47Speaker 03

  And it is embarrassing as hell. Yeah.

• 1:47:49Steven Rinella?

  Is it nerve wracking?

• 1:47:50Speaker 03

  It, it is. Yeah. I mean, the guy I'm up against, welcome, the millennial generation is gonna have a lot of public embarrassment.

• 1:47:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:58Speaker 03

  Um, but no, the guy I'm up against, he had, well, an AI super PAC dropped 600K just in the month of May to get the fellow I'm running against through his primary.

• 1:48:06Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:48:06Speaker 03

  That really is a terrifying prospect. I mean, millions of dollars a raid to make you look like the biggest monster that they possibly can.

• 1:48:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:13Speaker 03

  But I think what you just said is the only way you get through it is just keep being a human and actually showing up and talking to people and like, I think that all that noise is, is not gonna work this time around, cause people are pissed. And we are angry and we're sick and tired and, um, I don't think, uh, $10 million worth of mailers is gonna stop that.

• 1:48:31Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Well, all right, man. Thanks for coming on.

• 1:48:34Speaker 03

  Thank you, brother. I appreciate it.

• 1:48:35Steven Rinella?

  Good luck, Sam.

• 1:48:36Speaker 03

  Thank you, man.

• 1:48:37Speaker 05

  Thanks, Sam.

• 1:48:37Speaker 03

  Thank you all. Thanks.

• 1:49:05Speaker 07

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