Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't
Speaker 1: predict anything presented by on X Hunt creators are the
Speaker 1: most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt
Speaker 1: app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where
Speaker 1: you stand with on X everybody. I don't want to
Speaker 1: discourage you from listening to this episode. It's about Pebble
Speaker 1: Mind in Alaska, and everything you're gonna hear is pertinent
Speaker 1: and relevant. But here's here's the weird thing. While we
Speaker 1: were recording this episode with Tim Bristol about Pebble Mind
Speaker 1: in Bristol Bay, Alaska, a big news story broke. In
Speaker 1: this eisode you're gonna hear mention of a guy named
Speaker 1: Tim Collier who works on behalf of Pebble Mind. While
Speaker 1: we were recording the show, it came out that Tim Collier,
Speaker 1: who served as CEO role on the Pebble Mind project,
Speaker 1: was secretly recorded saying some things that are speculated about
Speaker 1: in this coming episode. This will make more sense after
Speaker 1: you listen. For instance, he acknowledges to some people who
Speaker 1: are posing as potential investors to the Mind we're going
Speaker 1: to be discussing today. He acknowledges not that this would
Speaker 1: be a twenty year project, but this that phase one
Speaker 1: of this project would be a one year project. And
Speaker 1: he discusses certain politicians by name who he says, sure
Speaker 1: they'll pay lip service, two opponents of the mind, and
Speaker 1: they'll act like they care about having this mind on right.
Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, I'm friends with him,
Speaker 1: I know him, and they'll just rubber stamp the thing.
Speaker 1: That's an essence I'm I'm paraphrasing them, that's an essence
Speaker 1: of what this guy says on these secretly recorded tapes.
Speaker 1: And Tim Collier, who were going to discuss quite a
Speaker 1: bit in this show, had to promptly resign. So understand
Speaker 1: that this episode happened in the minutes before this major
Speaker 1: twist in the story occurred. So dig in and you
Speaker 1: will walk away borderline expert on pebble Mind, and hopefully,
Speaker 1: like me, you'll come to the decision that this is
Speaker 1: the wrong mind in the wrong place and we need
Speaker 1: to fix this problem once and for all. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're joined by uh super special guests out of Homer Laste,
Speaker 1: Tim Bristol, how predictable? Is it that I bring up that?
Speaker 1: You know? You know what I'm gonna bring up? Look
Speaker 1: about your name? How that work out? Either chance or faith?
Speaker 1: You know, take your pick. So what I'm getting at here?
Speaker 1: His name is Tim Bristol. Yeah, you've dedicated how many
Speaker 1: years to fighting pebble mine on Bristol Bay? Did you
Speaker 1: change your name to Bristol? Did not know it's born
Speaker 1: with that name? At what point where you like, wow, huh,
Speaker 1: you know my name is the name of that place.
Speaker 1: I think the best thing about it was when I
Speaker 1: started going out to these communities, these native villages. You
Speaker 1: know a lot of us white people all the same,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of got out there in baseball hats
Speaker 1: and right and garret and you know I have some
Speaker 1: kind of you know, scruffy scruffy beard, and they remembered
Speaker 1: me because they're like Tim Bristol, we remember your last name.
Speaker 1: It's so good. It's great. So I worked out, you know,
Speaker 1: it worked out really well. It was that vantageous. Yes,
Speaker 1: can you uh man like, explain to people as though
Speaker 1: they're five years old, Yeah, as twenty years old. Explain
Speaker 1: to people like they're twenty years old. What when someone
Speaker 1: says pebble mind. Okay, what is pebble mind? Considering that
Speaker 1: it's at this point it's nothing, But what are we
Speaker 1: talking about when we talk about Pebble mine. Pebble Mine
Speaker 1: is a proposal to build either the second largest or
Speaker 1: the largest open pit golden copper mine in the world
Speaker 1: at the headwaters of the most productive wild salmon fishery
Speaker 1: left on the planet. And it's a choice for Alaska.
Speaker 1: You know, we're we're at a crossroads. We got to
Speaker 1: decide whether we're going to allow everything everywhere where? Are
Speaker 1: we just going to say some places are just too
Speaker 1: important for renewable resources, for thousands of American jobs, for
Speaker 1: America's you know, natural heritage, and we're not going to
Speaker 1: allow this to go forward. The superlative largest or second largest.
Speaker 1: What does that hinge on? Well, it's all about the
Speaker 1: habitat when you're talking about Sakai salmon production, right, So
Speaker 1: I'm talking about the mind size like it would be
Speaker 1: the largest, Like I mean, there's there's varying proposals or
Speaker 1: like it's unclear how to measure them. Well that there's
Speaker 1: there's This is where it gets really confusing for the
Speaker 1: public and incredibly irritating for us that are trying to
Speaker 1: you know, punch through and tell the truth on this thing.
Speaker 1: It is the largest known gold resource and the second
Speaker 1: largest known copper resource in North America. And when the
Speaker 1: head of the company Pebble Limited Partnership, this guy named
Speaker 1: Ron Theson, goes and talks to investors at you know
Speaker 1: World Gold Form and things like that, he talks in
Speaker 1: those terms, those superlatives, that this is a you know,
Speaker 1: world class resource that we may be able to mind
Speaker 1: it for a hundred years or more. But then when
Speaker 1: Pebble comes back to the public, when Pebble gives a
Speaker 1: proposal to the Army Corps of Engineers, they say, oh,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be there for twenty years and then we're
Speaker 1: gonna go away. And you know, there's really no way
Speaker 1: to sugarcoat it. It's a flat outline, and the government
Speaker 1: right now is swallowing it, hook line and sinker. It
Speaker 1: makes it incredibly frustrating because I just you know, if
Speaker 1: you talk to people that don't have a that don't
Speaker 1: have skin in the game, that are experts in the
Speaker 1: mining world, they'll tell you that they're not going to
Speaker 1: make any money in the first twenty years, and there's
Speaker 1: no way they're going to stop after twenty years. The
Speaker 1: shareholders wouldn't let them. Everybody was part of the company
Speaker 1: would get sued, and they would just put a whole
Speaker 1: new set of leadership in there and then apply for
Speaker 1: a little additional permit and just keep going. Would it
Speaker 1: somehow make it better if they did stop after twenty years? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Would that? Would that ease your mind? Not really now?
Speaker 1: And the other damage will be done as far as
Speaker 1: like the all the infrastructure and the what it takes
Speaker 1: to open the mind, right, Yeah, yeah, I I would.
Speaker 1: I would point I would try to find you know
Speaker 1: a place in the world where that's happened. Right, we
Speaker 1: spend billions on infrastructure, roads, a port, uh, getting a
Speaker 1: natural gas pipeline out there, and and then just quitting
Speaker 1: after twenty years, right when you you may have not
Speaker 1: turned to profit by that point, So I just you
Speaker 1: know that's not going to happen. And then you have
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of other mineral claims staked around the
Speaker 1: Pebble Prospect. The thing that people don't realize is you're
Speaker 1: looking at a thousand square miles and mining claims at
Speaker 1: the headwaters of Bristol Bay, and that would make it
Speaker 1: one of the largest mining districts, if not the largest
Speaker 1: mining district in the world. And you start thinking about
Speaker 1: the implications for wild salmon production, and you look at
Speaker 1: wild salmon runs all the all throughout the Pacific rim
Speaker 1: and you pretty much know all the story is gonna end.
Speaker 1: You know, have you ever heard this? That all of
Speaker 1: the gold that's ever that's in existence above ground, So
Speaker 1: all of the gold that's ever been hauled out of
Speaker 1: the earth since the Egyptians, there's only enough to fill
Speaker 1: three Olympic sized swimming pools all of that gold, Forbes estimate.
Speaker 1: Forbes estimates that that it's would take that all the
Speaker 1: gold since two thousand BC, including the Egyptians, that all
Speaker 1: of that gold would fill three point to seven Olympic
Speaker 1: swimming pools. That's what's ever been dragged out of the earth.
Speaker 1: Isn't that one die hard movie they had? Do you
Speaker 1: think pools? Swimming pools? Note joke though either Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a lot of volume. The Okay, put your mining engineer
Speaker 1: head on for a minute about have one of those.
Speaker 1: But I'll try, Okay, I mean, shooting engineers are smart people.
Speaker 1: We should have brought one like explained because it's the process, right,
Speaker 1: part of what pisses people off about Pebble minds Like
Speaker 1: it's not like you're it's not like a bunch of
Speaker 1: old dudes dressed up like hatch Jack out there with
Speaker 1: gold pans pulland nuggets. Yeah, like explain leech you know,
Speaker 1: cyanide leech mining. Yeah, so you know with Pebble, to
Speaker 1: get back to the speaking to the twenty year old,
Speaker 1: it's size type location, right, it's the it's the size
Speaker 1: of the mind. We we've already talked about that. It
Speaker 1: would be one of the biggest excavations in the history
Speaker 1: of mankind really when you include the pit and the infrastructure.
Speaker 1: So Pebble Pebble, if if to go to full build out,
Speaker 1: would use more energy on a daily basis in the
Speaker 1: city of Anchorage. And you've been through there a bunch
Speaker 1: of times. It's not a small town. It's two sixty
Speaker 1: people that would suck up that amount of electricity, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and use fuel and water, use more than twice as
Speaker 1: much water that is used by a city a two
Speaker 1: d sixty people on a daily basis. And you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've ever flown over the mindset area.
Speaker 1: There's nothing there. I mean, it's just it's just wilderness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's an amazing spot. And it drains two ways
Speaker 1: towards two river systems, up towards the New Segak Malchatna
Speaker 1: and then down down towards Lake Ilyamna and the the
Speaker 1: Quejack River. And those are the two major drivers of
Speaker 1: the of the salmon fishery that I think we'll probably
Speaker 1: talk about a little bit. But so from an engineering standpoint,
Speaker 1: you're talking something, you know, the biggest development project in
Speaker 1: Alaska since they discovered oil in the North Slope and
Speaker 1: built the Trans Alaska pipeline, and you know dead Horse
Speaker 1: and Prude Obey and all that kind of stuff. And
Speaker 1: then uh so, yes, size, and then you have the
Speaker 1: type of mind So there's a lot of gold and
Speaker 1: copper in the ground, but it's not a very rich
Speaker 1: or body. Um. It sits in a in a big
Speaker 1: sulfide deposit. And you're basically so a friend, a friend
Speaker 1: of virus who has worked for a long time with us,
Speaker 1: who has some background in mining, and he used to
Speaker 1: be the state Senate president. Guy named Rick Alford, lifelong Republican,
Speaker 1: UM Big Game Guide retired Big Game Guide. He uh,
Speaker 1: he calls it a sulfur mine with a golden copper component.
Speaker 1: You have to get through a whole bunch of waste
Speaker 1: rock to get to the gold and the copper. And
Speaker 1: then the big problem, the engineering problem, the one that's
Speaker 1: chased away Anglo American and Rio Tinto and Mitsubishi and
Speaker 1: Quantum Mineral, some of the heavy hitters has been what
Speaker 1: the hell are they going to do with all that waste?
Speaker 1: Because you have those are other mining companies, and those
Speaker 1: are like the contractors. There's like the developer and then
Speaker 1: the contractor. There's the analogy. Now there's a developer, the
Speaker 1: sort of the hype machine, which is Pebble Limited Partnership,
Speaker 1: the Snake Oil salesman, if I may, and then there's
Speaker 1: the the majors who actually design and operate minds. And
Speaker 1: we should get to the fact that that Pebble part
Speaker 1: like the sort of brain, the sort of brains behind this.
Speaker 1: I'd like to get to this because I don't understand
Speaker 1: as well. They're having a hard time sort of finding
Speaker 1: the contractor right like they're like, Hey, here's this crazy
Speaker 1: house we're gonna build, and contractors keep coming in and
Speaker 1: being like, yeah, that's not for us. So I like
Speaker 1: that analogy. Yeah, so you get Anglo American, Rio, Tinto, Mitsubishi,
Speaker 1: Quantum all walked away, Anglo walked away from a five
Speaker 1: seventy million dollar investment. And I think it's you know,
Speaker 1: it really comes down to and what we've heard through
Speaker 1: the grapevine and lots of experts that have just kind
Speaker 1: of been around the proposal throughout the years and said,
Speaker 1: we just don't know how you're going to manage that
Speaker 1: kind of waste over time. It would be like like
Speaker 1: a Berkeley pit, beyond comprehension. I think that's another piece
Speaker 1: from the twenty year old standpoint that needs to explained.
Speaker 1: When you're talking about that waste, about that sulfur, what
Speaker 1: what are we talking about specifically in terms of contained
Speaker 1: and the potential for if it gets out? Are we
Speaker 1: being condescending to two year olds? But I mean actually
Speaker 1: actually we are because my coworkers she's twenty two, and
Speaker 1: she's way smarter than me, so way smarter as though
Speaker 1: talking to a forty six year old. Um, yeah, I
Speaker 1: want to get it, Like why okay, let me just
Speaker 1: show us out real quick. We have the thing nearby
Speaker 1: to where we're sitting right now. I don't have to
Speaker 1: drive from here called Berkeley Pit, And at a time
Speaker 1: was the like golden copper mine. It's in Butte, Montana.
Speaker 1: You always I don't know what this means. You always
Speaker 1: here thrown out that like once upon time Beau had
Speaker 1: per capita more millionaires than anywhere in the country. But
Speaker 1: I was thinking too, if you had a community of
Speaker 1: a hundred people and there happened to be a millionaire there,
Speaker 1: you would have more millionaires per capita. So I don't
Speaker 1: really that people like to throw that out there. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a great history of Butte in the Berkeley Pit.
Speaker 1: It's just an article. There's all these books, but there's
Speaker 1: an article called Pennies from Hell, and it gets into
Speaker 1: like what exactly happened there, and they tunnel mind it right,
Speaker 1: just like pulling out chunks. But over time technology is improved,
Speaker 1: the quality of the ore decrease in different areas, and
Speaker 1: they eventually got to this thing where they pull the
Speaker 1: ship out of the ground and the ore contains what
Speaker 1: you're after, copper and gold, silver, and you leach it
Speaker 1: out by you pour acid on it, cyanide, you pull
Speaker 1: it up, crush it up, dump a bunch of cyanide
Speaker 1: on it, and then it it dissolves, correct, and there's
Speaker 1: some way that you then harvest it, but then you
Speaker 1: wind up with all of this contaminated liquid that then
Speaker 1: has the gold live in a lake. And Berkeley Pit
Speaker 1: is a problem that will never go away. It's an
Speaker 1: enorm Once a hundred snow geese once landed there and
Speaker 1: died on the water in that pit, and it'll be
Speaker 1: a problem into you know, I don't want to over
Speaker 1: conflate work pit with this, but I do want to
Speaker 1: talk like, like what what they mean when they say
Speaker 1: because I think people think of mining and think you're
Speaker 1: gonna dig a hole and also all these goals starts
Speaker 1: flying out of the hole and then you load it
Speaker 1: on airplanes and fly it somewhere. Yeah, they're talking ten
Speaker 1: billion tons of waste associated with full build out of
Speaker 1: pebble um. A percentage of that would be highly reactive
Speaker 1: sulfide bearing rock. And when that sulfide bearing rock is
Speaker 1: exposed to air and water, it creates the loot sulfuric acid,
Speaker 1: which has a half life of never. It just has
Speaker 1: to sit and a pit and be treated in perpetuity.
Speaker 1: That's the part I didn't get. So that so it's
Speaker 1: like it's something that when you pull it up and
Speaker 1: allow it to oxidize or expose the water, then it
Speaker 1: creates the problem. And you put that ship into a
Speaker 1: lake that's right, and build a damn to keep it
Speaker 1: from going anywhere on Earth and dam in an area
Speaker 1: that's one of the more seismically active places in the world.
Speaker 1: You know, it's on the Pacific rim of Fire. They
Speaker 1: had an earthquake out there last year that really shook
Speaker 1: our house. Um, it was high sevens. So you know
Speaker 1: when they talk about, oh we got damns designing, nothing
Speaker 1: can ever go wrong. But you're seeing more and more
Speaker 1: of that of these these modern minds. You know that
Speaker 1: they have such huge amounts of waste that they have
Speaker 1: to contain that it becomes a real problem. And Pebble makes,
Speaker 1: you know, Berkeley Pitt look like you know, just a
Speaker 1: just a dot. It's way bigger. You know, you just
Speaker 1: mentioned a seven uh earthquake in the sevens. I was
Speaker 1: just reading this book about the what year did the
Speaker 1: big earthquake hit the Anchorage? I read a book about
Speaker 1: the John Muellen who's been on the show, just wrote
Speaker 1: a book called This is Chance and it's about the
Speaker 1: sixty four earthquake and Anchorage. And Richter at the time
Speaker 1: was just developing his scale, and it's an exponential scale,
Speaker 1: so a seven is ten times worse than the six.
Speaker 1: He he was a nudist. Richter, he was down in California,
Speaker 1: um listening to any he'd built the rick, he'd built
Speaker 1: the seismic graph that he installed in his living room
Speaker 1: and drove his wife crazy, this giant seismograph. And he
Speaker 1: was working on his scale, and he was sitting in
Speaker 1: his living room listening to a concert with his wife.
Speaker 1: Won the sixty four earthquake hit in Alaska, and he
Speaker 1: looked over at his seismograph and said that was a
Speaker 1: big one and low and behole, the biggest earthquake to
Speaker 1: ever strike the continent. Yeah, it could happen again. You
Speaker 1: know that's not that long ago. No, no, no, A
Speaker 1: lot of these people are still around swallowed streets, right,
Speaker 1: sixty ft tsunami hit Kodiak. Yeah. Yeah. When people point
Speaker 1: out the seismic part of the area, I think people
Speaker 1: are like, oh, you're just being alarms. But I mean
Speaker 1: it's like it's an actual thing, man, Right, I think
Speaker 1: you know, we have a tough time grasping these time frames, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, the the asset mind waste doesn't go away,
Speaker 1: someone's gonna have to store it, and you know, companies
Speaker 1: rise and fall, and someone's gonna have to pay for
Speaker 1: all that monitoring. If you were to, you know, take
Speaker 1: all these steps and actually build the thing and over time,
Speaker 1: you never know who's going to get stuck with the bill,
Speaker 1: Probably the people of Alaska, the people of the United States.
Speaker 1: Explain a little bit about what's to be what's to
Speaker 1: be lost, Like besides this the actual destruction or you
Speaker 1: can take it both ways, the actual destruction of the footprint, okay,
Speaker 1: which is not insignificant, but I think that that is
Speaker 1: something that people probably would become comfortable with maybe Like Okay,
Speaker 1: there's this there's this like part of the earth that
Speaker 1: will cease to function as it now. It will like
Speaker 1: not be wild byfe habitat anymore, it'll be the opposite.
Speaker 1: But then there's this sort of like ticking time bomb element,
Speaker 1: right that all this ship would just downstream, Like what's
Speaker 1: that look like? Like, like what is the resource that
Speaker 1: would be the resource resources that could be compromised if
Speaker 1: the worst in the worst case scenario, and when I
Speaker 1: want to know too, if in the best case scenario,
Speaker 1: are there still compromises to the wildlife habitat. Yes. So
Speaker 1: the third part size, type and then location. So the
Speaker 1: Pebble prospect sits in the saddle between the two largest
Speaker 1: salmon producing watersheds in Bristol Bay, which makes them two
Speaker 1: of the biggest salmon producing watersheds in the world. Because
Speaker 1: the Bristol Bay being the biggest salmon run, it's it's
Speaker 1: the biggest SOCCI salmon run in the world. It's probably
Speaker 1: gonna be closest in the world's global SOCCAI salmon supply
Speaker 1: this year because you shippn't me really. Yeah, So the
Speaker 1: total run this year was fifty seven million fish and
Speaker 1: the commercial fleet harvested about forty million ski go on
Speaker 1: hit me with that again. Fifty seven million was a
Speaker 1: total run and the harvest was forty million, And you
Speaker 1: know that's amazing that you can harvest that level and
Speaker 1: still get the return. Salmon are incredible if you take
Speaker 1: care of habitat and you're really on it management wise,
Speaker 1: you know, fishing game can turn the run on and
Speaker 1: off like a like a faucet. You know, they can
Speaker 1: they can take you know, hardcore gill netters and say
Speaker 1: you're done for the day and they all stop. Can
Speaker 1: imagine you did that kind of trim off on a
Speaker 1: deer population, Dude, did you take decades to recover? Yeah?
Speaker 1: They're incredible. Um. So it's that location sitting in the
Speaker 1: saddle between the two rivers and you know up to
Speaker 1: the that's them coming in. Yeah, that's the fish coming in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the return and that's seventeen million then cranks out
Speaker 1: enough returners to pull another forty million fish out in
Speaker 1: the future for human consumption. Yeah, we're probably at peak
Speaker 1: abundance right now. Bristol Bay probably has more salmon coming
Speaker 1: back now than it ever has because they can go
Speaker 1: down in the bottom of these lakes and do these samples,
Speaker 1: you know, these of just where the layers of decayed
Speaker 1: matter have settled in the bottom of the settim of
Speaker 1: these lakes over time and kind of reconstruct runs from
Speaker 1: a hundred two hundred years ago, and they think, I
Speaker 1: think the researchers think that we're probably having productivity that
Speaker 1: is as strong or exceeds what you had before. Four
Speaker 1: white people showed up so successful just because the habitats
Speaker 1: in great shape. It's the theory overwhelmingly about super high
Speaker 1: quality habitat that hasn't been disturbed. And then you know,
Speaker 1: pretty pretty solid management by Alaska fishing game. So so yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's that's so even if even if the mind
Speaker 1: never had something go wrong, Um, you're still gonna have
Speaker 1: a destruction of wetlands. You're gonna have the elimination of
Speaker 1: you know, several dozen miles of salmon stream. And then
Speaker 1: Pebble will point out, well, that's the only like one
Speaker 1: small percentage of the overall you know, the area of
Speaker 1: productive salmon habitat in the region. What's the problem. Then
Speaker 1: you have to start looking at what happens if something
Speaker 1: does go wrong, if there's a catastrophic tailing dam failure.
Speaker 1: Let's visit that. Let's visit Yah's question for a minute.
Speaker 1: So best case scenario, as you lose several dozen miles
Speaker 1: of salmon stream. Yeah, it's it's more than that. That
Speaker 1: gets into weather. They're gonna operate for twenty years, they're
Speaker 1: gonna operate for a hundred. Right. That gets back to
Speaker 1: the thing that drives us crazy. Where it's there's a
Speaker 1: bait and switch going on right now. That's all there
Speaker 1: is to it. So if you read full build out,
Speaker 1: you you destroy hundreds of miles of salmon stream and
Speaker 1: you'd have this huge excavation. And then you got to
Speaker 1: remember the pit serves as a sump, so all the
Speaker 1: water in around there that's charging all these these systems
Speaker 1: that have these very complex um interchanges of surface and
Speaker 1: subsurface water, it all just sucks towards the pit that
Speaker 1: will be holding the the tailings. So how big is
Speaker 1: the pit we don't know as of yet because we
Speaker 1: don't know what the you know, the proposal that's going
Speaker 1: to possibly get approved by them federal government is. But
Speaker 1: it would be one thousand seventy ft deep and one
Speaker 1: thousand seventy ft deep, and it's gonna be a good
Speaker 1: episode of Deep Drop Boys. And then i'd have to
Speaker 1: you know, I can't remember exactly how many miles by
Speaker 1: how many miles, but we're talking miles. I've kind of
Speaker 1: lost some of this stuff. You couldn't drink no no
Speaker 1: like no amount a like stry pen. No huh, let's
Speaker 1: let's let's cover off our worst case. Yeah, So we
Speaker 1: hired an expert to look at what would happen if
Speaker 1: you had a tailing stam failure, because the Army Corps
Speaker 1: of Engineers did not require Pebble to do that during
Speaker 1: the e I S process, which seems that doesn't seem
Speaker 1: to be looking at all them things that could or
Speaker 1: could not happen, right, Um, So we hired an expert
Speaker 1: and he showed, if you know a tailing dam, let go,
Speaker 1: you would have waste that would reach Bristol Bay. So
Speaker 1: the Pebble prospect is a long way from Bristol Bay.
Speaker 1: It's about hundred miles up river and up the watershed.
Speaker 1: It's enormous watershed. It's like the size of Wisconsin, you know.
Speaker 1: So and you know, he just he said, based on
Speaker 1: what I know and what I've seen in other places,
Speaker 1: you would have mine waste that would reach all the
Speaker 1: way to the Pacific Ocean. The Bristol Bay itself salt
Speaker 1: wire and would essentially wipe out the whole system for
Speaker 1: a period of years. And we started going to the
Speaker 1: public with this presentation, We're going to the commercial fishing
Speaker 1: fleet because you know, you have to have the commercial
Speaker 1: fishing fleet on your side out there if you're going
Speaker 1: to if you could actually make up a difference politically
Speaker 1: and start to do a presentation for all these all
Speaker 1: these guys before the and women. A matter of fact,
Speaker 1: one of my co workers is a commercial fishing boat captain.
Speaker 1: So Um and Pebble hated the information so much that
Speaker 1: they suit us. So there's there's a bunch of details there,
Speaker 1: but yeah, they just wanted to kind of squelch public debate.
Speaker 1: They didn't want anybody covering this part of the issue
Speaker 1: because you know, it's really problematic. They didn't want to
Speaker 1: talk about the failure, right, they don't want and then
Speaker 1: they want us talk about it either, so because it'll
Speaker 1: just sit there for thousands and thousands of years fine
Speaker 1: or un earthing tailings damn collapses, you know that happened,
Speaker 1: and there they're arguing, would be like, no, it will
Speaker 1: just always be there, but it will always be fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And then you know the evidence is starting
Speaker 1: to really come in. Right, So you had that catastrophe
Speaker 1: down in Brazil a couple of years ago, where and
Speaker 1: that was a modern mind run by a modern company,
Speaker 1: you know, a well capitalized company that really knew what
Speaker 1: they were doing, and tailing dam let go went to
Speaker 1: destroy the river and killed people. And then you had
Speaker 1: the case of the mom Polly um mine in British Columbian,
Speaker 1: a tributary of the Fraser, which is a sacay salmon
Speaker 1: producer in British Columbia, and they had a catastrophic tailings
Speaker 1: damn failure, and you know it's just it's a mess.
Speaker 1: Or five years later in productivity at question the lake
Speaker 1: which the waste went out into his way down, and
Speaker 1: you know, these things can fail. In the recent years,
Speaker 1: I've read about mass fish die offs from things ranging
Speaker 1: from a farmer putting a bunch of hog ship in
Speaker 1: a pile next to a trout stream, bourbon spilling out
Speaker 1: of a distillery during a fire, milk killing miles of
Speaker 1: fish out of a river. It's like, these things happen
Speaker 1: all the time, and we're talking about things that most
Speaker 1: of them sitting like regards like fairly benign milk. Yeah
Speaker 1: you can, you can those things versus sulfuric acid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know. It's like it's like it's like, what's the
Speaker 1: big deal. It's like, well, i'll tell you the big deal.
Speaker 1: Ten miles of fish are dead. And when we're talking
Speaker 1: about where this is right, like going towards Alamna. And
Speaker 1: this is one thing just having guided in that area
Speaker 1: for years, primarily as as a trout guy, but also
Speaker 1: for salmon, that is one of there's a reason why
Speaker 1: people spend tens of thousands of dollars to go there
Speaker 1: just fish for a week or two there. I don't
Speaker 1: know of a trout fishery like that Iliamna system that
Speaker 1: produces just massive, massive, super healthy rainbows and all based
Speaker 1: on the salmon bringing the energy back up through that.
Speaker 1: Everything about that, everything about that whole area, flora, fauna,
Speaker 1: everything is based on the nutrient return from the salmon
Speaker 1: coming from the ocean and dragging a hundred some odd
Speaker 1: miles upstream. None of that stuff would exist without that
Speaker 1: nutrient return. And so if you're if you're talking about
Speaker 1: losing this particular place, and and you know when I
Speaker 1: was up there, I have to admit I hated sak guiding.
Speaker 1: Sak guiding is probably the most boring type of fishing
Speaker 1: you could imagine. But so there's like the two levels
Speaker 1: of of of reasons why I opposed this. One is
Speaker 1: the super personal level, which is that I love the
Speaker 1: place and I love those trout, probably as much as
Speaker 1: any fish I've ever fished for. But then the bigger
Speaker 1: picture of what the saki represent to the economy into
Speaker 1: the whole area, Like I may not have wanted to
Speaker 1: fish for impersonally, but what they do for Alaska and
Speaker 1: what they do for the planet is massive, and to
Speaker 1: lose all that, it's just it's it's not the same
Speaker 1: as like your backyard creek. Not to say you shouldn't
Speaker 1: love your background backyard creek, but lake only I'm in
Speaker 1: that whole system and then gat those places are incredible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Miles brings up a good point that people need to
Speaker 1: think about. And you talk about Sam and is that
Speaker 1: um Well, first off, so when sok I gets born,
Speaker 1: walk me through this to him, like a ski gets hatched,
Speaker 1: he goes down and spend that they dropped down to
Speaker 1: a lake. Correct, They usually spawn an inlet inlet streams
Speaker 1: coming into lakes. But there's all these different genetic subgroups
Speaker 1: out in Bristol Bay. This this really diverse portfolio of
Speaker 1: different salmon stocks. So it's really amazing at beach spawners
Speaker 1: and you have some lake spawners, but usually it's a
Speaker 1: it's a it's a smaller stream coming into a big lake,
Speaker 1: and then those juveniles hang out for how long in
Speaker 1: that couple of years year, a year, two years, and
Speaker 1: they're roughly how big when they finally go and hit
Speaker 1: the hill like a finger right, and then there how
Speaker 1: big when they come back, probably averaging around five six
Speaker 1: seven pounds. So when when Miles mentions this, like this
Speaker 1: sort of like exchange, you have an area where you
Speaker 1: have an extraordinarily rich marine environment in a somewhat sterile
Speaker 1: land environment and just in terms of like in terms
Speaker 1: of biodiversity, like it's it's stunning in the marine environment
Speaker 1: and and stunning but like limited in the land environment,
Speaker 1: meaning you don't have like you have like a great
Speaker 1: wealth of like large land mammals that are very inspiring
Speaker 1: and stuff. But when you get down like just like
Speaker 1: the species count relative to the marine environment, it's kind
Speaker 1: of low. So if you have fifty seven million sacks
Speaker 1: that are gonna go up this river, and even if
Speaker 1: humans then consume forty million of them, seventeen million five
Speaker 1: to six pound fish basically transport marine resource back up
Speaker 1: and to feed the land, millions and millions of pounds
Speaker 1: of like carbon based life go up and it gets
Speaker 1: eaten by everything and shout out by everything everywhere and
Speaker 1: decomposes and feeds the plants, feeds the fish, feeds the bears,
Speaker 1: the birds. It's like that's where it's kind of like
Speaker 1: life comes from, right from catisflies to brown bears. So
Speaker 1: if you want to, like you talk, if you talk
Speaker 1: about oh yeah, so the salmon are gone. You know.
Speaker 1: My kids always like to ask, like, why do we
Speaker 1: have mosquitoes? Oh my, I don't know, man, but I
Speaker 1: bet you in a weird way if we didn't things
Speaker 1: that go to ship, you know, and you remove that,
Speaker 1: it's like you're removing more than It's not like, oh,
Speaker 1: forty million people have to find a different thing for supper.
Speaker 1: This is different than that. Yeah. I mean they've even
Speaker 1: done studies in British Columbia now where where you know,
Speaker 1: the salmon runs have been greatly diminished and the the
Speaker 1: ecosystem is just not the same. There isn't as much wildlife,
Speaker 1: there aren't as many insects. I mean, these these systems
Speaker 1: are just completely dependent on salmon. There wouldn't be anything
Speaker 1: in these rivers really, maybe some growling, some small grawling, right,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't have you wouldn't have the rainbow trout either,
Speaker 1: which we haven't talked about. You wouldn't have this incredibly huge,
Speaker 1: vicious rainbow trout fishery either. You know, everything's just keyed
Speaker 1: in on on the salmon lifecycle. My boy, Jimmy, I
Speaker 1: went to my first pebble mine event when he was
Speaker 1: an infant. He's ten years old, but he was a baby.
Speaker 1: He's now ten. It was an event in New York
Speaker 1: and it was being put on by It was partially
Speaker 1: being put on by Tiffany's, the jewelry company, and Tiffany
Speaker 1: was was saying and even at that time, Uh, sure
Speaker 1: we sell all kinds of golden ship, but we're making
Speaker 1: a promise that we will not carry these people's gold.
Speaker 1: How could Why were we talking about it ten years
Speaker 1: ago and we're still talking about it now? Like what
Speaker 1: was happening then? Like how did it even come up
Speaker 1: to something like what I'm not asking very clear question.
Speaker 1: Let's start with this question. When did someone first say,
Speaker 1: holy ship, we should mind some gold out there on
Speaker 1: Tholds Rivers, probably probably twenty years ago. And the pe
Speaker 1: the name pebble comes from a geologist flew over the
Speaker 1: mind site and it reminded him of the Pebble Beach
Speaker 1: golf course. So because all the water holes. You know,
Speaker 1: So the history is really is that really what it
Speaker 1: goes from? Yeah, yeah, I didn't know that. It's like
Speaker 1: sometimes the names you think, na, yeah, yeah, the history
Speaker 1: is a little bit like to smack that guy in
Speaker 1: the it looks like golf course. That the opposite of
Speaker 1: a golf course. But the history is a little bit tragic. Right.
Speaker 1: So you had all these lands that were set aside
Speaker 1: by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, and there
Speaker 1: were all these lands that we all from selection and
Speaker 1: then they whittled it down, explain that I never heard
Speaker 1: of that you never heard of in oh yeah, so
Speaker 1: Anoka and there was a there was a huge selection pool.
Speaker 1: And then I got win that was that was around
Speaker 1: like the Native Claim Settlement Act, and there was a
Speaker 1: Settlement Act and then they decided something needs to be
Speaker 1: done to set aside a bunch of Alaska's lands for
Speaker 1: the National Interest for created Wrangle SA National Park. I
Speaker 1: didn't know that that was. I didn't know that that
Speaker 1: that that component of that era had a name. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I added a hundred million acres to the conservation
Speaker 1: system in the United States so it's unbelieved all now
Speaker 1: as part of this is elaborate deal brokered around, like
Speaker 1: what we're gonna do with this new state, and then
Speaker 1: how we're gonna get away from the reservation system that
Speaker 1: we used in the US, and how we're gonna settle
Speaker 1: with natives. That was the first piece of legislation. Then
Speaker 1: there was sort of lands conservation legislation, and there were
Speaker 1: more lands that were part of the selection pool that
Speaker 1: ended up in passing in the legislation, and one piece
Speaker 1: was called the Ilianda Game Refuge, and it's the area
Speaker 1: that now includes a Pebble Prospect. And if you look
Speaker 1: at the rest of the land use patterns, management panterns
Speaker 1: out there, they're all set aside for salmon production and conservation.
Speaker 1: Right you got Lake Clark National Park, you have cat
Speaker 1: My National Park, and then you have the biggest state
Speaker 1: park in the United States, would tick Chick. That's two
Speaker 1: million acre state park, and all of them have huge
Speaker 1: salmon production, all these you know, low gradient streams and
Speaker 1: these big lakes that are really productive. And then this
Speaker 1: Alianda Game Refuge would have been the last piece of
Speaker 1: the wild salmon puzzled right out there. You would have
Speaker 1: the great salmon production zone in the world, and it
Speaker 1: would all be safeguarded and perpetuity, And I mean, I
Speaker 1: think that's something to be really proud of as an
Speaker 1: American citizen. And you know, the state actually managed that
Speaker 1: area for a long time for fishing game, mostly for
Speaker 1: salmon production, but also for cariboo. There's some mild Chatton
Speaker 1: heard out there and and moose and and the two
Speaker 1: thousand five we had a governor and a chief of
Speaker 1: staff who decided that they wanted to take Alaska in
Speaker 1: a different direction. There had been all these rumors that
Speaker 1: there was a huge golden copper deposit out there. There
Speaker 1: was all this breathless talk of one of the world's
Speaker 1: great claims. And they took a management plan that was
Speaker 1: based on you know, renewable resources and have been deeply
Speaker 1: vetted with the local people out there, and they almost
Speaker 1: overnight turned it into this area that was going to
Speaker 1: be open in mineral claim staking. And that's when you
Speaker 1: start to see, you know, big mining companies and junior
Speaker 1: mining companies all start to take a hard look at
Speaker 1: you know, can we make a ton of money out here?
Speaker 1: And we've been fighting it ever since. So you know,
Speaker 1: I I was working for Trout Unlimited and we were
Speaker 1: working on some watershed restoration projects and some forest conservation
Speaker 1: work in Southeast Alaska and Pacific's Amon Treaty. And I
Speaker 1: got a call from this lodge owner guy named Brian Kraft,
Speaker 1: who has uh two lodges out there, and he said, hey,
Speaker 1: you're the You're the Trout Sky and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: because I gotta I got an issue for you, and
Speaker 1: that the rest has been history. That's that was seriously. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been two thousand five. And he had to uh
Speaker 1: two uh guys at his lodge from Newmont Cold and
Speaker 1: he showed them the preliminary um propaganda from from Pebble
Speaker 1: and Brian was like, hey, there's gonna be more people
Speaker 1: out here. You know, it'll be good for my lodge,
Speaker 1: you know, would be more customers. And these new Mont guys,
Speaker 1: there are two experts that were getting close to retirement.
Speaker 1: They said, flies over the mindset, and so he did.
Speaker 1: And they came back and they looked at what was
Speaker 1: proposed and they said, you can't let this happen. There's
Speaker 1: so much water here, there's so much habitat that's going
Speaker 1: to be destroyed. There's no way you can do that
Speaker 1: us and have it be successful, you know with you know,
Speaker 1: from a from a balance standpoint, yeah you could, you
Speaker 1: could do it, but you're going to destroy this place
Speaker 1: if you allowed to happen. And that put the fear
Speaker 1: of God and Brian, and Brian started calling me. And
Speaker 1: I've been lucky enough to have a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: great people I've worked with throughout the years. And you know,
Speaker 1: we spent a lot of time out in the region
Speaker 1: with the people who live there who hate the idea
Speaker 1: of the mind at a tune up about opposition. So
Speaker 1: it's been it's been a long grind. We're still in it.
Speaker 1: Get back to your question from a long time ago.
Speaker 1: We're still in it because of politics, right, the pendulum
Speaker 1: keeps swinging back and forth as to what we're gonna
Speaker 1: do with her with our you know, best wild places,
Speaker 1: and here we are. You mentioned the locals there, it's
Speaker 1: predominly Native Alaska, Alaska Native and what's that? What's their
Speaker 1: take off? I mean, just for full clarity here, we
Speaker 1: had arranged to have a colleague a year, a Native
Speaker 1: Alaskan colleague years come down. But just because of the
Speaker 1: landscape with COVID and everything. She wasn't able to come down.
Speaker 1: But what's um, what's what has been that communities and
Speaker 1: in the history of the things its two thousand five,
Speaker 1: what has been that community's just asking you to step
Speaker 1: in and articulative, you know, as much as you're comfortable
Speaker 1: articulating their viewpoint on it. Uh. What has been that
Speaker 1: community's response to this? Yeah, I mean they've led the
Speaker 1: effort from the beginning. You know, even before Brian called me.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of local people, some of the
Speaker 1: elders out there, Uh, and so some of the younger
Speaker 1: people that just said, this is we don't want this,
Speaker 1: you know, this is this goes contrary to everything we
Speaker 1: believe in and everything that we've you know, our entire culture. Um.
Speaker 1: So there's been a bunch of polling done by the
Speaker 1: Regional Native Corporation out there, and about eight of their
Speaker 1: shareholders opposed development of the mind and that's pretty exceptional Alaska.
Speaker 1: Used Really, the closer you get to a development project,
Speaker 1: the more support you have for it. You know, it's
Speaker 1: still a rural place. We're still heavily dependent on natural
Speaker 1: resource development for for incommon you know, wealth and paying
Speaker 1: for state government and the locals hate the idea, and
Speaker 1: they've been the leaders since the beginning. You know. I
Speaker 1: think one of the things that's been unique is we
Speaker 1: showed up. We had a lot of ideas and a
Speaker 1: lot of opinions as to how a campaign should work,
Speaker 1: and we realized pretty quickly that we needed to go
Speaker 1: to these communities. We needed to go um talk to
Speaker 1: locals and kind of let them display leadership. And I
Speaker 1: think that's why we've been so successful of holding back
Speaker 1: mind development for so long. You know, you're talking one
Speaker 1: of the richest golden copper deposits in the world, and
Speaker 1: you've had politics that, to a certain degree, have been
Speaker 1: in favor of doing that that kind of stuff, but
Speaker 1: having that local opposition has just been amazing. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: too bad. It's too bad. Alana her you who couldn't
Speaker 1: come down and join us. She's been she's been working
Speaker 1: on Pebble or entire adult life. She started working on
Speaker 1: when she was in Hoist, before she was like grade school. So,
Speaker 1: and that's coming from the perspective of someone whose family
Speaker 1: and community members live a subsistence lifestyle. Yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of a based on the resource. Yeah, it's kind of
Speaker 1: a blend out there. You know, you have you have
Speaker 1: a lot of Alaska Natives who are commercial fishermen as well.
Speaker 1: So they the gill Net and Trout unlimiteds had this
Speaker 1: amazing program for the last ten years now where they're
Speaker 1: trying to build up a stable of of local guides,
Speaker 1: getting more Alaska Native kids from the region to become
Speaker 1: sport fishing guides. And the regional Native corporation out there,
Speaker 1: Bristol Bay Native Corporation just bought one of the big
Speaker 1: lodge concessions and they run three lodges. Now, They've got
Speaker 1: capt my Land and they have they have a mission lodge,
Speaker 1: and they're trying to get more their their people working
Speaker 1: at the lodgest. So I think, you know, I think
Speaker 1: you're going to see more local ownership and operation of
Speaker 1: the sport fishing industry as well. Yeah, so, which is good.
Speaker 1: I mean in terms of like the diversified revenue, you
Speaker 1: know what, what has been some of the I think
Speaker 1: there's like an issue fatigue that takes place. Yeah, with
Speaker 1: pebble about it, because like I was saying, I haven't
Speaker 1: mapped every twist and turn, but um, I'm be here
Speaker 1: about this thing all the time. And I've been alarmed
Speaker 1: about it and concerned about it all along, and we're always,
Speaker 1: you know, off of being invited to talk about it,
Speaker 1: and it's always like, this is the turning point. But
Speaker 1: it was a turning point a decade ago. Like why
Speaker 1: why are there so many? You know, I remember the thing,
Speaker 1: you know, remember Paul Wolf, what's remember someone saying like
Speaker 1: you could put a wooden steak in Paul Wolf, what's
Speaker 1: his heart? And he would turn up in the next
Speaker 1: administration being like, uh, why is it that it won't
Speaker 1: go away? But it always seems like this is the
Speaker 1: turning point. How many turning points are there? Or like,
Speaker 1: tell me about some turning I mean I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I stopped trying to politics. You
Speaker 1: can't predict it anymore, right, So big turning points? Give
Speaker 1: me a turning point from a decade? So when when? When?
Speaker 1: So when Rio Tinto and Anglo American, two of the
Speaker 1: largest mining companies in the world, decided to walk away
Speaker 1: from the pebble prospect that was huge And honestly, I
Speaker 1: wish you would have had a little bigger party. You know,
Speaker 1: we kind of we knew that the saga wasn't over.
Speaker 1: But to see two of the major mining companies in
Speaker 1: the world walk away from a you know, half a
Speaker 1: billion dollar investment, that was really significant. I don't for
Speaker 1: those of us that were just kind of working day
Speaker 1: in and day out, I think we we didn't really
Speaker 1: totally understand the significance of that, right, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: And what did they publicly say, and what is the
Speaker 1: rumor mill about why they walked publicly? I think they
Speaker 1: said that they were it was during you know, they
Speaker 1: were coming we were coming up on the on the
Speaker 1: big you know, global economic downturn, and they just decided
Speaker 1: to focus their their work on on minds that were
Speaker 1: closer to operation, closer to coming to fruition. You know,
Speaker 1: you need to still knew they had a big permitting
Speaker 1: process and huge infrastructure costs. They were like, we're gonna
Speaker 1: we're gonna shrink a little bit here and focus on
Speaker 1: a few other prospects in other places around the world. Um.
Speaker 1: That's what they said publicly, And then we heard internally
Speaker 1: that there was a there's a real tug of war
Speaker 1: between the two companies that you know, one wanted to
Speaker 1: try to do it in a way that wouldn't have
Speaker 1: the huge negative impacts that we've been talking about, and
Speaker 1: the other one said, there's no way you can make
Speaker 1: any money doing that because the or grade, the or
Speaker 1: body is a low grade and you need a massive
Speaker 1: excavation to get to the point where you're gonna make
Speaker 1: any money. So that tug of war, you know, they
Speaker 1: just they walked away, and then UM then first Quantum
Speaker 1: was the next big operator that came in, and they
Speaker 1: walked away. And those are really significant events. UM. The
Speaker 1: other really big significant event was when at the talent
Speaker 1: of the Obama administration, they used Clean Water Act Authority
Speaker 1: to say, UM, essentially that we're not going to grant
Speaker 1: you the Dredge and phil permit, the four Old four permit, UM,
Speaker 1: because we have looked at the proposed mind and it's
Speaker 1: going to have negative, serious negative impacts on wetlands and
Speaker 1: waterways of the United States. And we got really close
Speaker 1: to uh to it a victory, I think. UM. Through
Speaker 1: that process, it was in the you know, it went
Speaker 1: into the courts. Probable challenged it in the courts, and
Speaker 1: it kind of languished in the courts for a couple
Speaker 1: of years, and then UM, the Trump administration came in
Speaker 1: and they settled the outstanding lawsuits with Pebble Limited Partnership
Speaker 1: to the favor of Pebble Limited Partnership and started kind
Speaker 1: of restarted the permanent clock again. So that's where we're at.
Speaker 1: Who who actually owns the land? Where the whose land is?
Speaker 1: Where the actual thing is gonna stay of Alaska, but
Speaker 1: it becomes federal because there's just implications for all the stuff.
Speaker 1: So yeah, because there's federal waters. So the Clean Water
Speaker 1: Act comes into play in the Army Corps of Engineers,
Speaker 1: is the Permittee of record? What is uh? What's the
Speaker 1: state's general groove about this? The governor, the current governor,
Speaker 1: he's going home. He likes it. Yeah, what's you like
Speaker 1: about it? I? You know, I think he sees it
Speaker 1: as the next big thing, right you Now, we're we're
Speaker 1: getting a lot less money for oil. There's less oil
Speaker 1: going through the Alaska Pipeline. There's lots of people talking
Speaker 1: about how we're gonna be using less oil in the future.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure I believe that yet, but um so,
Speaker 1: I think that the governor is looking for that next
Speaker 1: big resource development play that's going to you know, fill
Speaker 1: the Alaskan coffers again. Because we don't pay any state
Speaker 1: income tax or any state sales tax, and we're heavily
Speaker 1: dependent on oil revenue for all our budget. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: also heavily. There's some interesting things about Alaska's economy that
Speaker 1: I think people should understand is that, uh one, it's
Speaker 1: a federal spending a little bit of a sink federal wise, yeah,
Speaker 1: meaning the federal government spends far more in Alaska then
Speaker 1: they get in tax revenue. Yeah, way more. It's the
Speaker 1: states that people love to hate. I think New Jersey
Speaker 1: pays in better than any like, Like the Feds pull
Speaker 1: more money out of New Jersey than they put in,
Speaker 1: and I think that's the strongest performing state. Alaska is
Speaker 1: one of the weakest. Yeah yeah, yeah, I want to
Speaker 1: change our license plate from last frontier to give me
Speaker 1: my money and leave me alone. So then instead of
Speaker 1: paying state taxes in Alaska, the state pays you. Right.
Speaker 1: So they have a thing called the Permanent Fund, and
Speaker 1: they take the state has all these lucrative oil leases
Speaker 1: on state land. Um, they generate so much money that
Speaker 1: they cut you a check and this and the check
Speaker 1: that you get caught as a citizen of Alaska and
Speaker 1: your members of your household uh, isn't tied directly to
Speaker 1: the price of oil. It's tied to the health of
Speaker 1: the fund. But the health of the fund is definitely
Speaker 1: influenced by the price of oil. So you could go
Speaker 1: up there, Let's say you're particularly fecunned individual, you and
Speaker 1: your wife could move up there and produce six kids
Speaker 1: and make quite a tidy little sum. What was what
Speaker 1: was the fund? What was the fun play? What did
Speaker 1: the fun pay last year? You know, it's only like
Speaker 1: a thousand bucks last year, So it's actually, you know,
Speaker 1: we're coming to the end of the road of you know,
Speaker 1: but it's it's it highs. It's like three grand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you could go up there and have like two
Speaker 1: people go up there, have six kids and pull twenty
Speaker 1: four k just in uh. It's been known to happen
Speaker 1: and for a year. Yeah, I got friends with you
Speaker 1: with his blood money. I got one body who he
Speaker 1: every year takes his check and puts it into his
Speaker 1: kids college fund because he thinks he thinks it's blood money.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's actually a really cool concept. But it
Speaker 1: gets to the fact that you know, oil is not
Speaker 1: going to happen again. You know, the amount we get
Speaker 1: per barrel produced is way higher than you get from minerals.
Speaker 1: It's like you know, on each on each barrel of oil,
Speaker 1: and for minerals, our royalties regime is the same as
Speaker 1: on federal lands. Right, it's like less than one return.
Speaker 1: So it's not gonna do what our governor done Levy
Speaker 1: wants it to do. Yeah, let me, I forgot finish.
Speaker 1: The point about the economy there is that when oil
Speaker 1: goes south, everything goes south, everything goes soun school education
Speaker 1: goes so like university spending, public school spending. Like they
Speaker 1: get hit man, and they're kind of living in a
Speaker 1: separate like just because there's a something could happen in
Speaker 1: the lower forty eight like whatever, housing thing, whatever, like
Speaker 1: different blips, they're living a different reality. Like their ship
Speaker 1: is driven by a completely different set of factors. So
Speaker 1: you could see, like if oil is going the way
Speaker 1: you're saying, you can see that someone who's charged by
Speaker 1: voters with looking at the long term financial prospects for
Speaker 1: his state could be excused for thinking like we gotta
Speaker 1: do something, yeah yeah, and we have other minds, you know,
Speaker 1: and you don't you don't see the big, huge controversy
Speaker 1: around some of these other minds, whether it's Fort Knox
Speaker 1: or Red Dog, you know, some of the some of
Speaker 1: the bigger operating minds in the United States. And it's
Speaker 1: definitely a part of the economy. And we all, you know,
Speaker 1: use all these materials that are coming out of the
Speaker 1: ground for you know, our modern lifestyle. So we're not
Speaker 1: saying that this is an anti mining campaign, but size
Speaker 1: type location again, and then you look at what's at stake,
Speaker 1: and you know, you have about ten thousand American jobs
Speaker 1: that are depending on depending on that fishery. So you know,
Speaker 1: in a good year, this was not a good year
Speaker 1: because of COVID, salmon prices were in the toilet, and
Speaker 1: you know, the export market was non existent. But if
Speaker 1: you know you're a good gillnet captain, in a good year,
Speaker 1: you can make a hundred thousand bucks in six weeks,
Speaker 1: and you have a whole the whole host of sport
Speaker 1: fishing lodges out there that are charging upwards the twelve
Speaker 1: grand a week, and you have guides and you have
Speaker 1: pilots and all kinds of you know, different segments of
Speaker 1: that economy are based on on that fishery and the
Speaker 1: things renewable salmon prices were little this year. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: were way down this yeah, attributed to COVID. Demand was down,
Speaker 1: you know. And then there was the trade stuff with China,
Speaker 1: because the Chinese buy a lot of Bristol based ok
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, I know that that Chinese stuff is
Speaker 1: messing with some of the logging projects. I think that
Speaker 1: that point you bring up is one that I've dealt with,
Speaker 1: having written in the past a lot about mining issues
Speaker 1: and pebble, among others, primarily for fishing focus publications. I've
Speaker 1: I've definitely taken some scrutiny saying, well, you just anti
Speaker 1: mining and and you know, to be fair to some
Speaker 1: of those points, my interests lie in the fish, right.
Speaker 1: I don't make my living off of minds, but I don't.
Speaker 1: I try to be as I look at these issues
Speaker 1: as as objective as I can be. And when you
Speaker 1: talk about pebble mind you talk about some of the
Speaker 1: other sulfide type minds. And as I learned more about
Speaker 1: this in doing some of that reporting and understood like
Speaker 1: the process by which these byproducts come about in these
Speaker 1: minds and how toxic they can be, and when they're
Speaker 1: located right next to a waterway, that I personally think
Speaker 1: it's important. I think that you have to. I personally
Speaker 1: think you should be drawing lines on well, this is
Speaker 1: a place we shouldn't have this type of mind. And
Speaker 1: this not to say we can't have sulified minds elsewhere
Speaker 1: where there will still be risk, but it's not located
Speaker 1: right next to a place that I really want to
Speaker 1: go fishing and a lot of other people want to
Speaker 1: make their living off of. I don't think it's bad
Speaker 1: necessarily to come out and claim like your personal steak
Speaker 1: on something. No, it's like it's better than the opposite,
Speaker 1: and it's better than you know, it's better than when
Speaker 1: people um don't lay out they're they're sort of like
Speaker 1: personal investment in an issue and act like they're just
Speaker 1: acting like completely altruistically. That drives me not. I would
Speaker 1: rather be like, I support these policies, and I'll be
Speaker 1: frank with you, it's good for me financially, I like
Speaker 1: I like it. I like it aesthetically, I like it
Speaker 1: financially or whatever. So to be like, you know, I
Speaker 1: just try to like clear up that all the time
Speaker 1: by saying my view in terms of when I pursue
Speaker 1: like my sort of like professional work and the media
Speaker 1: products that I produced, and things like I try to
Speaker 1: be that I won't belabor you with my opinions about
Speaker 1: things that don't impact like the world of like sort
Speaker 1: of like what's good for hunters and anglers? Right, And
Speaker 1: I think this is just really shitty for hunters and anglers.
Speaker 1: I think people minds like shitty for hunters and anglers.
Speaker 1: So I'll come out and say like where I'm coming
Speaker 1: from on it, And I also just think it's I
Speaker 1: also think that it's uh. I don't like the country
Speaker 1: to make big mistakes where you confuse short term where
Speaker 1: where like you pursue short term gain and and do
Speaker 1: things that later we will sit and look like that
Speaker 1: in a hundred years when we're being analyzed by that generation,
Speaker 1: that it will be like what idiots. Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: mean we talk about a sulfide mind much smaller, but
Speaker 1: some of this in the third episode of Dots Boat, right,
Speaker 1: and and it's the same principle, and it's about deciding
Speaker 1: like this particular kind of mind right next to this
Speaker 1: watershed could be problematic for those of us who really
Speaker 1: these fish and maybe depend on them. I do think though,
Speaker 1: like when again going back to the writing that I
Speaker 1: was doing. I felt like I had a responsibility not
Speaker 1: just to be honest about my inclinations, but also to say, like,
Speaker 1: I don't think I'm just anti mining. I'm not. I
Speaker 1: don't have this pie in the sky vision where we
Speaker 1: can survive in modern society without mining for minerals. It's
Speaker 1: just deciding which places we can do that and then
Speaker 1: figuring out how to price them accordingly. Yeah, that's good,
Speaker 1: that's a good point. And so that's gonna cost you more.
Speaker 1: It's gonna cost you more if we if we mind
Speaker 1: less of it, things are going to be more expensive.
Speaker 1: And and I recognize that that that is a sacrifice
Speaker 1: that I am able to make, him willing to make,
Speaker 1: and other people don't agree on. But to me, losing
Speaker 1: these fisheries it just isn't worth it. Can we get
Speaker 1: a new minute? Like who who are these dudes? Like?
Speaker 1: Who are the constant dudes here? I know that we
Speaker 1: have sort of the big mining companies that actually like
Speaker 1: come in and that coming and like do the work right?
Speaker 1: They come in and do the work, They got the capital.
Speaker 1: Like who who's the constant presence through this idea? Uh,
Speaker 1: Northern dynasty minerals they're out of Vancouver, and the Pebble
Speaker 1: Limited Partnership is the subsidiary from from Northern Dynasty. And
Speaker 1: what's their story. They're they're they're a minor, you know
Speaker 1: they are. They're a non major. So they're kind of
Speaker 1: the set up people, right. They go out and they
Speaker 1: do the exploration, They provide all the background on on
Speaker 1: the geology and the and the and the mineralization, and
Speaker 1: then they try to attract a major that would come
Speaker 1: in and invest billions of dollars and actually operate the
Speaker 1: mind How many people we talked about this outfit, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know at this point. Maybe yeah, I wouldn't know.
Speaker 1: There's been a couple of figures that have been prominent
Speaker 1: throughout the years. There was a guy named Bruce Jenkins,
Speaker 1: you know, that was profiled by Travis Rummel and Ben
Speaker 1: Knight and Red Gold. And that guy was great. He
Speaker 1: was like right out of Central Casting. I mean, everybody
Speaker 1: hated him immediately. And then uh, and then there's a
Speaker 1: guy named John Shiveley. He used to work for the
Speaker 1: Alaska Department and Natural Resources and he had to resign
Speaker 1: and during a vail of disgrace years ago, and you know,
Speaker 1: he's just kind of like old Alaska, and it's like
Speaker 1: trust me, you know, I would never do anything that
Speaker 1: wouldn't be for the benefit of the public. And he
Speaker 1: sold a couple hundred thousand dollars of pebble stock just
Speaker 1: a couple of months ago and then um like dumped
Speaker 1: or sold he he sold it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it
Speaker 1: was you know, it was in a moment when it
Speaker 1: you know, probably looked like their stock was gonna go down.
Speaker 1: I should I should explain the reverence you just dropped
Speaker 1: for folks. Red Gold was a film was two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: I believe, Yeah, that was profiled. Yeah. I was guiding
Speaker 1: when it came out, and and it's worth if you
Speaker 1: want to get some historical perspective on how this has
Speaker 1: looked and how long has been going on, you should
Speaker 1: check that one out. Seven. Oh so I went to
Speaker 1: my first pebble event way before my kid was born,
Speaker 1: because I had already been to a pebble event way
Speaker 1: before Red Gold. Yeah, I mean it was it was
Speaker 1: two five was when I first heard of But I
Speaker 1: was guiding up there then and that was like everybody
Speaker 1: was talking about this proposal sort of lines were getting
Speaker 1: drawn at that point. Um, someone told me recently, is
Speaker 1: it someone at the Northern Is it Northern Dynasties? That
Speaker 1: what it's called. Yeah, it sounds like a name that
Speaker 1: you picked to be Like, it's like a name you
Speaker 1: picked to be an asshole, to be the bad guy,
Speaker 1: the Villainy. I've dealt with these guys for too long.
Speaker 1: I heard he remember recently that someone involved. There someone
Speaker 1: if they can get this thing across the finish line,
Speaker 1: they get some absurd amount of one. Yeah, guy named
Speaker 1: Tom Collier, and he worked for the Department of Interior
Speaker 1: under Clinton H and he took this on. And he's
Speaker 1: good at what he does. You know, he's Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: a Washington d C insider and what's the carrot in
Speaker 1: front of his nose? Well, you know, if this thing
Speaker 1: gets to gets to operation, he gets twelve and a
Speaker 1: half million bucks. I'll get the guy out in the morning. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if they if they get a record of decision signed,
Speaker 1: it's four and a half million bucks. So yeah. We
Speaker 1: actually ran a little website for a while. They're called
Speaker 1: cash Grab Collier and it was pretty fun. So that's
Speaker 1: what he's gotta do. Like he's he's motivated, like he
Speaker 1: gets like, yeah yeah. And if you look at look
Speaker 1: at some of the some of the handicappers out there
Speaker 1: that really understand the mining industry in that world, you know,
Speaker 1: they think that this is there's a lot of incentive
Speaker 1: for the executives a puble limited partnership to just continue
Speaker 1: to hype this thing for as long as they possibly can,
Speaker 1: right because as long as people are willing to give
Speaker 1: them money, willing to invest in their company, they can
Speaker 1: skim off profits for themselves. Whether they get any closer
Speaker 1: to a mine or not doesn't really matter, I think
Speaker 1: to some of them, m hm, there's incentivized along the
Speaker 1: way to keep bumping. Yeah. Yeah. And they've spent so
Speaker 1: much money on lobbyists for the last few years there.
Speaker 1: They have actually spent more money on lobbyists in Washington,
Speaker 1: d c. Than any other mining company, and that includes
Speaker 1: you know, mining companies that are actually running mines five
Speaker 1: years ago, five or six years ago. I bet my
Speaker 1: sister in law a thousand dollars a year bet she
Speaker 1: doesn't Alaska. There's a ten year bet where if they
Speaker 1: hadn't we framed it this way, if a decade went
Speaker 1: by and they hadn't begun to pull minerals out of
Speaker 1: the ground. In production. We framed it up in some
Speaker 1: way like it's more than just you know, testing and
Speaker 1: stuff like in full production. Like Megan Gold, She's gotta
Speaker 1: give me a thousand bucks. When did you make the
Speaker 1: bet five or six years ago? You're gonna win? Sweet.
Speaker 1: That's the one. That's one is I'm into that. That's
Speaker 1: the long reason we're sitting here right now. I don't
Speaker 1: care what your motivations. It takes an army. What is
Speaker 1: going Okay, we just hit like a new there was
Speaker 1: a new Let's get let's get real detailed. Now, let's
Speaker 1: get real granular about what's happened over the last month.
Speaker 1: There was some Army core ship, there was some e
Speaker 1: p A ship like what was happening over the last
Speaker 1: month or two. So we saw the final environmental impact
Speaker 1: statement for the Pebble Mind made by who, the Army
Speaker 1: Corps of Engineers. Why is it their deal? They are
Speaker 1: the they are the they are the permit agency. They
Speaker 1: are the agency that issues the permit and then they
Speaker 1: go into a consultation with the Environmental Protection Agency about
Speaker 1: anything that has to do with UH excavating wetlands and
Speaker 1: impacting water. So it makes it the Army Corps of
Speaker 1: Engineers business because it involves digging stuff and making damns
Speaker 1: and whatnot. Because you always your Army Corp of Engineers
Speaker 1: around like the big damns. Then ye okay, so it's
Speaker 1: it's their deal because it's engineering. So they did a
Speaker 1: final environmental impact statement which we thought was terrible. You know,
Speaker 1: it was just filled with holes or all these scientific
Speaker 1: gaps there's you know, we spent a huge amount of
Speaker 1: time and energy just to analyzing what they put out there,
Speaker 1: and it was it's terrible. Well, but were you motivated
Speaker 1: to think it was terrible because it didn't come up
Speaker 1: with the answer you wanted? Or is it like legitimately
Speaker 1: poorly done. Well, we hired a bunch of people way
Speaker 1: smarter than me, and that would stake their reputations on
Speaker 1: the fact that it was one of the worst, if
Speaker 1: not the worst environmental impact statement they've ever seen. So
Speaker 1: why was it shoddy? It is done really quickly one
Speaker 1: and it didn't look at all these you know, projected
Speaker 1: impacts out over out over the time horizon, like didn't
Speaker 1: look at catastrophic tailing, damp failure, UM and the e
Speaker 1: I s. They they were talking about a wastewater treat
Speaker 1: and facility that had never been operated before. Um. They
Speaker 1: they we're trying to figure out how to build the
Speaker 1: port out there on the west side of cook Inlet,
Speaker 1: which is not a not an easy place to build
Speaker 1: a port, and they were just huge gaps asked. You know,
Speaker 1: it was just like we're gonna we say, we're gonna
Speaker 1: do this, and then there would just be a big
Speaker 1: gap as to how they were going to actually achieve
Speaker 1: that and then build a port. Yeah, right, because you's
Speaker 1: got to land all this equipment and build roads to
Speaker 1: get it there. And yeah, yeah, yeah, And you know
Speaker 1: you're dealing with cook Inlet, which is the second highest
Speaker 1: tide fluctuation in the world, and starting about now, the
Speaker 1: weather really gets bad on a very consistent basis. So
Speaker 1: we lots of gaps, lots of holes, lots of technical details.
Speaker 1: So we think needed to be figured out with someone
Speaker 1: leaning on them to get it done in a hurry
Speaker 1: because they're just driving towards resolution. Yeah, so massive development project.
Speaker 1: You know, scaling scope has unprecedented in Alaska since they
Speaker 1: discovered a while in the our slope. And you're gonna
Speaker 1: get an eis done in two years. So we're the
Speaker 1: final environmental impact statement came out and then they have
Speaker 1: to wait thirty days before they can issue a record
Speaker 1: of decision. Who does the Army Corps. So there's like
Speaker 1: this thirty day waiting period after the environmental impact statement
Speaker 1: comes out and we were expecting to see it pretty quickly,
Speaker 1: and then uh, we started to see concern expressed by
Speaker 1: Donald Trump Jr. And Nick Ayers, who was the chief
Speaker 1: of staff to back up, come confused. The Army Corps
Speaker 1: of Engineers does like the assessment, like here's what's gonna
Speaker 1: look like, here's risks, and then they deliver the final
Speaker 1: environmental Impact Statement to the public, and then there's a
Speaker 1: thirty day period between the issuance of that final and
Speaker 1: what's called the record of decision. That's the minimum. The
Speaker 1: record of decision is made by the Corp of Engineers.
Speaker 1: So they make the report, the they wait thirty days
Speaker 1: and pretend to not know what the decision is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I don't get like, because they're making room for
Speaker 1: public input, there's no more public input. I don't really
Speaker 1: know what that thirty day period is about. You'd have
Speaker 1: to ask a lawyer, is it like you lay out
Speaker 1: all the pages, then you got one that you don't flip,
Speaker 1: and you're like, and I'll flip this one in thirty days. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sort of like that. At least that's what it felt
Speaker 1: like to us. You know, this thing seemed rigged, is it?
Speaker 1: The part of the Core is doing putting together that
Speaker 1: that report, and then there are other oversight committees or
Speaker 1: bodies within the Core that are looking at that. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: there's usually probably a little bit, a little bit of
Speaker 1: a paperwork exercise between that that final and the record
Speaker 1: of decision. There's probably something they have to craft that
Speaker 1: justifies the record of decision, right, And then then it
Speaker 1: would go to the Army Corps for this consultation about
Speaker 1: whether they were going to issue or whether the whether
Speaker 1: the Army Corps was gonna give a thumbs up or
Speaker 1: thumbs down to that Dredge and Phil permit. And we
Speaker 1: thought it felt like a fad, a complete that the
Speaker 1: record of decision was going to hit the streets, that
Speaker 1: the that the Environmental Protection Agency was just gonna you know,
Speaker 1: not really weigh in one way or another, or they
Speaker 1: would say it was fine, and then we're going to
Speaker 1: be going into court um, because that's that's the thing
Speaker 1: is like whatever the Army Corps. Now we're getting into
Speaker 1: future alternate reality. But the Army Corps does this, They
Speaker 1: do the record of decision and they say like we're
Speaker 1: not We're on this is good, no problem. Um. At
Speaker 1: that point, if no one challenged it, at that point,
Speaker 1: were they like, it's off to the races we're making.
Speaker 1: Of mind if no one said, if there was no
Speaker 1: one around to say no, yeah, yeah, that would be
Speaker 1: like that that that's the last hurdle. If the Environmental
Speaker 1: Protection Agency decided not to weigh in via the Clean
Speaker 1: Water Act, no one sued challenging the record of decision, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would be a it's not like the other person.
Speaker 1: You gotta go ask permission from right because the state's
Speaker 1: on board. Well then the state there there are a
Speaker 1: bunch of state permits. But perfectly honest, they're pretty that
Speaker 1: that those gears are greased. I mean, it's the it's
Speaker 1: the it's the four or four Dredge and Phil permit,
Speaker 1: which is the permit, and that's the one that's been
Speaker 1: the source of this tug a war for you know,
Speaker 1: back to the last presidential administration. Like that's the big win.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's that's the prize. So so they finished
Speaker 1: the report, and the issue the report. You look at
Speaker 1: the report like this report is kind of shoddy. And
Speaker 1: then also everywhere in the news is people weighing in, Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: including you know folks we didn't expect to weigh in,
Speaker 1: you know, Donald Trump Jr. And Nick Arris who was
Speaker 1: chief of staff too, Vice President Pence, and TALMR. Carlson
Speaker 1: on his show, and what's these guys great with it? Well,
Speaker 1: I think you know, from what I understand, Um, both
Speaker 1: Trump Junior and Heiress have been out there quite a
Speaker 1: few times, and you know, it's it's it's a one
Speaker 1: of a kind place. They're just like, yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: my sense was like, you know, the kind of the
Speaker 1: slogan of wrong mind, wrong place. Yeah, it seems to
Speaker 1: have been like it was just as clean as that,
Speaker 1: I think, So, you know, and I think for them,
Speaker 1: they've probably heard about it years because it does attract
Speaker 1: a lot of hunters and anglers and you know, people
Speaker 1: that don't self identify as you know, lefty environmentalists. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a source of a bunch of jobs
Speaker 1: and it's this great hunting and fishing destination. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that actually brings people together.
Speaker 1: And I think they just identified it one. I think
Speaker 1: they actually really care and too they saw it as
Speaker 1: you know, good politics. And so then what so then
Speaker 1: what happened? I mean now we're talking like within the
Speaker 1: last few weeks. Yeah, So then the Army Corps of
Speaker 1: Engineers came back and said, you know what, we're not
Speaker 1: going to sign the record of decision right now because
Speaker 1: we need Pebble to go back and provide some more
Speaker 1: detail about how they're going to mitigate the destruction of
Speaker 1: wetlands associated with the development. So that's where we're at
Speaker 1: right now. They are saying that they will have that
Speaker 1: mitigation plan done within a month, and that's okay. Sorry,
Speaker 1: well I was gonna say that. I think that's where
Speaker 1: I personally got sucked into thinking we had another one
Speaker 1: of those moments of like turning point. I did a
Speaker 1: whole thing on on bent about this, saying like, hey,
Speaker 1: look at this great decision that came through, and I
Speaker 1: got flooded with emails from folks who know more than
Speaker 1: me and said like no, no, no, no, hold on
Speaker 1: the permit as written was kicked back. This is this
Speaker 1: is gonna keep going. There will be a revision and
Speaker 1: another process. This is this is not at all over.
Speaker 1: And I think a lot of a lot folks had
Speaker 1: a moment like, hey, we got it. Oh. I had
Speaker 1: one of those about thirty seconds and then I saw
Speaker 1: that people like, it's just another punt, and I got
Speaker 1: sucked into it and had to then make a slight
Speaker 1: retraction on the next episode, say I didn't get all
Speaker 1: the all the facts straight on this one. Does the
Speaker 1: president have authority to just kill it? Yeah? By what mechanism?
Speaker 1: Because they know you don't just run around like ending things,
Speaker 1: and I mean it's like you do. You do things
Speaker 1: through processes, right, It would be telling the head off
Speaker 1: the e P a region that's in charge of Alaska,
Speaker 1: saying like, here, allowed to use your authority under the
Speaker 1: Clean Water Act to reject the dredging phil permit to
Speaker 1: use your veto authority. And that's what the last administrator
Speaker 1: did under Obama. So yeah, because you see how things
Speaker 1: work like that, Like I was in me used recently
Speaker 1: to see that um that like Attorney General bar right,
Speaker 1: like in a call with attorneys general gives kind of
Speaker 1: like guidance like we would like to see, you know,
Speaker 1: we would like to see action taken in these areas.
Speaker 1: And then people are like, Okay, so cool, Yeah I
Speaker 1: can do that. So I can imagine there could be
Speaker 1: presidential sort of you know, even him just saying it's
Speaker 1: not gonna happen. It will never let it happen. Right,
Speaker 1: if you were to say that, it would require like steps.
Speaker 1: You know, It's not like he can't just like you know,
Speaker 1: say that on Twitter and have that be the end
Speaker 1: of it. It would have to be that it would
Speaker 1: flow that way. Yeah, and and and you know, and
Speaker 1: then some some of our cohorts think that short of
Speaker 1: using that e p A veto the the Army Corps
Speaker 1: could just reject the permit. That doesn't reject it forever, right,
Speaker 1: and it it kind of kicks the can down the road.
Speaker 1: But it would be significant, there's no doubt. But now
Speaker 1: there's been another tweet that came from the president, uh
Speaker 1: where he very hard, very hard to interpret, where yeah,
Speaker 1: he borrowed directly from an ad that was running on
Speaker 1: television that evening that had been put up by the
Speaker 1: Pebble Limited Partnership saying keep politics out of this, and
Speaker 1: then they flashed to a picture of Barack Obama in
Speaker 1: a tan suit, which just like Obama didn't like the
Speaker 1: mind Obama Obama's e p A. You know, I said,
Speaker 1: we won't, we won't permit it. I mean Obama went
Speaker 1: to he went to Dillingham, he went to Bristol bay
Speaker 1: Um near the end of his his term. So so
Speaker 1: they're keeping politics out of it, um. But I don't know.
Speaker 1: I read like I read and analyze that tweet, but
Speaker 1: I don't know what that tweet meant. No, that's the
Speaker 1: thing is, no one knows now, right, and for those
Speaker 1: of us have been working on it for so long,
Speaker 1: and I seeing all these twisting he said, like, don't
Speaker 1: Alaska is a beautiful place, great place. We'll keep politics
Speaker 1: out of it. I guess it depends on who's politics, right.
Speaker 1: I don't know how I can keep I don't know
Speaker 1: how anyone could promise to keep politics? Like what politics
Speaker 1: is the means by which the public's voices her Like,
Speaker 1: I don't know when people say that, like keep politics,
Speaker 1: it's like it's annoying. Is when people say following the science, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was like, who's hey, who's science. Right. The ones
Speaker 1: that say it's a sweet damn are the ones that
Speaker 1: this greatest damn ever made. We're the ones that say
Speaker 1: your damn won't work. It's like like it's like a
Speaker 1: non people say that keep politics. It's like a nonstatement.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like it's empty air. I never understand
Speaker 1: what that means. I know, yep, does that include my
Speaker 1: opinion in that I vote? Like I don't know? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I didn't know what the hell that man I
Speaker 1: mean into To your point from earlier, Steve, if you
Speaker 1: like were to plot out of timeline on this right,
Speaker 1: there was the some major moments of the big big
Speaker 1: minding company pulling out and say it's not worth it. Oh,
Speaker 1: it looked like it was gone, okay, great, And then
Speaker 1: there was the moment when the e p A under
Speaker 1: last administration said we're not gonna permit this. Okay, it's done,
Speaker 1: and it just it's like the zombie issue, right. And
Speaker 1: then there was that a couple of weeks ago when
Speaker 1: when people like me who got sucked in momentary and thought, oh,
Speaker 1: I think we made another No, no, we haven't made
Speaker 1: another step forward. We're just stuck in the same limbo.
Speaker 1: I thought the watershed moment was when you had a
Speaker 1: rare circumstance where hippies, Native Alaskans, commercial fish hereman in
Speaker 1: brown bear guides, I'll agreed on something. Yeah, I was like, dude,
Speaker 1: no way, that doesn't happen. Letn't make a bet. I
Speaker 1: bet you a thousand dollars. Well that's still going on, right,
Speaker 1: you know. The opposition is as high as it's ever been.
Speaker 1: We actually did a poll not that long ago and
Speaker 1: on a development issue, and I'll ask a six of
Speaker 1: the population opposes pebble, and like I don't remember, like
Speaker 1: a quarter of the population supports it. That never happens,
Speaker 1: you know, whether you're talking about drilling for oil and
Speaker 1: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and I don't know where
Speaker 1: we are, and like logging in the tongas anymore. You know,
Speaker 1: I think that that's kind of moved more towards opposition
Speaker 1: than support. But pebble Alaskans don't want pebble. And the
Speaker 1: closer you can get to the pebble prospect other than
Speaker 1: a couple of small communities that have a huge pebble presence,
Speaker 1: they don't want it. Yeah, when you got guys like
Speaker 1: I would like to have permission to kill any marine
Speaker 1: mammal that comes near my salmon. Oh and stop pebble mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like that's it feels like, you know, to me, feels
Speaker 1: like they'll they'll never be able to do this. I
Speaker 1: want to shoot sea lions, but I hate pebble. So
Speaker 1: what is there any there's no real death for this,
Speaker 1: Like there's no way, like you can't in Yeah, because
Speaker 1: they tried the state referendum and that didn't work. You
Speaker 1: remember this one. There was a state vote to to
Speaker 1: like basically took it to the voters through something that
Speaker 1: kind of would have been deathly to pebble. Mind. But
Speaker 1: it was too far reaching, right, and it was because
Speaker 1: you couldn't get on People couldn't get on board with
Speaker 1: it because it was had uncertain implications for the future.
Speaker 1: There's two things. So there was a referendum that passed
Speaker 1: and it passed into every precinct in Alaska, and that
Speaker 1: was bankrolled by the late Great Bob Gillham, who was
Speaker 1: the rich guy who actually went to Wharton with Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: And it essentially said that the state legislature would have
Speaker 1: final say over the permitting of pebble. It if it
Speaker 1: ever got to the point where they got to the
Speaker 1: final state permit, then the legislature would have to vote
Speaker 1: up or down on it. Pebble claims that it's unconstitutional,
Speaker 1: and they said they'll sue it a later date if
Speaker 1: need be. But that doesn't stop it because under our
Speaker 1: state constitution, the public can't appropriate land. So you had
Speaker 1: to do this like bureaucratic thing. Then there was another
Speaker 1: initiative that would have updated safeguards for you know, development
Speaker 1: and salmon habitat, and I was a big part of that,
Speaker 1: and we just got outspent and like ten or twelve
Speaker 1: and one, and you know, it was it was not
Speaker 1: an easy read for the public, and we went down
Speaker 1: to defeat um. What could happen as the right thing
Speaker 1: is done through the federal government via the Clean Water Act?
Speaker 1: Pebble decides to walk away UM and then the state
Speaker 1: of Alaska does not allow another mining company to come in,
Speaker 1: and you know, top file on those claims, and then
Speaker 1: you know, ultimately you would have to get a governor
Speaker 1: and a legislature and public will and Alaska to say
Speaker 1: that we're going to take this land and we're gonna
Speaker 1: put it into a protected status and we could we
Speaker 1: could do that. Actually that's the way you'd steal the
Speaker 1: coffin and then you know, probably gonna be another fifteen years.
Speaker 1: But if that's what it is. X. Yeah. You ever
Speaker 1: hear this thing called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, given something a cool name doesn't necessarily no now,
Speaker 1: you know. But but you know, I have a lot
Speaker 1: of friends people have known for a long time worked
Speaker 1: on that issue. But pebble is different because so many
Speaker 1: people use it, so many people depend upon it for
Speaker 1: their livelihood, and you know, even by Alaska standards, it's
Speaker 1: not a pedestal, right, very few people are lucky enough
Speaker 1: to go to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, But a
Speaker 1: lot of people go to Bristol Bay, like where I
Speaker 1: live in Homer, there's a whole fleet, you know, every
Speaker 1: every June they getting their gill netters and had a
Speaker 1: cross cooking let and chake the road over to like
Speaker 1: Ilama and out the queen Jack to go fish and
Speaker 1: then see him eight weeks later and tell me how
Speaker 1: shit either season was. But they all seem to have
Speaker 1: nice houses and nice trucks and things like that. So
Speaker 1: when I made my bet with my sister in law.
Speaker 1: I also told her that there would be um resistance.
Speaker 1: There would be what's it called um, you know, like
Speaker 1: like not not vigilanti, but social disobedience. Is that the
Speaker 1: term that fits The people go out and chain themselves
Speaker 1: the bulldozers and ship like that. I'm gonna chaine my
Speaker 1: daughter to something or another landing strip or something. Civil disobedience,
Speaker 1: civil disobedience. I was like, they're probably civil disobedience because
Speaker 1: it means so much to people. You know, you gotta
Speaker 1: handful of people that like, you gotta handle people, They're
Speaker 1: gonna make them bunch money. But then you got a
Speaker 1: bunch of people spend a decade, in a decade of
Speaker 1: a decade's worth of emotion being like you can't just
Speaker 1: there's some things you can't shut up, Like there's some
Speaker 1: things that are too precious and beautiful and you just
Speaker 1: have to be comfortable leaving it. And I feel like
Speaker 1: that some people are so impassionate about that that in
Speaker 1: the end, when all the legal stuff was done, there'd
Speaker 1: be like one last push where people got nasty monkey
Speaker 1: wrench gang. Yeah. I would never advocate for something like that,
Speaker 1: but but I'm not saying that you need to advocate for.
Speaker 1: You don't need to imagine, you know. I I have
Speaker 1: heard you know, people kind of looking at this issue
Speaker 1: from not you know, the perspective, the narrow, too close perspective,
Speaker 1: too close to the screen perspective of me saying like, yeah, this,
Speaker 1: you can see how this if everything went wrong from
Speaker 1: the regulatory and legal framework, you know, you could see
Speaker 1: this being like Keystone XL. You know, where you have
Speaker 1: people laying down in front of things, and you know,
Speaker 1: you start thinking about the people in that region, how
Speaker 1: long they've been fighting against this thing. They can trace
Speaker 1: their history back there ten thousand years, and they really
Speaker 1: don't want it. That's what I'm getting at. Man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's that whole concept of social license and the and
Speaker 1: develop and they know the development industry and mining in particular,
Speaker 1: and there's pebble does not have social license. I don't
Speaker 1: think they'll ever ever get it, no matter how much
Speaker 1: money they spend, how much propaganda they put out there,
Speaker 1: it's just never gonna happen. Where is it gonna sit with?
Speaker 1: If if let's say old Biden wins, still don't see
Speaker 1: anybody's find a Biden flag. If Biden wins, I don't
Speaker 1: imagine it's gonna Pebble is gonna move for four years
Speaker 1: now he did, he didn't if you know he was
Speaker 1: elected president, Pebble doesn't move forward. That's four that's four years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that doesn't That doesn't kill anything. That just means it
Speaker 1: would probably just stall out. Right. Then you get into
Speaker 1: future administration, do you think that they would actually like
Speaker 1: do you think the Biden's team would just be like
Speaker 1: not cooperative and it would just be quiet, or do
Speaker 1: you think Biden's team would come in and like try
Speaker 1: to like wrap it up. We would, we would, you know,
Speaker 1: we would try to convince them to do that, to
Speaker 1: do some things that would make it extra hard for
Speaker 1: the next people try to fire. Honestly, you know we're
Speaker 1: gonna try, and some of our courthorts are gonna try
Speaker 1: no matter who's the president. So but Biden Biden did
Speaker 1: tweet uh saying that Pebble is a non starter if
Speaker 1: he's president. I was having a conversation one time with
Speaker 1: some people close to the current administration, and I was like, man,
Speaker 1: I don't see, like why not just take a why
Speaker 1: not just take a conservation win? That is it going
Speaker 1: to cost you? You guys are gonna lose. You're not
Speaker 1: gonna lose Alaska. How many how many delicates is Alaska have? Well,
Speaker 1: we've got one rep. You know, and our or electoral
Speaker 1: votes don't matter. Yeah, that's what. Sorry, not delicate, you're
Speaker 1: the electoral the electoral college. Like, you're not gonna lose Alaska.
Speaker 1: If you did lose Alaska. It's like you're not gonna
Speaker 1: lose it anyway. They won't lose it, like Trump's I
Speaker 1: canna lose Alaska if you didn't lose Alaska. It's not
Speaker 1: that main electoral votes. It's like you're gonna piss off
Speaker 1: Alaska's governor who's under recall. Recall, Okay, you're gonna off
Speaker 1: that got kicked down the road, but you're gonna piss
Speaker 1: off their governor, but you're still going to carry the state.
Speaker 1: It's like, I don't see the mining company isn't even
Speaker 1: a US company. I don't see why not just like,
Speaker 1: why not just take the conservation win. Yeah, it's a big,
Speaker 1: high profile thing. You can then go and you know
Speaker 1: that certainly they'll do all the things. They're gonna piss
Speaker 1: off hunters and angers in other places, and it's just
Speaker 1: like part of life. They might even do it. A
Speaker 1: cynic might be like, oh yeah, they could kill pebble
Speaker 1: and it'll be it'll provide air cover to be able
Speaker 1: to do more work in anoir. There's all these like
Speaker 1: you know, there's all these like cynical perspectives, but why
Speaker 1: not just take the wind and and then whatever you
Speaker 1: do down the in the future. You can look and
Speaker 1: be like, but but we helped you guys out on
Speaker 1: pebbles to shut up. What was the response that you
Speaker 1: got to that they weren't like, okay, we're on it
Speaker 1: like that. This is a conversation. I agree with you.
Speaker 1: It seems like just a way to if nothing else,
Speaker 1: man just accepted as cover for cover for what you
Speaker 1: got to do down the road. No one's gonna punish.
Speaker 1: No one's gonna punish you. Now, no one's gonna punish you.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe like the American Mining Association, But they'll
Speaker 1: get over it. I mean, there's there's all kinds of
Speaker 1: talking even in the mining industry that this is you know,
Speaker 1: this drags us all down, you know, the optics around it,
Speaker 1: the human rights issue, the fishery, the economics. It makes
Speaker 1: us all look bad. Yeah, they'd be like, next time
Speaker 1: we do something, just keep your mouth shut, you know,
Speaker 1: I just keep coming I keep yeah, exactly, I just
Speaker 1: keep coming back to the quality of the environmental impact statement. Right,
Speaker 1: it's so bad that it's just gonna it's just gonna
Speaker 1: make people take a harder look at every other environmental
Speaker 1: impact statement for every other mind elsewhere in the United States.
Speaker 1: It's like, is this a new standard? If this is
Speaker 1: new standard, just gonna be in court forever. And that's
Speaker 1: what I just keep trying to, you know, pound away.
Speaker 1: It's like, this is a the set the size, type,
Speaker 1: and location of pebble, and the diversity of opinion against it,
Speaker 1: the economic concerns that are you know, pushing you know back,
Speaker 1: just do the right thing. It's one place you would
Speaker 1: be an interesting activity in the future would be to
Speaker 1: come in and and and take a look at, uh,
Speaker 1: how how much money was spent on lawyers through this process.
Speaker 1: Lawyers like that industry has to be like, I don't
Speaker 1: care what they decide in the end, but this has
Speaker 1: been quite good for us. Yeah, I mean lawyers, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, public relations firms advertising things like that. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I was like an economic it's like like
Speaker 1: debating pebble as an economic driver. Yeah, you know it's
Speaker 1: funny because you hear that. It's like, well, you know
Speaker 1: you ain't work on this, tim because you know it
Speaker 1: makes you money, like you can I would get rich, No,
Speaker 1: I would. I would love if tomorrow do you get
Speaker 1: four million dollars when they get rejected. I am not
Speaker 1: getting a four and a half million dollar nor a
Speaker 1: twelve and a half million dollar bonus. It's not happening.
Speaker 1: I would love to have no other role of playing
Speaker 1: this then to go visit some friends and go catch
Speaker 1: some trout. You know, we haven't we haven't talked about
Speaker 1: what you're like, what what banner you fly under. So
Speaker 1: the name of the outfit I am sort of in
Speaker 1: control of, in charge of is It's called Salmon State. Um.
Speaker 1: The the whole idea of we want to make sure
Speaker 1: that Alaska remains a place where salmon thrive, and you know,
Speaker 1: Alaska is kind of last remaining salmon state and where
Speaker 1: we promote laws and policies and and practices at in Sherre.
Speaker 1: Alaska remains the home of the greatest wild salmon resource
Speaker 1: on the planet and the source of food and income
Speaker 1: and culture. For people across the political spectrum. My brother
Speaker 1: had a good point. We're talking about we're talking about
Speaker 1: the conservation movement in the Lower forty eight, and what
Speaker 1: I was saying to him is I was complaining to
Speaker 1: him about um Alaskan's and their conservation battles are always
Speaker 1: coming to the Lower forty eight right through. I was like,
Speaker 1: you like people down there and need to hear about
Speaker 1: this issue we have now, right, but it's a one
Speaker 1: way flow. I'm like, how can I never get how
Speaker 1: can people in Alaska? I never fired up about the
Speaker 1: conservation asan battles that are being waged down here. Like
Speaker 1: I know all kinds of people that live in Michigan, Utah, Montana, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we're fired up about your guys issues. We're fired
Speaker 1: up about Pebble mind. We'd like to protect Annoir. But
Speaker 1: I never hear from your sons of bitches on anything
Speaker 1: we're doing down here. Yeah, I think you know within
Speaker 1: well with like you know, say like Tongas National Forest
Speaker 1: or the Arctic National Wilife Reft future, those are federal lands,
Speaker 1: so they're owned by every American, So there's always that
Speaker 1: you know, that concept of you know, you're just as
Speaker 1: important to the debate as somebody who lives in Fairbanks.
Speaker 1: And that's true. This conversation brought up an observation though
Speaker 1: that it led to an observation where we were trying
Speaker 1: to say, like why is it different? And he was
Speaker 1: saying that conservation in the lower forty eight is a
Speaker 1: lot about recovery, and it's a lot about land management
Speaker 1: conservation and um in Alaska is a lot of is
Speaker 1: more about wildlife management, meaning that they're not trying to
Speaker 1: repair habitat like down here, wh's trying to fix everything?
Speaker 1: How do we fix the Columbia River? Right? How do
Speaker 1: we fix the Meadal Lands in New Jersey? Like? What
Speaker 1: could ever be? Like it's it's ruined or mostly ruined,
Speaker 1: Like what could we do to hang on to some
Speaker 1: vestige and make things a little better. The conversation there
Speaker 1: is like dude, sitting pretty, things look solid and it's
Speaker 1: just kind of like it's a different fight. Yeah, it's different.
Speaker 1: So it's like holding onto perfect things. Can we just
Speaker 1: keep the perfect things perfect? It's not like these elaborate
Speaker 1: plans to try to fix some massive mistake we made
Speaker 1: a hundred years ago, and those things are really hard
Speaker 1: to do and they're really expensive. I mean, that's salmon
Speaker 1: in a nutshell, right, And that's sort of the premise
Speaker 1: for why why we're doing what we're what we're doing
Speaker 1: at salmon stay it is. You just look at recovery
Speaker 1: efforts all around the Pacific Northwest and in British Columbia
Speaker 1: when it comes to wild salmon, and they're that's not working,
Speaker 1: you know what, because it's too it's too complicated. There's
Speaker 1: no way like even if you had all the money
Speaker 1: and all the willpower, right, it's still be like it's
Speaker 1: there's still like a sort of component to recovering salmon
Speaker 1: in the Columbia or whatever. There's still like a component
Speaker 1: of just like brain power and thought that isn't there,
Speaker 1: or like engineering that's you know, I mean, it's too hard,
Speaker 1: even with all kinds of money. It's hard. There's too
Speaker 1: many parts to it. Something like pebbly like it's already perfect,
Speaker 1: it's so easy, just don't ruin it. And I think
Speaker 1: else you'd be sitting there talking about in a hundred
Speaker 1: years how we're gonna fix it, and people be like
Speaker 1: you can't, you know, and lower for you a lot
Speaker 1: of us, there's still the mythology of Alaska, and I
Speaker 1: think that there's an investment for for us down here
Speaker 1: just knowing that it's there right, Like there's there's a
Speaker 1: different relationship that we have with the idea of Alaska
Speaker 1: and wanted to get there. I know that was the
Speaker 1: case for me as a kid, having read all the
Speaker 1: stories that I read in magazine articles and everything else,
Speaker 1: like that was the place I wanted to go. That
Speaker 1: was my goal. And just just the value of knowing
Speaker 1: that it exists in the form that it does brings
Speaker 1: I think those of us in lower Ford significant positive feelings. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would sign a deal. I would sign a deal
Speaker 1: if someone said, Okay, we'll kill pebble mine, but here's
Speaker 1: the deal. You can't step ever again in your life
Speaker 1: within two hundred miles of the epicenter of that mine
Speaker 1: or anything that that water flows into, or any of
Speaker 1: the streams. You can't go there. Okay, that's fine, I
Speaker 1: signed that. Be bummed about it, but I'd take that deal.
Speaker 1: It's like, it's not like I need to, you know,
Speaker 1: like never go back again, but I know it it
Speaker 1: stays protected. Yeah, that's cool. I'd even sign away with
Speaker 1: my kids ability to go children. Yeah, no, seriously, not
Speaker 1: only your children and your children's children cannot fish those rivers,
Speaker 1: you know. But that's the thing about that pebble is
Speaker 1: a little bit different than say the Arctic National Wilife
Speaker 1: Refuge we were talking about. You know, that is like
Speaker 1: that is out there and you're either going to develop
Speaker 1: it or it's just gonna be left alone for caribou
Speaker 1: and mosquitoes and a few intrepid people, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: Bristol Bay is highly utilized. It just works. You know,
Speaker 1: you have tens of thousands of people make their make
Speaker 1: their living off that resource, and it's proven that it's
Speaker 1: sustainable and it's renewable. So it's been that weird. It's
Speaker 1: a good it's a good distinction. Yeah. I don't think
Speaker 1: you trying on't think you're trying to sell I don't
Speaker 1: think you're trying to sell anwar short. But it's a
Speaker 1: reason distinction definitely not. I'm you know, it's not like
Speaker 1: it's not elitist. Yeah, yeah, whether it's it's not a museum.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not a park. I mean there are parks,
Speaker 1: but those get heavily heal well by the lodges. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a place that works. It shows that there's actually
Speaker 1: something between. You can't go there at all and you
Speaker 1: have to destroy it. That there's something in between. And
Speaker 1: I think that's kind of what you know, your stuff
Speaker 1: is all about, right, I mean, getting out there and
Speaker 1: doing things. Just don't ruin it. That's why I well that.
Speaker 1: You know, I came to Alaska and worked in on
Speaker 1: a same boat and in a canary, and yeah it
Speaker 1: was miserable, Um, but I just was captivated, you know,
Speaker 1: I just like I gotta go back because of what
Speaker 1: it represented. You know, lived I lived in southeast for
Speaker 1: a long time and you worked on a canary and
Speaker 1: catch I got all my fingers. You must not stayed long. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so but you know, that whole idea of just being
Speaker 1: able to, you know, go out and all these public
Speaker 1: lands and essentially do whatever you want except screw it up. No,
Speaker 1: it's amazing how how well it works and how heavily
Speaker 1: it's utilized like that. That is still mind blow. And
Speaker 1: I mean you think talking about the number of salmon
Speaker 1: that are taking out of that system and it's still
Speaker 1: self perpetuating the number of lodges and boats and planes.
Speaker 1: You know, you feel like you're out in the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere, but when you're on those rivers, you're not
Speaker 1: by yourself. They're people fishing all around you. And yet
Speaker 1: it's still maintains that character of wilderness incredibly well. It's
Speaker 1: it's like a really resilient space too, as long as
Speaker 1: you don't do anything overtly terrible. Those fish keep coming back,
Speaker 1: those nutrients work, the bears are there, the motion there,
Speaker 1: it's holding on. It's a good point I had considered. Man,
Speaker 1: I think there are are there, There are those places,
Speaker 1: but it's a working landscape. Yeah, myle is good. I
Speaker 1: have one other one that maybe maybe if it's does
Speaker 1: my own personal desire, And I know you're not a
Speaker 1: saki expert, but maybe you have the answers. Maybe you don't.
Speaker 1: I was told when I was working up there, and
Speaker 1: I took this as gospel without digging into it. Soak
Speaker 1: I only reproducing systems with lakes correct pretty much? Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Is it true that they are therefore like micro invertebrate
Speaker 1: feeders only and they do not eat other fish or
Speaker 1: creatures as far as I know, they do not. Okay,
Speaker 1: but you're not you're not coming out as like the
Speaker 1: solid definitive expert on this because I I know it's
Speaker 1: a weird thing too, but yeah, my brow would be
Speaker 1: on asked that one. But the other day we're floating
Speaker 1: the river up there and and uh, they were well
Speaker 1: colored fish, but my god, they just aggressively chased down
Speaker 1: spoons and spinners. Only when they're there though, Like, so,
Speaker 1: here's the thing, and that's why I hated guiding for them,
Speaker 1: because you wanted to get them when they're fresh, and
Speaker 1: they don't unlike the other species of Pacific salm, and
Speaker 1: they do not attack generally you're offerings. They just swim
Speaker 1: right by it. So ninety soccer that you catch the
Speaker 1: air fresh. If you're doing on Roden reel, you're snagging
Speaker 1: them in the face. You're just floss them, right. And
Speaker 1: I was always told that the reason they don't attack
Speaker 1: lures or spinners, are flies or anything is because they're
Speaker 1: not accustomed hunting down prey like krill and like like
Speaker 1: feel like open mouth feeding through. Yeah, exactly, that was
Speaker 1: my understanding. The old played out, half spawned out fish weird.
Speaker 1: They're like pissed, yeah, like a big angry male. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you catch predominantly mails, but man, they're pissed. Yeah, defending
Speaker 1: the spawning reds. Let's put Yeah, we got some some
Speaker 1: of the guys that we work, some of our crew
Speaker 1: guys that just can't fish. It's like, now a chance
Speaker 1: to shine. There you go, I bet you catch one
Speaker 1: one of these guys. He caught five. And when he
Speaker 1: cast Johnny that the he'd cast and his cast and
Speaker 1: he goes like far overhead and kind on his toes.
Speaker 1: I was like, well, like, I understand what you're doing.
Speaker 1: But he casting, like point the rod skyword. The thing
Speaker 1: is to sort of go up and kind of land
Speaker 1: by his feet. But the sock had swim over and
Speaker 1: grab It doesn't matter where you put it, they're gonna
Speaker 1: find it. It's like, dude, it's your time. He wanted
Speaker 1: a picture to show his kids. They're cool looking fish
Speaker 1: when they get a colored pretty cool. They're real pretty
Speaker 1: all right. Well that I'm kind of exactly ended that
Speaker 1: where I started thinking that was the case. But I'd
Speaker 1: love to like get definitive answer if I was. If
Speaker 1: I'm right about what I'll find out it's in Thanks
Speaker 1: for making the trip down. Yeah, it's my pleasure to
Speaker 1: go back where you came from. Now appreciate it. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: keep slugging away, man, we will. Well, we should ask
Speaker 1: a question, what can people do if they if they're
Speaker 1: interested in help and continue to stop the I got
Speaker 1: two more questions though. For that one, do you get
Speaker 1: death threats and stuff like that? I haven't in a
Speaker 1: long time, you know. I think I think other people have,
Speaker 1: you know, taken on leadership roles and I'm kind of
Speaker 1: kind of faded into the background a little bit. So
Speaker 1: that's that's nice. You know, Like like a Lana who
Speaker 1: would have been great to get down here, she just can't,
Speaker 1: you know, with with everything going on in her community.
Speaker 1: But you know she's She's people are in her face
Speaker 1: all the time. I mean, the people in like those communities,
Speaker 1: the askanted people in those communities there, they're super tough
Speaker 1: and really brave. Um. But you know, we've all had
Speaker 1: our moments where we've been harassed by the by the
Speaker 1: powers that be. Yeah, and then for Yanni's question, right now,
Speaker 1: it's just sit and wait or is the stuff people
Speaker 1: should be doing? Well? You know, you can always weigh
Speaker 1: in with your elected officials, right you know, because I
Speaker 1: think there could be a congressional play at some point
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's been talk of well, the House
Speaker 1: of Representatives actually passed a spending bill Jared Huffman out
Speaker 1: of California that no money can be spent on the
Speaker 1: processing of the Pebble Project Environmental impact statement in fiscal year,
Speaker 1: and the Senate will take up a you know, a
Speaker 1: companion spending bill and then they'll do some sausage making
Speaker 1: in theory before the years out and you know, right
Speaker 1: into the right and your senators asking them to, you know,
Speaker 1: support efforts not to fund the e I S. Look,
Speaker 1: no matter where you are on the issue, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of debate out there about the quality
Speaker 1: of this thing. And maybe we just take a time
Speaker 1: out for you. So that's one thing you could do
Speaker 1: in the the immediate term. And then and then we've
Speaker 1: got a we've got a website that's a consortium of
Speaker 1: a lot of different groups now stop Pebble mind now
Speaker 1: dot org and uh, it's got a ton of good
Speaker 1: information and the way she can win in I'm working
Speaker 1: on a philosophy, a political philosophy. It's called environmental nationalism. Um.
Speaker 1: Part of this would be this, if it really is
Speaker 1: the biggest pile of gold in the world. Isn't it
Speaker 1: sweet that we own it and it's just sitting there
Speaker 1: and waiting for us. Right, let everybody else copper, Let
Speaker 1: everybody else screw their area. It's not going anywhere. It's
Speaker 1: been there for millions of years, maybe billions of years. Um,
Speaker 1: just leave it there. It's not like is that like
Speaker 1: strike now or we'll never be able to get it. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a real It comes down to something where like
Speaker 1: America will end, Like America will end, will all die,
Speaker 1: and the American dream will be over, the American experiment
Speaker 1: will collapse if we can't get some gold there. It is, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's nothing to say that in fifty year, a
Speaker 1: hundred years we won't have the mining technology to take
Speaker 1: it out of there without scarring the surface and possibly
Speaker 1: killing Yeah, probably not the crazy witch and rod and
Speaker 1: just I mean that's the problem with right. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of it there, but it's low grade. It's a
Speaker 1: huge excavation. You're saying that we're not smart enough to
Speaker 1: eventually figure out how to get it out. I'm hoping
Speaker 1: that we're smart enough that we realize we don't really
Speaker 1: need gold for anything, you know, like the majority of
Speaker 1: it goes to jewelry at Walmart and to dowries and
Speaker 1: you know, for like marriages and other cultures and countries.
Speaker 1: It's not like it's not like it's a critical mineral copper.
Speaker 1: It's a totally different story. But who knows what we'll
Speaker 1: figure out as far as renewables go in the future
Speaker 1: and as far as there's some rare earth minerals there too, right,
Speaker 1: and they talk about that and we're gonna need that
Speaker 1: for the for the renewable economy. Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: the thing that always stops these guys dead in their tracks,
Speaker 1: it's kind of just the exact opposite of that. It's like, okay,
Speaker 1: well this is in the national interest because you know,
Speaker 1: the Chinese have all these rare earth minerals. Are you
Speaker 1: telling me you're never gonna sell any of the material
Speaker 1: that comes out of pebble on the international market? And
Speaker 1: that just stops the conversation right there. It's just like oil.
Speaker 1: You know, there is no there is no like national
Speaker 1: market for oil. It's it's all traded on the on
Speaker 1: the global market. That's how commodities work. Yeah, but I
Speaker 1: like that, you know, and I've heard that from a
Speaker 1: lot of people. It's like, why wouldn't we just you know,
Speaker 1: invest against the fact that we actually have this resource
Speaker 1: in the ground, you know, to speculate on it. It's
Speaker 1: a different kind of speculation, but it's one that you
Speaker 1: have to get. You have your cake and eat it too.
Speaker 1: You have a wild salmon run and you get to,
Speaker 1: you know, do weird ship with the stock market that
Speaker 1: most people don't understand. When I first one on a
Speaker 1: date with my wife, I bet my body hunter Bucks
Speaker 1: that I'd end up marriing her after our first date,
Speaker 1: and he's like bullshit. We bet a hundred dollars and
Speaker 1: I had two years to do it, and he sent
Speaker 1: me my hunter Bocks. And we also wrote our beat
Speaker 1: up in a little contract when we were drinking, and
Speaker 1: so I framed the hunter Bucks in the contract. Right,
Speaker 1: It's not lost on me that there could be a
Speaker 1: situation in which I would bust that glass and get
Speaker 1: that hunter Bucks out. It would take a lot. We're
Speaker 1: not there yet. We haven't been there in the last
Speaker 1: ten years. Is there a way in which, some way
Speaker 1: I would break the glass and get the hunter Bucks out?
Speaker 1: No rivers so long that is not a bend, right, Like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, but right now I like it where
Speaker 1: it is. I don't want to break the glass people,
Speaker 1: and that's the thing and they all depend on it
Speaker 1: hopefully never. But I'm just saying, think about it's like
Speaker 1: it's not going anywhere. There's not like a thing where
Speaker 1: like it's like if you is that, like, get it
Speaker 1: now where it's gone. We can afford not to. Like
Speaker 1: we're rich enough and lucky enough as a country. I
Speaker 1: won't say rich and lucky because it might be like
Speaker 1: we're fortunate enough and we've done enough things right as
Speaker 1: a country that we can have pristine places. It is
Speaker 1: a tremendous not a look, not like a luxury like
Speaker 1: we just fell onto it. We've people have done things,
Speaker 1: We have made sacrifices to have places that we can
Speaker 1: afford to leave and and have cities and have a
Speaker 1: great economy and do all this and have perfect places,
Speaker 1: perfect places like like God put them there. So we
Speaker 1: should be jumping up and down with joy. We can
Speaker 1: pull it off. We can have a hundred bucks in
Speaker 1: a picture frame hanging on our wall. Well, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: gonna work really hard to make sure you get your
Speaker 1: thousand bucks. Please. Other I want you to be two
Speaker 1: for two. You have a frame up, tenadent. I'm not
Speaker 1: framing this thousand man. This thouse is going into the
Speaker 1: family pile. But thank you, all right, thanks for coming down, man,
Speaker 1: my pleasure. Good luck. Thanks, you know, not for your
Speaker 1: own sake, but for our good, for everybody. It's like
Speaker 1: when I say a good luck to someone in Star Wars,
Speaker 1: right for the Force, that's right, all right, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you,