I’ve been sitting on this conversation with conservationist, hunter, and all-around public land warrior Randy Newberg for a hot minute. Not because it wasn’t applicable to today’s public lands fights, but because the stream of attacks on our public lands has been so great, I really didn’t have the time to get it up and do this conversation justice.
But we need to highlight voices like Newberg even more now, and join with him and other outdoor recreation advocates, because if we don’t, we’re liable to lose the public lands that we all love, cherish, and utilize to escape the modern hustle and bustle.
We’ve seen Congress attack our public lands in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. We’ve seen the Secretary of the Interior’s office send salvo after salvo aimed squarely at selling and leasing off our public lands, despite that office’s mandate to be good stewards of said parcels. And the White House has sent directive after directive of Executive Orders, circumventing the normal processes, to sell off, lease, and otherwise do away with the land it’s been entrusted to protect for all Americans, all in the name of a fake energy crisis, a fake housing crisis, and a fake public lands management crisis.
It’s a wonder I’ve even had the chance to enjoy our public lands with the fire-hose that is each week’s next attack.
Even as I write this, more attacks are becoming public knowledge. Most will know about the Ambler Road in Alaska receiving the green light after years of litigation and fights to halt it. But there are also attacks on public land management plans by the Senate that could see the sell-off of 166 million acres. There was a covert sell-off in Utah. There are also attacks on the Roadless Rule, the Wilderness Act, the Public Lands Rule, and countless others. And the folks responsible have made it increasingly difficult for the public to weigh in on these sales and rule changes or rescissions because they all know that the one topic in American politics that every American can agree on is that public lands are good.
Whether you know Randy Newberg or not, he’s one of the OG conservationists, citing Aldo Leopold and others as his north star, and has been fighting for everyone’s public lands for decades now. He chalks his conservationist career to his wife’s demand that he go give his representative an earful when they wanted to sell off some prime habitat back in the day, something that snowballed into his many flights to and from Washington D.C., giving those politicians the same earful.
This conversation occurred before a lot of the details above, and before the defeat of the land sale provisions in the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’ But it’s more apt than ever, as the fight isn’t over. In fact, it’s only just begun. And we can take a lot of tips and tactics to fight for our public lands from folks like Randy, who understands the cyclical nature of these attacks, how they’ve been won in the past, and who absolutely isn’t giving up.
And why neither should you. So before we get into the talk, here's how to contact your House and Senate representatives, directly here by email, or call (202) 224-3121 for the Senate's main switchboard, because you're going to want to give them a shout after you're done reading this.
Jonathon Klein: I've been listening to you for years now, as you were one of the first people when I started my hunting journey to come across my desk, and you're sort of the preeminent conservationist of this generation.
Randy Newberg: I appreciate you saying that. I sometimes look around, who are you talking about?
JK: You right there. You, sir. But I wanted to talk to you at this critical juncture, as we're at this influx of public land attacks right now. And while this seems like a very cyclical thing, it comes around every 10 or so years, you've been doing it long enough that you can see that cycle. But to me, it feels a little bit different. It feels like a much more concerted attack. I would love to get your thoughts on that.
RN: There's one thing about having this gray hair, you have been around a while. I first encountered all of this when I was going to college in Reno in 1984 to 1988. At that time, it was selling the public lands, and the folks involved, they just got their clock cleaned. They had no idea what they walked into.
So they kind of disappeared until about, I'd say 2000, and that’s when they started talking about how states could do a better job. And then that went away. And then about 2010 through 2015, they said, let's transfer 'em to the states because they know that the states, the state landlords would have to sell them if they're not profitable. So, to your point, it does come and go in these cycles.
Well, now it's back under a different umbrella, and this one is all kinds of smaller attacks like you're reading about lowering the cost of housing, you're reading about giving local state control. Just a whole lot of other things that, yeah, it's back. And I thought it was just things are going through its normal cycles until January when I got a call from a group, and that's the group that's having me back in D.C. this week. They're like, Randy, some of the Republicans are reaching out to us and asking us, bring some hunters, some loggers, some business owners back here because there are people so far out in the weeds, and some of them do have the ear of where decisions are being made, they need to hear that this public land sale is not some crazy idea.
So that got my attention. And then I've been on multiple calls with those groups since January, and the one they tell me it’s coming and it's coming fast and it has support from both sides is the concept of lowering the cost of housing.
JK: It’s frustrating as that’s been so thoroughly disproven that that's not what's happening. I did a story about this when the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development made that statement, and I thoroughly went through all their points debunking them. We have plenty of stock. The problem isn’t the stock, it’s the price. We have plenty of housing.
RN: And so one of the things related to that is in 1998, a bunch of us pushed back on Harry Reed with his Southern Nevada Land Management Act. It took 66,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land around Vegas. And if you've ever been on the west side of Vegas, my wife is from there, so I get there a lot, but there's a Red Rocks Recreation Area there, and it's big for climbing and bike riding, which got protected.
But the stuff in Northeast Vegas, Northwest Vegas, and South over by Henderson, all that, it was like, no, we got to convert that to housing.
So, as of when I checked it a month ago, they've sold 17,000 acres for 3.5 billion. Part of what we got negotiated in there was that they have to reinvest the net proceeds for other public access. And the Nevada delegation said, yeah, but it's got to be in the state of Nevada. Whatever, as long as it's public land. But then the Clark County people are like, well, we need some of this. We need the libraries and schools. So between the land, the acreage they got, I think they got about 5,000 acres for parks and schools and other stuff.
They also get, I think combined 14% or 15% of the gross proceeds for local infrastructure. But if you look over in Summerland, which is the kind of the ritzy part of Vegas, those are all 2 to 4-million-dollar homes that were once BLM.
And it is like your point of how much evidence do we need to disprove that this isn't the issue.
So in the process of all this, what we've found out this week with most of the Senators on the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee, which is where most of these issues go through, at least with the Department of the Interior, they've warned me, they're like, look, there are a lot of folks who are in favor of this idea. This one has legs. This is not the fringe element out there. And that Assistant Secretary of the Interior said that they are going with what's called the Federal Land Administrative and Transfer Act Facilitation Act.
What that did back in the seventies, eighties, and nineties was it told the BLM to go through your land use plans and see if there are any parcels that just, why do we even have 'em? Okay, they're completely landlocked and isolated, or they're next to some railroad tracks so it's like, okay, maybe they'd make for better commercial port, whatever. So they went through all of that, and there's a pretty big list, but this was based on what access, knowledge, and information we had before these things. Right before we had this and onX maps and everything else, it was a lot easier for something to make that list. So supposedly that's the list they're going through when they've identified the acreage [for potential sale]. The downside is with the Interior under FLTFA, the law already has the mechanisms for disposal, where it would not take an act of Congress.
So the BLM could just start selling this stuff.
Department of Agriculture, that's way different, which is the Forest Service. They don't have any of these bills that have a process to do it. So anytime the Department of Agriculture sells a track, I think it's under 10 acres, it requires a true act of Congress. So we're a little bit protected on that standpoint.
But the pressure is coming in the Rocky Mountain area that a lot of these, I'll call 'em ski resorts, like Big Sky in Montana, they say that we can't afford to have employee housing. We got to ship 'em all from Bozeman or from Manus, and they got to drive forever because we don't have enough land base around all these ski resorts. Well, the worry would be is if somehow they quickly copied and pasted the Department of the Interior rules and made 'em available for the Department of Agriculture. Then you would see Vail, Aspen, Steamboat, Mammoth, Park City, all your California resorts, all around Tahoe, any place where there are those amenities, it would be sold under that premise. Those would be prime pieces.
JK: And the House recently amended the new congressional rules at the start of the session this year, though, which allows them to sell land off more easily. Is that kind of in conjunction with FLTFA so that they could copy that and paste it onto the Department of Agriculture and then sell those tracts?
RN: Exactly. Yeah, they could. That opening resolution is kind of a way to virtue signal what you stand for. It really doesn't have much teeth to it, other than giving everyone, especially the new freshmen, a chance to say, yeah, I'll stand in line and be one of the pawns here for my party. So it is an indicator of how many people are, it shows where they feel their electorate has it as a priority.
Like in Montana, you win or lose elections in Montana based on public land issues. Texas, it wouldn't make the top 500 list. New York, probably not. Maybe upstate New York, up in the Adirondacks. But you look at that, and you're mostly looking for, are there any crazy surprises? And there usually isn't. Montana, Nevada, and Arizona are three states where public land issues are important enough that they could swing an election. Those states are pretty purple, even in Montana.
The issue is just such a high priority that even though we've grown quite red over the last 10 years [in Montana], it still is the third rail. Man, if you touched that. [whistles]
And so the leverage, and I think this is why I've been asked to go to D.C. last year, this year, and they want me to go again in August, is the Senate is really close, right? It's 52 or 53. Well, the Republicans have to defend a bunch of seats in 2026. One of 'em is Steve Daines, senior senator from Montana, and I know him. He's from here in Bozeman. I've known him a long time. And so the idea is, look, you guys don't want to do anything stupid because Steve could lose his seat based on public land issues.
And he knows that.
He is fully aware of this, and he has concerns that there are people in his party who are going to try to push this hard, and that's going to put him in a hard spot. But back to your point, I do think there's a lot more inertia, momentum, whatever you want to call it, to do something, especially on the Department of the Interior side.
You look at the BLM lands, you look around Moab, St. George, those are all BLM lands, those are all Department of the Interior lands. There are quite a few other places in Utah, around Reno, Carson City, Gardnerville, Douglas County, and Nevada, Elco, Boise, Tucson, Phoenix; those are all BLM lands around those places. And will it do anything for the price of housing? No, no. And we all know it.
But this is the first time that the Republicans have been excited or passionate about getting rid of some public lands, and feel that the planets are aligning for them. They got JD Vance on their side, plus they have a bunch of Democrats who want a way to go back home and say, Hey, we're doing everything we can to lower the cost of housing!
JK: I get so much hate for pointing out that both parties want to sell it.
RN: Right there with you. It's like whatever. I don't really care. My focus is on whoever's in office, how do we make sure that we have better land management, and we don't get rid of the public lands?
JK: To that end, we're talking about the two sides of the coin, and we have an issue with public land users where it's very tribal. How do we get to a point where we can all kind of come together? I've talked about this a bunch, and I will inevitably get an email from a hiker or a camper or a climber, a hunter, a fisherman, or a UTV’r or someone that uses it, and they'll be complaining about the other group. And I always want to go up to them and slap them upside the head and be like, if you do not fight for this with fellow recreaters, you will lose it.
Is there any way that, in your years of conservation efforts, is there any way of diffusing that kind of tribalism that I could use to help get this point across?
RN: I wish I could give you something on that, Jonathon, that I could point to you to say, oh, this worked. The only time I've seen it work was in instances where the loss of those lands was imminent. We're going to lose this!
And there are some examples here in Montana where very wealthy people bought up a whole bunch of land, locked it up, and it was public land that we all had access to, and then everyone was like, whoa. It got everybody on the same page, on the same side of the table, to do a huge land exchange. And we exchanged 70,000 acres, and we got 160,000 acres in return, and it consolidated everything.
So that was one of the few times I've seen all these sides get together.
The first time I went to Washington, D.C., was in 1998. There was a bill called the Conservation and Reinvestment Act, and it was by Don Young, who all of the Democrats in the outdoor rec world hated him, but he had a Democratic co-sponsor. And the idea was we would permanently fund and extend the Land and Water Conservation Fund forever. I was like, oh, cool. This is going to expire in 2015. Yeah, let's get ahead of it. Well, it had a 2% backpack tax on it. In other words, the outdoor rec people would have to start paying just like hunters and anglers pay [through Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson].
Oh man. That went down. I mean, it was unfortunate we had it this close.
At that time, Clinton was the President, and word was they'd agreed they'd sign it if it ended up on his desk. And so, if I remember right, the Democrats held the Senate, they held one house at that time. Anyhow, they put on the full on assault lobbying and got it killed. So during the early part of the Bush administration, they completely cut the funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. They didn't appropriate anything. So we went quite a few years there where that 900 million dollars that we now have because of the Great American Outdoor Act, we missed out on that because we killed it among our tribalism of fighting.
So I really wish I knew what that answer is, because even within the hunting space, we're so tribal. It's like, do you guys want to fight about lighted knocks and whether or not you can have three rounds in your rifle? And I always tell people, you know what? We're really good at picking the dandelions out of the yard while our house is on fire. We're worried about the dandelion out on the boulevard between the sidewalk and the street in our house, and all of our worldly possessions are burning down, but we took care of those dandelions. Someday we’re gonna wake up saying, what the hell happened to the house?
I guess once you have something for free, you feel that, well, it's supposed to be free forever no matter what. And what we're seeing now is a far more nuanced approach than what they tried in the ‘80s and ‘90s and even the ‘00s. They have a long game.
If there's one lucky thing about being a CPA, some of my CPA clients actually were economists who are the think tankers behind getting it at the public land. So we would joust about this, we'd go to coffee, and they pointed out to me that they have the funding, they have strategy. They will do this piece by piece if they have to. And I'm seeing that plan in effect.
JK: I've heard you say a bunch of times that you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater in terms of how federally managed public lands are actually managed because everyone loves public lands, but everyone hates how they're managed.
RN: So if you're the accounting commissioner and you get word that the BLM or the US Wildlife Service or the Forest Service has decided they're only going to pay half their property taxes this year, well, that's cuts to services. It's cuts to schools. It's cut to every essential thing. So there's no wonder why a lot of these rural communities hate public land because Congress gets play with the formula for how it’s supposed to be funded. It still is way below what you and I pay as property taxes on our assessed value, but sometimes they don't even pay that fully.
And so they have done a really good job of pissing off rural communities and rural counties.
JK: Do you think that's part of the plan or… you know, Jon Stewart just had on Ezra Klein on his podcast and they were talking about how road infrastructure projects under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was working and how counties, individual counties had to go through this 14 step process that took three and a half years just to get to the point where, hey, maybe we can actually break ground. Do you think it is part of that bureaucratic process that has been instilled into Congress or do you think this is part of those stakeholders that want to sell off public land? Do you think they've put these things in where they don't pay their property taxes as a way of pissing off people so that they can later sell it off without having us be upset about it?
RN: Yes. That's fully part of their strategy as it relates to the bureaucratic process. I guess it’s more complicated than just one group has a bad motive. It is coming from a lot of different sides, which is why the best traction I always get with this, especially when I'm being called the Commie Pinko on one side and fascist on the other, is I'm just here for better land management.
Now what does that mean? I don't know. But pretty much everybody that you and I would talk to in our audiences when you say, we want better land management, they'd be like, yeah, they might all have a different idea of what better land management is, but the status quo is not what they think of as good land management. So my point is by letting Congress off the hook and not forcing them to manage the way they should, we're over here again, fighting in our little tribes and being mad at the local forest Ranger or the local BLM officer when they're just doing what Congress tells them to do.
And well, every bit of this does come back to Congress.
Congress is fully aware that they can come up with whatever they want to fix it. And who is the public mad at? The baseball coach who happens to work for the US Fish and Wildlife Service or the community city council person who she works for the BLM as a biologist, that's who everyone gets mad at. Congress has no accountability, and they have the responsibility, but no accountability. So we've kind of fallen for that simplistic reaction, get pissed off and go yell at somebody. And I've been trying to educate my audience that every bit of this is fixable.
But some of these people who want to get rid of public lands, they don't want better land management.
JK: I mean, they're actively firing people. We were talking about this earlier this year when the administration came in and they were cutting forest service jobs, and I had to be like, you're losing avalanche responders and the folks that mitigate avalanches for the snowmobiles, and everyone's like, oh, wait, what do you mean? And you're like, that's part of the forestry service.
All your trails that you go ride dirt bikes on, UTVs and ATVs on all the trails that you use to access your hunting and fishing grounds, those people that maintain your trails are gone now. The people who mitigate fire, all the fire like the woodland firefighters, they're all gone. What do you think is going to happen? Yes, burns are great for hunting two years down the line, but what happens when it goes out of control?
RN: And so every one of those crisis and tragedies that is going to come, I hope that it rains like hell across the west this summer because if we have a terrible fire season, it is going to be more fuel for these groups to say, see, we told you those sons of bitches don't know how to manage anything where the whole place is going to burn down. Let's just sell that shit.
That's my worry because you said there's not going to be the infrastructure there to take care of things, and it's either going to be a pivot of people realizing that, well, they got rid of everybody. No wonder everything burned down, or people aren't going to think that far. They're just going to be mad, frustrated, and someone's going to feed their anger and they're going to be like, yeah, let's sell this stuff. This is a waste of time and resources. Let's balance the budget.
That's the other part of this.
The whole FLTP thing, that list the lands under FLTP, they're supposed to do the same thing that they did under the Southern Nevada Land Management Act. They're supposed to go and replace or use the proceeds like a land bank. You sell one piece, you put it in bank, then you go buy other parcels. But if Congress never authorizes the appropriation to go buy the other parcels… That Southern Nevada Fund has, I think over a billion dollars in it that hasn't been spent yet, and in the prior Trump administration, one of their budget balancing suggestions was to take any earmarked money that have not been spent in the last some period of time and treat those as current revenues and clean out those accounts.
So that tells me that us getting anything in return for selling some of these public lands, it's going to be hard like, alright, let's go and set up some plan where we're going to improve trails or we're going to do whatever. We're going to build parking lots so that everyone's not parked on the shoulder of the road or whatever.
I think some of these groups are like, yeah, we'll say that, but we want to retain the Congressional mechanism where if we want to, we can renege on the deal and say, eh, we are not going to approve the replacement part of that. We are happy with the disposal.
JK: How do we get that message out? I am sure you feel the same way that I do, as I put out a public land story and public land fight and I feel like I'm not doing enough. How do we as communicators of public land issues, how do we best tell the public what is actually going on with those managements? I mean, you have your platform, I have mine, you have Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, RMEF, the Mule Deer Foundation, and countless others.
How do we come together and have that concerted effort to ensure that my children and their children have public lands to enjoy? I just spent the last year reporting on the Utah stuff now my home state, and it feels like a drop in the bucket. Yes, it got defeated by the Supreme Court, but it did not have to go that way. That felt razor-thin. I did not think it was going to go that way, to be honest.
RN: So that's back to how I said that the Koch brothers have funded a really, really big team, and it's based in Utah. You have the American Land Council there. You have a very strong group of Americans for Prosperity. You have another group based out of Texas, Stewards of American Liberty. They're all very involved in your Utah legislature.
So the Supreme Court said, we're not going to give you the shortcut here. You got to go back and do like anyone else. So they have the money, they're going to take it to a lower federal court if they don't win or if they do win, it's going to end up in the appeals court and then it'll possibly go to the Supreme Court. But the premise they've had forever is that it's unconstitutional for the federal government on these lands. That's been their argument.
Have you ever heard of the Skousen Constitution? Okay, Cleon Skousen was a bit of a out there guy. He has his version of the Constitution as this defined document, and he goes into quite an interesting thread that he weaves, but it's applicable to Utah.
So back in the 18 hundreds, even 17 hundreds, the Jeffersonian view was that the highest standing a citizen could find is by being an agrarian landowner, the yeoman farmer. And so with that whole process, it became part of the religious definitions at the time. It's why at the time we only allowed landowners to vote, white male landowners, stuff like that.
Skousen, however, goes through all this and talks about how the Constitution is this divine instrument. And he's pretty harsh on the idea of the federal government having any powers for anything. Well, a lot of people from Utah where in the land movement or land disposal movement try to cite that the schism version of the Constitution as the Constitution, or that's the interpretation of the Constitution. It completely disregards everything that the courts and the judiciary. Then it's as if Article III is not part of their Constitution. The Judiciary, that doesn't matter. But with being in Utah that's been out there, I think Skousen published that in the sixties or seventies, and so that's been out there for a long time and in rural Utah, it's the thing. And so yeah, so I am a hundred percent convinced that your legislature will fund whatever it takes to keep this in the public eye and they want to get it to the US Supreme Court.
JK: It's so weird that Utah would be the focal point for this when so much public land and so much of our revenue is derived from public land. So much tourism is derived from public land and public land access. It feels very antithetical to reality, to what this state embodies, especially as I look outside and I see Wasatch National Forest right behind me. And I'm going to St. George to go to Moab next week or this week.
Everyone I know hunts or fishes, they use side-by-sides, and they snowmobile. It feels insane to me that the legislature is allowed to get away with this when so much of the populace derives enjoyment from these lands. I have not been able to balance that scale, figure that out.
RN: I've yet to meet a Utah hunter that is in favor of selling the public lands. If you look at Utah’s state land, it has some of the lowest, I think Utah and Mississippi are close to the same per capita general fund spending on education. So how they've made up the gap by not raising people's property taxes or sales taxes by selling land, and that's one reason why Utah has such an aggressive land sale program is to fund from the universities down to K through 12. That's a way to keep taxes lower. It's been a philosophy in Utah for a long time.
So I've asked around a lot. I have a ton of friends in Utah who are great people, and I'm like, what's the deal? Why will nobody push back on this?
And most of them say, well, if you look at the priority list of how the majority of folks in Utah vote, public lands don't make it up that priority list. I'm like, well, I get that. The thing could be said in a lot of states, but why don't people push back? I voted for this person based on taxes or abortion or immigration or whatever. You voted for 'em. Why don't you push back when they get out the weeds on public land stuff? Well, that's just not the way we are. But wish I had an answer for that in Utah, but the whole public land movement has its roots there.
JK: Yeah, I mean, it feels like it. As soon as that SCOTUS thing came up last year and the other states signed on and the AGs signed on, and you're just like, okay, we're just the center point of this and we're the center point of this movement of trying to disperse federal land.
RN: There’s more, too. Utah also said we'll show you sum’bitches. So when Clinton walked out the door, he created the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, and so many people are like, why are you doing that? You are really going to piss off these people.
The response was, well, they don't vote for me anyhow. They don't vote for us. So that was probably the biggest piece of fuel that got thrown on the whole fire in Utah after the sale movement dissipated at the time. Well, when Clinton did that on his way out the door, that was a kick in the crotch to Utah, and it wasn't casual and coincidental. It was like, you guys have made my life miserable. I'm going to show you guys, and there would be people who argued, oh no, it was all based on its conservation values and blah, blah, blah.
There's really nothing that had changed in the Staircase Escalante up to that point. Okay, there were some coal mines and there were some plotted uranium mines, but the coal mine stuff, the only reason any of that goes away is because of just the coal market itself sucks now that natural gas is so much more efficient.
So as if that wasn't bad enough, then along comes Obama on his way out the door and creates Bears Ear. So I told all my liberal friends, I'm like, if Obama creates Bears Ear and Gold, whatever it was in Nevada, Gold something, I said, he's going to make our lives so difficult by doing that. And what he did in the last week of his administration, Bears Ear. So, and I get that you're probably not going to get the Utah delegation to sign on to anything, but if you would've at least brought 'em to the table and said, hey, let's work on, let's see at least what's acceptable, and if you use the Antiquities Act for some type of administrative action that creates a National Monument, that is okay, maybe you're going to push it a little further than that to just say, F you guys, you made my life miserable.
You didn't approve any of my Supreme Court justices. Those were political stones. I can't call 'em anything other than that.
JK: Oh, I called it out when Biden was going out the door and we were reporting on Project 2025 ahead of the election, and we were just like, this is not good. They really want to sell off public lands. And then as soon as Biden reclaimed Bears Ear and did all this other stuff and put out more maps of what they're going to do versus all the proposed plans, that would've been far more equitable amongst all the groups, just went and said to hell with everyone. That's why I always, I get the same emails. But bboth sides are terrible at public lands issues.
Either they're a political football or they just want to sell it. I think what frustrates me the most is in all of the topics in American political life, the only one that I know that has an 80% approval rating by the public is public lands. Right? Nothing else. How do you…
RN: …stop shooting each other in the foot to bring that even that 80% on page? Yeah, that's one. I have been trying to solve that riddle for so long.
I've been reading all these books about the human mind and tribalism and all this stuff because not only is it within the hunting space. But if you spread those concentric circles out, it's the rock climbers, the hikers, the mountain bikers, the powersports folks. We all have our own little tribes within our communities and even amongst our communities. We're always looking at each other with a side eye glance. I don't know if I trust those campers! And it's unfortunate and we're going to wake up someday and it'll have been a piece-by-piece [sale] thing. I think that's the message I've been trying to get my audience to understand is this isn't going to happen where we wake up one day and they're like, we're going to sell all 640 million acres of BLM and Forest Service.
No, it's going to be this affordable housing stuff. It's going to be, well, you let all this forest burn down, it's not worth anything anymore. We better go sell all that around there because the only people who take care of it are private landowners, and those are the places where we're going to see it.
And your audience like mine, if it wasn't for public land, my audience wouldn't have a place to hunt. And I look at all the ATVs, the motorcycle folks here, they don't do any of that on private land. No, It is all on public land. And even Montana with our liberal recreation laws, our state trust lands are the most restrictive on motorized travel of any lands in Montana. If you took our 30 million acres of forest service and BLM and gave it to our state land board, as far as a ATVing and snowmobiling or whatever you into, you’re SOL.
JK: A handful of these states don't let you shoot on state owned land. They don't let you camp on state land. They don't let you recreate on state land. You could walk in, but you can't do anything on state land. How do you raise the awareness of people of what's at risk?
RN: It’s really hard to do with all the chatter, all the noise. If there's one thing about social media now, everybody has their own platform and that makes them an expert in their opinion. They're an expert and they get to weigh in and throw shit on the wall that has no rationale to it as their way of saying, I don't like what you're proposing, or I think whatever. I've done this many times already this year, or I've either posted something where it's like any sane person would look at this and know we shouldn't not be charging the hard rock miners at least some royalty. It pays zero royalty. At least oil and gas pays 16%. For my film permits, I was paying somewhere $15,000 to $20,000 a year.
But when you tell people they're making billions of profits in the gold industry, and they pay zero royalty on it, oh, that's bullshit. That can't be okay. People don't want to believe the facts, though.
How do you get them from their immediate intuition of this is my team, I'm going to support 'em to no end. And how do you counter that? That's why I'm spending so much time reading, trying to understand the human dimension of why do people, very smart people who if you showed'em a different set of facts that they weren't so dug in on, they would look at that and immediately come to a logical conclusion. Smart people!
I wish I had an explanation, Jonathon, on how do you penetrate that. If you asked the crew here, they'd be like, that's all that Randy talks about anymore is how does he get people to understand?
JK: I ask myself every time I do a public land story. Or ask myself why I don't mean delete social media, maybe from the face of the earth, maybe the whole internet. I threaten to throw my laptop away at least once a week and I work on the internet.
RN: Yeah. The one thing that I have found is in this world of intensive communication and everyone being inundated, if you can be that person they trust, it's super valuable because right now they trust nobody.
But if you're even off slightly on something, you lost their trust. You're just like all those other assholes. You’ve got some agenda, some motivation. So I'm really, really careful that if I put something out there, it's factual and I can support it. And if it is my opinion, I will tell you, this is purely my opinion, folks, because if I start losing that trust at a time when trust is so fickle, I mean so subject to the winds of whatever are blowing that day…I've had to be really, really careful with that.
And there are times where I've maybe hacked on one side or the other a little harder, and I kind of keep a mental ledger in my head of, all right, we haven't hacked on the Democrats much lately. We better go find some shit they're doing that's going to piss off the audience so that when I start hacking on the Republicans, I can say, well, I just lit those guys up, or the other way around.
JK: Here's the links.
RN: So it's as hard as it is to, and for a lot of the people, I don't even think it matters, they're just augured into that side.
The other thing I'm finding out in all this reading and research is the downside of social media for people who are in positions like you and I, where we have a tendency to think that's representative of our bigger audience. And it's really not in a lot of ways. That is the fringe or the more vocal outer bands of our audiences. And so I just keep hammering the same message, trying to get the bell curve to learn.
But you’ve got cheerleaders that say, go get 'em, Randy. And then, Randy, where's your address? I'm coming to whoop your ass. So I always got to keep reminding myself that that's not necessarily the bigger part of my audience, and that bigger part of my audience is waiting for me to tell them when they can do something that's going to make a difference. So for me to just talk about something and whine and complain and the sky's falling, that's not what they want me to tell 'em. They want me to say, here's something that is critical and this is what you can do to help and make it as easy as possible. And a good percentage of 'em are willing to do that. I'm often blown away.
One time, Rob Bishop, who was one from Vernal, Utah, was the chair of the House Natural Resources Committee. I'd been back in D.C., I think that was in 2016, and he was just a pain in everybody's ass. He took pleasure in being a pain in people's ass. He made a statement to some of us that some land thing will never pass as long as he was here. And so I put on my podcast, I gave everyone his email and his phone number. I posted it on my Hunt Talk forum and a bunch of Utah guys got ahold of me. They're like, you have pissed him off to no end. I'm like, well, I don't vote for 'em.
But the point of that was that it impressed on me that my audience would really take action to the degree that they did. He actually, for about a week said, we are no longer able to take phone messages. And not that I did it with the intention of to piss him off, but if you can find something that your audience feels is worth their time because they have such small amount of time to think about it, they're trusting you, Jonathon. You're my guy, man, you're not going to lead me wrong. You're the one who's going to tell me, you're going to sort out all this bullshit, this crazy stuff from this news source and that news source. I'm counting on you to be my fact checker.
And when you tell me, hey, time has come to make a phone call or send an email or go to a meeting, alright, I'll do that, but don't just bitch and moan and tell me about how bad this person is or how bad that is.
I have found that when we try to give a call to action of some sort, it's very helpful and we'll preface it sometimes by telling our audience this is a five part series. We've got to give you the background and the information so that when we ask you at the end to take a call to action, you understand why and the whole idea behind it and that we're not just making this up.
JK: So do you think that that time for all of us to come together is right now? Do you think it would be beneficial the next time I publish a public land story to have those contact information of local, state and federal representatives? The ones that I can track down and be like, these are the people you need to talk to. You need to voice your opinion. It's time to put up or shut up.
RN: Yeah. One of my friends, Mark Lambrecht was Max Baucus's chief of staff in D.C., who was a Senator 30 years ago or so, and Mark is a very helpful guy. I remember calling him one time, I'm like, what was the level to get your attention or the senator's attention? And granted now this is Montana, we have a million people.
He said, if we got five calls or emails on the same issue from back home, the staff knew to bring that to me. Then I'd look at it and I'd say, I'll find out a little more. If we got 10 calls, I'm like, the next time I'm back in Montana, I'm having a meeting with this group of people. If we got 20 calls, I'm setting up a meeting for Max when he comes back here and we're going to meet with those people. Now, I'm sure there's some scale to that based on the population of each state and what it takes to get on their radar screen. But I've told a lot of my audience that, and a lot of them were like, yeah, five or six of us, we lit up the governor and damn his staff, one of his staff people called us. We had a meeting with 'em.
So I try to tell my people, be polite, be professional and be persistent. Don't do it into name calling and partisan and whatever. They get enough of that. They want to know that you're thoughtful and that you're concerned about the issue, not your guy or their guy. So I've been communicating that a lot to my audience. I think part of the reason I'll never have the largest audience in the hunting space, even though I've been here longer than most, is I don't really want the largest audience. I want the audience that's going to take action.
And I think we still got a ton of work to do in that direction, but I think we're making some progress there.
