Ep. 15: Tom Opre – Award-Winning Filmmaker & Director of The Real Yellowstone

Tom: For me growing up, the traditions that come being in the outdoors, whether you're hunting or fly fishing or, or hiking, you know, all of these things are interconnected and you continue to pull little pieces from all those different elements of those things you do throughout the year, you know, and so, you know, you have this people that love to bow hunt and that connectivity and they want to go hunt in the mountains. So they train and they go to the gym and they work out and they get together with other people that are similar, like minded, and then they believe in that resource and they want to make sure that it's protected. Well, there's all your hunting groups. There's all your wildlife NGOs.

Tarek: Welcome to Y'all Street. Today, I'm speaking with Tom Opre, the writer and director of "The Real Yellowstone," recently selected as a finalist at the Cannes Film Festival. Tom, you want a cup of coffee?

Tom: I'd love a cup of coffee.

Tarek: Got you these Yellowstone coffee mugs with the animals of Yellowstone. I thought that would be appropriate for today's conversation.

Tom: That would be appropriate.

Tarek: Coffee cheers to you.

Tom: Thank you, sir.

Tarek: Amazing documentary.

Tom: Thank you.

Tarek: I watched it last night. It was filled with tension.

Tom: Welcome to the American West.

Tarek: Talk to me about it. What was the inspiration of the documentary?

Tom: Well, you know, we've we're in a society now where everything's really urbanized. You know, people don't understand a lot of the basic things in life. Like, you know, when they wake up in the morning, they flip a switch, they expect the lights to come on. All right. They don't know where electricity comes from. They don't care as long as the light comes on. The next thing of the day is walking to the loo or the bathroom, flush the toilet out of sight, out of mind. And the next big decision of the day is a chai latte or a caramel macchiato. But two thirds of the world doesn't live that way. And we also live in a modern society where we make decisions that have downstream effects and those downstream effects can be positive or they can be negative. In the case of wildlife, wildlife habitat, we've come to understand that wildlife doesn't live in cities and it doesn't even live on the tops of mountains in Montana or here in Idaho because they're covered in snow and ice. A big part of the year lives on fertile ground with people. And it's those people that live with that wildlife resource and that wildlife habitat that have to see a benefit in order to take care of it. Because as a species, we have a long track record, thousands of years of making a lot of mistakes and mucking things up when it comes to our wildlife resources because we didn't really understand that a lot of this stuff is very finite. And of course, a lot of it comes back from our own human population numbers, you know, since the great, you know, since the industrial revolution, you know, our population is skyrocketed if you look at the charts. And now we're at a point in our technological and modern society where we can produce almost unlimited amounts of food and store it for almost a limited amounts of time. And of course that's really good for human beings, because that means we could live on this planet a lot longer. And so that's putting a lot of pressure on what resources are out there.

Tarek: When did this urban migration really kick into high gear?

Tom: Well, I think you can go back to real simple, you know, you had homesteading days and, and in the turn of the century, you get to the great depression in the 1930s. We saw a migration of people from the countryside, from rural places. You know, most people prior to the great depression had a family member or a friend that had a ranch or a farm. You knew kind of your impact on the land. You knew where your food comes from. Yet today, we live in a society where the vast majority of our urban folks, a lot of them don't know where the food comes from. I remember hearing a survey right before COVID where they asked the kids in the public high school system in Chicago, where their hamburger came from and 50% of the kids didn't know it came from an animal. You know, so it's, it's, it's, it's really serious stuff. And again, we live in a representative democracy, 50% plus one wins in a day, you know, and so there's decisions being made and policies being created and laws enacted that have serious, serious implications in many cases, kind of the law of unintended consequences, which have really drastic impacts on land and wildlife and rural communities.

Tarek: So your hope for the film is to hopefully educate some of these folks in urban communities to so that they understand some of the challenges that are going on in places like Montana.

Tom: Yeah. A hundred percent on that. You know, it is about, we created a little nonprofit called The Shepherds of Wildlife Society. Once I recognized that there was this issue. And so part of that, uh, mission for the organization is to reconnect our, our urban society, our Western urban society with nature. And we really want them to understand what modern conservation is. We want to get that social buy on that social acceptance because, you know, the reason why you have birds in your bird feeder, the reasons why you have deer and turkey in the backyards, the reasons why we have national forest is because people saw a benefit and a value to utilizing in a sustainable way, those resources. If we don't do that, you know, you go back to market hunting days and, and the, and the commercialization of wildlife, which is there was no hunting seasons, you know, it's a shoot all the bison because we're going to sell everything. Of course there's warfare going on there. So there's a lot of different factors, but you know, we're going to kill all of these animals in order to sell them to make a buck. And of course in the modern age, you know, late 1800s, guys like Teddy Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, they came in and they, they literally brought in this modern ethos of conservation, the wise use of natural resource. Gifford Pinchot, the father of the American Forest Service, who, with those gentlemen coined that definition is the wise use to be a conservationist. You have to conserve. It's a physical act. It's not a state of mind. It's not an emotion to be a conservationist. It goes back. So simply as human beings, the majority of us are, you know, we were made up. The majority of us is water. Okay. We need food calories to survive. So wildlife was a big part of what we've, we've eaten. I mean, let's just face it. Let's go back in human history to the time we walked on two feet. We've always hunted. We've always been, have a connection to the land. And that's really why I started making these film series. And it started off in 2017, 2021 right in there. We worked on a film called "Killing the Shepherd" and it was in Zambia. It was about a rural community led by a woman chief, not very, that's not a common thing there. And these people, you know, she wanted to break the bonds of poverty by waging a war against wildlife poaching. And the story went off and we ended up in a bunch of film festivals, over 40 film festivals around the world, won a bunch of awards for social justice, indigenous and human rights. So, you know, at the end of the day, you're like, Whoa, wait a minute. Okay. And again, it's getting back to that fact that as humans, if we don't see a value, we have a tendency and a track record not to take care of things. So that film took off and that kind of just started. I saw this huge opportunity that if you tell a really good story as a filmmaker, and as I've mentioned, I've been a filmmaker all of my, all of my life. I started carrying a camera when I was 19 and I can, we'll talk a little bit more about my history, but getting back to why we made the real Yellowstone is that I saw a real need to educate this, this very important group of people because you know, now we're seeing the politicization of wildlife and habitat conservation and hunting where, you know, politicians are using the very highly emotive issue of killing an animal and to gin up the vote, just like the second amendment or pro-choice pro-life or whatever it is. And so when you get into these scenarios, and of course we're also seeing the anti-hunting lobby, anti-use lobby that are using, you know, they collect about a billion dollars every year in their nine 90 tax returns. You can see that they're using that money to fight against conservation. These are preservationists. And so again, at the end of the day, 50% plus one wins at the ballot box and only 4%, only 4% of Americans buy a hunting license a given year.

Tarek: So I want to, I want to get into that, but, but first let's, let's rewind a little bit and talk about how we got here. So, you know, in the mid 18 hundreds, something on the order of about 90% of our society was agrarian. Most people had land. They were, you know, one cow, you know, growing their own food, going to markets, homesteading. Um, you know, obviously some operations bigger than others, but, but even people that lived in and around what we consider today to be the big cities, all were connected to the land, all had gardens, all were, um, you know, growing their own food and so forth. Then we have the mass industrialization, um, that came about and call it the late 1800s. Then you have World War I, you move into the great depression. During the time of the Great Depression, you still had a vast majority of people in this country that lived out on the land. Great Depression brought a lot of them into the cities, change the function of society. There was a lot more, uh, socialization of resources.

Tom: Um, we get into world war two and we come out of world war two and that's when the modern suburbs were created.

Tarek: And from the end of world war two to today, the pendulum has swung to 90% of people now live in the city.

Tom: Okay.

Tarek: What we saw during COVID was in some respects, a wake up call for a lot of people and that feeling of being boxed in, of being in an apartment, being in the suburbs. So a lot of people went out, they started buying land and rural areas. Uh, obviously Montana was a big destination for, for money from California and all around the country. And there was, I think the beginning of an awakening about just how I'm connected we are to the conveniences of modern life and being able to grow, go to the grocery store. And so when people went to the grocery store and there was no chicken or all of the eggs were gone or you couldn't even get toilet paper, there was a realization of just how vulnerable we really are. And so, you know, as, as we kind of get into your film and uh, what really struck me with some of the people that you interviewed were a lot of these folks actually were not born and raised in Montana. Some of them came from inner cities and you know, Chicago and other places. They were buying land and they were rediscovering some of the roots of, you know, the, the entire food supply and the food chain. So this film is not just about food, but it is certainly a big part of the documentary. So can you talk a little bit about that? And, um, I'm also interested in how you actually met some of the people that were in the film.

Tom: That's a great question. And so food is obviously we don't exist without food. Right. And so with COVID that was a big wake up call, you know, all of a sudden grocery store shelves are empty. What are you going to do? And of course, where I live in Montana, we've seen a huge influx of people. I mean, cause Montana really didn't shut down during COVID we're pretty fierce, independent stock in Montana. You know, we, we, we kind of like to say we can take care of things. And when you have the truck or the tractor break down and you're 60 miles from your town, you figure out how to fix it. Cause otherwise it's a long walk. And that's kind of probably, it's a good way to, to, to maybe phrase, you know, what that overall mentality is. And so, you know, looking at the film, you know, there are, you know, the, the emphasis is on multi-generational ranching families, you know, you know, everybody's watched the television show Yellowstone. This is not that it's not, has nothing to do with the park has everything to do with that lifestyle of living on the land, utilizing the land to make a living, which ranchers and farmers do.

Tarek: There's not a lot of murder in your documentary.

Tom: Nobody's going to the train station. Yeah, no, the Indians aren't trying to kill each other or kill, you know, kill, kill the other guys, the cowboys and stuff. But yeah, it's the real brutal truth of what goes on on the land. Again, you know, what we look at there is that, Hey, you know, when you have a multi-generational ranching family out there and they maybe have been there for 150 years. And if they're there for that long, they've obviously done something right. And at the end of the day, if you lose that family for whatever reason, you lose that institutional knowledge of say conservation on the land, management of the grass and the wildlife in there. And so what we try to do is delve into a lot of those issues. Food is obviously a big part. And of course, you know, we, we delve into the fact that, you know, that there, there is a funnel where food goes to, and it's constricted to a handful of corporations that literally have monopolistic control over it all. And these ranchers are all, you know, they're basically told what they're going to get, they're going to make, you know, every year. And, you know, most of them, especially the ones that are also farming, you know, they're leveraged to, you know, and 90, 98 cents of every dollar they make goes back into pay for fertilizer, fuel, the John Deere stuff. And, you know, I've got ranchers telling me that are, that are, they've got 13,000 acres under, under plow, you know, farming, and they can't figure out how to make a pencil for a new combine next year. It's just too expensive. And there's not enough commodity price to make it work. But again, we're getting back to this whole idea of, okay, you know, with the food side of things, but you were talking about, you know, these guys are trying to figure out how can we make, how can we diversify? You know, we have, you know, you get these families that have been on the landscape and of course they have children and of course their children have children and children. Then you have all these generations. And of course it's like a spider web, right? It gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

Tarek: This is part of the tension that I was talking about at the outset where, you know, there, there's tension between the big corporations and the local farmers because it's going to be very difficult for a local farmer rancher to be able to compete on price with these big corporations. The corporations have a conflict of interest.

Tom: You might say their, their focus is not on food quality.

Tarek: It's on food quantity and on, and share price and share price and, and bringing the cost down at the expense of the environment, at the expense of the quality of the food. These ranchers sit in sort of contradistinction to that and they are trying to sell local to farm to market or farm to table with, with their distribution network. But there's this real tension between, you know, the, the care of the animals, the care of the environment the, the cost of the food, the quality of the food in terms of what we're ingesting. And then on top of that, these ranches are also dealing with the threat of wildlife around them who are, you know, in the case of, you know, say a grizzly or, or wolves taking down, you know, a certain portion, a certain percentage of, you know, their, their livelihood of their livelihood every single year. And then you're dealing with unknown weather circumstances. You're dealing with drought, you're dealing with all kinds of challenges that eat into what is already a very thin margin product for them. And so you can feel that, you know, how palpable the difficulty is for, for these ranchers who are, you know, as they say, asset rich, cash poor, they, they own the land, they own the equipment, but they don't have a lot of cash to make ends meet at the end of the day.

Tom: I like to say the largest set of multimillionaires that are the poorest set of multimillionaires in the country.

Tarek: That's right. Should we watch the trailer?

Tom: Sure. Let's do that.

Tarek: Mickey.

Trailer: We've been here in Montana since the mid 1800s. It's our history. It's our heritage. It's our family. The good old American spirit is still here, you know, working and, you know, being a part of this land.

Trailer (Tom): The goal of American Prairie is pretty simple. We're, we're trying to build the largest nature reserve in America and completely open everything to the public.

Trailer: They call it rewilding the land. It's a very easy thing for them to sell because it sounds like they're doing a good thing, unless you're one of the people that they're trying to rewild. You know, the idea that animals belong to everybody is different than the idea of my property belongs to me.

Trailer (Tom): The reality is in Montana, there's a lot of private land and there's a lot of people who don't provide any access to that private land.

Trailer: You know, they wanted to buy our land, change our traditions and disregard our communities. Everybody knows that we're in the land acquisition business. We're very transparent about that. You're affecting people's families that have been ranching on those lands for hundreds of years now. Last year they were coming down in our hay field ate the equivalent of $150,000 worth of hay. They recover that cost through leasing to an outfitter or charging a trespass fee. And they get yelled at. Oh, you're commercializing the public's wildlife. Are they, or are they just recovering some of the costs associated with the public's wildlife? Production agriculture is what provides the economy for central Montana. What we're doing here is producing the cleanest food in the entire world. Like you can taste the sunshine in the grass. Without agriculture, the production of food, you cannot have a city. You cannot have any business. You cannot have a bank. It's the basis. When American Prairie Reserve buys a place, I view it as a death in the community. The last 150 years, it's been the producers here developing those grasslands. We've created this ecological resilience from the soil up. It works. You can raise food totally in sync with nature.

Trailer (Tom): We're seeing animals that have never been on the prairie before we turn. Those are our indicators of success. We're seeing that ecosystem restored.

Trailer: I don't know that I have the right to choose what should or shouldn't be here based on what's convenient for me.

Trailer (Tom): You can never take the human out of a conversation about conservation. This is all deeply connected.

Trailer: A lot of ranches are barely hanging on as it is. Everybody that's coming into this area is driving the price of land through the roof. And, you know, then there were a lot of cattle in danger. Finally, you know, the fire was going to overtake us. And so we took off.

Tarek: Again, amazing film.

Tom: We were talking before the trailer about how you met some of the people that are in the film. Can you finish that line of thought? I've been in Montana most of my adult life. I have to admit, it's starting to push 30 years now. And I've been coming to Montana ever since I was knee-high to somebody's britches. I always wanted to live there. My dad was an outdoor writer. And so we had an opportunity to spend time. He had outdoor writer friends and, you know, around the West and Bozeman and so forth. So I got a really cool track record and I love the place. And so when I finally figured out how to live here full time in my late 20s, you know, I just started meeting people and I love the outdoors. And so in Montana, one of the cool things about living there, especially back in the day, and I'd say, you know, we didn't use to have... When I first moved there, there was no speed limit. It was called safe and prudent. That's what the sign said out there. I would fly in and out of Helena, the capital, go to my film production work on location. And I'd pull up to the front of the terminal and leave the truck, run in, and go in and check my bags in and go park the truck down below. And when I came back a week or two later, there'd be a little envelope out on the windshield and I'd have to put in the days I was there. And it was, I think, two dollars or three dollars a day and one dollar bills. And then on the way out of the parking lot, there'd be a steel pipe with a slit cut it in. I just stick that in there. It was on the honor system.

Tarek: Yeah.

Tom: But one of the coolest things about Montana and Montanans is you could be walking around on a two track road in the middle of nowhere or on a county road someplace or a four service road. And if somebody came by, they always stopped. How are you doing? Are you OK? Do you need any help? That's one of the cool things about it. Even today, when I walk around in downtown Whitefish, which has changed vastly in the last 30 years, I walk by somebody and I look them in the eye and I smile and say, good evening, good morning. And if they don't see anything, I say, wait a minute here. You're not from around here, are you? That's the case and it's happened more and more. But so my point is, is that I love the outdoors, love hunt and fish. I met a lot of great people. Of course, a lot of wildlife lives on private land, like we said. And with the fact that wildlife is out there, it's being stewarded by these private landowners. And so I've built a lot of relationships over the last 20, 25, 30 years with people out there and and doing the first film in Africa. And I saw there was a need for it. Last year, we came a film called The Last Keeper on all this is on Amazon Prime about the rural folks living in the highlands, working at the sporting estates in this whole war over land use and land ownership. And I saw a need to maybe do something back home. And this has kind of been on my radar for years. And I started jotting down, like, who do I want to talk to? And who has a story here? And I mean, I remember my friends here that they put their ranch up for sale after one hundred six years because hoppers and drought and commodity prices were weren't working. This is a family that literally they farm, they ranch. They got a herd of cattle. And they run an outfitting business for hunting. And between all those businesses that make enough to make ends meet. But they had three kids and the two daughters didn't want to run the ranch. The old the son wanted to run the ranch, but he married a young gal from Bozeman who was a was a city girl and a nurse. And they were afraid that, you know, it's eight days a week, 80 hour, 80 hour weeks or more, you know, 80 hour week. You know, I mean, just a ton of business, a ton of work to do all this stuff and wear all these hats. And they were just afraid they were going to set them up for for, you know, literally that they're going to end up divorced. And so they put the ranch up for sale. And of course, I'm friends with them. You know, go out and spend time on the ranch. And we've done some filming out there for some commercial projects and stuff. So, yeah, just just really good, solid tier people. But, you know, you have these experiences, you know, and I'm thinking back, well, you know, wait a minute, that's kind of a cool story. And then, you know, I've got other families like there was a rancher that also was an outfitter. I'd met through that and they do a lot of farming. And he decided to run for for office for the state legislature. A guy named Eric Albus up on the high line of Montana. And, you know, I've known Eric for close to 20 years now. And I think it was the second person after his wife to find out he was going to run. He told me, I'm like, oh, can you help me with this? I'm a marketing guy, too, right? You know, hey, can you help me? Yeah. Oh, wait a minute. That is a good story, right? And so you have all these things go on there. And of course, there are people that that I've met on this project. And I think it's really cool about these films. You know, I'm not an expert in anything, but I get to be really immersed in these subject matter and these topics. And I get to know a little bit about a lot of things. And it's fascinating. You know, I mean, Scotland, I can tell you all about, you know, going back to feudal system, feudal system and William the Conqueror and what happened with the Victorian age and the clearances. And I mean, you really become like a walking encyclopedia because it's how you tell these stories. And it's pretty critical to have all that. So, you know, trying to find people, a lot of it were people I knew. Friends of friends. And then our associate producer, a guy named Tony Bynum, a phenomenal photographer, has worked on me, all the projects and travel around. He's also a Native American. He's got a master's in land use. He's worked at the EPA in D.C. dealing with Native American issues, reporting directly to the director of the EPA. And he just brings a different perspective to things. He's a little he kind of bends the left politically a little bit on some things. And sometimes I have to go, hey, wait a minute here. It's not . . . stop drinking the Kool-Aid. But at the end of the day, though, it's like, hey, you know, we really have some really cool people. And so, you know, we ended up meeting Matt Skoglund from North Bridger Bison. And this is a guy that was an environmental attorney. And he just kind of, you know, disillusioned with the whole thing. But he had this really affinity for bison and he wanted to do something. And he's got this really cool story.

Tarek: This is a guy that I think he grew up in Chicago.

Tom: Yeah, I grew up in Chicago. Yeah. So, of course, he's not a multigenerational rancher. And so but again, you know, at the end of the day, I thought it was such a cool story. And then, you know, without giving away too much of the plot, you know, I mean, he came to me and we talked for hours and he says, yeah, I'd like you to come out here. But I really would like you to to film a harvest where the killing of a bison for food. And I said, well, I'll only do it if you can bring one. Your customers has never seen an animal killed for. I thought that was one of the neatest things in the film. Yeah, I was really, really powerful. And the gal that came in there, I just wow. You just have to watch it. But again, it's kind of getting back to like we're trying to reach that that urbanized society that doesn't understand where the food comes from. Well, boy, this is it's right there and it's in your face. But I think it's it's it's portrayed in a way that it's not it's not gory. It's not it's not it's not like, you know, heck, you know, screw you kind of thing. You got to watch this thing. It's really tasteful. It's it's and it's just like what we see a lot with the hunting side of things. There's a reverence, a certain reverence to this, to our food, that connectivity that we have with the land and, you know, being able to touch it and going back to that COVID thing. I mean, you know, being connected to the land, you know, a little bit of my history. I grew up in the Midwest, in Michigan. My dad was a newspaper union journalist for the Detroit Free Press for close to 25 years, and he wrote about the outdoors, hunting, fishing, camping, boating, all that kind of stuff. And in Michigan, you know, with the Great Lakes around there, you want to talk about a sportsman's paradise and, you know, tons of deer and waterfall and walleye and fishing and, you know, boating and all this stuff, camping, all that stuff. So I grew up there. I'm very blessed, very blessed childhood. And my dad exposed me to a lot of these good things. And of course, you know, being a union journalist, I didn't make any money. So Wild Game was was on the menu.

Tarek: So let's get into that a little bit, because the film talks quite a bit about hunting and the importance of hunting on some of these ranches, not only as a source of income, but but also as herd management and the importance of herd management.

Tom: Yeah. You know, in the film, what we really came to understand was that these ranchers are trying to make a go. We've talked about commodity prices. We've talked about all the pressures that are on them. These people are absolutely one thousand percent invested in their lifestyle. It's a passion. It's a lifestyle. They don't do it because they're getting rich. And you start talking about working at seven. I mean, they don't even know if they can ever take vacations. Some of my friends, you know, invite them. Hey, come over to the flat and stay here and Whitefish with us. We've got plenty of room. Yeah. You know, and I've got friends that took five years to take us up on it.

Tarek: Yeah.

Tom: You know, ranching friends, because it's just they're too big.

Tarek: Talk to the dairy farmers.

Tom: Yeah.

Tarek: And they never leave the property.

Tom: Yeah. You just don't leave. You know, but, you know, one of the components, you know, in our North American conservation model is obviously hunting. And that's why we have all these all this, why we have all this all this wonderful land. So at the same time, these ranchers, when they're being good stewards, their land like, hey, wait a minute here. You know, we get back to that that tension again. So one of the ranching families who dealt with was Sieben Livestock Company, the Hibbard family. And they have taken on and we'll probably talk more about this, this this concept of regenerative ranching, which is it's not novel. It's novel in the modern age. But if you go back a couple hundred years, it's pretty much normal. But what they're doing is they're they're mimicking what that wild prairie land landscape, how it evolved. So we go back 200 years, 300 years. There was bison, pretty good sized bison, you know, populations, thousands, millions, tens of millions, potentially. And all that land also was utilized by the Native Americans and the Americans burned. You know, they literally put things on fire because we've come to understand that if you burn the land, it regenerates itself. Well, the same thing with heavy grazing. And so what the the Hibbards really started pushing about 30 years ago is to literally let's try to put a bunch of cattle and mimic what bison do. So they put a thousand head on one hundred acres, use electric polywire around it for twenty four hours. And when you look at it, when the cattle are done, they eat everything up. There's no selective grazing. They eat everything that's there because that's all there is. And they break up the ground with their hooves. Of course, they defecate on it. And then after they leave, then they give. The key thing is, is they move them on to the next place.

Tarek: All right.

Tom: Next door. Here's the next hundred acres. And then at the end of that, they let it sit for two years. That's the key. So you all go to the gym and you lifted your weights and you're eating a good balanced diet. You break down that muscle fiber, give a little bit of rest. What happens to your body? Goes back stronger. And that's exactly what regenerative ranching is. And so it's mimicking what those natural ecosystems, natural processes have occurred over the millennia. And that's the thing that, you know, smart people do. And in that case of the of the Sieben Livestock Company, the wildlife populations. You get to a point where the grass now they graze year round. The only thing that they that they grow hay for is for is for their yearlings. And they feed those in the winter. But everything else is grazed all winter long. And we document that in the film. But one of the unintended consequences that comes from that, from being a good steward of that land, is that you have a much healthier ecosystem, a lot more water retention in the grass. So literally they showed me some state lands that the state of Montana had some wildlife lands that run up adjacent to their boundary. And right where the fence was, there had been a big fire that came along from the state lands. And when it hit the fence, that's where they put it out. And I said, how'd you guys put it out of the fence line? So we didn't. It went out naturally because the moisture content in there in their vegetation, which measure, which was a lot higher vegetation, too. Some of the stuff's three, four feet high. Grasses and so forth. So cool thing about the wildlife, though, is you get enough there for your livestock to grow. So, of course, that helps your bottom line on the livestock side of things. And at the same time, wildlife works off that coattail. So the populations of wildlife increases. So in the case with them, let's get back to that tension . . . Elk. A lot of elk in this country. Didn't used to be a lot, but there's a lot more now. And when you do that kind of land management, of course, you're creating a lot more food on the landscape. And, of course, they do have some irrigated hay grounds. And this is always kind of the ban of what these ranchers are all dealing with, especially ones that aren't doing regenerative ranching and don't have the hay inventory or grass inventory on the ground because they just don't because their practices are using, you know, great-great-grandfather's approach. But at the end of the day, you've got this wildlife that, say, come the end of July, early August, the mountains are starting to dry up. You know, all the winter runoff is gone and it's drying up. And these elk move down into these irrigated hay fields. Well, at that point, you're looking at your second cutting, which is the most valuable cutting of hay that a rancher can have. And in the case of the Hibbards, some years, they were having upwards of 1,000 to 2,000 head of elk every night.

Tarek: And the killer there is that in a place like Montana where you get a lot of snow, you have to store a lot of hay through the winter to feed your herd.

Tom: And if you're not doing regenerative ranching.

Tarek: If you're not doing regenerative ranching, right.

Tom: But even the case of their yearlings, you know, they figure conservatively that those elk were eating in between 80 and $150,000 worth of hay in about a four to six week time period. And that affects the bottom line. So there's a tension there. So what do you do?

Tarek: And you have a clip in the documentary where you have this apex predator, grizzly bear, coming on someone's land, taking down a calf. And that calf, you know, at maturity sells for $2,000. And, you know, they're losing, let's say, five calves a year. It's $10,000 of really important income for them. And there's nothing they can do about it.

Tom: Well, you're talking about the Endangered Species Act and grizzly bears, which, you know, believe me, I love our predators. I think all sportsmen, all hunters love to see wolves on the landscape, love to see the grizzly bear. We know, but we compete with them, right? And of course, our ancestors didn't use this modern conservation ethos in their decision-making. So they used strychnine poison, you know, and wolves are really super smart. The grizzly bears, they're a prairie animal. And when Lewis and Clark showed up on the landscape, they were out there where all the bison and the elk and the antelope and the deer play, right? It was out on the prairies. It was not in the mountains. It was colonization, you know, by Northern Europeans that pushed those animals into a place where they wouldn't be, you know, they were conditioned to live in those places because that was the only place they could be without being shot. And so now you're in a scenario where you've had over a hundred years and these bears have lived in, you know, Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park, all up and down the Continental Divide in what is the largest, you know, largest untracked wilderness in North 48, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. And of course there was a lot of wildlife in that too, at one time, not as much anymore. But then you're in a scenario where you now have these bears that—You know, everything in nature's programmed to overpopulate the carrying capacity of the land. If you talk to any good ecologist, scientist, they'll tell you that. I mean, it's species survival. Look at humans, 8.1 billion on the planet today, right? So these bear populations have increased. Of course, yeah, it takes them a while. But you know, it's been since I think the 70s, since they've been on the endangered species list. And now these populations have grown to a point where they're moving out, back into the prairie. They're following the rivers and the creek bottoms, and they're going along there. Of course, they're omnivores, so they don't have to kill anything to survive every day like a wolf does. They can eat the crops, and that's exactly what they're doing. They're going right on down the Missouri River, down the Yellowstone, and down places. And so now we're seeing bears in places where humans haven't seen them in over 100 years. And we also have a real issue there where our government, federal government, state government, have not done a good job of educating people how to live with bears. And of course, we've got a whole group of people that live in the city that are telling you how you should live with bears, even though they don't live with bears. And we've got politicians that are making policy about bears that have never seen a bear track.

Tarek: So what would you say to those people who don't think that bears should be hunted, that wolves should be hunted, that elk should be hunted? What is your response to them?

Tom: I think we're now at a point now with the impact that humans have on the landscape. Let's face it. You can go to the highest point of the Earth, Mount Everest, and you will go up there today and find all kinds of used oxygen bottles, trash, and over 120 dead bodies. You can go to the lowest point of the Earth, the Marianas Trench in the South Pacific. And I've always said since it's that Fukushima nuclear reactor tsunami thing, it goes downhill. Sorry, but that's what happens, right? That's the reality. Well, sure enough, National Geographic did a biological sample study of the creatures in the trench. And they've been exposed to more and worse pollutants than most polluted rivers in China today. I've been to China. It's not pretty. But that's our legacy. So what you have to understand is that with the pressures that we put as a species on the planet, and we don't need to get into, do you believe in human-caused global warming and all that stuff? But the reality is there is change going on, whether it's regional, local, or otherwise. It is going on. I've witnessed it. I'm seeing it. But at the end of the day, we've got to be good stewards. And part of that stewardship is ensuring that what habitat we have for wildlife, because let's face it, folks. If we don't have places, homes for wildlife to live in, if we don't have these forests, if we don't have these prairies, if we don't have these lakes and streams that are healthy and clean, we don't have the wildlife resource. And we don't sit around and debate whether somebody is going to pull the trigger on anything. So at the end of the day, we have to ensure that we have these resources, that we have these ecosystems where they are. And what I would tell people is, listen, we have to take the responsibility to be good stewards. We need to manage these things. And we've got to use good, peer-reviewed science, because we have to make a decision. If you're going to make an investment in your business, you're going to check the books, right? You're not going to just say, oh, I really like their logo. Here's $10 million. So at the end of the day, we have to do the same thing. And so that's the North American conservation model, what I call modern conservation, a little less of a mouthful. And the reality there is that that wildlife provides a value. And there's a certain offtake that scientifically, we know that we can utilize. And we've always used wildlife, like we said, to eat. And nothing ever goes to waste in nature. It's against the law. Every state and province in North America has a law of want and waste. You cannot go shoot something and leave it out, because they will cite you. You could go to jail. You would lose your ability to go hunting or fishing if you do that, if you get caught. And I believe you. Hunters are very, very, very much about protecting that resource. I mean, they were the first in the modern age. My dad always used to tell me, the very first conservationists were the modern hunters. And it's a modern construct, because if you go to places like Africa, there's not a lot of conservation going on unless you have people that have been educated to understand, hey, wait a minute, that particular animal's now worth $5,000, or $500, or $100,000. And I'll regress for one second. I have this little thing called the rat analogy. And people go, well, why do people hunt these iconic species, so the lion, the elephant, or the golly, the wild sheep, or something like that. And I said, well, it's really simple. We don't have a lot of them. But if you had a rat in your house, what would you do?

Tarek: Kill it.

Tom: Yeah, OK. What do you do if the rat's worth $50,000?

Tarek: You'd kill a lot of them.

Tom: You'd raise a whole bunch of them, right?

Tarek: Yeah.

Tom: So it's an oversimplification of the issue. But that's really what it is, is getting back to that benefit cosmet, so getting back to the real Yellowstone, getting back to our ranching friends. These guys, a lot of these families have embraced some form of management, for whatever reasons. It may be to keep the populations of these herbivores down on the predator side. We want to have whole ecosystem conservation. So we want to make sure our wildlife managers can manage these ecosystems, these environments. And it can't just be with X, Y, and Z. It's got to be the prey and predator species. And I think people, that's pretty common sense, right? Because if you don't, it's like telling a wildlife biologist, hey, listen, at the end of the day, you've got to take the checkbook and reconcile it every month. But you can't have data from Tuesdays and Thursdays. Well, how do they do that? They can't. And that's where that social side of thing comes into it, where these urban people that don't really understand the nuance and the realities on the ground. And a lot of the people in the film talk about that.

Tarek: Someone's going to be listening to this and saying, well, you're saying that hunters are conservationists at heart. But I've seen the pictures of the American bison just completely obliterated by hunters and the great Western migration.

Tom: You've got to be careful with that, because what you're alluding to is the old market hunting days and, of course, the war that went on between whites, colonization, expansion of Northern Europeans on this landscape, and the Native Americans that were here. Let's face it, it was a war. And so that was burn everything and try to win this thing. War's not pretty. We see this all over the world. It stops going to Ukraine and so forth. Humans are not very nice.

Tarek: So you're saying that's comparing apples to oranges?

Tom: Yeah, you're comparing apples to oranges. Commercialization is great when you don't have seasons, you don't have bag limits, you don't have all the legal ramifications that we have in this modern conservation system. And so it's really important people understand that these people out there, people talk, well, you've got all these people out there shooting this. And you see it on social media, these guys standing there holding an animal that's dead and stuff. And I try to tell the hunting community, it's like, hey, guys, you've got to understand, when you're sitting there with that dead animal, and I don't care what it is, whether it's something in Africa, a zoo animal, or something here in North America, or your white-tailed deer holding up a bunch of cottontail rabbits, to some people in our urban society, the disconnect is so huge that you don't look any different than an ISIS terrorist in Syria who just cut the head off a human being with a knife that's on YouTube today. Which, by the way, doesn't break their community standards. That's real, because there's such a disconnect. And so what we try to explain to people is like, hey, at the end of the day, few hunters actually pull the trigger. You talk to any hunter who's got a 10, 20, 30, lifetime experience being in the woods, and the amount of times that they actually pull the trigger on something or let an arrow fly is 1,000th of 1,000th of 1% of the time out there. Really, the hunting side of things, there's a responsibility that comes with it. There's that respect that you have towards it. In fact, my dad being an outdoor writer, writing for the Detroit Free Press, he had about a million and a half paid subscribers on Sundays. This is way before the internet, guys, way before e-blast and Facebook and all this other stuff. We're talking about 1980 when I was a young kid. And my dad did a survey about why you hunt in Michigan. And again, like I said, there's a lot of sportsmen and women there. And there was 10 reasons, and the thing was up against the gutter, the middle of the paper. So you had to cut it out. You had to put your name and address on the top. And then you had to rank 1 through 10, because he'd written on the paper there. And then you had to put it in your own envelope. You had to address it to my dad at the newspaper. You had to lick the stamp, because they didn't have self adhesive stamps back there. And then you had to walk down to your mailbox. The mail would say, oh, man, who in the world would have responded to that? You wouldn't think very many people. Well, my dad got over 40,000 responses. And my mom and I and my little brother, every day after school, once homework was done, we had to sit there and tally these things. And it was so fresh in my mind. It feels like it was yesterday. But I have to tell you, the top 10 reasons why people back then hunted, when you were killing an animal came in, like seven or eight. But the number second, the second most important reason to spend time in the outdoors, and the first reason, number one reason to spend time in the outdoors are friends and family, camaraderie. And when we talk about this connection and people wanting, after COVID, to want to, hey, I want to know where my food comes from, this locavore, this local sourcing of things, even Steven Ranella with his MeatEater show. I mean, he's touched on a nerve that I think is, I like to say that a campfire mesmerizes every human being in the world. And it has nothing. Absolutely nothing to do with roasting marshmallows. I mean, it's that simple. It's in our DNA. And only, like you said, we talked about the Industrial Revolution. I mean, when were we talking? Since the 1800s? Well, last time I checked, we're just over 2025 here. It's not that long ago in the whole scope of things.

Tarek: The social aspect of hunting is, I think, a really important point because, obviously, we live in a day where we're just loaded with distractions all the time.

Tom: Instant gratification.

Tarek: Instant gratification. We're text messaging each other. We're communicating a lot less. I was having a conversation with my children the other day about what life was like growing up in the '80s. You know, you'd get on your bike and you'd come home when the lights go out. And we've lost a lot of that. And, you know, what is interesting about hunting is that in a lot of times you're in places where there's no cell reception. And, you know, the phone goes away and you're having long conversations with your son or your daughter or your dad or whomever. And it really is a really important and memorable experience in the life of a lot of families. So, you know, being here in Northern Idaho, a lot of hunters up here, you're right. I mean, it's about spending time outdoors with people that you care about. And, yeah, I think that's just such an important point.

Tom: You know, and it's so important in our makeup. You know, for me growing up, the traditions that come being in the outdoors, whether you're hunting or fly fishing or hiking, you know, all of these things are interconnected and you continue to pull little pieces from all those different elements of those things you do throughout the year, you know. And so, you know, you have this people that love to bow hunt and that connectivity and they wanna go hunt in the mountains. So they train and they go to the gym and they work out and they get together with other people that are similar, like-minded. And then they believe in that resource and they wanna make sure that it's protected. Well, there's all your hunting groups. There's all your wildlife NGOs. I mean, in America today, we have, when it comes to the goodwill of sportsmen and the philanthropy of sportsmen, you know, I've been UK, I've been other parts of the world, and I'm like, hey, how come you guys don't raise millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars for your wildlife NGOs? Well, the Wild Sheep Foundation on a Saturday night will raise 12 plus million dollars and 99% of that goes back into wildlife and habitat conservation, the wise use of a natural resource. And so it's really important. And in other countries, they just don't have that tradition that we have here. And a lot of, you know, like, I've got a lot of friends in the UK now since we did the film there in Scotland. And they're like, well, how do you guys do this? And I'm like, well, first of all, our people aren't worried about generational wealth transfer, which they are in the UK, right? You know, it's like, okay, was my son gonna get the helicopter and get these estates and da-da-da-da-da? And I'm like, well, no, your son's never gonna go stalking and shooting again, or his grandson, or whatever your, you know, it's not gonna happen unless you guys start spending some money and start telling people about why you do it. Because that's one of the hardest things, I think, that people that are involved in hunting, to be able to explain why people do it, right? It's a very highly emotive thing. It's a connectivity, it's hard for people to describe, you know, and you hear this whole terminology that gets bantered around, I'm a meat hunter, I don't like the trophy hunters, or whatever. No, there's no such thing as trophy hunting. There's no such thing as meat hunting. You're a hunter. You are pursuing an animal with the intent to kill it. That's all hunting is. I don't care if you're hunting a fly, or a moose, or you're hunting for morel mushrooms. You can't use emotion to describe an act.

Tarek: Well, it's interesting, too, because today, there's a lot of sensitivity over just gun ownership. And, you know, the idea of owning a gun, for many people, it's, you know, whether it's a pistol, or an AR-15, or a rifle, it's, you know, they make no distinction. You know, I spent a lot of time in Europe, and, you know, trying to buy a gun in Europe, even just a hunting rifle, is extraordinarily difficult. The security teams that we deal with, just in the precious metals space, the vast majority of them don't even carry a weapon. So, you know, there's a lot there to overcome psychologically. You talk about, you know, this idea of killing an animal, and being associated with almost like killing a human, but just the idea of gun ownership, and responsible gun ownership. And I think that also ties into hunting, because a lot of people don't realize how difficult it actually is to get a hunting license. You know, you have to go through this 80-hour hunting course, and your children have to understand gun safety, and, you know, responsible hunting, et cetera, et cetera.

Tom: Yeah, and I think, you know, a lot of people don't understand, because we're not very good at telling that story. Yet, you know, there is a certain segment of hunters that are really good at telling the stories. You know, I liken it to real estate. 5% of the realtors sell 95% of the real estate, right? Why? Because they're good at selling real estate. Well, 5% of the hunters put out 95% of the stuff that probably does not ingratiate ourselves to the broader public, you know, stuff that just can look disrespectful towards wildlife. No, 99% of hunters absolutely, I mean, that animal, that deer, that, you know, whatever that animal is they're pursuing, it's the holy grail to them. It's that important to them, that they're willing to give up, you know, a lot of their time, their riches, you know, to help fund research and science and protection of the resources. And let's face it, all the hunting licenses, they buy all that money. Between that and Pittman-Robertson money, which I think last year, which is, you know, 1937, the Pittman-Robertson Act was enacted. It's a federal excise tax, as you know, 11.3% on all firearms, ammunition, and archery tackle. And that goes to, you know, every, you know, it gets divvied up among all 50 states fishing game agencies. And last year, I think it was $1.4 billion. That's all fine and dandy, but, you know, at the end of the day, we still, hunting is not a right. Hunting is a privilege. And let me explain something here. Hunting is not a right, because it's not in the U.S. Constitution. It is not in the Bill of Rights. It is not in the Second Amendment. But the Second Amendment propagates hunting, and I'm pretty sure our founding fathers, and I remind you, you're talking to a guy here that my family goes back to 1620s here, and quite a few of them fought in the Continental Army. So I've got a pretty long history, and I love the fact that our founding fathers took the chances they took to do what they've done, because we would not have these wonderful wildlife resources if they hadn't. But I don't think that anywhere in their mind did they ever think that somebody would ban somebody going hunting, because that's how we survive. That's how we do it. But now we have all these humans, and we've outsourced our killing, and because of that outsourcing and that disconnect that goes on, you've got people, like I said, that are making policy decisions and laws that have these terrible unintended consequences towards the resource. So, again, I think hunters have to understand, you know, I'll run into these guys, and they'll be like, yeah, you know, it's my right, you know, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. It might be your God-given right, but at the end of the day, it's not a legal right. And so we get to hunt because of the privilege that all the rest of the population allows us to do. So it's really important as hunters that you're respectful, that when you post things on social media, that you do it in a respectful way. And we even have gotten to the point, my wife is a very accomplished huntress, and, you know, hey, we talk about respect. You know, when I talk to these guys that are selling hunting trips, the Outfitters, and even these ranching families, and, you know, it's a service industry. Why are they successful? Because of repeat business and referrals. What do you have control over, you know, when you're on your operation? Well, you know, your facilities, the food, your staff to some extent. What do you don't have control over? Well, Mother Nature, the wildlife. You don't have any control over the weather. You don't have any control over the clients sometimes, you know, but at the end of the day, the people come back to you and do business with you because you make good drinks, you tell great jokes. It's back to that thing about surveying, my dad said. It's about camaraderie, being in the outdoors. Now, you did a heck of a good job conserving your wildlife resources so that there was plenty of wildlife to hunt, and the quality of the wildlife was good. So, yeah, you've done a good job there, and you should be commended for that. But at the end of the day, you just do a terrible job of explaining that to the broader public. And so, you know, getting back to "The Real Yellowstone" and why, you know, what I found is a lot of these ranching families, that was another piece of the economic pie, okay? So, the amount of money. You have this resource, you have this tension. Okay, well, if I go out and I do some hunting, there was a guy named Lance Johnson that talks about it in the film, you know? He's got all these elk out there in his hayfield and his crops, and he's like, well, if I go ahead and do some hunts here, then maybe I can cover the cost. And of course, you gotta remember, this is a public resource. This is in the public trust. It's the elk, the deer, all of it's in the public. We all own it. All Americans own it. But it's basically managed by the state or the federal government, mostly the states manage these things. But it's the private landowner, when he has the wildlife or she has the wildlife on his land, they're feeding it. So, you know, say, okay, well, is it commercialization? No, not really, because it's not this unlimited killing and no bag limits and things like that. So, it's not the 1800s that we saw with everything that happened there. But what it is is a business model that allows these people to generate enough revenue. You know, it could be thousands of dollars. It could be tens of thousands. It could be hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending where you're at. But it's usually in the tens of thousands. And that's the difference in some cases between being a black and the red, is rancher. You know, commodity prices where they're at or fertilizer prices have jacked up so much or fuel, whatever it is. You know, they're not making a whole lot. Now, yeah, they were doing pretty good on beef right now. You know, I wish I'd bought a bunch of cows back in the day. But that's not the norm.

Tarek: Yeah, you raised some interesting questions. And so, I wanna backtrack just a second. You had said that hunting is a privilege and not a right legally. Can the same be said about growing food? That it is a privilege and not a right? Because it would seem to me that, you know, if I were to take the other side of that position, that, you know, I have a right to survive. That's, you know, I don't need that instantiated in law. I have a right to survive. And so, you know, if, you know, put up against starvation or, you know, the ability to, you know, hunt or to grow food that, you know, I think you maybe alluded to this and saying it's a God-given right, but maybe not a legal right. But when it comes to growing food, you know, the reason why I bring up this question is, you know, in the urban areas, there's a lot of debate and tremendous fighting over, can I have chickens? You know, can I have a garden in my backyard? In certain, you know, communities, you're not allowed to have a garden. You're not allowed to have—

Tom: Even here in Montana, you know, nobody wants to listen to that rooster at five o'clock in the morning.

Tarek: That's exactly right. So it's an interesting question. And I think kind of, you know, worthy of further discussion. Another one that you raise, and I think this is a really important consideration when, you know, the documentary was over, I was sitting there, I was, you know, just thinking about animals and, you know, this idea that it's the public that owns all of the animals, right? The public owns the moose and the public owns the elk and the public own, you know, the grizzly bears to the extent that we can call that ownership, right? But you just raised the point that for a lot of these ranchers, many of whom have thousands of acres, it is their ranch that is supporting the life of all of these animals.

Tom: The resource, yeah.

Tarek: You know, and they are, you know, you can think about it that there's a monetary impact to them. Either it's the hay, it is, you know, the potential risk that they're incurring by having that animal on their land. And so, you know, the question maybe is, you know, at what point does an animal no longer belong to the public?

Tom: Yeah, and that's a great question. You know, I do think though, when you talk about, okay, do you have a right to grow food and all that? But then, you know, you kind of get into this little bit of a slippery slope deal here because when we go back to that urban interface, those people in the city, well, what happened in COVID when there wasn't anything on the grocery store? People rioted, right? Okay, so when you have riot, governments don't like that because you want stability. If you don't have stability, you have what happened during COVID, some of the things that happened with, you know, during the whole, you know, Floyd deal and all that stuff where you've got people that now have license to do whatever they think they want to do, then society breaks down. So getting back to growing food, well, we have private property rights. So you have the right to grow that food and utilize that land the way you want to, within reason, right? You know, we have these societal norms. And so, you know, I think at the end of the day, what I'd like to think is that everybody wants to manage their land and be a good steward of it. And there's going to be those offtakes. There's going to be more wildlife on it. You're going to have healthy environment. We're going to have vibrant forest and clean drinking water when we take care of these ecosystems, which, you know, when you can utilize a resource, like we said earlier, humans tend to do a better job of seeing some sort of benefit. And so, you know, getting back to, you know, do they have a right to grow food on it? Well, I mean, we have entire national forests that the federal government manages for berry and mushroom production, yet we don't have a single national forest that's managed for wildlife production. I think that's a problem. But we also have this problem here in America where you can't eat, or anybody's listeners can't eat wild game unless you go source it yourself or you know somebody who's been successful in the field, a hunter, because it's illegal since our market hunting days to sell wild game. Now, I'm not saying we need to open up the doors and start selling every deer and elk and everything else, but at the end of the day, where we know we have that surplus, we've got this huge disconnect, like we said with the urban society, where they can't eat wild game, where we historically have done it, right? So they get everything from the mass packing houses and the big grocery store chains. And it's not always good for us. You know, a lot of it's full of a lot of things that are bad for humans. And we're dealing with all these things from type two diabetes to heart disease and all these other ailments and inflammatory things. I mean, look what RFK Jr. is really pushing on. You know, I think a lot of the things that they're talking about are we need to talk about. And so it's real important because that's what these films are all about. It's like, hey, let's start this conversation. And that value of having that land, you've got a responsibility towards it. But again, a lot of those ranchers said, hey, you know, we own the land, but we really don't. We're just caretakers for the time that we're here in our human lifespan.

Tarek: That is what I felt was so masterful about the documentary was you took a truly journalistic approach to these questions and heard from both sides and really investigated the pros and cons of all of the challenges that people are facing.

Tom: All of these questions that you're asking, what happens if this group does this or this group does that? What are the knock-on effects of all of it?

Tarek: And enter American Prairie Reserve, which also features prominently in the documentary and is another source of great tension. Can you talk about that?

Tom: Yeah, you know, American Prairie is a really interesting thing. 24, 25 years ago, a lot of ranchers told me they were sitting at their house on a Sunday evening or whatever, and here comes a cloud of dust with black suburbans rolling down their driveway. And if you've seen the dust in eastern Montana, you see the dust, you're not really sure who's coming, right? Everybody has a little version to the federal government in urban Montana. But you've got these people showing up in three-piece suits, telling them that, you know, they jump out and tell them that we're here to save the prairie. And the first reaction from the ranchers, save it from who? Because they've been managing these lands for, in some cases, 100, 150 years. And utilizing them and managing the wildlife resources and managing the grass and the water and all these things they're doing. And they like to think they're doing it right. And so there was a lot of red flags went up. And of course, this was the concept of some individuals that were able to latch on to some very wealthy people from the eastern part of the United States, almost in limited amounts of money. And they had this plan and they sold them on it. And so the plan was to take an area south of, in south central, north central Montana, south of Malta, and along where the Missouri River runs through and Fort Peck Reservoir is, which is a reservoir that was built in the late 40s that has the Charlie Russell National Wildlife Refuge all around it. And there's a lot of land in there that's what they call BLM, Bureau of Land Management. And this is all land that coming out of the Great Depression was land that was turned back to the government because it wasn't fertile enough. In order to, in the homestead days to get your acreage, you had to prove to the federal government over a course of two years, you could make a go of the land. You could be able to produce enough out of that to survive on the land. And this land was not, you couldn't do it. It wasn't fertile enough. So you have about, I think about 2 million acres of land in that area that went back to the federal government in the 1920s and 30s. And so now the government's doing this. And of course, the land that they were able to keep was the lower lands where the water was. So where the creeks and small streams are running through and they could make a go of that because they could put a crop in there, or that's where they could bring their cows to drink water, their cattle. And so you ended up with a whole bunch of small ranches that were a couple thousand, four or 5,000 acres. And what the federal government with the Hatch Act did was it allowed these landowners to attach grazing allotments of this BLM land, which is, like I said, not fertile, very fertile, and utilize it for additional grazing so they can increase the number of their cow animal units. And so some of these properties and these deeds actually include these allotments. Now you don't own the federal land, but you get to use it for grazing for a certain time of the year and a certain amount of the land. In some cases, some of these places had tens of thousands of federal acres that were in their allotment for grazing. And so this particular plan to do this American Prairie to save the, they call it the American Serengeti. There was a lot of marketing there. They wanted to have 30,000 bison roaming the land and they wanted to have wolves and grizzly bears manage the bison populations, you know? Walt Disney says, let nature take care of it. Well, I've got news for you. I've got a lot of really good scientists that told me nature's never taken care of it, or mother nature, or God, or whatever. It never is and it never will! The reality is with our impact, like I've said, which is everywhere, we have to be the stewards of it. We have to take care of these resources and we have to understand how to do it right. So in the case of American Prairie, they had this big plan. Of course, everybody was a little freaked out about it and they started buying up ranches. And I think today they control about a half million acres. And don't quote me on this, but they have deeded land of, you know, between 100 and 200,000 acres, maybe a little over that right now. And their objective is to get to about 3.5 million? Well, their objective is to buy, there's about a million acres of deeded land in that area. And there's a couple million acres of public land. And their stated goal is to get all this in one contiguous unit. And if they are able to do that, then you're looking at an area of landmass that's larger than Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks combined. It's a big place. Now, it's geographically remote. Nobody really uses it except for hunters. You know, because I don't know if you've ever driven around Eastern Montana when it gets wet, but you get this gumbo and you aren't going anywhere. You know, even with chains on your truck and four by four, you know, it's just impossible to move around. But, you know, we don't really have a prairie ecosystem in a wilderness that's been set aside. So, you know, I mean, yeah, it's a really cool idea. And the idea behind it is to have all this natural, you know, ecosystem and, you know, take the 10% of the land that's in there that had been under the plow and let's get it back into, you know, prairie, grasses and shrubs and things like that. And they do talk about wanting to do, you know, some intensive grazing and burning and stuff. So it's an interesting story, but there's an awful lot of, okay, what if you do this? And of course, now the real issue there is that you have these rural communities. You know, we talked about since the Great Depression, people have been moving off the land. So they're getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Because, you know, 1930s, there was a hundred times more people out in this country than there is today. And you still, you see the old school houses, you see the old stores, you see the little towns you go through like Brockway, where if you blink, you miss it, but it's nothing but dilapidated buildings because there's nobody out there that can make a living. There's just nothing there. And so when you have a scenario where the people that are tight-knit communities, community is a big thing for these people. You know, because, you know, when I talked about that, that Montana ethos of, you know, hey, are you okay? And say good morning and hello when you see you on the sidewalk. It exists in these communities 10 times that.

Tarek: Yeah, and you're reliant upon each other.

Tom: Absolutely, you know, when you do a branding, you go around all spring long from ranch to ranch to ranch to ranch because everybody's helping everybody. When you do your, you know, you're going and bring your cattle in to go ahead and ship and, you know, and you're literally helping everybody out. In the wintertime, if something goes wrong, you're there to help you. That's in the summertime, if a well breaks down, you're trucking water from the ranch next door. Everybody's there helping everybody because that's the only way you can exist because that's difficult, that hard to live out in these landscapes. But again, these people, they love it, they're passionate. But so here's where American Prairie comes into it is that you've got these people that have basically unlimited money. They're not worried about commodity prices. They're worried about, you know, what big donor just gave them $10 million or $20 million or $50 million, and they can buy anything. Now they have to buy it at whatever the market prices are because they have to get it appraised and all that. But they, you know, I've got bankers that told me that they do pay more than, you know, but you guys got to understand, this land isn't the most fertile stuff in the world. And at least in Montana, if you buy land for more than $1,000 an acre, it's pretty tough to make a pencil out with cows. And we now have people that are buying ranches over 10,000 acres that are paying 10, 15, $25,000 an acre. So these ranches will never, ever be working ranches. Now, you know, we're gonna talk about the song we wrote about it. And one of the lyrics is, you know, this land that, you know, was paid for by blood, sweat, and grazing cows, you know, and, you know, the land hasn't been able to be paid by cattle since 1982.

Tarek: Right.

Tom: It's real. This is real. And so you've got these last vestiges, these people, and you've got these out-of-state interests that are coming in. And I know they definitely are well-meaning. You know, I don't think they're trying to mess up anything here. They just, they see an object and they think, oh, wow, it's a law of unintended consequences. Now, I will say American Prairie has done, they seem to be doing a little bit of, you know, there's an evolutionary process going on here. And they've got some leadership there that I'm, no, I'm hopefully optimistic that their ultimate goal will be something that will benefit these communities. But, you know, there's a lot of pushback. And so there was an organization formed, I say it's not even, it's just a loose-leaf group of people. It's not legally formed or anything, called Save the Cowboy. And so a bunch of these ranchers got together and said, hey, you know what? We just need to figure out how to devalue our land to these people. So they put together, I call them negative conservation easements. You know, conservation easement being basically, hey, if we agree not to develop our land or whatever, somebody will give us some money or give us some tax breaks. And so it's a thing, right? You know, that people do all over the United States, but especially in Montana. But in the case of these folks, it's like, hey, you know, we're gonna go ahead and make this enforceable by the county government. And we're gonna go ahead and put up what they call a negative bison easement, which means for the next 20 years, we agree not to have any bison on our property. And it doesn't matter if we sell the property or not, that bison, negative bison travels with, for a 20 year period with the land, no matter who owns it. So the idea is, of course, we're trying to, you know, they're trying to offset the American Prairie wanting to be interested. And of course, American Prairie started off with just wanting to be in that one area, so it's south of Malta, down to the river there, the Missouri River. But now they've bought ranches on some of the south of the river. Well, that's when people started getting really concerned, which now they've now gone beyond there. And when I ask them, well, why did you guys go to these other areas? Well, we're hitting the mouths of these rivers that flow into the Missouri. And we think that they're, you know, a very critical wildlife habitat, migration corridors and stuff. Yeah, okay, all right, I get it. But, you know, it certainly set up some more red flags. But yeah, so I think, you know, American Prairie is an interesting cat. There's some cool things that they want to do. I think the 30,000 bison and realizing that, no, you know, they're never gonna own all this land. There's always gonna be ranchers out there with their livestock, with their kids and so forth. And so they're probably not going to have all these wolves, packs of wolves and grizzly bears managing the land for them. But, you know, there's all kinds of stuff that comes, just a ton of stuff to unpack on that. But I do see that they have a new chairman about a year and a half ago. They brought in a guy named Bill Hilf. Bill has spent the last seven years as Paul Allen's CEO at Vulcan. Paul Allen, IE.

Tarek: Microsoft.

Tom: Yeah. So Bill's an interesting cat. And I've actually had some really long conversations. Turns out Bill's a hunter. And he wants to see more wildlife and landscape. There's a block management program we have in Montana, part of that financial side of thing of trying to recoup some of the cost of having wildlife on the land and giving access to hunters, you know, resident hunters and non-resident hunters. And so we have this block management program in Montana that, you know, depending on what year it is, it can be anywhere from five to eight million acres that they actually, the state, uses non-resident license hunting fees to go and pay ranchers to let people on their land to hunt. And so American Prairie, this last year, had over 80,000 acres in that program enrolled. And they're the largest participant in the program of any landowner in the state of Montana. They also open up their lands for access. Now a lot of private people, private landowners don't do that. And so there's a lot of different issues going on here. And of course, you could make a whole film about every one of these things. So we're, like you said, we're trying to give people an opportunity to kind of get the big picture of what's going on so that they understand. And then hopefully, if a subject matter really perks their interest, then they can kind of dive in into a little bit more. And then we, of course, we've got tons and tons of content in producing these films. And so people go to our social media feeds and website. There's stories behind the really old stone and podcasts. And I actually write a book for every one of these films.

Tarek: Oh, gosh.

Tom: Yeah, so basically, it's our board at Shepherd's Wildlife say, hey, you gotta write a book out here. Oh, geez, another thing for me to do. But we do a hard cover, soft cover, audio book, and Kindle, EPUB, all that stuff. But literally, I take all the interviews from these films. Because when you do, you interview 30, 40 people for a film and it might be multiple times and different things going on. I'll be lucky to use 1% of whatever they said. But a lot of these people have some really incredible things to say that I think is really important that people get to hear. So I almost call it like curating this important content. So whether it be a scientist or a rancher or some other person that has something really interesting to say about, you know, like the guy from North Bridger Bison. I mean, here's his story. And so getting back to that whole story about how we do things, it's investigative journalism, it's filmmaking. And so I get to follow through this path. And the cool thing about the books and the podcast, if you sit down and read the book, you figure out how I got to where I got to go at the end of this thing. It's like, okay, you know, the last chapter, I basically kind of, you know, encapsulate the whole thing and use a little bit of a bully pulpit to say, well, this is what's going on and it's going on and what are the outcomes gonna be? And if they're gonna be, then, you know, we need to start thinking about these things.

Tarek: Yeah, there's a quote in the film and it goes, this isn't about parks or postcards, it's about people. It's about survival. And I just think, you know, it really is an interesting time in our history as we talk about survival and it ties everything together from conservation to the food that we eat, et cetera. Recently, Trump has come out and explored the possibility of selling some federal lands. I was looking before the interview at some statistics that between the federal and state governments, 35% of Montana is owned by the government, 65% of Idaho is owned by the government, and 54% of Wyoming. So the three states that kind of make up that Yellowstone Corridor. Where do you land on the issue? - And we love our state parks.

Tom: But just remember, the government doesn't own anything, we do, that's the nice, wonderful thing about it. So yeah, I have lots of friends on both sides of the aisle. I'll have friends that are on the left-hand side of the aisle that will talk about the fact for years and years now about the fact that the Republicans wanna sell or conservatives wanna sell all this land. You gotta put things in perspective. I mean, most politicians wanna get reelected, right? So you show me some focus group research that says, or some polling that says that the majority of Montanans, the majority of people in Idaho or Wyoming, or the majority of Americans anywhere wanna sell their public land, and you will find that it does not work. There is no polling. So when you sit there, it's just scare tactics when I hear it. Now, of course, Senator Mike Lee being in Utah. Now, the Utah people are a little different, right? So they don't like the federal government. I mean, when you start thinking about what Representative, or now it was, Secretary Ryan Zinke, he was my representative in Western Montana in the Congress, when he was the Secretary of Interior, Trump asked him to go and look at all these national monuments. And of course, the national monuments, you can get into the ins and outs of why they exist or whatever. As I understand it, it was supposed to be, oh, hey, here's somebody's important house. Let's make it a monument, not to take a million acres and in a stroke of a pen. And again, we get back into the politics of things here. You know, decree by administration is not the way to work. That's not how our country was set up. We need to sit down and have conversations, have dialogue. We need to let the Congress finally do, Congress needs to do their job. But in the case of public lands, those are our lands. And I think the Republicans got a big eye opener when they said, oh, hey, we're gonna sell this in order to cut down the debt by 1.2% or whatever it was. And of course, the Mike Lee and the rest of the folks that are in his contingent down there in Utah, they don't like the federal government. So yeah, so they've made that, what I've always told my leftist center friends, oh, this is, nobody's ever gonna go for this. This doesn't poll, guys, it's just not gonna work. But they basically gave it some legs to stand on, you know, the folks in Utah, which is unfortunate that that's the case. But you know, I mean, we have, that's what makes democracy so interesting.

Tarek: This circles back to the tension between the urban life and the urban voter and what's happening in the rural communities. Yeah, I think you alluded to this earlier in the pod, talking about, you know, the 50 plus one. Can you talk about that a little bit? And just kind of the political challenges of everything we're talking about.

Tom: The politics of what we're seeing today. When we're talking about conservation, talk about modern conservation with hunting being its main tenant or tool, we are seeing the politicization of that every political cycle. We are seeing politicians say, vote for me, and I will ban this, ban hunting here, we'll ban hunting of that. We'll go ahead and create laws that ban the importation of hunting trophies. We're now seeing things like IP3 in Oregon, which has not gotten on the ballot, but it's a ballot initiative. And I don't know what states, everyone, we have a Montana, a lot of states have it. It's an apparatus where if you get enough signatures from around the state in each one of the voting precincts that you can put it on the ballot in November. I mean, we're talking Athens here, right? Athens, Greece, mob rules, 50% plus one. It doesn't, if it gets enacted, it becomes law automatically. It doesn't go to the legislature, it doesn't go to the Congress, it doesn't go, it just, it becomes law. Now, there's a lot of unintended consequences that can come from that, but in the case of IP3 in Oregon, it would make it an automatic felony to harm any animal while they're domestic. Now, you and I both know that on the domestic side for food, the poultry, the cattle industry, the pork industry, they've got money, they've got, they're organized, they've got attorneys, they can fight something like this. And of course, these folks that are out there asking for these signatures on the street corners in front of supermarkets in Portland, Oregon are going up to these people, going, do you believe in bestiality? No, sign here. Sure, bestiality harms an animal, right? That's how crazy these people are to get this through there. Now, of course, the hunting community, conservation and hunting community, I've been part of efforts to try to bring them together to have just a hub for communication. So the left hand can, the right hand can talk to people that are really good at lobbying, can talk and help out other people that aren't good at it, or just so you can have this information and dialogue amongst these different disparate parts. Because the problem we ran into though was that the hunting community and the conservation hunting community, they don't play very well together. And so we ended up running against a brick wall or maybe a stone wall in trying to do this, which was unfortunate, but it's kind of ingrained in our DNA as human beings. I call it the fishing hole syndrome. I'm not gonna take you to my fishing hole because you might come back and fish it. Well, unfortunately, that's what we're dealing with here. So what happens if something like IP3 ends up on the ballot? Well, hunters are gonna sit around there and talk about how great they are at raising all this money, all the billions of dollars and all the millions of acres that we've conserved and all the millions of animals we've brought back from the brink of extinction. But that doesn't mean anything at all. And I mean, absolutely nothing at all to the 39-year-old suburban housewife who votes. She's all about the warm and fuzzy. She's about emotions. And that's exactly what the anti-use, that's their playbook. They talk about the evil trophy hunters. I mean, we know in America today that nine out of 10 people are okay, that aren't strongly for or against hunting, that nine out of 10 people are okay with hunting as long as it's for consumption. It's simple, right? We need food, right? It's okay, we've always done it. But as soon as you use the word trophy or safari as an adjective to hunting, that same group of people, where nine out of 10 are okay with it, go into the 97% negative. That's just a fact. Why? Because of that disconnect we talked about. So part of why we make these films and what we really see in this world with 8.1 billion humans, the fact that humans have to see a value to having that resource to be a good steward of land, a good steward of the wildlife resource, getting back to that modern conservation model, is that we can't keep talking about the past laurels of a Teddy Roosevelt conservation. Sorry, folks, it's dead. It doesn't mean anything to the broader public. And again, I said earlier, only 4% of us buy a hunting license. Even if it's 10% of the population, when these things get politicized, hunters who go hunting and conservationists that are tied to that sustainable use model, we're 40% plus one vote behind. Okay, so we all know what the definition of insanity is, right? Keep doing the same thing over and over again. Well, that pretty well sums up the hunting conservation community of the last 40, 50 years that I've been watching it. So what do we do? Okay, well, anytime that you wanna win an argument, what do you do in a debate? You take your foundational argument of your opponent and you flip it upside down. But we've also come to understand the only reason why we have these things, and this isn't a gimmick. It's just, honest to God, truth. The truth is, without that value, that value can also be, you can literally look at that value and it can become a whole bunch of different things for different people. So in Africa, when I did "Killing the Shepherd," the value of that natural resource with people coming and utilizing it in a sustainable way allows for people to have a job, be able to buy food. Now, these are subsistence farmers. Crops fail, they don't have crop insurance. And they don't have governments that can help them out. There is no UN, there's no NGOs, there's no UNICEF there in these remote parts of Africa. Remember, Africa's a huge continent. You can take all of North and South America in it, most of Europe and India, and stick it inside the place. So these people are geographically remote, they're trying to make a go, and they have big families just like our families had that were farming subsistence here in this continent back in the day. So you got eight or nine miles to feed, the crops fail, what do you do? Got wildlife, right? Utilize the wildlife. Well, we figured out this continent's a finite resource. Eventually, it's gone. Now, you still got eight or nine miles to feed, what do you do? If you have a daughter who's 12 or 13, she's reached puberty, it's perfectly acceptable to sell her as a second or third wife for 30 bags of corn. So when you want to devalue the natural resources of these rural Africans by having a hunting trophy import ban. I mean, I sat and talked with in Westminster or the House of Lords. I said, that's fine, great. I want to come back with a brand from Montana that says you guys are a bunch of pedophile enablers, childbirth creators. The law of unintended consequences. Now, what is the positive outcome of this? When you create that value, now not only can these people see a good paying job to be able to buy food, so they're not reliant on those subsistence crops or that wildlife resource, but now they can get an education because now there's money in the system to be able to pay for schools. Now they can have access to healthcare. Well, guess what? We run entire presidential elections on those three platforms. A good paying job, access to healthcare, and opportunity to get an education. It's our basic human right, right? That's how we look at it. And with the fact that we have less and less resources and we've got to be better at taking care of them, then we have to make sure that that value, that literally that value is about our human rights, whether it be a rancher in Montana, that the money they get from utilizing the wildlife, whether they have block management or they become outfitters or they lease their land or charge people a trespass fee, that money that comes in may be the difference between the black and the red. It may allow them to take mama on a vacation so they don't get divorced after five, six generations on the land. In Africa, we talked about that. In Europe, these guys that are working on these sporting estates, the hunting there that they do there, that pays for them to have a home. They get a home as part of their job. It allows their kids to go to school. And without that resource, the landowner's not gonna continue to subsidize, which they have to do, because the government doesn't give them any money to subsidize conservation. So again, if the resource has a value and we use it right, you can directly look at that resource and say, you know what? At the end of the day, it's about human rights, not animal rights. And if we don't have people taking care of it, it's all gonna go the way of the dodo bird. And we got thousands of years of history with all kinds of examples of us mucking things up.

Tarek: So let's get into the 501c3, your nonprofit that is responsible for funding. This is now the third film in a trilogy of films. Can you talk about that trilogy and sort of the origins of this nonprofit?

Tom: Yeah, you know, obviously we saw that there was this huge disconnect. I mean, I used to, for about seven years, I had an outdoor television show called Eye of the Hunter on NBC Sports. And it was all about the adventure and the experience of being with friends and in the outdoors, the adventure of the hunt. And, you know, we're the hunter, you know, this modern conservation, we're really what the responsibilities were. So there's always a segment about the wildlife species and how hunting comes into that modern conservation. And 2015, a lion in Zimbabwe in Wenge National Park, actually not in the park, excuse me, outside of the park was shot, called Cecil the Lion. And it created this huge uproar worldwide, both on social media and on mainstream media. And, you know, it's kind of the first time in the modern technological age where all kinds of people could get all this information. Of course, a lot of it was weaponized. And I had this show that we had an agreement to be on NBC Sports, which, you know, NBC Sports at the time, I mean, it was about 105 million TV households had it available every night based on my Nielsen overnights. I ended up on Monday nights against Monday Night Football at 9 p.m. I had probably the largest audience on NBC Sports. And by virtue of the fact it was by far the largest audience of any field sports show in the world. We had an agreement to be on through 2018. We do a contract every year. And my wife and I were in Switzerland working on an incredible story about the Alpine Ibex that had been brought back from the brink of extinction because of hunting. And they've got Ibex everywhere in the Alps now. And I get a phone call from New York, you know, from NBC. They say, hey, we love you, but we're not bringing you back next year. I'm like, well, what do you mean? Well, we're not bringing back any field sports. It has nothing to do with you. We're done. Because of that. Now, they didn't say that, but that's what was, you know, reading the tea leaves. And it was real disappointing. I mean, we had an entire season in the can. And of course, we built up a really good model and it was very successful. It was a great business. It was not a hobby. You know, I don't film my wife. My wife didn't film me. I mean, this is professional filmmaking. It was all done first person, present tense. And it was an incredible story. It's like watching a little mini movies every Monday night. And we had to figure out what the heck we were gonna do because it was really important. And of course, like I said, I've got a long career of being very successful in the film. That wasn't the only business that we do. Of course, you know, very successful in doing film productions and, you know, for Fortune 500 corporations and major. I haven't done a Super Bowl commercial, but I've done some a lot of really cool commercials in my life and been very blessed to have some great opportunities. So it wasn't, my life wasn't contingent on the show, but it didn't make a lot of sense to me. And as I mentioned, you know, I've had this long history of being in the outdoors, my father being an outdoor communicator, myself also. I couldn't figure it out. So I sat down and started doing some research and I researched and researched, just trying to figure out why this perception around modern conservation was so negative. And I ended up doing a presentation in August of 2016 in front of about 80 or 90 outdoor hunting conservation organizations. So, you know, your sheep, your elk, your safari people, and all these folks out there, your hunters and guides and outfitters. And, you know, it was a real eye-opener for these people because at the end of the day, you know, like I said earlier, you know, when you're holding that dead animal in your hands, that the proverbial grip and grin on a little bit of blood coming off the animal and you're sitting there with a smile, I mean, you don't look like anything other than a terrorist to this broader public. And then, you know, I looked at, you know, we know the largest search engine in the world is Google, right? Well, the largest search engine for millennials, which is now the largest age group we have in the United States now, is YouTube. So I went down and started searching through a search bar. I typed in animal kill shots. And page after page after page of videos of animals being killed by humans. And I have to be real honest with you, it brought me to tears. I mean, it was just, it was unbelievable. And it's not why I hunt, it's not how I was taught to hunt, but that's what the public sees. And we talked about that thing about real estate agents. Well, 5% of the hunters out there put out 95% of, I almost say BS. It's just, you know, we have this model of, hey, you know, everybody wants to get paid to be, and my dad used to joke about this. Everybody thinks that, you know, I have this great career, I get paid to go hunting and fishing all the time as an outdoor writer. Back when you had real outdoor writers in your major newspapers, which we don't have anymore in real journalism. And, you know, at the end of the day, my dad always used to say, you know, once you add up all the time I did researching and interviews and writing, he said, I'd be lucky to spend 10% of my time actually in the field, let alone hunting and fishing. And when we start to, you know, there's this now that we have technological advances, you know, you can buy a video camera, you can buy a $200 or $300 piece of software, put it on your laptop, and you can go ahead and start producing a TV show. And, you know, and again, the enthusiasm and the people that do enthusiast stuff, I'm not trying to dig on them or anything like that, but what a part of this research I did was like, you know, I looked at how many outdoor television hunting centric shows there. And at that time, this was 2016, between the Outdoor Channel, Sportsman's Channel, and Pursuit Channel, there were 286 hunting centric show. All it was was about hunting. Now, you, if you work in Hollywood, if you work in the real world of film and television production, first of all, you don't fund your own productions. Somebody else does, typically a studio for films or a channel, you know, Discovery Channel. Like I said, I've done Shark Week before, been involved in a lot of big productions, a lot of Hollywood stuff. If you were to look at the genre of all these different television shows that we produce, whether it be a Tom Selleck, Blue Bloods, or Cops and Robbers, or even these haunting, you know, these ghost shows, show me 286 ghost shows that are produced in America today. You can't, there isn't. There might be a half a dozen because the money that comes to produce those and produce them well comes from one pool of money. People who wanna make money because it's a business, right? You don't invest in a movie if you're not gonna get a return. Yeah, it's a big risk, but studios, there's a reason why every film has the same damn formula, right? You gotta have the hero, the heroine, you gotta have the evil person who takes the heroine away twice and then the hero gets her back. I mean, that's just a recipe because it sells because we want to, you know, they wanna make money, you know, and that's what Hollywood does. That's what these television shows are. So when you look at 286 television shows where I guarantee you 95% of those television shows, the producers of them are not making a living wage. The reason why they're doing it is because they had an opportunity because maybe somebody left them some money or maybe they have a business that they wanna go and promote. Now, I'm not saying that's not a good thing, but when you break up that pie into so many different little itty-bitty microscopic points, you could lose something. In this case, you lose production value, you don't tell the story right, and then you have a tendency when it's all about, say, record books, hey, you know, how many times I did this search on there on outdoor television hosts and poaching and game violations? Go search it sometimes, folks. You will see the names of people that you know if you're a hunter, if you watch outdoor television. There is a long list of people out there that are very well known that are known to have admitted and been convicted of crimes against wildlife. Now, I got news for you. I mean, if you were out there working with the NRA and you had gun violations, I don't think the NRA would be giving you money.

Tarek: So this is what prompted you to start?

Tom: Well, it was part of this, because this is part of this whole thing. I'm looking at this thing going, hey, wait a minute here. We have this huge disconnect, and you've got people out there claiming to be these great people that are caring about the resource and doing hunting. I have no doubt that that's what they're doing, but to get there, you've got this mentality now where the barrier of entry's got to be so low and that you've got people out there that really have no business doing this stuff, but then the motivation is, hey, how do I get more sponsors on? Of course, it's a pay-to-play deal. So the Outdoor Channel started out with basically a million dollars. You get 10 guys, a $100,000 piece, and you're buying bandwidth on the satellite. That's how it started. So, okay, we're gonna do this. We're gonna call it the Outdoor Channel. I mean, you and I could go ahead and put the money together and we could do the same thing. Okay, we're gonna call it the, you know, Bill and Tom's Excellent Adventures or whatever, you know? But you can do that. And of course, that motivation, everybody wants to get paid to go hunting. There's this dream, right? Nothing wrong with that, but we have to be careful, folks, because at the end of the day, what we put out there, again, we talked about hunting is a privilege. It's not a right. And so when you put a bunch of really bad stuff out there, you know, all of a sudden, you know, people don't understand and you have this disconnect and the majority of the people, you know, don't understand what you're doing and you continually put that stuff out there, you know, you're gonna get in trouble. And that's where we are today. So we have this huge issue. And so, okay, why do we have this? You know, we talked about earlier about why we have this disconnect, you know, where people gets their food. And interesting enough, that connection to food still exists there, even though you can't go get it. Arby's, which is the fast food burger joints in America. Every November, they have a wild game burger. It's usually, you know, because we can't get any wild game from here. It comes from a farm. You know, it might be duck or it might be venison from New Zealand where they farm red deer and sell that, you know, lots of it. It sells out in 24 to 48 hours. You know, people want to have that. They want to have that. You go to Africa and bushmeat is a billion dollar black market niche. Now, bushmeat is any kind of game. It could be primate, it could be an elephant, it could be kudu, whatever, that these people dry and they sell it, you know, back in the cities. Matter of fact, during COVID, one of my daughters was big into soccer and we had the UK soccer club come and they brought these coaches to kind of teach our kids in Kalispell how to play soccer. And of course, during COVID, you know, these guys would end up staying with families. And of course, at COVID, nobody wanted to have these guys there all worried they're going to die or whatever. And so my wife jumped into, yeah, all three of you guys can stay at our house. Well, one of the kids was from Nigeria. You know, this kid, a black kid from Nigeria, one of the coaches. And we were working on the film, "Killing the Shepherd." And so I had received some photos on WhatsApp from the operators there of a bus they had on some poachers and with pictures of the packaged dried meat and all that. And I just showed it to this kid. And I said, what do you think of this? This is a kid who lives in the city of Nigeria and nowhere near any of these wildlife areas or anything like that. And he goes, oh man, that's bush meat. That's good stuff. You know, you go to Scotland where we did Killing the, or "The Last Keeper," you know, they utilize their wildlife there. There's a place called Highland Game that they process 60,000 red deer a year. And you can go to downtown Costco in London and buy venison meatballs, venison steaks, and venison burger. And it all comes from wild venison in Scotland. Scandinavian countries, you, the national dish is reindeer, caribou. You can buy it in the grocery store. If you go out and hunt a moose, you can put that into the food chain too and buy moose in the grocery store. So it's really interesting how we have all these issues. And so, but we have this disconnect and I'm sitting there going, well, wait a minute. All this makes sense, but how do we get all this to come back together? Okay, well, again, we can't, we know through focus group research that you can't have the safari hunter guy or the NRA guy out there telling these people what's going on. I mean, it's dead on arrival. I mean, and even our wonderful wildlife NGOs, these groups that do an incredible job, laser focused on whatever species it is that they're trying to conserve and improve. And of course, that's the species they're gonna hunt and kill, right? They look like a bunch of Elmer Fudd's raising more rascally rabbits for, to go out and shoot and kill. That's the perception. And that's what the research showed me. And we did some very serious research across America about the perceptions around conservation, modern conservation, hunting, and just who are the people they wanna hear from? What are the messages they wanna hear? Really, really cool stuff. And so, what it allowed me to do is say, okay, wait a minute, we have a problem. Here's a solution. Here's how we can get to it. We made the first film in Zambia, "Killing the Shepherd." And all of a sudden, we're winning all these awards for human rights. I gotta be honest with you. If you would've asked me six months before the film came out if I thought I was a human rights advocate, I would've laughed at you. But you know what? I'm not the smartest guy by any means, but I realized, hey, wait, this works. This means something. And as I delve more and more into it, again, like I said earlier before the break, without that value that wildlife provides, there's a lot of people out in this world that aren't going to realize their most basic human rights. And how can we sit here in our country with all the great richness that we have, the grocery stores, the department stores, and all the things that we can go get done. You wake up, like I said, wake up in the morning and go worry about what you're gonna order at the coffee shop. Yet you've got these people eeking out a living. And we seem to think we can tell them how they need to manage their own sovereign resources. I mean, in Asian countries, we're now seeing community conservancies where you have places in Tajikistan and Mongolia and Pakistan where they might have a tag to hunt one animal a year, like a markhor, which is like a goat species. And in that conservancy, the people all protect it and take care of it. And some hunter will come in and write a check, in some cases, in excess of $200,000 just for the tag. And that money filters in there. And there's nothing else. And there's another aspect to this too. These are areas that people are really impoverished. And that money that comes in allows them all these, like you said, these human rights. But if they don't get that money, what's on the flip side? Well, what we're dealing with here throughout the world? Terrorism. Where does terrorism breed itself? Where do they go recruit people? With impoverished people. And very geographically. Look what Africa's going on.

Tarek: So you see it as your mission to bring a lot of these stories to life.

Tom: 100%.

Tarek: Bring them to the community.

Tom: And that's really what it comes down to, is there are great stories. I've got a dozen films on paper of places we want to go, people want to. And this is beyond me. We're trying to create a movement here. This isn't me trying to do whatever I think we need to do. I'm here to say to everyone, be a part of this. Be a part of this movement. Talk to people about the fact that we have a responsibility to be good stewards of the land, and that the people out there, I want to give them a voice, because they don't have a voice, these rural folks. And even if they do in today, because you run around Africa, and you just guys pop up, and we're on a safari vehicle, we just got back from doing some photo safaris in Botswana and the Okavango Delta. We did some hunting in Zambia where we shot "Killing the Shepherd." And my kids got to see Africa the first time, and the Game Scouts and the trackers and stuff are in the back of the truck, and they're popping out their phones, and oh yeah, yeah, can I friend you on Facebook? We're in the middle of the bush, and there's cell phone service, and they're sitting there doing this. But my point is, these people need to have a voice, and that they can have that voice. It can't be overshadowed by people who don't understand what the law of unintended consequences are for these people. And it's the same story all over the world. My goal is to, I've got Hollywood filmmakers I want to work with. As a matter of fact, I've been having conversations with one of the probably biggest Hollywood actors, and his producer, not with him, with the actor, but with his producer and his wife, that are very interested in what we're doing, and want to help. Because at the end of the day, this is so simple. This is about making sure that we leave this planet better than we found it.

Tarek: So do you already have your next project in mind?

Tom: Oh, yes, yeah. Yeah, so the next project is, we're just getting our pitch deck together. So basically, we have a business model for this whole thing. So this isn't just, hey, pie in the sky, we're asking for donations. Yeah, donations help us get things rolling, and keep things going, and we need all the help we can get.

Tarek: How much does it cost to make one of these films?

Tom: Well, so actually, since we've been doing this for a long time, most of the films that you'll see come out on National Geographic and so forth, those are in the millions of dollars. We're doing our stuff on the bottom end of the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Less than half a million dollars.

Tarek: It doesn't feel that way when you watch the film.

Tom: No, because I've got some great people that work with us that have done big, multimillion-dollar productions.

Tarek: The cinematography is unbelievable in "The Real Yellowstone," it's just so beautiful.

Tom: It's taken me 30-some years to figure out how to do this, and I've been carrying a camera since I was 19, and when I first started editing, we actually started editing, and again, this is, I was at old school, actually cutting film negative on a Steenbeck, a flatbed editor, along with Magstripe, which is the audio, and taping it together and then running it back there. I started that when I was real young, working for a production company right out of college, but I'm still trying to figure out with these newfangled cameras how to get my film into these digital cameras. There's no spot to stick in them. Maybe you can help me with that one of these days. But yeah, it's really important that people understand these stories, and these stories are incredible stories, and we need to have more people out there helping us make these films. They're not super expensive to produce, but there is this business model. Of course, we're trying to, we've moved in the world of Shopify. We're trying to get everything set up. We're building a store. We're putting products in the store. Like I said, we make films. We make the books. We write the books, and all the different iterations of those things. One of the other cool things, we always try to find something interesting in each place that we do a film. So in Africa, where we did "Killing the Shepherd," I saw a pile of wire snares that the Game Scouts had brought out. Wire snare is an indiscriminate, just evil, evil thing, and people, these poachers will put these out along waterways, because everything has to come to drink, and they'll put these things out there, and they're just indiscriminate killers. So when an antelope species comes into it, say if it's a male antelope, they'll have horns, and it'll come in there. When that wire starts to go over its head, it usually will hit the horns, and it'll make a sound that's very unnatural, and almost always, they'll back up out of it. But in the case of the females and the young, they don't have the horns, or they don't have much of horns at that time, and when they feel that tension of that wire around their neck, that instinct to fly, kills them every time. So you lose entire generations of certain species of wildlife. And so I saw all these snares sitting there, and I'm like, what do you guys do with these things? Oh, you know, hey, we usually throw them in concrete foundations, or build them a dam, or whatever they're doing. And I said, yeah, I kind of have an idea here. I mean, let's keep some of the better ones out here, and so I went back home, and was working with my older daughter, who's somewhat artistic and whatever, and so we came up with this bracelet, snare bracelet. And so now we have eight women in Zambia, rural Africa, that are repurposing these wire snares into bracelets, and every bracelet's an animal saved in the wild. And so that was a cool thing we've got going, which we sell through our website. We are also working with Wolfburn Distillery in Tongue, Scotland. We're coming up with our own branded 12-year-old single malt scotch whiskey, called "The Last Keeper," that's branded with the film and all that. And so a portion of the profits will go to Shepherds of Wildlife. We've decided, besides the money we're gonna receive, and it's a limited edition, 500 bottles, and it'll be out probably this fall, we've decided that we're going to donate a portion of that money to the United Kingdom's Gamekeepers Welfare Trust. In Scotland, in the countryside, almost two people every week take their lives through suicide because they're in these remote areas, they're being hammered on social media in their communities. And at one time, the gamekeeper was one of the most important people in these communities. They had the ear of the landowners. They were the people that you could go to to get things accomplished. You could deal with issues, problems, whatever, but now they're being ostracized in their own communities by these urban people. And it's a sad, sad story. So what are we gonna do here in Montana with "The Real Yellowstone"? We haven't figured out, but again, that economic model is to produce a film, to produce a book, we do a sneak peek, which we'll have the link, I'm sure, somewhere you can go and watch. And basically, it's telling you a little bit about the film, giving you a sneak peek to the film. And we're asking for support because if we can get support, we're a 501c3 nonprofit, we can use those monies to help buy Facebook advertising. You know, $50,000, I can reach five million people.

Tarek: So where do people learn more?

Tom: Well, shepherdsofwildlife.org. I mean, that's the real place to go. And from there, you can head into our store. You can be able to watch the films from there. You can buy, we're getting ready to do a multi-city tour around the United States, especially the West. We've got about 12, 13 theaters booked starting this tomorrow night.

Tarek: Yeah, tomorrow night is the premiere of "The Real Yellowstone".

Tom: Yeah, yeah, well, then we go to Glasgow, Montana, Eastern Montana on Saturday. Friday, we're in Havre, Montana, or no, excuse me, on Sunday, we're in Havre, Montana. And then we're in, excuse me, Lewistown on Sunday, Havre on Monday, and Cutbank on Tuesday. And then the next week we go to, we'll be in Salmon, Idaho, we'll be in Billings, you know, we'll be in Missoula, we'll be all over the place, we'll be in Helena.

Tarek: What does success look like for the film? Is it people going on the website?

Tom: Yeah, so part of that business model is not only, so we sell tickets to people that go there. So we're hoping to generate some revenue there. And then really for us, our big thing is what we call a digital cinema event. That's where we really need people to come and watch it. So for $19.99, you can buy a ticket. It'll be good for you, you'll go on our website. That's gonna happen around the 15th of August. And so basically, you'll be able to watch that, you'll be able to watch the 90-minute film in its entirety. And we've got a couple upsells on there. We'll have a panel discussion that we're gonna record tomorrow night. We've got some great panelists that are gonna talk about the issues, their first impressions of the film. We don't let the panelists watch the film in advance. We want them to see it first time up on the big screen and then tell us their first impressions. And it's really powerful stuff. And then of course, we've got other opportunities. People can help us out with things. But we only run that for 30 days. So it's at that time period that you have it. We also produce a 55-minute version. We boil it down to 55 for PBS. And we're working with Wyoming PBS as our presenting station. So all three of these films are about ready to go into that PBS ecosystem, onto a catalog and distributed and be available all 300 and some odd stations in the PBS ecosystem. And then we also do a 30-minute version and that's for educational purposes. So that's the corporate boardroom, classroom settings and of course, political screenings. And so we just screened a film, actually the full film with the director of the Department of Ag in Montana on Tuesday night along with 15 other state directors from around the country that were here in Montana for a program. And then we'll be screening this with state legislators all around the United States. We'll be at the U.S. Capitol and then we're gonna be at the end of the year at the CITES Convention or Conference of Parties 20 in Uzbekistan. So CITES is the International Trade of Flora and Fauna, 180 some countries abide by that treaty including the United States. And we're hoping to get both the Scottish film and the Montana film into the program so that we can let people understand. Again, part of the CITES Treaty is about ensuring that rural people see a benefit for their natural resources but it's about how they regulate it. And unfortunately, it's been hijacked by the anti-use people, the anti-hunting folks and those NGOs come in and actually literally in some cases pay for representatives from certain countries to show up so you can imagine who they vote for.

Tarek: You know, it strikes me that, you know, the word conservation and the word conversation are very similar, two letters switched. And you can't really walk away from this film without wanting to have more conversation.

Tom: And that to me is, you know, just the telltale sign of great filmmaking. And I was having this conversation just the other day with someone that, you know, I hate the immediately forgettable sugar high movies that have become the norm.

Tarek: And I greatly appreciate the movies that you walk out of the cinema and you continue to have that conversation for another hour, hour and a half with your spouse, your date or whomever. Your film does that and you've just done a tremendous job. I appreciate your time here today. And Tom Opre, best of luck to you. Everybody go see this film. It's definitely worth it.

Tom: Thank you. It's great to be here and I appreciate the audience jumping on to shepherdsofwildlife.org and supporting us. And like, yeah, we love it. Post on Facebook, you know, comments and share stuff. And I do everything I can to answer every single comment, every single DM, all that, because we're all in this together. And I think we want to leave the planet better than we found it. That's my goal.

Tarek: Yeah, it's great. Jump all over social media with this film.