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This week on The Alaska Show Podcast Emily and Alex sit down with Josie Stiles. Josie spent her childhood in Anchorage and Unalakleet, and moved to Nome as a young adult where she has contributed to the area VPSO program, the Nome and State Arts Councils, and tourism in Nome.  www.TheAKShow.com

This week we sit down with surgeon Doc Sayer and gold miner Emily Riedel in Nome. Doc is 82 and has been performing general surgery across the state of Alaska for 50 years. He's a general surgeon from a bygone era - performing everything from brain surgery to heart surgery to cancer treatment - performing procedures in homes with his wife and nursing assistant Frankie and sometimes taking payment in the form of game meat instead of cash. In addition to being a medical pioneer in the state of Alaska, Doc has been a gold miner for 40 years and shares some insights on the business. Listen for a trove of great stories of mining and medicine in the bush. www.TheAKShow.com

This week on The Alaska Show Podcast, with gold just hitting $2,000 an oz, I talk to Augie Krutsch, the owner of AKAU Alaska Gold Mining Adventure Camp in Nome, Alaska, and Emily Riedel, Bering Sea gold dredger - to talk all things gold mining in Nome. Augie's family has been mining this area since the 1930s - and he paints a picture of the history of the place and his own adventures in commercial gold mining. Augie tells me how to win the mining game and why he doesn't care when guests walk out with 5 oz nuggets they find on his claim on the historic Anvil Creek. See his operation here: https://www.akaugold.com/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/AKAUAUGIE Find us at www.TheAKShow.com 

This week on The Alaska Show Podcast I talk to Ben Staley - born and bred Alaskan, filmmaker, TV producer, and Emmy award winner. Ben tells me about growing up off-the-grid, getting his start in Hollywood, creating a documentary about F/V Starbound, stories from his time working on Deadliest Catch, and how to get your start in the entertainment business as a creative. Links DailyStaley.com F/V Starbound Documentary - https://vimeo.com/298002211 Ben’s Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/c/AdventureArtStaley

This week on The Alaska Show Podcast I speak to Andrew Smallwood, pilot and fisherman/owner of the Celtic Cross seiner in Cordova. Andrew tells me about his childhood on a coffee farm in Kenya, apartheid South Africa, being the personal pilot of the King of Lisotho, coming to Alaska, the events that have had huge impacts on Prince William Sound fisheries, and the future of seining. www.TheAKShow.com

This week I sit down with Geoff Larson, co-founder of Alaskan Brewing Company in Juneau, Alaska. Geoff and I talk trends in hard seltzer and beer, brewing Alaskan flavors into beer, how being off the road system forced him to innovate the brewing process, and what the beer shelves will look like in 15 years. Alaskan Brewing's tasting room is now open! AlaskanBeer.com  

This week on The Alaska Show Podcast I sit down with Kyle Moffat, the founder of The Alaska Life social media platform and www.TheAlaskaLife.com. We talk about our shared experiences starting a content business, how he built the largest social media platform in the state, his advice for people trying to start a similar business, growing up in the interior, and where to visit to get the quintessential Alaska experience. www.TheAKShow.com

This week on The Alaska Show Podcast I talk to Alaska Ocean Cluster Program Manager Justin Sternberg. Justin and I talk about the future of Alaska's economy - which he believes involves a higher utilization of the seafood catch in processing, mariculture, and developing new products from Alaska's underexplored coastal resources. Get the Newsletter: https://www.alaskaoceancluster.com/newsletters/ Check out Ocean Tuesdays https://www.alaskaoceancluster.com/engage/ocean-tuesday/ www.TheAKShow.com

This week on The Alaska Show Podcast I talk to Weatherly Bates, cofounder of Glacier Point Oyster Farm in Halibut Cove, Alaska. Weatherly and her husband have created a nationally-recognized product and turned their farm into the largest commercial oyster and mussel operation in Alaska, nearing their goal of shipping a million oysters a year. We talk about the challenges of running an oyster farm, how it gives back to the ocean, the oyster market, how Covid forced them to rely on the local community, and the time Weatherly shot a bear nine months pregnant and had a Bear-b-que. https://www.alaskashellfish.net/ https://www.instagram.com/alaska_shellfish_farms/ https://www.facebook.com/Glacier-Point-Oyster-302213276529159/ www.TheAKShow.com  

This week on The Alaska Show Podcast I sit down with Commissioner of Alaska Department of Fish and Game Douglas Vincent-Lang. Doug and I discuss how many bears should be on the Kenai Peninsula, the state's relationship with the federal government, subsistence, and raising the next generation of hunters and fishermen. www.TheAKShow.com

This week I sit down with Dan Voelz, owner of Pacific Pride Marine Supply in Ketchikan, Alaska. We talk about the seasonality of his business, the community service aspect of keeping the store open during unprofitable winter months, the challenges of being a business owner in Alaska, and advances in the marine industry. https://www.facebook.com/PacificPrideAK/ www.TheAKShow.com

This week we sit down with Dr. Anne Zink, emergency room physician and Alaska's Chief Medical Officer. She talks to us about how she is leading us through the Covid-19 crisis, Alaska's public health strengths, and activities she wishes Alaskans would think twice about as an emergency room physician. www.TheAKShow.com Interview Notes Dr. Anne Zink has been the Chief Medical Officer for the State of Alaska - starting July 2019. Sits under the commissioner of the DHSS. Disaster response, disease, epidemiology are their main focus. She’s the medical voice. Dr. Zink’s day-to-day changes a lot. They stood up their disaster response structure for the Wuhan flight. It’s been escalating since thm> She helps secure PPE. Looks at protocols around travel, tourism, large groups, and businesses. Covid is the main focus but there are other health initiatives as well. Lots of conversations and talking to the Governor and commissioners and messaging and trying to understand the data behind Covid. They do a lot of calls with frontline providers to help them understand the latest data, science, and testing. She also works with the fishing industry and various businesses. How much do we really know about Covid-19? We have come a long way in just a month. 5-6 months ago we didn’t know this virus existed. In a short time we’ve learned a lot. There are inherent things we won’t know without time, such as immunity information. That just takes time to study. This has also highlighted uncertainty in medicine and science - and how different people adjust differently to a disease. But the genetic sequencing is already uploaded. There are over 200 vaccines in different trials. We have different antivirals working. They’re doing calls with different doctors all the time all over the world. Dr. Zink is still working from the yurt at her house - which is a guest bedroom. That gives her kids space to homeschool in her office at home.  Dr. Zink reminds her patients that medicine is an art and it’s not perfect. She brings knowledge and education through her training and it has to sit with their personal experience. Each individual person has different needs and environment and it’s a partnership and not an exact science. How do you decide what treatment to recommend? You analyze the benefits, the effectiveness, and the downsides. For something like masks the downside is that it’s uncomfortable and not everyone has them and it’s politicized. The upside is that the data shows the disease is translated by air through micro-droplets, and a cloth face covering could significantly decrease those droplets. A mask is covering your talking like covering a sneeze or cough. There are other social norms around what we wear like “no shirt, no shoes, no service.” A study said if 60% of us wear a mask that’s 60% effective this disease would stop. How do we use rules and regulations to address preventable disease? Dr. Zink sees a lot of Covid deaths as preventable. Dr. Zink reminds herself that changing culture and behavior is hard. You see it in drunk driving, STIs, and drug and alcohol addiction. What’s hard about Covid for her is it’s asking us to be different than our normal human experiences. People miss having large parties and holidays and hugging their friends. Dr. Zink sees other options and treatments coming soon and knows if we can hold it off we could prevent a lot of death. What are the bright spots of public health in Alaska? We have some of the lowest infant mortality cases in the country. We have a robust public health network. Some rates like STIs and Tuberculosis have been sore spots. The community response to public health challenges has been strong, specifically around the opioid crisis. We struggle with it but aren’t the worst in the country by far. Communities have done a great job responding on a local level. We have some of the lowest cases in the country and highest per capita testing in the country that’s because of Alaskans. Is Dr. Zink still seeing patients? She was until 6 weeks ago. She was doing it on weekends but this job became all consuming. Her group covered her shifts for her. She misses that part of her job a lot right now. Does she feel removed or disconnected from patients? The highlights of her week are zoom meetings with clinicians in order to stay connected. Right before the pandemic Dr. Zink took care of a young man who coded and essentially died and came back. His friends did CPR, the EMS was ready, and the hospital system worked to save his life. Even the sadness of the job - Dr. Zink appreciates being able to grieve with people who get bad diagnoses. She has a visceral response when she sees people riding a four wheeler with no helmet and when people party with fireworks. She has the same response when people post on social media about partying with tons of people in the time of Covid. Don’t do dumb things drunk. Dr. Zink wishes people would test more for Covid. The data says if you get tested early on they can manage it better. She also wishes people would just ask for help more as an ER doctor. Someone with a stroke can get treated right away and get something taken care of. It’s an act of kindness to be tested early.

This week on The Alaska Show Podcast we sit down with Laine Welch, founder of Alaska Fish Radio and the author of the weekly Fish Factor column out of Kodiak, Alaska. Laine and I talk about how she got her start in independent media, how she found her niche and served it well, her other work in the fishing industry, and what makes Alaska so special. AlaskaFishRadio.com TheAKShow.com

This week I sit down with Assistant Guide Tyler Kuhn about his truly amazing story of becoming Alaska's youngest big game guide. Growing up impoverished in Western Pennsylvania, hunting was both an escape and a way to put food on his family's table. From a young age he had a singular focus to move to Alaska and become a big game guide. His journey of the last 6 years has been filled with harrowing encounters and bad actors, but through perseverance he achieved his dreams. Links www.TheAKShow.com Tyler’s IG @BearSkinner907 One of Tyler's contributions to Fur-Fish-Game Magazine https://www.furfishgame.com/back_issues/2019/2019-01.php Interview Notes Tyler is 23, he’s an Alaskan hunting guide, and hails from a small city in Western Penn called Newcastle. Hour north of Pittsburgh. Interesting upbringing - kind of an inner city environment. Grew up hunting - he was very poor. Once the steel mills disappeared in the 1980s the economy never recovered and a lot of drugs moved into the area. Tyler grew up with no real income in the household - tons of family members did drugs and drank. His release was being in the outdoors and hunting, fishing and trapping. It was both a way for his family to eat and for his own release. There were times where food was scarce because they were on food stamps and welfare. Hunting white-tailed deer was a means to provide for himself and the family. Extended family would live in the house. There were times when they’d have 5-9 people in one household.  Tyler hunted and fished everything - deer, turkey, small game, fishing for trout and walleye. Anything Tyler could get his hands on he would. School was interesting for Tyler. When you grow up in that environment getting an education was on the backburner. He wasn’t sure if he’d have something to eat when he got home, so it would weigh on him. Back when he was in school he got picked on and bullied a lot. He used to be a really scrawny, frail, emaciated kid. Now Tyler has changed a lot through the experiences of being a hunting guide. School at that time was really tough. Tyler was the first person in his family to graduate high school. He’s thought about getting further education. Tyler, when he was 7 or 8, saw a documentary program about the western caribou migration and told his grandma he would live in Alaska. No one believed him. In high school Tyler thought about getting into a science feel like wildlife biology or zoology since he loved the outdoors so much. But when he was a teenager he discovered the Alaska guide industry - and that became his main focus when he was 14 or 15 years old. He learned about it initially by studying Alaska. One day he was watching a hunting show on tv and saw a guy do a goat hunt in Alaska. Tyler admired the way the guide presented himself and how strong he was. At the time that really impacted Tyler. The mindset of the Alaskan guide is no matter what you must push through. After that he started reading literature by the pioneer guides. And nowadays he’s worked for some of these guys and knows them.  Has the guiding industry changed much? There are timeless aspects to the job but there’s also a lot of industry change between the pioneers and now. With the growth of technology and expansion of humanity across the globe - Alaska has changed in a lot of ways. The fundamentals of guiding in the 1970s is the same as 2020, but the technology is obviously way different and the skills are different. Back in the day those guys had to have very strong grasp of the local topography and land navigation. Nowadays Tyler can use his Garmin and it’s much easier, although they have to learn those land navigation skills. The overall fundamentals and the ethics and morals has never changed. Tyler came to Alaska directly after high school. He graduated high school in Pennsylvania. Went down to visit them in Arkansas for a little bit. Then took his savings and went straight to Alaska. Didn’t know anybody. He had applied for a Packer position for 26 or 27 different outfits and got one callback.  A packer hauls meat and camp supplies around. It ultimately gets into the Alaskan assistant guide apprenticeship which lasts two years. He started here directly after high school.  For that position the job description is vague. These outfits will fly them up there, give them basic gear like rain gear and a tent for the most part, and put you to work. For some you pay your own way. A lot of the outfits won’t pay you - it’s your way to get your foot in the door in the industry. There is some variability in the different outfits whether they pay or don’t pay.  You come up here and pack meat and being a sherpa hauling supplies, cooking, and doing all the industry grunt work. That’s what he was told and what he expected. This is an industry where you work your way from the ground up. You hope to rise through the ranks. Every master guide outfitter started being a packer. He applies for the jobs mid-summer and they fly him up at the end of August. He started in the Brooks Range up above the arctic circle. He flew into Fairbanks commercially. They drove most of the way there up the Dalton Highway. Then they flew into camp. You can imagine coming up to Alaska and seeing it for the first time - that was a magical first experience for Tyler.  The thing that shocked him the most was the actual reality of the vastness of the wilderness. Growing up in Pennsylvania - you’re seeing human civilization everywhere, even deep in the country. When you’re a packer you answer to every single person above you. The outfitter is the guy who runs everything - he’s the boss. He’s giving tours to everyone, but he’ll assign you to an assistant guide or camp manager for the day. The idea of being a packer before being an apprentice is they’re trying to break you down physically, mentally, and emotionally. When you’re out in the field as a guide and performing that duty you’re in charge of your camp, your hunter, other guides under you, and all the packers. You’re in charge of keeping them safe and alive in dangerous situations. Tyler compares it to a special operations attitude in the military - they want to break you down and build you up to do your duty. There’s a lot of humbling that’s necessary and it’s also an educational experience. They’re destroying the toughness you think you have and are testing how tough you really are. The unpredictability of the training surprised Tyler. Not even the guides know what’s going to happen. When that super cub drops you off and flies away no one knows what’s going to happen after that. When you’re packing they’re putting you in situations to see how you react to things. Every guide remembers his first pack because it’s the worst experience in his life. Tyler’s first pack - they killed a big bull that was probably 4-5 miles from base camp. They were glassing from this ridge. As a packer you also help hunt and learn the basics. They see a monster bull moose. The guide Tyler was with told him it was very nice - over 60”. It was actually 66”. They saw two bulls fighting - one was a 58” the other was that 66” bull. For a big bull like that their hindquarters can be 150-160 lb and that’s a long way to pack that meat. They made the decision like this is a very far pack, Tyler is new, is he capable of it? The guide asked Tyler if he was up to the task and Tyler said absolutely. They put on a successful stalk, shot the bull, and butchered it. THey called in a second packer to help. It was shocking to Tyler how difficult it was. You’re in hip waders going through swamps. In certain game management units you have to leave the meat “bone-in” and in some areas you can “bone out” the quarter. In that area you had to leave bone-in. In some places where you can bone-out it’s still highly recommended you leave bone-in so you don’t have as much surface area for bacteria to grow and it takes longer to pack and bears are more likely to come after it. So they’re packing the quarters back. They didn’t even make it a mile when the other packer took a nasty fall and did something bad to his foot like twisted it. The second packer had to keep stopping and Tyler took his pack on and off like 20 times. It’s the worst to take it off because it’s so heavy, you can’t even do it on flat tundra. They finally get back to base camp after probably 5 hours. That second packer quits. He couldn’t even get his boot off because his ankle was swollen so bad. They call in a second packer. That bull took 5 trips. Now Tyler and the new packer go out and do another two loads like that when another bull moose gets shot. The pilot comes in and takes the other packer to the other moose. Tyler’s legs are destroyed at this point. It’s about 4 miles total walking each direction for this pack. In this distance there are several swamps and rolling hills you have to go up and down. You climb the hill, go down in the swamp, and trudge through the swamp. You have to do that 5-6 times throughout the 4 mile walk. He packs back tenderloin and some loose meet. He has one more load - the antlers - by law the “trophy” comes back last after the meat’s been preserved. He goes back and ties up the antlers and he sees this massive wall of cloud and rain coming down the valley. Tyler has no real survival gear. The thing about Alaska is one minute it’s sunny and 70 and the next it’s 38 degrees. The pack back to camp was so bad with the swamps. They’d tried multiple routes back to camp to make it easier. When it’s as foggy as it was during that storm you can get lost very easily. The guide had marked off certain places on game trails with orange ribbon. Those ribbons would give him decent orientation to get back. The guide had the foresight to do that and Tyler doesn’t know if he would’ve gotten back. Hypothermia was a definite risk.  Tyler couldn’t stop

I sit down with Arron Kallenberg, founder of Wild Alaskan Company, to discuss how building a tech platform around the family business of fishing Bristol Bay sockeye is reviving the dying profession of personal fishmonger in the internet age. We talk family history in Alaska, why so many fishermen are intellectuals, the inception of Wild Alaskan Company, the challenges of marketing and moving frozen fish online, and how the book "Antifragile" helped his company prepare for disruption. Links WildAlaskanCompany.com TheAKShow.com Interview Notes Arron is the founder of Wild Alaskan Company, a tech-enabled marketing and logistics company that sells wild-caught Alaskan seafood. Their customers are all over the United States and they are looking to establish some international fulfillment centers in the future. Arron’s grandfather was born in Manhattan, grew up in New Jersey, and came to Alaska in 1926. Arron’s son was born in Manhattan 6 months ago, so his family is oscillating between Alaska and eastern seaboard. His grandfather was very academic and a city kid but was very interested in farming and the outdoors. He also had asthma. He looked around the lower 48 and decided to go to Alaska originally, as the story goes, to herd reindeer. He moved out to the DIllingham area at 23 in the 1920s. There was no road out there. Instead of herding reindeer he fell in love with the salmon fishery. He started fishing on one of the original wooden sailboats. At some point he wanted to get married so he went down to Florida on a fishing charter and met Arron’s grandmother, who was also from New Jersey. They got married after only knowing each other 2 or 3 months and packed up and moved to Alaska and had 5 children, one of which was Arron’s father. His grandfather went back and got his master’s degree at Cornell at one point. His master’s thesis was a study of the red salmon at Bristol Bay with a focus on conservation. He went on to serve temporarily on the territory board of fisheries and was pretty active in conservation efforts early. That was the ethos of the Kallenberg family. Fishermen, focused on sustainability, and very academic. That’s a big part of his family’s history and is inseparable from the genesis of Wild Alaskan Company. Often fishermen are very academic and accomplished. Why is that? Arron has observed that phenomenon as well. He’s woken up on the boat to hear a conversation on trigonometry on the radio in Bristol Bay. His dad used to say there’s no good reason to be a fisherman if you don’t love it - there are easier ways to make money. His dad told him if they wanted to make money they’d be in stocks or real estate. It attracts people who might be quirky or idiosyncratic who prioritize certain things. Alaska and fishing self-selects for a certain type of person. The only thing harder in e-commerce than selling frozen fish on the internet is probably ice cream. If you’re a Kallenberg born in NYC you go to Alaska. If you’re a Kallenberg born in Alaska you need another challenge. Arron’s grandfather was back and forth but they always had a home in Alaska. They moved from Dillingham when his dad was in high school to Chugiak and lived the rest of their lives there. His grandmother passed away in Chugiak and his grandfather passed in Anchorage a few years later. Arron’s father and his siblings carried on the tradition of nerdy fishermen. His dad has a degree in aerospace, astronautics and aeronautics. He was working in the aerospace industry for Boeing and then came back to Alaska to fish in the bay. He was involved in the design of refrigeration systems at fish processing plants as well as being a fisherman. Arron’s mom tells everyone he caught his first fish with her, but when he got old enough to fish in the Bay he went out with his dad. They were always working with the fish plants. All his uncles fished as well. Arron was just born into that culture - it wasn’t an option. Arron had a major interest in computers when he was young. Growing up in Alaska was pretty humbling. He had no running water or outhouse. But he was interested in how the internet could connect him to the outside world. It was a huge outlet for him as a kid to sit in the middle of Homer, Alaska but be connected to the entire world. He got his first internet connection at XYZ.net. Even when Arron was out in Bristol Bay in the 90s he rigged up a boat phone to a modem and was learning to code in between picking fish. Even back then they were talking about building a website and selling fish online. As he got older and into the tech industry it became less of a pipe dream to something that was just a little crazy and then to going for it. There was 15 years of him leaving Alaska, going to college, working, then getting the gumption together to start this company. When was the moment he’d decided to start the business? In 2010 Arron wrote an email to someone and asked his dad to crunch the numbers on the economics and the shipping. You start with the raw commodity, then you need someone to process it, and you get shipping and back into the price per lb you have to sell it at. Then you look at the market on, say, the east coast and see if they’re paying that much, and they were. Arron was working in tech at that time and asked investors if they were interested and heard radio silence. Fast forward 7 years he was working in tech on the east coast and he met his wife. He was positive he would marry her on their first date. THey connected on wanting to have a family. On the third date she moved in with Arron and within a year he proposed to her and within two years of meeting they got married. What happened was Arron was living in NYC and his wife was visiting from Colombia. SHe was born in Colombia and raised in Miami. She was supposed to go home and decided to stay with Arron instead. Eventually she had to go to Florida and he missed her so much he flew down there. He had to go to a conference in Ireland and he convinced her to go to Europe with him. They had a romantic start to the trip and Arron got the worst food poisoning ever in Paris and she took care of him and Arron knew he had to marry her. It was easy to talk her into coming back to New York because she spent 30 years of her life in NYC. They got married in Colombia. If you want to see a culture clash bring a bunch of Alaskan fishermen to Colombia for a Latin-Jewish wedding. She got pregnant on their honeymoon and they lost the baby. Arron’s wife is six years older than him and they decided to try IVF. They had another baby and lost it again. It was heartbreaking. They did 12 rounds of IVF. Now they have a son, who you can hear in the background. It was the result of some stubborn people. About halfway through that journey which took 3 ½ years Arron was working for a private equity and venture capital group doing technical due diligence on companies and meeting with amazing founders. As an entrepreneur at heart it was torturous to see these amazing companies and founders and not being able to be one.  At round 6 of IVF the doctors told his wife she had to take a break for a summer. It was her dream of going to Japan so they decided to take a trip. Arron told his firm that he was going to leave, and they told him he couldn’t go. When the firm wouldn’t co-sign the trip he gave them his resignation letter and they had an amazing trip. The first thing they did was go to the fish market the year before it burned down. They saw all the seafood and traveled everywhere. It was another romantic trip. When Arron got back to NYC he didn’t know what he’d do - but he always had this idea for the seafood company. A lot of his friends talked him into doing it. He thought what did he have to lose? The only thing he really wanted was a family and he didn’t have that so why not? He didn’t know how it would work.Fast forward to today they have five distribution centers across the country under contract, they’re moving a large amount of seafood each week. Arron was going to be happy with like 40 monthly seafood subscribers or “members.” That would be enough to pay him to keep the business going. They definitely blew past that number. How long was it from the moment he decided to start the business to the first sale? Arron wrote the business plan in 2016 and pulled the trigger in 2017. He’d had the plan fleshed out and had a bunch of people he trusted read it. He wanted economic security and didn’t want to rock the boat around IVF. He spent most of 2017 getting the fulfillment network in place. That was the most difficult part. It’s cheaper to move fish via freight to a local distribution center and have them take it the last mile versus shipping direct from Alaska. It was tough to find distribution centers that could hold frozen inventory and do it well. There was one really good frozen warehouse group and Arron spent a lot of time talking to them. A competitor at the time exercised a non-compete agreement they had with that group to stop them from shipping out of the only national frozen fulfillment center. Arron works with independent operators, they had to design a whole new inventory management system to put together their own network of warehouses. He has business intelligence that can determine location to customer and inventory. A salmon box can have a combo of sockeye and coho, in the combo box there can be pollock and cod and other fish. They can change what the customer is receiving based on localized inventory. That took a year along with building the warehouse group relationships. A lot of them were used to catering to grocers and they were figuring out how to do direct e-commerce business. Arron had to work with their engineers a lot. February 12 of 2018 they sold their first box of fish. That felt unreal because he had this dream since he was a kid. Gunny Bishop is the name of their first member - Arron talked to him on the

This episode will make you mad and will open your eyes. Anchorage attorney and real estate investor Robin O. Brena is spearheading the Fair Share Act on the ballot in November to raise production taxes on Alaska's most established and profitable oil fields. He clearly lays out the flaws in Senate Bill 21 in 2013 that let oil companies obscure their profits and evade production taxes, explains why the Alaskan economy was still in recession when oil was at $70 a barrel recently (hint: we aren't getting our fair share) and how this state's dividend and essential services are flat out unsustainable if Alaskans let oil companies buy their votes this November. We also discuss his major litigation wins (fighting on behalf of AND against oil companies), his pro-business approach, and commercial real estate in Anchorage.  Interview starts right away - no timestamps! Links https://voteyesforalaskasfairshare.com/ https://rsd-properties.com/ - developing coworking space in Anchorage www.TheAKShow.com Interview Notes Robin O. Brena is the founding partner of Brena, Bell and Walker law office in Anchorage. He is a commercial real estate investor, born and raised in Skagway and is one of the three sponsors of Fair Share Act. Fair Share Act: Robin has skin in the game - he’s spent $100,000+ of his own money It’s not anti-business - it supports some oil fields and not others He has a long history of fighting big oil on behalf of Alaskans and independent producers. The Fair Share Act is on the general election ballot in November. It raises the production taxes on our three largest and most profitable fields in a transparent way. One of the most important pieces is it requires the production tax returns associated with Prudhoe, Alpine, and Kuparuk to be transparent. Their production tax files will be public. That’s critical because it’s our oil on our land and we’re in partnership with these companies and have no clue what their revenues, costs, and profits are in the three major fields. It’s hard to be a proper steward of this resource when we have no access to this information. The administration and legislature doesn’t have this information. How did we get into the situation with no transparency? It was a process of political influence over years chipping away at the reporting. We used to have this information years ago and we don’t have it anymore. People are passing oil policies in Juneau and they don’t know how the fields are performing. Has it always been like this? Robin doesn’t think people understand how important it is that they stay informed and engaged. We’ve reached a point where we’re getting very little for our oil. Robin thinks one of the most important things the Fair Share Act does is allow Alaskans and the industry to sit down and determine what is fair based on knowing something. Under normal circumstances it would raise about a billion dollars a year. Even with that it will be lower than the average production tax in the past three decades. That money will help fund essential services, Permanent Fund, and PFDs, and hopefully we will get a capital budget back to do construction which we haven’t had since Senate Bill 21 passed in 2013 lowering these taxes. Alex thinks something has to give. We need money from somewhere. Governor Hammond said if you don’t have enough money to run the government here you should first look at oil and make sure we’re getting our fair share. He was right. $1 billion is a lot of money - that’s 10,000 jobs at $100k a year. We need to keep more oil revenue in Alaska to create and save jobs in Alaska. Right now it’s all leaving the state. Alaska doesn’t work if you give away your oil. All resource-rich countries deal with this problem. Alaska is doing the worst of all of them. If you look at our production tax and royalties we’re doing worse than any other resource owner in the world - less than Brazil, Nigeria, Iraq, Norway, even Iran is doing better than us. There’s an inherent tension between resource owners and producers. We’re doing the worst job of any resource owner in the world as a result of Senate Bill 21. They produce oil throughout the w2orld for $2-5 a barrel. In 2018 they made between $25-30 a barrel of oil in Alaska. There’s no way to have a fair conversation about oil in this state except for popular initiative. There are too many ways for oil to influence the legislature and the political process. You have to get it done through the initiative. SB-21 does a bad job at low, middle, and high oil prices. So nothing has changed even though oil prices have crashed. There aren’t any major resource owners taking the kind of commodity risk Alaska is. When oil goes down, our production taxes go down faster than that. In fact they go down almost twice as fast as the price of oil. So when the price of oil goes down the pie gets smaller, but Senate Bill 21 gives away that even smaller share to international producers. Why did you spearhead this initiative? SB21 went into effect in 2014, was passed in 2013. It got through the senate by 1 vote and there were two ConocoPhillips employees that voted for it. Robin doesn’t think it passed in a fair way. On appeal they spent $15 million dollars telling Alaskans if they lower production taxes the companies will invest more in jobs and production, but all they’ve done since then is lay people off and reduce production. That was BEFORE Coronavirus. We got less investment, less jobs, less production, and a whole bunch less revenue. We gave up $1.5B a year and we got less of everything they promised. Robin is a conservative businessman by nature - this is just a matter of getting fair value of what you own. If you’re going to sell your house, your car, or oil, you have to sit down and get a fair deal. He doesn’t view it as a flawed economic theory as much as poor negotiating. We’re in a partnership - the Fair Share Act isn’t even about taxes it’s about getting a fair cut of revenue. What’s Robin’s feeling on public sentiment around this act? His polling suggests people strongly support the Fair Share Act and transparency. Alaskans are tired of learning how their oil fields are performing secondhand and through partial information. People know we’re not doing well in Alaska and know that we gave SB21 a chance after they spent $30m to convince us to try it, and it’s failed miserably on every promise that was made. This is our time to revisit it and change it. What was Skagway like in the 60s and 70s when he grew up? It was a beautiful place to grow up - Robin still loves Skagway and Southeast Alaska. Their family ran the oldest bar in Alaska that started in the gold rush days. When it came time to go to college Robin worked the railroads and did every job there. Was there still a lot of gold business there? Tourism started picking up then. They had the railroad from Whitehorse to Skagway so the industry cut back and tourism picked it up and it’s a spectacular example of turn-of-the-century architecture and Klondike gold rush vibe. Tourism is how it survives now. A lot of Robin’s friends worked on the pipeline and Robin got three graduate degrees. His mother was a teacher and so was his grandmother - so he grew up in a living room full of books. Robin thought, when he went to school at 17, that he would be a teacher. But when he saw the $17,000 starting salary and his friends making six figures working on the pipeline he gave that up and followed his passion. He has an MBA, a Law Degree, and a Masters in Law in Real Estate Finance. He took a year off between his MBA and law degree because the family bar business fell on hard times and his dad had passed and mom was running the business. He took that year to put together a historic restoration of the building so his mom and sister could have income for their life. Robin’s father passed when he was 12. Soon after his brother became married and moved out, so Robin took on the responsibilities of the household. When he was 17 he started working to support the family filling vacancies at the railroad roundhouse. He was going to high school then working 3-11pm after school at the railroad yards. When he got to college he signed up for 25 academic hours. They said freshmen can’t sign up for more than 15 hours without special permission. He went to the dean and said “this is just 25 hours a week” because he’d been working 40 hours at the railroad, and night janitor at the school, and going to school during the day so he thought it was ridiculous he could only take 15 hours. Robin talked him into 18. Robin always took a lot of classes and did really well, he was in National Honors’ Society.  Robin always wanted to come back to Alaska - it was home. When he finished his graduate degrees he had opportunities on the east coast to develop real estate and to teach law at Hastings Law School, but he couldn’t leave Alaska. If there was a job for him here that’s where  he wanted to be. He came back and went to work at a law firm Atkinson, Conway and Gagnon. Bruce Gagnon was his mentor, one of the best attorneys he knew. After three and a half years there Robin had the opportunity to start his own firm. Two other attorneys told him to talk to them if he started a new firm, and he partnered with them in business. They’ve been in an office share or the same law firm since 1988 and there hasn’t been a raised voice in the office since then. Three and a half years is pretty quick, no? Robin says it was the right timing for him. He has 110 open cases when he left the firm he was with. He took every one of them with him with the firm’s blessing. That was the first of major cases he worked on with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. It makes more sense to build your firm when you manage major cases so you can focus the firm resources on those cases rather than being at the bottom of the totem pole. Did you feel there were more entre

I sit down with Ray Troll, Ketchikan-based artist, to discuss how Alaska's fishing industry inspired him to build a t-shirt empire that would ship millions of shirts worldwide and adorn the chests of rockstars and actors, the business of art, the founding of Salmonfest, the ongoing fight against Pebble Mine, and Alaska's precarious future. Ray Troll Interview (5:15) TrollArt.com SalmonFestAlaska.org TheAKShow.com Interview Ray Troll is an artist, activist, lay scientist, and musician songwriter for the “Ratfish Wranglers.” Ray is most well-known for his shirts and his designs like “Spawn Till You Die” and “Return of the Sockeye.” STYD is the biggest seller over the years. Ray is 56 years old and still cranking out new lines of shirts every year. He doesn’t get tired of seeing his old designs. His shirts end up in the wackiest places - in Superbad, a Ugandan action film, on celebrities, and all around Alaska. Ray’s currently in “hunker down” mode. He hasn’t been doing much in 7 weeks at home. It’s been relaxing and meditative. He’s been walking in the woods and working on a line of new t-shirts. He hasn’t taken on the next big project yet. His band the Ratfish Wranglers recorded an album in Port Townsend, Washington before Covid-19 hit. Ray is thinking about starting a podcast. He has a ventriloquist friend named David Strassman from California. Twenty years ago they met and have been friends since. David used to do shows in Anchorage in the 70s and 80s, but his main career is in Australia. They want to start a show called “Paleo Nerds” and talk to scientists. They want to pick the brains of various scientists. Does Ray do a new line of shirts each year? He needs to be inspired to create new designs, otherwise it’s too much like work. But he’s been inspired regularly for decades now. Over the years he’s done his t-shirts that sustain him financially but in the meantime he has book projects, museum exhibits, a band, and he travels and speaks. The t-shirt business is almost on the side even though it’s his “main gig.” But he has a deep archive of designs. He can go back thirty years ago and rework old designs or hits. “Return of the Sockeye” is a great example. The shirt came out in the early 90s. The sales tapered off, but one year in the 2000s when he didn’t have new designs he dug it out and did a new digital coloring. It came out again in 2007 or 2008 and they flew off the shelf. Ray doesn’t think he will ever run out of ideas. He has a huge archive of idea and sketchbooks. His designs go beyond just fishing into paleontology and the natural world and they aren’t all pun or jokes. So he can be funny or not and cover a wide array of subjects. Most people know Ray from the t-shirts but he’s done bigger pieces as well. Usually he’s doing large paintings and prints and the shirts are on the side. He has done large murals for universities and government things. He’s always wanted to sell his original art for big money, and he’s had good prices for originals, but he’s always liked the egalitarian “art for the masses” attitude. Art on a t-shirt is art that everyone can have - it shouldn’t be for the wealthy alone. He was trained as a printmaker and that trade is all about making multiples. That was the everyman’s art back in the middle ages. They were kind of the first t-shirts. Was having such a big t-shirt business a master plan? No, Ray says, it just took off on him and he was shocked by how popular the shirts were. Back in summer of 1983 Ray was out of graduate school and was teaching at his Alma Mater in Kansas. He wanted to be a college professor, but it’s hard to get that job as a new MFA. He was looking for a day job and his big sister Kate was living in Ketchikan and she and her husband started a little seafood shop on the dock in Ketchikan. They offered him a summer job. Ray comes from a family of 6 kids and three of his siblings were already living in Alaska. 4 of the 6 of them have since made Alaska their home even though they grew up all over the place as Air Force brats. Kate and Bill offered him a job running the store and Ray came up here to sell fish on the docks. He made a t-shirt for the business - which was called Hallelujah Halibut. Ray found Alaska appealed to him. He taught part-time that fall at University of Alaska Southeast campus and he worked on the slime line at canneries and had a studio. He began painting fish. In the summer of ‘84 he printed up a bunch of t-shirts of his original designs for a seafood festival in town. He brought a couple hundred of the shirts to the show and sold out of them in three days pretty much.  The shirt said “Let’s Spawn” and had a salmon on it. He had a few shirts left over and he took those shirts to a local seafood store and wholesaled them for $1 per shirt profit. The store sold those shirts quickly and wanted more and that was the beginning of it. Then he and his wife took the ferry around southeast Alaska with a little catalog of drawings of the shirts and he took orders. A bunch of stores ordered them and many of the stores still sell them. Then he got a printer in Seattle who took it to the next level. That printer hired sales reps and they sold to stores in Anchorage, Seattle, all over the Northwest, and eventually all over the nation. His t-shirt sales were gangbusters in the early 90s. They had outlets in every state and even the Canadian provinces. It got to a point where it almost collapsed in on itself. The printer sold the company to another guy and the new guy took on all kinds of other artists and grew an art department. They put Ray’s stuff on the backburner and so when the contract ran out he signed up with another printer in Tacoma with more modest ambitions. He’s been with that printer for 20+ years. Post Industrial Press is the printer name. Ray doesn’t know how many shirts he’s sold over the years but he thinks it’s in the millions over several decades. The shirts are part of the geologic footprint on the planet. The only online source is at TrollArt.com but he has retailers in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and some outlets in California and Canada and out east. He also does stickers, calendars, magnets, and all that.  Ray has two museum exhibits right now - one at University Alaska Fairbanks - the dinosaur exhibit - and one in Kansas. Those are floating around the country. He has a lot of irons in the fire. Why does his art resonate so well culturally? Ray tries to be true to himself - he has to think it’s funny or cool or it looks good. He doesn’t like to pander to an audience - he believes visual artists should do work for themselves and hold themselves to a standard. Then you run it up the flagpole and see what works. He doesn’t pander, but he has a feedback loop with the audience. Alaska is its own unique world or tribe. We’re different here. We are proud of this place even though there are a lot of issues we face.  Around fishing - there’s sport fishing, commercial fishing, the science side of it - there’s a ton of depth to the subject. But in the end the work speaks for itself. You can look at a piece of art and see if there’s depth to it or if it resonates. If Ray Troll were to give advice to someone starting out in art and commerce: it takes ambition. You have to work at it and get your stuff out there and hit the pavement. Ray shows up to work at his studio 40-60 hours a week like a zealot. He believes in the work and being bold enough to put your foot in the door and tell people to check something out. You have to have the guts to walk in a store and talk to the buyer. How much has the art business changed with the advent of social media? It’s a different world, but Ray thinks it’s a benefit that people can grow a global audience quickly. That said, the world is flooded with imagery so it’s tougher, but you can get a follower and grow it organically with your friends and peers. Ray tries to meet his own deadlines but as Douglas Adams says, “I love deadlines, especially the sound of them whooshing by.” Salmonfest. Ray wouldn’t say he was a founder, but he was part of the chain that helped ignite it with a group of people. Salmonfest is a wonderful event that happens in August every year. This year is going to be number 10, but Ray doesn’t know if it’s going to go on with Covid.  Nine years ago it started as an event to focus on stopping Pebble Mine. Ray’s brother Tim had a place out of Dillingham and has been very involved in protecting salmon habitat out in Bristol Bay. He introduced Ray to Anders Gustafson who put on a few rock n roll events against Pebble. Ray thought that idea was cool and called Anders up out of the blue and Anders liked the idea. Ray wanted art to be part of the festival and did the art for free for the festival. The idea floundered for a bit, but then Jim Stearns took it. Ray has been doing the art for the festival for 9 years but is now handing it off to the next generation. The festival pays for itself now. At the beginning it was called SalmonStock and it was focused on Pebble Mine - but when Jim took it over it morphed into SalmonFest. Anders rolled around the state looking for spots and he called Ray one day and told him he found the spot - Ninilchik Fairgrounds - and it was perfect. That became the spot for several reasons: 1) it has a highway 2) within striking distance of Anchorage 3) the proximity of Homer as the Cosmic Village by the Sea and the cultural fit there. It’s right near the ocean which is beautiful. It’s a magical place. Ray’s been to most of the Salmonfest events but not all of them. Where are we with Pebble Mine? The governor and president and EPA are all aligning to be more pro-mineral extraction so the fight against Pebble Mine is not over. It’s a celebration of the natural world - through salmon. We’re dealing with a lot of headwinds economic

This week we talk to Buck Bowden, Alaska master hunting guide and founder of Hidden Alaska Guides and Outfitters, one of the state’s top-rated Dall Sheep, Moose, and Grizzly hunt outfitters. We talk about trying to make grizzly bear edible, how hunting culture has changed, the pressure high-end outfitters face to be successful from clients, young people in hunting, and his amazing story of becoming a true Alaskan bush man. Alex rambles about Covid fatigue and Riley the Denali Park wolf who recently passed away. Intro (1:11) Interview w Buck Bowden (10:19) Links Buck's Outfitting Business https://hiddenak.com/ Buck's Appearance on MeatEater Podcast https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater/ep-133-youre-a-cool-dude-buck www.TheAKShow.com Interview Notes Buck hasn’t run a trapline in 15 years - but he used to do it for a living. Since he started the hunting business he needed to be based more in town plus he got married. So in the 90s he didn’t trap much - it was done in the 70s and 80s. Buck got on Steve Rinella’s podcast - that’s where Alex heard him first - on MeatEater. Buck went to hang out with Steve and Steve asked him to hang out in the basement and have a couple beers and Yannis and the crew was there and they just put some headphones on him and they started talking. When Buck jumped on the Meateater podcast he got inundated with emails and messages. Buck is a master hunting guide and is the founder of Hidden Alaska Guides and Outfitters - a hunting lodge only accessible by floatplane in the Alaska Range. They specialize in dall sheep, moose, and grizzly hunts - but clients can also go after black bear or on eco-tours in the summer.  Buck reserves May, June, and July for friends, family, and clients who want to bring their family up. He doesn’t put a ton of bank in the eco-tour stuff. Buck just flew into his lodge recently. April is typically when they have spring bear hunters, but since the state banned out-of-state hunters he had a lot of cancelled trips. He’s been harvesting logs from the beetle kill, taking care of the homestead, and harvesting burls for his bowls. In the spring, bear hunts are 15% of his income. He usually only takes out two hunters per year in the spring since there’s such a narrow window. Bears start coming out in April, but by the end of the month it’s touch-and-go trying to get people out of there because snow conditions have really deteriorated. May is that time when you can’t land on skis since the snow is too sloppy, but you can’t land on the lake since there is still ice. Buck has to make a tough decision around this time of year every year how to get out there. Landing in six feet of snow you’ll bury down to the belly of the plane and you have to get on top of it to get out. It’s pretty tricky since his “lake” is more of a glorified beaver pond and it’s tough. This time of year they go after brown bear more than black bear. They’ll start seeing bigger boars first week of April. They’ll go after them from the 5th to the 15th. The brown bear season is open year-round. Obviously you can’t hunt them in the winter. Buck has tried for 50 years to try to make brown bear edible and he just can’t do it. Black bear is actually really tasty. Even the meat looks different. The black bear meat is a richer, deeper red. Brown bear is kind of a pale brown when you skin it. The taste is really funky. Black bear usually come out the tail end of April. Pretty much every year in May he’ll take a black bear for camp meat since they are pretty much living off the land. What’s the closest buck has come to making brown bear edible? He’s tried it on the grill. The closest it was to being ok was boiling it on a simmer all day to tenderize it and then grilling it up and trying to season it but it always tastes rank. They’re known for sheep, moose, and brown bear in that order. Buck will be at the lodge doing his thing May, June, and July. When August 1st rolls around he’ll “shut the fun off” and concentrate on getting sheep clients up. Sheep season opens August 10th. He tries to fly his guys out August 6th to get cmap set up and clients come in August 8th. From August 1st he’s getting camps ready making sure the tents are in good shape. He has two sheep camps. He makes sure every camp has what they need. That first week of August is pretty busy preparing for the season. August, September and the first week of October is when he makes 90% of his income. Sheep is tough work. You have to go climbing for them. Buck says they very rarely surrender. How it works is they’ll fly a client out on August 8th and they have a big steak dinner that night. August 9th - all his guides work one-on-one - the guys will hike their way into whatever spy camp they want. All of Buck’s guys have been with him a while and they have the places they prefer. Guides will look for a group of rams. When they find one they’ll camp August 9th that night and hopefully the next morning on the 10th they’ll hike up and try to get within range. That’s hopefully how it goes. A lot of times something happens and the weather is bad or something and they’ll have to hunt the full 10 days, but more times than not the sheep hunter will get the sheep the first two-to-three days. A lot of people may think the second hunt which starts August 19th that their odds are better on the first hunt than the second, but that’s not true. THere’s no fence around the place - the sheep are moving in and out. The odds of getting sheep on the second hunt are just as successful as the first hunt. Buck started guiding in 1975 but went into business for himself in 1991. The first couple years were kind of slow - just like any business starting out. He had the sheep area he has now starting in ‘89. It’s really grown and in the last 10-15 years after growing pains he really locked in his good guides and the system. So they’ve gotten into the ability to be a top-end sheep outfitter in Alaska, although the prices they have are pretty much the going rate of a quality dall sheep hunt with an established outfitter that’s proven itself. How has hunting changed? When Buck started doing it there were no sat phones, no inreaches, the plane took you and the client out, they dropped you off, and they said goodbye for 10 days and hopefully they remembered to come get you. There was no contact. The hunting ethics were that you were out there and you had to go look for the animals, find them, and kill them. It was a true hunt. But nowadays you have inreaches and sat phones and the cost of the hunt is so high that a lot of the hunters think that because they paid so much that they are guaranteed to get a sheep. It’s actually illegal to guarantee an animal and it’s unethical. He’s had close to 100% success over the last few years because the Dall Sheep populations have been high and his guides are very good and they have a lot of pride in making sure the hunt is successful. Buck’s guides make his business. He owes everything he has to them. Two types of clients: the blue-collar guy who has saved up his whole life for this and then the guys who have so much money that it buys them success in every endeavor. Two different types of pressure on the outfitter. The guy who comes up to hunt and is on a fixed income and has saved up his whole life for this - these guys are the ones you almost cringe because you know it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing so if it’s not successful it’s really tough. But usually those guys are the ones who have a better attitude that understand hunting is hunting and they’re going to work hard at it and they’re not guaranteed a hunt. Better than guys who have so much money they feel like they’ve “bought” a sheep? This can put pressure on outfitters to cheat - hunt outside of season or hunt on behalf of an exhausted client - but it’s illegal and unethical. Every once in a while you’ll hear of an outfitter who breaks the law on behalf of a client. Do you have young people interested in this line of work? Buck thinks the average age of the hunters he gets is probably 50s and 60s. It doesn’t seem the younger generation has as much interest or passion to hunt as it did back in the 70s and 80s. Same goes for guides. It’s getting tough to find guides these days. When Buck was a kid it was a dream come true to get your assistant guide license and go out there and guide someone. That romance is gone. Since the 90s and into the 2000s it’s really getting hard to find younger guides that want to grow up to be a guide. I don’t know if it’s because of the computer age or what’s changed. Buck gets approached often by younger adults or kids who want to guide as a job because they want to be out of the woods. If he finds someone like that he will put them to work until they get an assistant guide license. If an outfitter finds someone like that they need to take them in and help them along. All guides have to be licensed. You have to get your assistant guide’s license first by working for an outfitter and that outfitter gives you a recommendation. You have to be able to judge a legal animal, take an animal, take care of the meat. You have to be adept at photography and cooking. There are social skills too, you have to be able to get along with people. You would need a few years before you can feel comfortable enough to take and judge animals on your own. You need to have a mentor and work with them. They teach you the ropes and you feel comfortable doing it on your own. Buck thinks there’s a stronger trend for eco-tourism based on what’s popular, but there’s a strong hunting community. It’s an American tradition and it will always be there and there will always be people with a passion to hunt. It’s just not as popular with younger people. How did Buck get into hunting? He came to Alaska in 1971. His parents sent him to Nome from Peoria, Il to li

This week on the final episode of The Homer Alaska Podcast I sit down with Claire Neaton and Emma Teal of The Salmon Sisters. These two real-life sisters co-founded the successful clothing, gear, and wild-caught Alaskan seafood brand and we talk about their new cookbook, how they started the company, their roles as ambassadors of Alaskan seafood, and the future of fish marketing. I also talk about fishing in Cordova this summer, our new Instagram Live content, and sit down with Dr. Minda Morris, PT at South Peninsula Hospital. (1:29) Intro, Fishing in Cordova, IG Live (12:56) SPH Rehab with Minda Morris (17:29) "The Salmon Sisters" Claire Neaton and Emma Laukitis Links https://aksalmonsisters.com/products/salmon-sisters-cookbook https://localcatch.org/ https://galleystories.podbean.com/e/ep-68-the-salmon-sisters-emma-clair-they-were-born-for-this/ www.TheAKShow.com Interview Notes They just released a new book “Salmon Sisters: Feasting, Fishing, and Living in Alaska” What inspired it? For their family catching and eating seafood and living in a world where fish is part of an identity it was hard for them not to make a book. They’d talked about making a cookbook for a long time and sharing their family’s recipes. They couldn’t just put a few recipes in a book without a cohesive story about their lifestyle and how Alaska seafood is caught and the fisheries are managed. They also wanted to talk about how they cook on the boat and being resourceful with limited ingredients. Emma put in a lot of work using old and new artwork, putting together infographics, and putting together this coffee table-style book. It’s a combination of recipes from their mom to favorites at potlucks in False Pass to their young adult friends who have great salmon dip recipes. Cooking on a boat more of a philosophy. It’s about using what you have and not following a recipe exactly. It’s also about simple ingredients like using canned beans and vegetables and frozen stuff. It’s not necessarily luxurious because they can’t go to the store or pick food from a garden. The book has a mix between simple recipes and more “projects.” Growing up, Emma and Claire’s mom was a great cook and a lot of her recipes are in the book. She took on the full time job of food production on the homestead which meant planting the greenhouse in the spring, raising chickens, and set netting for fish. They spent a lot of their summers smoking fish and puttng it up for the winter. They had a lot of the essentials from the land and sea and their mom used a lot of recipes from people in False Pass like traditional salmon and seafood recipes. She collected a lot of recipes and putting them in a three-ring binder. They learned a lot from their mom and tested their knowledge on the boat when they became crew fishing for their dad. They always had family dinner growing up. Claire and Emma’s mom didn’t learn to cook until she moved up to Alaska in her early 20s and moved to Alaska. Now she loves to create food and share with her family. They gained confidence cooking because on a boat if you make anything hot and on-time people love it. What are common mistakes people make preparing seafood? One big mistake is overcooking seafood like salmon. But the other mistake is people being too afraid to mess it up. If you start with a quality ingredient you’ll end up with something at least edible if not delicious. They want to tamp down that fear with their book. The cooking methods aren’t challenging and presentation doesn’t always matter. Another mistake is people don’t use what’s left. People will eat the fillet usually, but if there’s too much you can turn it into a salmon spread or patty the next day. If you start with the whole fish there’s a lot you can do with the whole fish. You can use it for soup or stock or use the bones or tail or skin. You can make chips with salmon skin, for example. There are fun ways to use the whole fish and that might be unapproachable to a lot of people if they don’t have a lot of experience. There’s a lot of information about that in the book - at the very least how to fillet a fish. What’s it going to take to get the average consumer in middle America to love seafood? Education is one piece. Having good fresh fish available easily to them will help. Convincing people that frozen product is very high quality. Also ready-to-go-snacks like canned salmon or smoked. A lot of Salmon Sisters’ customer care team is dedicated to educating customers on Alaskan seafood. A lot of customers want to share their experience with Alaska. A lot of customers also want recipes, and Claire and Emma are excited to be able to give them something. A lot of people who eat fish get stuck in a rut with what to make. The enthusiasm runs out after they tried the marinade and the grill - like how do you keep it exciting for everyone? You have to spend a lot of time at home trying. For a great interview of their childhood go check out the podcast “Galley Stories” where Mark Caylor interviewed them in December 2019. By 2nd or 3rd grade Claire and Emma were taking the Tustumena into Homer to do school in the winters. It gave them a strong foundation educationally. They both ended up on the east coast. Everything seemed so far away from Alaska, even the west coast, so it didn’t matter to them where they went in the Lower 48 since everything was a plane ride away. Claire went to University of Vermont through the influence of a teacher and family friends. She had a great educational experience and group of peers. School was very challenging. She focused on getting through classes and it was a natural transition from Homer since there was so much outdoor activity. She met her husband there. She was a year ahead of Emma so they crossed over in high school for a couple years. Emma also ended up on the east coast - she had a friend who was a year older who went to Williams and followed her. She joined the rowing team with her friend Lindsey. College was great for Emma as well she really enjoyed Williams and the small school. She adapted fine and there wasn’t much culture shock. Junior year both sisters studied together in Italy. Emma was doing screenprinting and was making fish prints at home and that was the moment she realized how much the place they group up had formed them and what they wanted to share. Emma was an art and english major at WIlliams and was doing a lot of visual representation of what they work on. That sparked the idea for working together in the business. College was a time of understanding how much Alaska had formed their identities. Once they realized that it’s hard not to go back and check-in. They worked their way through college commercial fishing every summer so they were constantly back and forth between the east coast and Alaska. When they graduated they took some time to figure out if they would get a job or fish or what. Claire and her husband started their own fish marketing business on their own and were doing fish deliveries around the midwest. Emma took a year to work for a magazine at Portland and do an art residency in New York. At the end of that year they had started on Salmon Sisters and prioritized fishing because it was too hard to get a real job. Claire wanted a real job really badly because her senior year everyone in her program went and worked for their uncle’s investment school or whatever. They had been making shirts and selling them at a shop on the spit. A lot of it came from not having a job starting that summer. She couldn’t find a job when she was going to fish all summer so she took odd jobs and did Salmon Sisters on the side. They were both on the west coast and in Alaska in the summers. They finally decided to fully invest in themselves and their fishing and how to make it work. It was hard to imagine how to do that out of school. How did Claire and Emma’s relationship evolve in college? Emma and Claire’s schools were only a couple hours away. They would see each other at crew events and spend holidays and summers together, so they saw each other a lot in college. But working together was very natural. Working on a boat you have to trust each other and communicate. When you fish you have to trust your crew, so they developed that trust and ability to work together in adverse conditions early. They developed a lot of resilience and grit. Their first mini-business together was selling eggs as little girls in False Pass. Where Salmon Sisters is more food-driven. They are also offering more gear that people can use in a professional capacity. It’s been a big learning experience to manage apparel and accessories. They listen closely to what their customers and community want. They’ve grown up with them. A lot of their peers now have families that already have a pair of fancy boats and are more interested in feeding and growing their kids. They have a million ideas but there is a balance in figuring out what people want and what the Salmon Sisters team can produce. The other important thing in decision making is having everything they sell connect their customers to the water, because a lot of their customers are or were commercial fishermen. A lot of the things they put out is things they would want to wear as fishermen. It’s a reflection of what they’re into at the time. Direct-to-consumer fish marketing. Claire doesn’t think that all or even most fishermen will direct market their fish. The value comes from stewardship and story-telling and being part of the food chain a little longer. Salmon Sisters does not sell the exact fish that Emma and her have touched. What they sell is from processors in those fisheries. It’s always felt a little funky because they can offer this story and the logistics and the education and recipes and outreach, but they can’t close the loop of directly processing their own catch. They catch such a large quantity of fis

This week on The Alaska Show I sit down with Rob Prince, Associate Professor of Documentary Filmmaking at University of Alaska Fairbanks and the founder of Dark Winter Nights: True Stories from Alaska. Rob and I discuss documentaries, how DWN was founded from his experience with reality tv, who controls Alaska's image to the world, and what makes a great story. As a special bonus we include one of the great stories from DWN at the beginning of the program! Go check out the show wherever you listen to podcasts or go to DarkWinterNights.com and get tickets to a live show! Next one is tentatively planned for the Saturday before Thanksgiving in Fairbanks. (0:55) Intro (3:27) Dark Winter Nights Story (13:59) Rob Prince Interview Interview Notes   Robert Prince is the Associate Professor of Digital Journalism and Documentary Filmmaking at University of Alaska - Fairbanks He was interested in video as a kid and he was amazed he could make a living making videos. As he got into college he took some tv criticism classes that opened his eyes to the power of television to be a force for good in the world and how it falls short. He wanted to make a difference in the world through his field. He liked being able to entertain and educate people at the same time. He also likes it because it’s a form of filmmaking you can do almost single-handedly. To get into fiction you have to convince people to act in the film and make them good at it.   Are documentaries journalism or entertainment? They’re both. It’s like paper journalism, it’s whatever you put on it. It can be long-form journalism which is why he’s in the journalism department. There are programs like Frontline on PBS that are great examples of documentary journalism. Then you have fun baloney documentaries and some that are downright evil. In the best way it’s both.   Alex’s favorite documentary is Queen of Versailles.   The dream of most documentary filmmakers is to have things unfold right on-screen. Queen of Versailles is a combination of luck and hard work.   Rob’s favorite documentaries depend on his mood. One of his favorites is “Flag Wars.” It was produced clearly by someone who was new at it. Some of the best documentaries are made by people that are not great filmmakers, but are just passionate about a subject. It’s the story of gentrification of a historically African-American Baltimore community by the homosexual community. Great documentaries leave you with more questions and things to think about.    Rob also likes anything by Errol Morris. Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control and Thin Blue Line are both fantastic. Errol Morris - 90% of his stuff is awesome. On Netflix “Dirty Money” is a thing he likes. Rob doesn’t love True Crime because he doesn’t know if it makes him a better person. He can’t let go of horrible crimes and true stories. He started watching a documentary about priest abuse and the murder of a nun. He was waiting for the story to get to some point of justice but he couldn’t.   Rob’s biggest problem with True Crime is “Mean World Syndrome.” The theory is the more tv you watch the more dangerous you think the world is than your neighbor. His concern of people who watch tons of true crime and news is it will warp their sense of how dangerous the world is beyond reality and lead them to do things they don’t need to do. If there’s a vote in the city for more policing vs more funding for schools, people who are afraid will vote for more policing. For example it would be hard to be killed by a serial killer even if you tried. It’s like being a police officer.   Alex loves business documentaries but thinks there are very few good ones. Often they’re a little too heavy-handed. Some are almost messianic biographies of people which is insufferable. He loves business documentaries like Silicon Cowboys on Netflix about the rise of Compaq computers out of Texas. How these guys founded the company and overcame IBM. Why are business makers so hard to make?   The key to a good documentary is access. There aren’t more because what disgraced CEO wants to invite a filmmaker in? If it’s an uplifting story that might be a different story, but billionaires don’t necessarily want to let people in like that. Rob tells his students he votes with his time and dollars. If you want more business documentaries watch the heck out of what they have and they’ll make more.   Frontline has great business documentaries for free streaming at PBS.org   The other documentaries Rob likes are those that change people’s lives and impact the world like Super Size Me by Morgan Spurlock. It had a sweeping effect on McDonald’s and fast food. Another example is Blackfish and how it stopped the breeding and showing of Killer Whales at Sea World. It will entertain you and change the world at the same time.   The subject can be so good that the documentary works. Nature documentaries are a good example. All you need is good footage and some facts and a good voiceover.    You are learning all the time whether you want to or not. Rob’s students think that just because you are watching something student you aren’t learning, but you’re always learning. TV doesn’t always tells you what to think, but it tells you what to think about. When you watch a nature documentary you are thinking about the planet. When you watch reality tv you are thinking about super rich people and their lives. When you watch tv you are basically surrendering your current thought process over to whatever that topic is. What do you want to be pondering in life? That you aren’t as rich as you want to be?   Make a conscious decision of what you watch.   In the 70s advertising had to cut from 60 seconds to 30 seconds, so advertisers didn’t have the time to practically convey their product vs another one. Once you shifted to 30 second short ads they don’t have time - all they can say is “here is how my product makes you feel.” It was no longer about the quality of the product anymore.   Our attention spans are shorter. Nobody reads anymore. Rob doesn’t read anymore. You can convey so much less information in a debate or talk or documentary vs text. People can only take it in the first time. They’re not going to rewind and hear it back again. In a book you don’t have to do that.   What’s the value of education in a creative field like media/journalism/entertainment? Rob doesn’t look down on people who don’t have college degrees, but it depends what you want to do. These days with the competition it’s something that’s going to be important that separates you from the crowd. It’s not always about what you learn but who you meet and know. You’re more likely to hire someone you know and trust that you have a relationship with rather than someone off the street. College is tribal - it’s a social club. You can use that time and take advantage or not. In creative fields it will accelerate your learning dramatically. Rob was mostly self-taught.   Rob is the founder of Dark Winter Nights. It started because Rob was frustrated how Hollywood was showing Alaska. This was 2012-2013. We gave over the reins to Hollywood to control their image.  A production company in LA called Rob and were looking for people living in a dry cabin to do a house hunting show. He was used and never credited and was frustrated. He was a big fan of radio programs like This American Life.   The way he approached it was he knew the world of podcasting was saturated. His idea was to build a local audience, raise awareness, and use it as a launching pad to show folks outside Alaska. He needed it to resonate with Alaskans before it went to the outside world.   The live events have way more tangible payback. If anything they almost “forgot” about the podcast and have focused on live events. Last November they had 900 people. They have about 1600 podcast subscribers. He’s gotten distracted by the live audience side of it. This spring was their 6th year. They can do that now because of income from live events.   The other thing he wants to do is go on tour because he thinks people in the Lower 48 would eat it up. There are a lot of logistical issues. His ultimate goal is to share the real Alaska with the world through podcasts and maybe a tour. His goal for the live events is to be the best dinner party you’ve ever been to. Real people are telling true stories in a natural way. It’s not a Ted Talk, things aren’t planned out to the millisecond.   There’s a reason we love stories, we learn stuff from them. They’re entertaining, but it taps into our empathy. We can put ourselves in others’ stories. Horror movies are so scary because you feel like you’re a character in that film. It’s a body-snatching thing in a good story. Stories are bad because they can’t put themselves in others’ shoes.   What makes a good story? Most people can tell a story and with some coaching they can tell it a lot better. After 45 minutes they can make great progress on their story. There are some people who are inherently not great at storytelling. They can get better but they take more work than others. The process is not that hard. There’s the element of making sure the audience can see what you see. One thing people forget is the audience doesn’t know what they know. The audience can’t picture it. What year was it? What season? You have to convey these things. How old were you? What did the environment look like? Things need to get more and more interesting until the climax, and then the audience needs a moment at the end to bask in it. Any story will be ruined by being too long. He aims for stories to be in the 15 minute range. That’s kind of the magic number, but they’ll range from 3 minutes for kids up to even low-20s. It’s enough time to settle into the story and feel a connection without being so long they get bored. A good 15-1