It's Monday morning everyone. I'm still alive. I have not got the coronavirus yet and I'm pretty excited about that.

I have two really great guests on. One's a long time friend, one's a new friend, and today we are going to talk about Safari Club International.

And who I have on is Alan Ernst from the great Pacific Northwest and Ben Cassidy from the unique Washington DC.

Thanks for coming on guys.

You bet. Happy beer.

Yeah, thank you a lot Aaron.

Yeah, no problem. Just to get things kicked off, how this got going, not too long ago I did a podcast about nonprofits and that relied down a crazy rabbit hole after that got going just because of a few different organizations and kind of their views and their values.

It caused me to do more studying in the last few weeks and I've done probably in my entire life about nonprofits 501c3s and c4s.

What the different nonprofits are actually doing for the hunter and outdoorsman and what they're not doing, where their money comes from, what they do with their money.

And as I went down that rabbit hole, I found that I really aligned with SCI along with a couple other organizations, but I was I was really surprised at what you guys do as I was done at the end of Google, right?

Like googling everything I possibly could researching. You guys do some amazing stuff.

Now, as far as Alan, I've known you for several years, you use Kaffiru products. We've backpacked together and Alan, you're more of a volunteer, where bin, I just met you and you are on staff with SCI.

You guys want to kind of want to explain each of your roles and what you're doing.

Yeah, very well. We think or Alan, if you want to go first, please go please take your your hire up the food chain and me, buddy.

Well, I started off as a volunteer at SCI and now I'm a paid employee, but yeah, I'm Ben Cassidy. So I'm the director of our government affairs department of SCI.

So I oversee our advocacy federally in the US, state and local, international level and also our legal team.

So I work out of our DC office, you know, where we've got our world tied towarders in the office. You know, we have policy experts, wildlife biologists, in house legal counsel who are wildlife and hunting law professionals, as well as a crack com's team.

So we kind of have this Hunters Embassy, Adam Washington DC, that's right in the shadow of the Capitol. So getting this really good access to the meeting with different decision makers.

We've got a state professional who handles all the state works out of Richmond tracking legislation and writing testimony and showing up on the staircase of state capitals to push for hunters.

I started up last July, having spent time in this community and space with NRA and with the Department of the Interior started off, you know, 10 years ago as a volunteer with SCI and gotten involved with the chapter in DC.

And work, you know, as a community partner with SCI while I was at NRA and then work as a government partner, interior now as an employee.

I've always been drawn to SCI and thought their partnerships when I wasn't with them now, you know, lead it because it was really the one group that's in DC that represents hunters.

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