The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 696: Wildfire and the Future of Public Lands with Sen. Tim Sheehy

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with U.S. Senator for Montana Tim Sheehy, Ryan Callaghan, and Brody Henderson. Topics discussed: The U.S. military, wildfires, public lands, and more.  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Check it out at firstlight.com. F I R S T L I T E.com. Joined today by U S Senator Tim Sheehy represents the state of Montana. Uh, Senator Sheehy joined the U S S special or no, not U S special forces, former Navy seal came out of the service and went into wild land firefighting from with an aviation pers from an aviation angle, as he'll explain, came out of that business and was just elected to the U S Senate. You got, they call you guys freshmen. Yeah. Freshman senator from Montana. We're

going to talk about background. We're going to talk about wildfires. We're going to talk about public lands and we'll talk about a couple other things that come up along the way. But for starters, you're from Minnesota. One of our colleagues, Maggie said you're from her hometown of Minnesota. Yeah, yeah. Right up across the street there, there was this old army base that used to build, it was, I mean, 50 caliber ammunition plant there. And that closed down like after Vietnam. So we grew up on a five acre plot around a lot of other folks.

And then right across the street was the barbed wire fence, this old army base. That was thousands of acres of basically just like abandoned land. And yeah, it was a pretty cool place to grow up. Cause you go running around in there. Well, we weren't supposed to, but of course, you know, of course you do.

Yeah. It's different for little kids can do what they. That's exactly right. Yeah. Like they'd see us sometimes and come, you know, yell at us. I'm like, you know, it's an abandoned base. I don't think see what's going on there. It's, and we go in the old factories.

It's huge. One building was 14 acres on the inside. It's you. And when they like shut the doors and left, I mean, it's like, I mean, everything was there, you go to the filing cabinets, all the orders were there. The keys, the bathroom had toilet. I mean, this place had been abandoned for 30 years and they had toilet paper rolls. I mean, they literally shut the gates and walked away.

And for, you know, of course there are things like asbestos everywhere and there's like, you know, holes in the ceiling. So it was not a safe OSHA approved environment for kids to be playing, but that's what we did. But at that age, if somebody comes and yells at you, it just becomes a game, not an actual warning. That's exactly right. Yeah.

You know, it's hilarious about that with the age at which you can just go around and not get in big trouble. And then you hit another age and you can't, there's this hill. I don't mind. I don't want to say to me, I don't want to like call out a neighbor, but there's a hill by our house and our little kids sled there all the time. Never a word.

But our 14 year old, his buddies go over there, sled immediately, has to leave. Exactly. Totally. But our 10 year old could sled there all day and no one says anything to him. He's like, yeah, I don't know. There's the age when they're going to do something dumb. Well, yeah, there's that phase where like, you know,

self-awareness is assumed to be present. You know, like, you know, you were aware enough of yourself that you shouldn't be doing this. Then there's that age wonder. It's like, whatever, we don't care. Yeah. Like that kid probably knows that he's not actually supposed to be on this hill. Right. But yeah, we go in there. And then once I was in the military, I came home one time on leave and And went in I was like I went to the base at this point Hey, can I go like you're like sure like hand me the keys and I walked around like 10 minutes

This is boring. Like it was so much more fun I'm like we knew we weren't supposed to be there then it was like we spent hours running around playing games and now I Could be there's like this is a bunch of abandoned buildings and I'm leaving. That's great. What was your uh, How did you decide to join military like and not only that yeah, not only join the military but going into the into the Navy SEALs Like what was that process for you? You know, it's it's as you guys probably know. I mean, it's like I just turned turned 39 a few months ago and it's like and I was telling someone the other day I was talking to a young man that wanted to go to the Naval Academy. And, and, you know, he had his whole life planned out. He's 19 years old and knows, you know, I got to do this and that

and that. I said, Listen, you know, if you'd asked me when I was 16, 24, 28, 36, where I was going to be in five years, I would have been wrong every single time, like every single time. So you know, I knew I wanted to be in the years, I would have been wrong every single time, like every single time. So, you know, I knew I wanted to be in the military. Uh, I just did. Um, I have no idea why my mom's like, yeah, from the time you could like run, you were had a stick in your hand and running around the woods, you know, shooting things, pretending you were, you

know, whatever. What war did you guys do? We did, uh, we did world war two always. Yeah, of course. I mean, all the war movies as kids, you know, and cowboys and indies. Yeah. We did like Americans and always Germans. Yes.

And never the Japanese, like it was never the Pacific. The, we didn't fight. We didn't fight the Japanese. It was always. Yeah. It was always. European theater. Yes.

Yeah. You know, I grew up dirty dozen Kelly's heroes, all that stuff. So yeah, I was always running around the woods. Yeah. Uh, pretending, you know, Normandy, whatever. So, um, anyways, I knew I wanted to go in the military and my neighbor growing up was a was a Korean

War Navy pilot And I didn't have really much relation my grandparents my mother's side that they died off when I was really young or One before I was born the one when I was young and then my dad's side just we didn't have much relationship there There was some you know just old-school familial strife So he kind of became my grandfather figure and he is Harry Thiebaud's name and his son Steve Thiebaud and their whole family, great folks. So he, he, I knew I was interested in the military and he took me up flying in his cub when I was like eight or nine years old and right away I was like, I love aviation. Like this is amazing. And as soon as I got to reach the

rudder pedals, my feet, when I was like 11, he started teaching me how to fly. So, yeah? Yeah. So at that point I decided I was going to go in the military and be a, as we were just talking before we started about Top Gun, you know, I'm a child of the eighties. Of course we all watched Top Gun on VHS. So, you know, we watched so many times the tape was wearing out, you know, and of course the dog fighting scenes, we rewind and watch so many times, you know, like you could see the tape had been, you know, degraded over time. But so I was like, I'm going to go to the naval academy and be a fighter pilot. And, um, so I was flying planes before I was driving cars, got my solo to plane before I had my driver's license, got my pilot's license in high school.

No kid. And then, uh, yeah, that went to the academy to be a, be a fighter pilot. So. Yeah. And then got there and, you know, I was in high school when 9-11 happened as, as probably all recently, all roughly the same age.

So, you know, was, was, was that, that11 happened, as probably all of us were similar, all roughly the same age, so you know, that was a defining factor of all of our young lives. I got a huge jump on you. I was in graduate school. Yeah, really? Well, you age well, you look great, fine wine. Thank you. You answered that well.

Yes, but I was, so got to the academy, this is fall of 2004, summer of 2004. And you know, there's always perception of organization from the outside. You perceive something from the outside and then when you're inside, you know, your perceptions normally clash with reality and things change. So I knew I wanted to be a fighter pilot and going in and when I got there, you know, I was immersed in the military for the first time really. And you know, we had Iraq was going full swing, was immersed in the military for the first time really. And, you know, we had Iraq was going full swing, Afghanistan was going full swing for the first time and, you know, 40 years America was seeing casualties come home and we were, you know, we had our

first Academy grad killed in action in a long time. So being at the Naval Academy was a very, you know, it was a wartime feel. And I think something you think about the GWOT, global war on terror, of course, was, um, people in the military, like the 2% of people in America that served, like we were all at war for 20 years. You know, like my wife, she was a Marine. We met the Academy, like her brother served, like everyone we knew, all of our best friends, all of our families were living the war. Yeah.

Most of America wasn't, they just went on with life as normal. It wasn't like World War II where everybody was pitching in and rationing food and rationing rubber. And everyone had a brother or a son deployed. For us, it was like a super small sector of America deployed again and again and again and again and again, and felt the pain and carried the load. Um, so anyways, where I'm going with that is I get to the academy and pretty quickly realized that, you know, this is a ground war.

I wanted to fly planes, but, um, you know, the war is being fought door to door, you know, in Sadr city and, you know, rock to rock in the valleys of Afghanistan and flying up above ahead. I mean, you were a supporting act, like the real action was on the ground. So I actually quit the academy my fall, my freshman year. I was like, hey, I got to go fight the war. I've got to go. Typical 18, 19-year-old kid full of piss and vigor. I'm like, I've got to go fight because the war will be over

by the time I graduate. I got to do my part. So I went to resign from the academy. And I was at the top of my class at that point, very highly ranked at that point in time. And they were like, hey, why are you like the top guy? Where are you leaving? I'm like, well, I got to go fight.

You know, like I can't sit here and take calculus while there's guys on the ground fighting, so I got to do my part. And my commanding officer for my company was like, all right, well, you know, fine, you do what you want to do, but you got to talk to a guy before you leave. Here's a name. He's going to meet you down at the at the kind of restaurant on campus tonight, which we weren't allowed in his plebe. So it was kind of like, well, I'm not allowed to go in there.

It's like, no, you can go tonight. I'll give you permission. Was it kind of like, this is going to help you or hurt you type of conversation at all? No context. Like, Hey, cool. All right. You want to leave?

I'm not going to stop you, but you need to talk to this guy, but you know, that's why I have a conversation with this guy. So I'm a plebe, you know, which is the lowest possible, you know, your, what's that stand for? So plebe is is what you call? It's a that's what you're fresh. It's not an acronym. No, please a P like ancient Rome plebeans like oh So plebe like which basically means the most common commoner like it's like a like a pawn and the game of chess. Yep, so You are the lowest ranking person in the military, basically as a plea.

So it, instead of freshmen, we call them plebes at the service Academy. So anyways, I go down to meet with this guy and it's a full bird army colonel, special forces guy, which for a plea is basically like, you know, getting you hired in that. So I'm like, oh wow. Like, Hey sir.

He's like, Oh, you must be Tim. I'm like, yep. So why here are you going to quit and leave the Academy? I said, yeah, you know, I got to go fight the war. I can't sit here and go to school while the war's going on. And he said, well, I just got back from my third deployment during the war. And I can tell you, you're not going to miss it.

We're going to be fighting this war for another 20 years. And what I need is smart young leaders and officers. Oh, he should have taken that message to the, yeah. He should have taken that message to DC. Yeah. to the, he should have taken that message to DC. So anyways, he convinced me to stick around and stay and finish my education in the process. You know, he, long other stories for the front of the time, but I got to go into this exchange program where starting that next year, I went through Army Ranger Training, Ranger Regiment Exchange, Special Forces Group, Airborne, Recon School. So kind of the, I went to the Army Commando Special Ops Training Pipeline, which was a

great experience. Met some amazing folks, learned a ton. And because really our Special Operations Command, JSOC, SOCOM, it's really an Army organization. I mean, the vast majority of our Special Ops organization in America is Army, like 85% of it. And, you know know then you got basically Air Force, Marines and Navy make up very small percentages. So the

SEALs are a very small part of our global special operations footprint. So it's important to understand how the Army works and that was the reasoning there. So kind of by accident I ended up going to the SEAL teams and you know once you're at the Academy you know you start to figure out what culturally you fit best in. And Naval Aviation is the best aviation community in the military, but at the same time, my personality fit pretty quickly, I realized, was with the SEAL teams and the Special Forces. Did you still have to do all the cold water stuff, just like the SEALs, the butt, you

still had to do that. Oh yeah. I don't know if you did the equipment in the Army. Yeah, the all-course validation in course validation and, and seal training. So yeah, that's the thing, man. Like the, the, the, the, my specialty is walking. Like I could do, I could do an elimination course about walking, but sitting in cold water.

Yeah. That's my week. I just, yeah. Well, that's, that's one of the, one of the great at, at triting factors and training is just the suck, you know, and racism. So, that's, that's one of the great at writing factors and training is just the suck, you know, and racism. So, you know, everyone wants the videos and

thinks it's all this really tough physical evolution. You got to jump, you got to do this crazy obstacle course. You got to do this insanely, you know, whatever what gets guys isn't, isn't the test gates, uh, whether it's, you know, assembling weapons, jumping onto planes.

What gets guys is just the suck, just the continued suck of like, not just that it sucks, but then the knowledge that it's assembling weapons, jumping onto planes, what gets guys is just the suck, just the continued suck of like, not just that it sucks, but then the knowledge that it's gonna continue to suck for a very long time. It's not like a hunt where it's like, all right, well, we'll be out of here today or tomorrow, the next day, we're gonna get in the truck,

we're gonna go get a hot shot. This is gonna go on for, and then you don't know. It's not like, all right, 62 more days to go, or it's like, this will just continue to suck until it doesn't. And then that, that unknown is what causes people to quit. That's really, it's the unknown of how bad the pain will be and how long it will go for. When folks decide, all right, this isn't for me. When you got deployed, what kind of, like, where did you go and what were you working on?

How did they spend your time? It was a crazy period of time. I mean, a lot of times in life, you know, when you're in the soccer, when you're in those chaotic periods of life, you know, they don't feel chaotic. You're just doing it. And as you normally years later, you look back, whether you have a whole bunch of kids close together, you know, whether it was a crazy time in your business, you know, or whether it was like during the war years, at the time, you just feel like you're doing your job. And then kind of years later, you look back like, Oh my God, like that was a crazy time how much we were doing. So like, I mean, during my time in my wife, she had

just commissioned in as a Marine Corps officer. So we were a married couple that was doing, you know, we were both deploying to the war zone separately. You don't like deploy together. It's not even not based out of the same area. No, no, like, you know, like it's not a couple's golf trip. Like, I mean, the Marine center where they need to go and the SEALs send me where they need me to go. So like, we're not like, we got married to the mail. Like I'm a mail order husband, literally.

So she was in Afghanistan deployed. I was deployed somewhere else and we kept trying to actually con, like get the marriage done. And we were like, we're not going to be together for like two and a half years. When are we actually going to be physically co-located? Were you guys even able to communicate with each other on a regular basis? You know, it was just pre-Skype and FaceTime and all that. So yes, but not like it is now.

Not where you can just open a tablet and have a meeting. It was like everything was landline phones still at the bases and snail mail and email when you could get access to an internet connection. And at most times in the, you know, 09, 10, 11, 12, like it was still landline phones and landline internet. So yeah, I mean, we'd communicate when we could, but it's not law. It's vastly improved today. Our service members today, as they should have a far better, you know, you can connect

to a wifi connection and still see your family. So in Montana, you can get married by proxy. That's what we did. We were, we were married via double proxy in Montana, neither of us were there. We're the only state that's legal where you can get married via double proxy. So Carmen figured that out.

She was in Afghanistan. She's like, yeah, I figured how we can get married. I'm like, all right, how send it. It's like, um, we can get married through the mail. I'm like, really? I didn't know that was legal. She was like, well, it's only legal in one state, Montana. I'm like, wow. She's like, yeah, we should notarize a form and mail it in. And basically they take it to the courthouse in Kalispell and two people we have, I still have no idea who they are, stand in and you pay them the proxy fee and they

get married for you. And then, you know, a couple of weeks later we get our forms mailed back to us like, Oh, we were married. We were married on February 11th. Cool. Happy anniversary. Yeah. So that's how we did it. It's cool. Although, you know, cause it's gotta be for the military. No, no, actually. Well, I mean, it is now, now their whole business model is they target military couples say exactly the situation my wife and I are dealing with, but where the law came from is the homestead days so you know only like half of homestead claims were actually awarded you know the whole perception you know from what was that stupid Tom Cruise movie where a terrible Irish accent you know where they're front there but also the

fighting scenes were great far away yeah I was like oh yeah I was like oh my, huh, huh. Joseph loves Catherine. And he punches the horse. That's great. Yeah, I was like, oh my God. But anyway, so they run out there and jam their stake in the ground and boom, here's your land. Like actually, surprisingly, the process is far more in-depth. And the government didn't want random speculators grabbing homestead claims. Obviously, that happened, but that's not what they wanted.

They wanted families to settle on the land, build a home, build a ranch, harvest crops. So homestead claims, one of the first criteria that they would award them was based on if you were married with a family and living on the land. Okay. And during those territory days before states were states, they were kind of competing for people because the sooner you had more people and land homesteaded, the sooner you were going to get statehood. I mean, that wasn't like a technical threshold, but that was basically, once

you had more people and more constituents in your state, you, you had a better chance of being as, or in your territory, you had better chance of being a state. So anyways, And a male to female threshold. That was very real. That was very real. So it was like 96%. It was crazy.

So Montana, territory rightfully is like, Hey, we can make it legal to basically come out here and then mail order a wife, show your piece of paper. Look, I'm married. This is my homestead. I live here and it helped to process homestead claims. So anyway, it's kind of an interesting. So you were in and out of, I have to imagine.

You have Iraq, Afghanistan. How many times did you get? So, I mean, all the times, you know, every time I was ever sent, I mean, basically mine, I really did four deployments, you know, but ultimately, you know, I was, I was sent overseas, you know, several times, I really did four deployments, but ultimately, I was sent overseas several times more than that, but ultimately, Iraq, Afghanistan, a couple of times, to South America for counter-narcotics and host nation partnership there, and then

a couple of other trips around different types of missions. So yeah, I had a great experience all over the world and loved leading our teams everywhere. It's a huge honor. When you look at the responsibility, again, you look back at the responsibility you're given. I mean, as a 25, 26 year old guy, you know, at one point between the Afghan army troops I had, my SEALs, my army assignment

that I'd get an army platoon assigned to me. And I had like 200 people under my command and daily combat operations, you know, you know, gun fights every day, airstrikes. And it's like, I was the commander. Like I was in charge. You think about that in the business world, you know, that amount of responsibility given to a 25, 26 year old.

And that's true across the military. I mean, you take a 25 year old pilot in the air force, he's flying a hundred million dollar aircraft. I mean, you take a 25 year old pilot in the air force, he's flying a hundred million dollar aircraft. I mean, so the responsibility that goes home to his dad, won't let him use the quad runner. Exactly. It's a toll.

It's weird. You come home and that's part of the reason the veteran transition, you know, I've spoken to veterans banquet last night here in town and I actually worked out with our air force, uh, with our ROTC kids. So I got this patch in my jacket here. You know, we, uh, worked out with the ROTC kids yesterday at MSU and kind of imparted that upon them.

Like, you know, you get home, it's a totally different, you'll work at a small business. Well, you know, you can't drive the forklift yet. You don't have the OSHA approval. It's like, dude, I used to like, you know, drive helicopters. You know, I used to drive tanks. You know, a 19-year-old kid will be at the, of a $3 billion submarine, you know, driving those things. So it's a, and then so that's sometimes hard for vets to come home and have like that reduction in scope all of a sudden.

It's like, you know, I used to have the, I have to prove yourself again, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's tough. It's crazy. Yeah. That's a tough transition for everybody. When you came out of that, how did you decide to get into wild land? Yeah.

So wild wild and firefighting. Like me ended up in the seals. I mean, I make no bones about it. I never like, almost everything I've done in life to include politics, which from true talk about was an accident. Like it was never a plan. So I basically, I didn't plan to get out of seal teams when I did. Um, you know, I got injured and for the time being, it was like, Hey, you

know, you, you have to go off the duty roles of the teams. You can't be an active seal anymore. We got to do meta evaluation. I'm like, well, you know, if I can't be a seal, I can't lead a team. Like, what do I do? Push paper and basically like, yeah, but that's okay. You push paper for awhile. And I was like, listen, that's not like, if I can't leave my guys on missions

and you're going to send me to headquarters for two or three years, like, you know, I'll move on with life. So, so that's why. Did you not get your 20 year retirement then? No, no, I got out. You know, I'd only been in all in 11 years between active and reserve time when I, when I, when I was done. So, no, no, yeah, you have to be, you have to be in for 20 years, active duty to retire at 20. So, yeah, so basically we got out and I decided at that point, Basically, we got out and I decided at that point, there was a technology we used in the special operations community.

We were really the innovators behind the tactical implementation of this, and that is airborne surveillance. So basically, if you ever watch these special ops, SEAL, CIA movies, you'll always see the aircraft overhead with an infrared sensor, with an electro-optic sensor, whatever it is basically watching the whole mission take place and providing a really Critical array of situational awareness for us on the ground You know, we could see where enemy fire was coming from. We could locate enemy positions We could load know where our own people were

So if we're calling an airstrike, we make sure we knew where all the friendly forces were before we started dropping bombs Which has been a any of you guys know what the largest killer of US troops in the first Gulf War was? people were, so for calling it an airstrike, we make sure we knew where all the friendly forces were before we started dropping bombs, which has been a, any of you guys know what the largest killer of US troops in the first Gulf War was? Not aviation? Friendly fire? Yeah, us, our own people. Now, if we had good data, which we don't, but I

promise you, if you had good data, you'd see the same in Vietnam, Korea, probably World War II. You think so? Absolutely. I mean, it's just a reality of conflict is friendly fire is sometimes just as if not more dangerous than any fire. I mean, the fog of war is real.

I mean, you watch these movies and, you know, every time you see a gunfight, it's like, you know, one guy's looking at the other guy in the eye and like the cunt comes out and he's like, you know, they all, you know, this isn't Mel Gibson, a lethal weapon as much as, you know, like bullets are flying, a lot of, you know, you don, you know, this isn't Mel Gibson, a lethal weapon as much as, you know, like bolts are flying. A lot of you don't even know where the hell they're coming from.

You don't even know who's shooting at you, especially in places like Afghanistan and urban warfare in Iraq. It's like sometimes the biggest challenge is figuring out where you're getting shot at from. Then once you figure that out, all right, now we can deal with it. But a lot of times, you know, you're taking fire inbound. You don't know where it's coming from. And that's something the movies never really capture. It's like, you know, you're taking fire inbound. You don't know where it's coming from. Um, and that's something the movies never really capture. It's like, you know, someone gets shot all of a sudden, they'd like, they see

the guy in the bell tower a mile away. There it is. You know, blow it up. It's like, no, it could be minutes, hours while you're taking fire before you figure out what's going on. So when we were little kids, we'd always like, I'd ask my dad, like, how many people did you shoot? You know, he'd be like, you can't tell what's going on.

That's exactly, I'd say a hundred percent right. I mean, you know, a hundred percent right. It is,'d be like, you can't tell what's going on. That's exactly, I'd say 100% right. I mean, you know, 100% right. It's like, you know, you just don't know. Because you're shooting into, as you would say, you're shooting in the windows a lot of times. Yeah, the fog of war is an absolutely real thing, 100%. And, but anyway, so it was, we had a capability that we exploited very effectively throughout the warriors, which was that airborne surveillance. And came in many ways, you know, you had lidar you and hyperspectral yet electro optic infrared yet communications detectors to identify walkie-talkies and cell phones and really that became a hugely important advantage for us and About the time so I'd seen that technology said man if we could take that give him my pilot background I think it take that and apply it to public safety tasks in America law enforcement border security fire

like, you know We could probably save a lot of lives and do a lot of good here and right about the time I was getting out That the debris for a terrible tragedy kind of became public as they finished the investigation That was the Arnall Mountain fire down in Arizona And if you're not familiar with that that was they made a movie about it called only the brave happened in 2013. And the grand, so the grand mountain hotshots were heading up on this fire. And it was one of those dangerous, real dangerous desert sage brush fires. Cause when that, when those, you know, Zephyr winds, when those winds hit down

there in the high deserts in the Southwest, like that those fires rip, I mean, they'll move 80, 90 miles an hour. And I mean, they can be deadly. And it's not the timber fires up here in Northwest Montana which are their own set of challenges, which is a really thick, heavy fuel that's hard to put out, but they don't move as fast as these ones. So anyways, the team got up there on the ridge line,

pretty quickly realized this thing's ripping. We can't fight this thing. We got to break contact. Let's get out of here. And the team leader made the right decision to take his team out of the way. Unfortunately, he made the right decision with the wrong information. And you know, the fire, he didn't understand the fire, it shifted directions and burned his whole team alive, killed all 19 of them right there on the side of the mountain.

Do you know what I remember about that is when they finally started releasing details, I remember looking down that list and it was like the kids, he's got a two year old, four year old, six year old, next guy, one year old, two year old, next guy. It's like, cause they're all like in that kind of like, not all of them, but I just remember being overwhelmed by how many were in that like early stage little kids. And they were like that. They were at that age, you know, whatever the hell mid-30 year yeah whatever I was like damn man and that's the and

that's why so I felt I felt myself in the shoes of that team leader you know I'd been on the side of a desert mountain in the middle of gunfights with guys blown legs blown off guys bleeding out making those tough decisions and I'm like man you know his whole team got wiped out andALs, we'd had a few of those incidents. Helicopters go down, exactly what you said. It's like, we're all in that age range where, and one of my SEAL batons, we had nine SEALs all have babies on the same team within two months.

You know, all the wives were like pregnant at the same time. And so to your point, it's like, man, I'm like, that hit home for me. I felt that, like that was an event that definitely, I was like, wow. And what I realized was I felt myself in that guy's boots. I'd been there, I'd been outside of a desert mountain, a hundred plus degree heat, full gear, sweating,

chaos happening, worried about bringing my guys home alive. And I realized if he'd had the same tools I'd had in Afghanistan, his team probably would have been alive. So that led to me starting Bridger Aerospace and we ended up, you know, several other companies spun out of that as well along the way. But the point was to bring that airborne intelligence capability that supported ground guys to industry and to public safety tasks other than the military. Why'd you come to Montana though? Yeah, so you um, we come here to train

before we go to Afghanistan. So our SEAL teams would come out here. Um, actually Butte was our home base, got him Rod Allen out there and Butte has a group called the peak and he is a former air force special ops guy, so he would host high altitude training events for, uh, teams getting ready to go, uh, to Afghanistan.

So everything from how to do parachuting to high altitude, high angle shooting, you know, most shooting ranges are level. The reality is in Afghanistan, you're never shooting level, you're always shooting down and most of the time you're shooting up, you know, and because people are shooting down. Yeah.

I mean, you know, the, the, the peaks over there are 22, 23,000 feet high, you know, these aren't 8,000 foot peaks. I mean, you're, you're fighting in the foothills of the Himalayas. Hindu Kush is the most rugged, 23,000 feet high. These aren't 8,000 foot peaks. I mean, you're fighting in the foothills of the Himalayas. Hindu Kush is the most rugged, basically, terrain in the world. So you're not just shooting up a few hundred feet. You're shooting up.

So horseback riding, packing in high angle rope rescue, high altitude medicine. Basically, we go out there and heat assembly is fantastic training modules for us. And we bring seals out here and train. So during a couple of those trips, Carmen had come out and visited. And we kind of decided, hey, this is a great spot. If we ever get out of the military, if that ever, maybe we'll come here and raise our family.

Lord works in mysterious ways. Things happened, I got hurt, timing lined up, so we decided to start our company here. So me and my co-founder who was also a military officer started our company and you know we hoped maybe one day we'd have like eight or ten employees but had no idea you know we scaled through through Ascent Vision Technologies was spun out of Bridger which is another great success story and a couple of other companies you know about 500 jobs worldwide we created we had bases in Australia and Spain and Italy and elsewhere so we kind of created an international company and all based right here. So. Maybe I misunderstood it. As I've become familiar with you through the race, the Senate race, but you guys have a heavy focus on wildfires.

Totally. Yeah. No. So Bridger Aerospace basically, you know, 70% of that company is all aerial wildland firefighting. You know, we got a base in Spain. I wasn't aware of the other applications. Yeah, so that sensor technology I had mentioned, we spun into a separate product-based company called Ascent Vision. So basically, Bridger Aerospace was our aerial firefighting arm, and basically the mission there was to bring military-style close air support

from our lessons from the war, cut pace that bring those lessons to wildland fire. And as we've seen in recent months, and as most people live out West Sea, like these fires are nasty and like we have not been winning the battle. We just lost America's biggest city just got burned over by this, Lahaina a couple years ago, and almost every Western state can point to just a massive disaster that's happening. It's like, you know, we can do better than we're doing. How would you, oh, sorry, you know, go ahead.

How would you, how would Bridger Aerospace get involved with a specific fire? Like, would you get a call from the government and they're like, hey, we need you guys, or how? Yeah, so, I mean, all of aircraft, not at all, 99% of aircraft flying over wildfires in America come from a private company. So basically the government decided in the 1960s, we're not going to operate firefighting

planes. For a while, the government did it themselves kind of in the, I actually wrote a book about this called Mud Slingers about the history of aerial firefighting. And all the profits go to benefit fallen wildland firefighters, but it was more of a history book. You wrote the book? Yeah. Oh, okay. So it was something I was interested in as I was

learning about aero firefighting, um, because I got into the industry really by accident, knew nothing about it. And then as I'm sitting at firebases as a pilot, cause I flew all our planes, I'd be sitting at the firebases. It's like being a fireman, except your fire engine flies instead of drive.

So you're hanging out the firebases, shooting the shit, talking to folks all day. And you start talking to some of these old timers and they're telling you old stories from the 60s and 70s and you start to figure out, man, the history of this is amazing. I mean, flying in, flying through smoke, dropping slurry, dropping water on wildfires.

Like a lot of these guys were like World War II heroes, Vietnam, I mean, they'd already flown the toughest stuff in the world in the toughest conditions and they can't even basically needed that adrenaline fix still. And now they start flying wildfire. I mean, they'd already flown the toughest stuff in the world in the toughest conditions and they can't even basically needed that adrenaline fix still. And now they start flying wildfire. As you start seeing history of that, but basically most, almost every single aircraft that flies a wildfire is contract owned and are operated.

Because the government pretty much decided in the 60s, you know what, we're not going to own an operator on aircraft. It's too expensive. It's too technically complex for us to just manage the way our budget cycle works. We're going to just hire contractors to fight fire from the air. We'll do it on the ground. So if I breaks out and you guys are just waiting for the phone to ring. Basically. So we'll get pre-staged around. And again, we could talk for hours in this accident, Sean Ron podcast, you know, a couple months ago and basically spent three hours talking just about wildfire. But yeah, we talked about how that all works.

And again, I could talk for hours about it, but basically, you know, we, we are pre-positioned as air crews and, and basically they will call us up and tell us what fire to go to basically, hey, go to this fire today. And sometimes mid area gets sent to a different fire. So you could take off.

I've taken off sometimes, you know, late morning and I'll fight three or four different fires, you know, go water bomb one, boom, shift to this one, shift to that one, and you'll fight multiple fires on the same tank of fuel in the air. And then come back and recharge. God, your insur, insurance premium has got to be a bitch in that business, man. It is. So, um, you know, and actually, what are you going to do again?

Yeah. Well, and it's how expensive is the plane? Yeah. I mean, as long as you bring that up, because I mean, that's really, and actually, so what are you going to do again? Yeah. Well, and it's expensive is the plane Yeah, I mean as well you bring that up because I mean that that's really I mean after LA, you know Those of us who lived in Western States, you know, we all know wildfire is an issue We're all familiar with it. But you know the average New Yorker average person in Chicago Average person lands like wildfire like the hell I grew up in Michigan. We never talked about it Yeah, it's just not doesn't like neighbor one time had his leaf fire get out of control for a minute, you know, but it made it into the edge of his yard.

It's enough the neighborhood for a few minutes. Yeah. But these million acre fires where it's like a whole, like, you have thousands of guys on the ground on water bombers come in. That's just doesn't for most of America. That doesn't really, they don't get it. Um, but after LA, everyone's like, oh wow, like this is, this is a thing. Um, but yeah, you know, wow, like this is a thing.

But the big impact, the word you said is insurance. So the LA wildfire is the most expensive disaster in American history ever, period. Quarter of a trillion dollars, more than any hurricane, any earthquake. Is that right? Huge, massive. And that's just the cost to recover. That doesn't even start to discuss what that does to insurance premiums, because when the insurance agency, I'm sorry, the insurance industry absorbs the impacts of the LA wildfires

on a comprehensive manner, like when all these underwriters and the reinsurers, because insurance all flows down to a pool of very consolidated reinsurance companies. I don't care whether you're talking about iPhone insurance, whether you're talking about car insurance, but especially homeowners insurance or airplane insurance, all that flows back down to a handful of reinsurers. And the amount of which insurance affects people's lives, I don't think they really appreciate. Like for instance, you know, I don't want to go into too much of a tangent, but this is just a good example of how insurance can affect something that appears to be totally unaffiliated. Ukraine was the biggest impact in the history of aviation insurance, the war in Ukraine.

There were massive amounts of aircraft destroyed on the ground, whole airlines repossessed. That shook the aviation insurance industry to its core. And then when Israel, the attack on Israel happened, you know, there's still isn't like common, there still isn't full airline service back in Israel. Now, like basically Hamas has been obliterated, like the active daily threat. Yes, it will always be there, but like, but very few airlines have resumed service into Israel.

Because insurance and a lot of airlines, airlines getting attacked, why aren't you flying? You're discriminating against the Jews. And you're like, no, like our insurance companies will not underwrite an aircraft flying into a war zone. Yeah. Because that changes the profile. Because like the Ukraine war, I mean, they've, they've shot down, uh, I think two,

right, two passenger planes in relation to the combatants and thousands of other aircraft that's right on the ground. So basically insurance won't underwrite an airliner flying into Tel Aviv. So therefore the airlines like we can't fly in without insurance. Like that's not legal. So when that insurance impact is absorbed by the

housing industry, I mean, right now some people's homeowners insurance is more than their mortgage. If you can get it. I mean, they've seen 900, a thousand, 2000% increases in wildfire premiums for people's homeowner's insurance. If they can get insurance. A lot of people can't get insurance at all.

And it's not even a wildfire prone area. It's sometimes it's flood prone or hurricane prone because this fire specifically really was like the straw that broke the camel's back for homeowner's insurance. Now, if you can't get insurance on your home, what else can't you get for that home? A mortgage. Exactly. Exactly right. And imagine if 10 to 20% of American homes become illiquid as a result of

unavailability of home insurance. I mean, how many people need a mortgage to refi their home? They use that money to invest in a business. How many people depend on a second home? That's their investment, rental income, they have a attached dwelling unit, the Airbnb, whatever. How many people depend on the liquidity of their home to live? I mean, most, most Americans have a mortgage. And then that home becomes illiquid, you can't sell it because then the buyer pool goes from anybody

who needs a mortgage, if they find out they can't insure the home, they can't get a mortgage for it, your home is unsellable. So you think about that, when that starts to affect, which it will now here, it's only been three months, is that is digested into the homeowners market and everyone comes up for renewals. I mean, it could be a bigger impact on the homeowners market than like the 08 financial crisis. So like this wildfire thing is not just a boutique Western issue.

It's not a boutique of forest management thing. Don't log this, log that. It really is like an existential economic one because I mean, how do you put a value on human life? But like the impact directly of LA is a quarter of a trillion dollars. So printing a quarter of a trillion dollars right now is inflationary. Like that's just on its own, but that doesn't even talk about the impact it's going to have when that whole episode is talk about the impact it's going to have when that

whole episode is absorbed by the insurance market. Do you think that wildfires, like, I mean, not the cost associated with them because the insurance industry or the costs associated with them because of housing or whatever, but do you think they're actually worse now? Do you mean like our fires are there like, like higher intensity, less predictable fires now than there were 20 years ago? I mean, that's the impression you get, but I mean, does it really felt that way by people involved in that industry? Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately short answer is, is yes, with the caveat that our sample set is very thin and also the whether the fires themselves are worse

they are exacerbated by the fact that our wildland urban interface is exponentially bigger than it's ever been before yeah you know a great example is the Marshall fire in Colorado like three years ago now maybe four years ago it burned the Denver suburb for like a thousand homes down Had that exact same fire happened in the exact same spot like five years prior No one would have known her care because it was basically a cow pasture I got you so but when the fire starts burning down thousands of homes Like so this fire that happened in LA in January terrible tragedy

obviously That almost exact same fire happened in 1961 called January. Terrible tragedy, obviously. That almost exact same fire happened in 1961 called the Bel Air fire. And it was bad, but it's not talked about much because we didn't have the massive sprawl in LA yet. And take a big sky, for example. People can go back and forth as the terrible that big sky grew, is sky good as big sky bad

Okay, whatever, but it's there. All right, whether you like it is there. We now have Thousands of people living there massive economic investment around it 50 years ago before Chet Huntley rode his horse up there I mean if that area had burned probably nobody would have noticed I mean, maybe the local paper would have written article about it But honestly would have been okay Mountain Valley burns a couple cab a couple of cabins, a couple of ranches. Yeah.

And a bunch of people being like, oh, and the hunting is going to be great up there. Today, I mean, you've got billions of dollars of investment out there. That area burns. Not only are we got one road in, one road out, not only are thousands of people going to die because they can't get out of there in time, there's going to be massive economic impact and loss up there. So to go back to that insurance footprint. Yes, exactly. So, and couple that with, we are coming off really a 40 year period

of a huge shift in our forest management mindset, where, you know, again, it's, I don't wanna be political about this cause it's just not a political issue. This affects people, it'll burn down your house, whether it's red or blue, it doesn't matter this because it's just not a political issue. This affects people. It'll burn down your house whether it's red or blue. It doesn't matter. But it's just a fact.

Our forest management policies have radically changed in the past 30 years. And the impact is you guys know better than I. I mean, I'll be up on our forest service. We're a cabin right now at the ranch. I'll be up there today. But it's like, you walk off the trail of forest service land, basically, you've got beetle-killed deadfall six feet high. Like you basically have a very hard time getting off a trail now. And, you

know, forest treatment logging projects have basically been injuncted to the point where they, they almost don't happen anymore. So I think a combination of factors of our, our change in mindset of forestry, our wildland airman interface is, has grown massively. I mean, tens of millions of people have moved into wildfire prone areas that didn't use to live there. Sure. Therefore people cause fires, tire chains,

cigarette butts, fireworks, gender reveal parties, whatever the hell you want to, you know, people cause fires. And then when fires happen near people, the, the, um, the impetus to fight them and put it out as far more when you have a thousand homes instead of just a thousand acres of sage brush and cheatgrass. Yeah.

Which means less stuff's getting burnt into a mosaic pattern and you create more areas that are ready for massive. So I don't want to make you crystal ball this, but I mean, we've the, on the political level, like we've been talking about like active management, active forest management for, you know, very publicly for close to a decade now. Right. And talking about, you know, the Southeast burns so much and look how healthy their forests are and, and getting that mindset, like reestablished back out here in the West. Like, like what's the next chapter? Yep. So we're basically writing it right now. I think, you know, LA was a terrible disaster. A lot of people killed, you know, economic 14,000 structures. I mean, 14,000, I mean, that's basically all of-

Is that really the number? Yeah. It's like all of the Gallatin Valley. So, um, we're writing that book right now. Um, and it's all bipartisan. Like I'm on my 14th bill right now. I mean, this is my life. So I showed up and I'm not, you know, co-chair of the wildfire caucus in the Senate. Cool.

Alex Padilla from California is co-chair and, um, we are moving at breakneck pace because this woke people up, people that typically wouldn't have cared about wildfire. Andy Kim from New Jersey, a great example. He's a New Jersey Senator. Um, our first like two weeks, uh, after we, we, we did our orientation, New Jersey's burning and he calls me cause he knows my background. I was like, Tim, like, how come there's nobody, there's no helicopters,

no planes putting this fire out? Like what's going on? Like, all right, well, let's, let me give you a quick lesson how this works. Like, not only is there nobody fighting your fire from the air, but there's nobody going to be coming to fight your fire from the air. He's like, how is that the case? Like if I had the Al-Naml-1, a fire engine shows up at my house right away. I had to explain to him that wildfire and structure fire are treated completely differently

in America. They just are. Structure fire, red fire engines. I mean, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, that firehouse just over there is manned. And there's bright red fire trucks and trained firefighters in there ready to go all the time. And every American knows that, accepts that, and expects that. We dial 911 right now and say there's a fire going on within 5 minutes and 20 seconds, a big red fire engine will show up here.

Uh, and they'll start fighting that fire. And that's national code, NFPA 419-1710, National Fire Protection Association. And it's a big line item on your, uh, mortgage application. How far away are you? Exactly right. And, and, and all of Americans have the expectation that, that, that's, that's what's going to happen. And, and NFPA didn't just happen like national fire happen. And NFPA didn't just happen.

Like National Fire Protection Association, these standards didn't just occur. They were forged out of the 19th century when basically, like every city had their great fire, the great Boston fire, great Chicago fire, Kansas City, Denver, every city essentially burned to the ground in the 1800s. And it's because they were all built out of wood. There was no zoning. There was no building codes. And basically a fire would start. They had no way to fight it because there was no fire department. They didn't have fire hydrants. So they'd run out with buckets of sand. And basically what they would do is they would, they would fight fire with fire. They'd like start a backfire to burn down a line of buildings to stop the fire from spreading to the whole city. And it was pretty common actually,

they'd use beer to fight fires because they didn't have pressurized water, but they'd go to a brewery and get a keg of beer and it would foam, just like firefighting foam, and they'd spray it on the fires. So in the wake of all these fires, finally, in like 1896, a lot of folks came together and said, like our cities literally keep burning to the ground and said, this is crazy. Our cities literally keep burning to the ground.

This is ridiculous. We need to figure out how to make it. And actually at the time it was the electrical contracting companies, General Electric, Edison, Westinghouse came together and said, we're the only organizations that really are cross cutting across America. We're in every city running electricity to the communities. Let's figure out a way to stop these fires. So they formed the National Fire Protection Association

and they started creating standards that said, listen, every block there'll be a fire hydrant and every city will have a fire brigade and they would standardize. And of course these lessons weren't all learned right away that happened one at a time. So then they standardized fire brigades. And then the fire brigades realized, well,

our hoses have to match. Because if Manhattan calls a Brooklyn fire department over and they show up to help and they have different size hoses, which this happened many times, our hoses don't plug into your hoses. Your fire hoses don't fit our hoses. We're basically useless now. So they started, OK, we'll standardize fire hoses.

These sprinklers inside, fire sprinklers. How we put our electrical outlets 16 inches off the ground, et cetera, et cetera. These standards became embedded across our country. And one of those standards is standards of cover and response time, where every city, the way especially dense urban is laid out, is every address is covered by at least two, sometimes three different fire stations. That way when you dial 911, dispatch immediately dispatches assets from three of those stations. That way if there's a traffic jam or a bridge is out or a tree gets blown over by a storm and blocks the road, someone's going to get to your house in time in just a few minutes. And the whole idea is get a fire while it's small. When the fire starts in your kitchen, when you call the fire department

and say, I got a house fire, they don't say, okay, where is your house? It's in the kitchen. Okay. Well, call us back when it's in the living room and then maybe we'll come. Or, it gets sometimes even worse. All right, well, cool.

Just get out of your house and just if it spreads to your neighbor's house, then call us and maybe we'll come help out. You're like, really? Like, yeah, we're just not're just not going to fight that one. Okay. And, or imagine, you know, if the mayor said, you know what our current policy for this city block is to let it burn. We're just going to let this block burn.

And if it spreads to the next block, then maybe we'll fight it. And I think, you know, that mindset has largely been, you know, bifurcated between structure fire and wildland fire. For good reason, because fire is a part of our natural landscape. No question. Like we want fires to burn. We need fire is extremely healthy for the

landscape. It has to happen. Um, but we also have to recognize that we now have a lot of people, values, infrastructure interspersed with our forest, with our urban wildland interface. I just say houses and stupid places, but that's, you know, I'm not putting words in your mouth.

Nope. I'd say that's any, any, which way you want to say it, you know, how's the stupid play, whatever it is, but they're there. And Matt Cork's like that stings. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You could call whatever you want.

He's finding the insurance problem right now. He just bought his own fire truck though. But you know, but then, you know, so stupid, but also like, so take the Smokehouse Creek fire last year in Texas. So it was about almost exactly where it was March of last year, that fire burned 1.6 million acres. That burned Panhandle, that burned like

part of ranch country. Those are houses, stupid places. Those are ranchers. Tens of thousands have had a cattle burn. I mean, it had structural impact on the cattle industry because they couldn't get air support on the fire quick enough. And that fire, when it was spreading at peak speed, was burning two football fields a second.

I think how fast that is. I mean, just in a blink of an eye. And about a month ago, the Hamptons eye. And, you know, about a month ago, the Hamptons, Long Island was burning, a wildfire started there and was burning, you know, actually in the worst was about a month ago, about three weeks ago, the same communities in Appalachia that got wiped out by that, they were burning in a

wildfire. So, you know, it's the point is not just a national forest, Western lands issue. I mean, it's really as a 50 state issue, you know, Lahaina, Hawaii, let's not forget about that. The deadliest's really as a 50 state issue, you know, Lahaina, Hawaii. Let's not forget about that. The deadliest fire in recent history was in Hawaii. You know, Lahaina, that fire started on the mountainside wind, push it through. It literally wiped that city off the map, killed a hundred people and it happened fast. Burned to the shoreline.

Exactly right. And, um, so like, I get, I, like, I get the point about houses and stupid places, but at the same time, like you said, like it or don't like it. I mean, if someone builds a house, people are going to be out, there's, there's going to wind up being the obligation to, like, you can't draw a line, you know, and be like, these are the ones we put out and these are the ones we don't put out. It's like driving down the interstate saying, Hey, you know, you're driving on I-90 between, you know, Bozeman and Butte and you roll your car and Pipestone Pass. Well, I never should have built an interstate there. It was a stupid spot for an interstate, you know. It's like, well,

my car rolled over, I'm pinned underneath. I would appreciate if the highway patrol rescued me. Like, well, you shouldn't be there. You know, so I think a point totally taken, but, you know, the American people are there. And when you look at how other countries deal with it, no one's perfect, but they do take more of that structural firefighting mindset, which is our first and primary obligation is public safety. So yes, nature management, yes, is a time for the forest to burn, prescribed burns, all that, but our first priority needs to be protecting the lives and homes Of people like number one and I think that's why the LA fire really cracked open a lot of frustration

Bipartisan and again, I'll add every single bill. I mean I was the first senator Excuse me freshman to pass a bill this this Congress And it's around wildfire and again, it was all bipartisan I mean every single wildfire bill is not one party other raw saying we owe the American people better like we just owe them a better solution than they're getting What's the theme like what's the theme of what you're driving toward for wildfires so the challenge is the reason why there's so many different bills and You hit the nail on the head when you said I've been hearing about this forestry crap for years, nothing's changing. And you're exactly right.

You have such a complicated interconnection of issues, organizations, and interests. So you guys know better than I do about our public lands and how many different organizations have a hand in that pot. You got the forest service, which we can talk about. USDA, which owns the Forest Service, a lot of people assume the Forest Service is in the Department of Interior, and it's not. Or they think it's its own agency. The Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture. That's very important. We can talk about that later. But the policies of USDA and how they operate dictate the Forest Service.

Then you have the Department of Interior. Within that, of course, you have National Park Service. You got Bureau of Land Management. You got Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is also a massive landowner. Then you've got Fish Wildlife Service. Then you've got state organizations, of course, state land, which as we know, especially in Montana, checkerboarded in,

you'll have state land shoved in there. Then you might have county land or city land, of course, private land. And then not so much in our state, go out of the state, you could have county land or city land, of course, private land, and then not so much in our state, go out of the state, you could have a lot of land that's Department of Energy or DOD. So you have a pretty- Another big one you see is a Corps of Engineers.

Yeah, there you go. Exactly. And all those organizations have completely different policies around acquisition, land management, funding, and some of them are considered themselves just passive landowners. don't want to manage the land they just don't even look at it some of them consider themselves conservationists like our job is not to manage the land is to conserve the land some of them view themselves as stewards so each agency has a completely different mindset over what and then of course that's the agency then you get to the local level you know the state

forester in one state may have a completely different outlook on logging the state forester in the next state. Or the director of the BIA in that state or BLM may have a completely different outlook than the neighboring state. And then when you put, especially when you go, depending on who's in charge in the presidency at the time, if it's a red or blue White House compared to a red or blue state, those policies, when you have state land, which as you know is very common, but it up against BLM or Forest Service land, now you have different policies around that. So the reason it's so hard to solve this problem is because you have so many different stakeholders with completely different policies and sometimes different worldviews coming at the issue. And that's just talking about landowners. That doesn't even begin to scratch the

surface of environmental advocacy groups. Um, legal advocacy groups who they're quite frankly, there are a lot of people that make a living off of suing the government over land issues. I mean, that's just, that's how they make their money. So they want lawsuits to happen. But even if you just took three, right? Like federal, state, private, Very realistic that all three of those overlap in an area and they all have different land management plans in place for their own objectives.

And that's why this legislation, again, LA was a terrible event, but unfortunately, usually it takes a terrible event to cause structural change to a bureaucracy. So you got a little momentum. As I've told folks, you know, the greatest force in government in the history of government, it's not good or bad. It's not love or hate. It's inertia. It's just the inertia of a massive bureaucracy to make it change direction is incredibly hard, incredibly hard. And unfortunately, it takes a big terrible event to cause a change in direction. Take the Navy, totally unaffiliated from this, but a great example is the Navy. Prior to

World War II, the Navy believed battleships were the capital ship. Battleships were big ships with big giant guns on them. And the concept of a capital ship was we're going to line up ships and they're going to shoot at each other with cannons till they sink. That's how navies thought. And a number of guys in the 30s said, hey, you know what? These things called airplanes actually are pretty effective and an airplane can sink a ship. So why don't we invest in these things called aircraft carriers where we basically cut the

top off the ship, put a piece of pavement down and we fly planes and we kill the other ship before their guns can hit us. The Navy said, that's a stupid idea. That's idiotic. And the guy that thought of it, they had him kicked out of the military, had him kicked out literally discharge gone. And guess what happened? Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor, all the battleships got sunk.

I used to live when I was stationed in Hawaii, I looked out my front window and from, I could throw a baseball and hit the wreck of the USS Utah that was still sunk, the hull's still sitting there in Pearl Harbor. All the battleships basically were wiped out. The Navy had no choice and guess what? Did all that damage, airplanes. The Navy quickly realized, all right, not only are our battleships gone, we need aircraft carriers, but also we just saw what a bunch of cheap airplanes can do to a bunch of expensive

ships. So, you know, I hate to say it, but I think LA may be our Pearl Harbor moment for fire where we realize it's time for a fundamental reset of how we're dealing with this. And it's giving us the momentum bipartisan to go across these agencies and say, listen, Forest Service, you want to have a forest treatment plan that's X and partner, you want to do great but guess what if we can identify an area as a critical fire shed all that other crap goes away we are going to cut through the bureaucracy the red tape and all that the litigation and we're going to prioritize public safety and we're going to identify critical fire sheds all throughout the US and say if you're within a fire shed we're going to cut through all these different environmental impact reviews,

all these different lawsuits, all these different acts. We're simply going to say the priority for this valley is we're going to do forest treatment. We're going to build roads where we have to to get firefighters there and we're going to bolster the firefighting capability here in an interagency cross-cutting manner. Is a critical fire shed a place that like a certain density of human population? Yeah, basically that so that's so the fixed our forests acts was that was we just introduced last week. Yep. So Westman, Curtis, Padilla, Hickenlooper, we all came together, basically all Western states guys saying, hey, you know, we need to find when you fix our forests. And one of the

key aspects of that is identify fire sheds. And, you know, part of the problem too is here, of course, you know, we're in a very polarized political environment, and everyone wants to grab every issue and just, you know, crank up the volume and get everyone pissed at each other. And unfortunately, that makes it hard to have a common sense conversation sometime. Nobody's talking about clear cutting forests like we did in the late 18 hours. No one's talking about going in and like, you know, Lorax here and just like wiping off the whole, what we're talking about is forest thinning and prescribed burns. And you know, no one seems to have a problem in some of these environmental groups letting the forest burn to the ground, yet they don't want us to use that timber to create jobs and economic activity in towns that frankly

didn't. They could go to Libby, go to Columbia Falls, some of these towns, you know, Pelt Grants, payment lieu of taxes have replaced timber revenue. And the Forest Service used to be the most profitable agency in the United States government. It made money every single year, literally contributed to the National Treasury. And now like every other agency, it's a cost center because they no longer, they used to harvest in the 80s, 13 million board fit a year. Now it's, they struggle to hit three. So, we got to figure out how to bring that common sense. In an area when we had, we've had a housing boom and how to shortage, you'd think we'd want more timber. Instead, we're buying timber from Canada when we should be getting it from here in America. So that critical fire shed will be basically a negotiating process to go around say, all right,

this area, this, this, as you know, a fire shed normally follows a drainage. It's like, all right, this drainage here is a critical fire shed for this town. You know, we're going to identify this as a fire critical area. What I would be afraid of here is that people would take that ability and manipulate it and wind up being that they're, they're pursuing other objectives when they draw those lines. I mean, I hope, I hope that follows like that. It really is a critical fire shed and not where someone says, can we extend it way over that way too? Yeah. Well, listen, I mean, that, that's where, so that's where local control comes into the picture. And you know, for me, and I think most people feel like they want more of a local voice in how the lands around them are managed. And it's funny, the public lands issue, obviously in Montana, it's a very unique issue. Where in Montana, public lands, you know, public lands and public hands is the motto as it

should be. Public belongs to the public. But then it's the public lands belong to the public though and what's happened a lot is the public lands now belong to the government. And that's different, you know. The public lands belong to the people and I think there's a separate and distinct definition between the government owning the land and the people owning the land. The steward of the land. Right. Like wildlife belongs to the people, but people don't do vigilante enforcement of wildlife laws, the state does.

Exactly. But the state, whether it's a county, whether it's a state or it's a federal agency, has to have the trust of the people who live around it to say, you know, your input matters. Whether it's in Deja Grizzies, whether it's sage grouse habitat, whether it's grazing rights, you know, every state is different. Some states are more about grazing.

Some states, you know, that sage grouse habitat has been used to conserve massive tracts of land to say, you can't graze this anymore, it's sage grouse habitat. It's like, oh wow, well like our family depends on that land has for a hundred years, now you're just going to take it away and we can't use it anymore. Um, so I think that there's been a big disconnect, especially, um, you know, in the Western States between how locals feel about how the federal government's

managing land and, and also saying, well, we want to say in that, okay, like we want to say, and what's going to happen here, because, you know, I share a fence line with this forest service, and I see the fuel load in that forest, and if a fire comes through there, like it's going to barrel through like a freight train. And they're like, yeah, well, you know, we're on a 10-year forest management plan, and currently, you know, it's being injuncted by a judge who says we can't cut a tree down. So, you know, we'll get back to it in a few years. Like, okay, well, a few years is great, but what happens when the fire comes through next fall?

I understand that frustration. Well, like when the Galt family, you know, Galt family, you know, ran up near us, you know, we're in Martinsdale, they're over the hill there in White River Springs. And, you know, they were, they were, you know, indicted for fighting a fire that was on their fence line on their lease. It was on federal land, but they were like, we have to protect our ranch as our livelihood.

And they were basically the government took them to court saying, you know, you are not allowed to do that destruction of government property. And, you know, obviously, we've seen a lot of these Western lands issues come to heads, you know, between ranchers between local like there's that sheriff that arrested the fire manager from the Forest Service a couple years ago out in Washington state, who they were doing a prescribed burn that got out of control and was burning private property and And the sheriff showed up and said, listen, like you had to prescribe, you can burn your federal land all you want, but now you're burning private land. And there had been years of tensions building here. And the sheriff arrested him, said,

you're a forest service employee. I don't care. It does not give you the right to burn down private property and put them under arrest. Obviously that case is still working its way through the system. And then you look in California and obviously the impacts of that were folks that, you know, decades of public lands management decisions impact the fire resilience of a community. And the folks saying, well, you know, if I had known that what you were doing was going to create my, was going to create a less safe fire environment for my community I never would have let you do it. So I think I think what we're seeing is a reckoning the pendulum always swings you know we

had a huge conservation push in the back half of the 20th century especially last 40 years which is obviously a good thing in many respects but as you know in any movement you know sometimes we make mistakes on the way and you know I would I would I would submit that the Endangered Species Act has been greatly abused, and the Clean Waters Act, Waters United States Act, has been taken by a lot of advocacy groups, and they've said, you know what, this is a way to shut down development here. This is a way to shut down ranchers using this irrigation water, because that case in Idaho where the irrigation ditch was 14 miles from

Priest Lake, yet they called it a navigable body of water. Yeah, I don't understand. Right. So I think both sides have to come to the table and say, listen, the land belongs to the people, not to the government. And we need to make sure that people who live... I mean, you talk to folks in Libby, they come out and be like, we have been desperate to get these timber projects going

for 10, 15, 20 years. And all we get is lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit. And we want our town back. We want our timber industry back in our town. And you know, we have lawyers from five states away, parachute in and well-heeled lawyers with millions of dollars of funding from who knows where it comes from.

And they pop in and every time we're about to get our timber lease, boom, it it's no, they judge shop, they sue it, they stop and the town's like, this is our forest, we live here. How do these people come in from where they're coming from and tell us we can't have an economy in our town? You know, go to Black Beet Copper Company, White Sulphur, that town wants that mine, it's on private land. And yet, you know, they get, they get,

and junked it every time they're about to stick a shovel in the ground, the mine gets shut down. So I think, there's some common sense application that needs to happen. And I think this fire in LA is waking people up to the fact that we have an obligation to be good stewards of our land. We have an obligation to be good stewards

for clean air, clean water and and to take care of Whether the species are endangered or not. We have an obligation there But at the same time we also have an obligation to protect our communities and two things can be true We can care about the environment and and want clean water and healthy forests and we can also say we can do that and protect Our communities in a common sense way from wildfire. Oh, sorry. In the fix our for, I haven't read it since last session, but, um, I know there was like financial provisions for non marketable timber, which is, you know, there's the slash that

you talk about off trail, right? It's like, you got to pay to take that stuff out of there. You know, we don't have the second or tertiary markets for wood pellets and stuff nearby to be profitable, etc. Do you see that happening? Like, are we going to see some funding to do that type of management? You know, like the not dimensional board foot lumber side of things. So short answer is yes. And I think this also takes into account where I think we have to have a little more of an organic relationship between small business and local communities and those four treatment projects where you can say we're going to give this section of forest the lease to a company to come in and they're going to have the timber lease.

But at the same time, their obligation is to deal with the non-dimensional timber, to deal with the offtake and create this kind of, it's more of a symbiotic relationship between industry, the forest products industry and the public landowner to say, again, and there are examples of this working very well. Go to Washington State. Not exactly a bastion of conservatism, but Washington State really undertook their public lands commissioner lady named Hillary France, who's a great lady, super sharp,

thought leader in this regard. Many, many years ago, I think starting in 2016, she started taking a pretty aggressive approach to active forest management in the state and really leveraged the very vibrant forest products industry in the Pacific Northwest to say, listen, I want to fireproof our communities, and I also want to reinvigorate especially a lot of these tribal communities like around Colville, who are always struggling for good economic growth. And they used kind of this forestry model around both traditional timber products, but also non-standard forestry products.

And, you know, the free market is a beautiful thing. The free market will adapt, you know, with amazing speed. And if you give them an economic outlet for any product, whether even if it's just slash, they'll find a way to use it. And they'll find a way to make it processable into something useful and if not, then they'll bake into their proposal to do a broader forest treatment project what it's going to take to get that out of there. So I think the paradigm of the government is going to write a check and say, here, boom, here's cash, we're going to pay you to go clean up that forest. That's not the way we're generally going to try to approach it. It comes as a chore list tied to a cut, a financial cut.

So you, I know we're going to lose you because you have other obligations. So I want to try to move quick on a couple of things. You campaigned really hard on public lands and public hands. How are you going to, like, how can you as an incoming Republican Senator, like maybe buck a trend that's coming from your broader party about divestiture from public lands, How can you as an incoming Republican Senator, maybe buck a trend that's coming from your broader party about divestiture from public lands, or a lot of talk about getting rid of public lands,

excess public lands, what kind of positions does that put you in? Well, first of all, so there was a bill that came out a couple weeks ago that both Senator Daines and I voted in favor of. Yeah, thank you. But you're the only two in your party, but a huge thank you, man.

Yeah, true, no question. I'd like to give you credit for that, because I was pleased to see it. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, the only two in your party, but a huge thank you, man. Yeah, true. No question I'd like to give you credit for that. I was pleased to see it. Yeah. Thank you so There's no question in our minds public lands belong to public hands again. That's not just a slogan. It's the fact It's a way of life, but there's a but and I'm not gonna we'll say government assets government owned assets What happens when you have a defunct military base in a that's been abandoned, that's shut down, that's inside your personal playground, a semi urban area, you know, El Toro air base in LA is a great example.

Like as LA grew El Toro air bases in like the middle of the growth of LA. That was public land, right? And the decision was we're going to transfer that to the city of LA and they will do with it what they deem best because this no longer makes sense. Basically, the entire San Francisco Bay, same thing, bunch of military bases, publicly owned lands that were transferred in a common sense way to say mainly pushed by Democrats, that, hey, we want these to be pushed into the private market. You will get no resistance from me on these issues. True. So, but where I'm going is, unfortunately, it's the same legal framework. And I think, you know, politics is politics. Everyone's got to, you know, run their game.

I get it. But, you know, in Montana specifically, there's been this effective narrative created that, you know, the Republican Party wants to sell off Yellowstone National Park and they want to turn Glacier into China. I haven't heard that, but I mean, I could picture someone saying that. Oh, I literally had people in my office like, I heard you're going to sell Yellowstone. I'm like, what are you talking about? But that same framework though extends. So take Nevada, and it's interesting how the the the the mine center around public lands to change that where you're at like there are people in Nevada that view the federal government owning land. It's almost the inverse of here. It's like occupation 97% of Nevada's owned by the federal government and a lot of advantage resent that deeply they're like because the government owns our whole state

We can't develop it. We can't you know have economic a lot of the native tribes in Hawaii Hate the fact that the US federal government of the native tribes in Hawaii hate the fact that the US federal government owns so much land in Hawaii. They view that as foreign occupation. Okay. So, in Alaska, people in Alaska are very supportive of saying, we want energy development on our public lands. In some cases, that may mean leasing or selling chunks

because we want jobs, we want economic growth. So it's not selling national parks, not selling BLM, not selling forest service, of course, but it is to say if we have a military base in the middle of a city, thousands of acres, is that just going to stay fenced off and empty forever? And I think when you hear Doug Burgum talking about we need to use our public lands more efficiently and he starts talking about We're gonna consider affordable housing projects on public lands. He's not gonna build an apartment building, you know next to you know old faithful what he's saying is there's a lot of Department of Interior owned land or Department of Energy owned land or DOD owned land that is owned by the public, that most people would say this could be used better than it is.

If they come in and say, if, if Burgum or anybody comes in and says, um, we're limiting this to, to pre-developed properties, we're limiting this to things that are, that are not, you know, I know these are fudgy words or fuzzy words. Um, we're limiting these actions to things that are not undeveloped wildlife habitat. I think you'd have a huge segment of the conservation community and hunters and anglers be like, well, it doesn't sound like my fight. Yeah. Well, and that's exactly, frankly, that's exactly where it's going. Obviously, again, we have to remember we're in a

politics of politics. And of course, you know, I've been dealing with everything I'm doing at FIRE is bipartisan, yet there's people pulling out, people who don't like my agenda are pulling out snippets of bills we're working on saying, oh, look, he's trying to do this with fire. And it's like, yeah, but put it in the full context of what we're talking about. And then when you look at the full document,

oh, that makes total sense. But when you pull it out of context, it doesn't. So, some folks are using this to attack, the Republicans saying, oh, they're talking about selling government owned land. Yeah, like military bases that have been used in 50 years, you know, or, you know, there's an old warehouse in downtown Gary, Indiana, like, okay, why does the federal government still own that piece of land for the Defense Logistics Agency? DLA doesn't need that land anymore. The factory that used to make those ships there has been shut down for 70 years. Why don't we sell that and pay down the debt? So to your point, I think,

we have to, and that's on us too, we got to message better, but also the opposition messaging. I never once in my life said anything close to let's sell our public lands yet that became an issue in my campaign because it was an issue that could easily be created by my political opposition and both sides do it. I would never in a million years sit here and ask you questions about like, like attack ads that came at you during a campaign. No, I get it. But I guess I'm more just going through the narrative. What you do and I, and I want to hear what you think. Yeah. So, but I guess where I'm going is the narrative that's been developed

kind of nationally is that, you know, the Republicans are trying to sell off our public lands. And that's not an accurate narrative, but there is a, I will definitely say there is a divergence where some people are more interested in saying, all right, can we sell off a piece of BLM land to a mining company? For me, I'm like, no, like it's public land. Now we could arrange a lease deal. Uh, of course we did all the time with coal leases and mine, of course, but like, I don't want to see

the land sold because I think one of the greatest inventions in the history of our nation was the concept of public land. And that's something so special to America. They don't have it in Europe. Sure. I mean, you know, that land was, was, you know, private thousands of years ago.

Um, they don't, Canada has crown land that's literally owned by the crown. But like, we're the only country in the world really to ever have the concept of the people will own massive tracts of land. And that's just so special. We can never, you know, we can't chip away at that. And if we do, it's a dangerous precedent we start. So, and especially here in Montana and our Western states, we know what a magical thing it is to have that. And, you know, we just have to fight to protect it. That's a red line for all of us. And our whole Montana delegation is aligned on that. That's just, that's a non-starter. I get a little nervous, honestly, when I hear national parks brought up, because like all we do every single day is interact with people from all across the country who love public lands and they own dogs that they want to have off leash and

they own guns. National parks are not the place to have dogs off leash and own guns. Right? So when we say public lands, it's like the example of a national park is pretty far down the list, but man, when you're paying attention to this, it's like, that is the example that's being used over and over and over again over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and them for that reason. Yeah that's exactly right. It's a spillover mechanism. Yeah. Listen, Matt, you gotta run. I don't want to keep you late. In all honesty, I would love to have you come back sometime. I don't know if we ever get much free time. I would love to have you come back for a

couple hours. I wanted our listeners to meet you. You know, most of our listeners are not in Montana. I wanted them to meet you We got some background covered which I think is important. I respect the service You did I think that you know doing what you did was such a high risk of injury Cost your family like earns you a seat at the table, right deserves respect We got that out of the way. I would love it to come back and talk more about fires and more about public lands Yeah, let's do it. I would love it to come back and talk more about fires and more about public lands. Yeah let's do it. I'd love to. As the fire legislation moves, you know, I think you know probably this summer I'll swing back around because in the next few months obviously it's already late April, you

know, some of these bills will be in place and I think we'll see a lot of the bipartisan action on the fire like taking place. I'd love to come back. Yeah, I spent two hours of summer and especially in the fire season when probably a lot of people are gonna be what's going on. Yeah. We can talk through it and just talk through some of the tactics and what's going on and why. Yeah, my brain has been trained in two hour, we do a two hour show. Oh yeah. My brain has been trained in two hour increments. I can't get there in an hour.

I get it. So apologies, but I know you got to run. Love to have you back, man. Also, I mean, big thank you too, for standing up for public lands there, both on the reconciliation bill on that or the amendment there and then Zinke's public lands and public hands bill. That's huge. Yep. Absolutely. Proud to do it. Thanks for having me. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. I've been running FHF vinyl harnesses for over a decade and for the last couple years it has been the FOB because it's quiet, it's tough, and it just plain works and it's easy

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