Ep. 696: Wildfire and the Future of Public Lands with Sen. Tim Sheehy

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is the meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
You can't predict anything.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
The meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by first Light.
Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
for ELK, First Light has performance apparel to support every
hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
dot com. F I R S T l I t
e dot com. Joined today by US Senator Tim Sheehe

(00:42):
represents the state of Montana.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
UH.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Senator she He joined the US Special or no not
US Special Forces, former Navy seal, came out of the
service and went into wild land firefighting from with an
aviation from an aviation angle as hills plane. Came out
of that business and was just elected to the US Senate.
You got they call you guys freshmen. Yeah, freshman senator

(01:08):
from Montana. We're going to talk about background, we're gonna
talk about wildfires, we're gonna talk about public lands, and
we'll talk about a couple of other things that come
up along the way. But uh, for starters, you from Minnesota.
One of our colleagues, Maggie said, you're from her hometown
of Minnesota. Yeah, yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Greright up across the street there that there was this
old army base that used to build It was a
main fifty 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 barber or fence, this
old army base that was thousands of acres of basically
just like abandoned land. And uh, yeah, it was pretty

(01:49):
cool place to grow up because could you go running
around in there. Well we weren't supposed to, but of course,
you know, of course you do.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah, it's a little bit. The kids can do it.
They that's exactly right.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Yeah, Like they'd see us sometimes and come, you know,
yell at some like you know, it's an abandoned basis
and I think, see what going on there? It's and
we go in the old factories. It's huge. One building
was fourteen acres on the inside. 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, really, the keys, the bathroom
had toilet I mean that this play's been banned for

(02:18):
thirty years and they had toilet paper rolls. I mean
they literally shut the gates and walked away. And for
you know, of course that thing's like asbesos everywhere and
there's like you know, holes in the ceiling. So it
was not a safe OCEHA approved environment for kids to
be playing. But that's what we did.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
Yeah, but at that age, if somebody comes and yells
at you, it just becomes a game, not an actual toilet.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
That's exactly right.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
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 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 fourteen year old, his body's go
over there, sled immediately he has to leave exactly totally.

(03:02):
But our ten year old could slid there all day
and no one says anything to them. You know, he's like, yeah,
I don't know. There was the age when they're gonna
do something dumb.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Well, yeah, there's there's that. 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.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah, like that kid probably knows, yes, he's not actually
supposed to be on this.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
Hill, right, but yeah, we go in there. And then
once I was in the military, I came home one
time on leave and went in. I was like, I
went to the base at this point, hey can I go?
Like they're like sure, Like hand me the keys, and
I walked around like ten, I said, this is boring,
Like it was so much more fun when 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. I was like, there's a bunch

(03:45):
of abandoned buildings and I'm leaving. That's great.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
What was your uh, how did you decide to join military?
Like and not only that, but not only joined the military,
but going into the into the Navy seals, Like, uh,
what was that process for you?

Speaker 2 (03:58):
You know, it's it's as you guys probably know, I mean,
And it's like I just turned thirty nine a few
months ago, and it's like, and I was telling someone
the other day. I was talking to a young man
at wanting to go to the Nail Academy, and and
you know, he had his whole life planned out. He's
nineteen years old and knows, you know, I gotta do
this and then that and that. I said, listen, you
know if you'd asked me when I was sixteen, twenty four,

(04:21):
twenty eight, thirty six 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 military. I just did. I
have no idea why. My Mom's like, yeah, from the
time you could like run, you had a stick in
your hand and run around the woods, you know, shooting
things pretending you were you know, whatever.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
What war did you guys do?

Speaker 2 (04:44):
We did?

Speaker 1 (04:44):
We did World War.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Two always, yeah, of course, I mean all them war
movies as kids, you know, and cowboys and yeah we did.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
Like Americans and the Germans, yes.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
And never the jet Japanese like it was never the
Pacific things we did.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
We didn't fight the jet. It was always European.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
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, pretending, you know, Normandy whatever. So anyways,
I knew I wanted to go on the military. And
my neighbor growing up was a Korean War Navy pilot.
And I didn't have really much relations on my grandparents.
My mother's side that they died off when I was
really young, or one before I was born, the one

(05:18):
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 Tebow's name, and
his son Steve Tebow and their whole family great folks.
So 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

(05:40):
away I was like, I love aviation, Like this is amazing.
And as soon as I could reach the rudder pedals
my feet when I was like eleven, he started teaching
me how to fly.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
So really.

Speaker 3 (05:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
So at that point I decided I was going to
go on the military and be as we were just
talking before he 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 were wined and watched
so many times, you know, like you could see the
tape had been uh, you know, degraded over time. But
so I was like, I'm gonna go naval cando be

(06:09):
a fire pile. And so I was flying planes for
as drabbing cars, got my soul at the plane before
I had my driver's license, got my pile's license in
high school, no kid, and then yeah, I went to
the academy to be be a fighter pile. So yeah,
and then got there and you know, I was in
high school on nine to eleven. Happened as probably all
we were seeming all rough of the same age, so
you know, it was was was that that was a

(06:30):
defining factor of all of our young lives. And then
I got a huge jump on you. I was in
graduate school. Yeah really, well your age, well you look great,
you know, fine one, you know, but yes, but I was,
uh so got to the academy. This is fall of four,
summer of four, and you know, I I you know,

(06:51):
there's always perception of organization from the outside. You perceive
something from the outside, and when you're inside, you know,
your perceptions normally clash with the reality and things changed.
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,

(07:11):
Afghanistan was going full swinging for the first time, and
you know, forty years America was seeing couch that these
come home. And we were you know that we had
our first academy grad killed in action in a long time.
So being at the Naval Academy was very you know,
it was a wartime feel. And I think something's unique
about the Gwatt Glo War and terror, of course, was

(07:31):
people in the military, like the two percent of people
in America that served, like we were all at war
for twenty years. You know. Yeah, 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. Yet most
of America wasn't. They just went on with life as normal.
It wasn't like World War Two, where everybody was pitching
in and rationing food and rationing rubber, and everyone had

(07:52):
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, felt the pain
and carried the load. 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 you know the war is
being fought door to door, you know, in Solder City

(08:15):
and you know, rock the 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 my fall my
freshman year. I was like, hey, I got to go
fight the war, Like I've got to go typical eighteen
nae gienal Kid Filipiss and Vigor. I'm like, I've got

(08:35):
to go fight because the war will be over by
the time I graduated, I got to do my part.
So I went to resign from the academy, and you know,
I was I was at the top of my class
at that point, very highly ranked that that that at
that point in time, and they were like, hey, why
are you like the top guy? What 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

(08:56):
guys on the ground fighting. So I got to do
my part. And my commanding officer from my company was like,
all right, well, you know, bind you do what you
want to do, but you got to talk to 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 as pleeb So
it's kind of like, well, I'm not allowed to go,
and there's like, no, you can go tonight. I'll give
you permission.

Speaker 3 (09:16):
Is it kind of like this is going to help
you or hurt you?

Speaker 2 (09:18):
No context 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.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
You know, you're what's that stand for?

Speaker 2 (09:29):
So plebe is is what you call it. That's what
your freshman. It's not an acronym no, like ancient Rome
plebeans like T L E B E. Yah. So plebe like,
which basically means the most common commoner. Like it's like
a like a pawn in the game of chess. So
you are the lowest ranking person in the military basically

(09:50):
is a pleap. So 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 pleave is
basically like, you know, get any higher than that. So
I'm like, oh wow, Like I sir, He's like, oh,
you must be timp I'm like yeah, So I hear
you're gonna quit and leave the academy. I said, yeah,
you know, I gotta go fight the war. I can't
sit here and go to school while the war's going on.

(10:12):
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 twenty years. And what I
need is smart young leaders and officers.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
Oh, he should have taken that message to the Yeah,
he had to take that message to DC.

Speaker 3 (10:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
So anyways, that he convinced me to stick around and
stay and finish my education of the process. You know,
he long other stories for the front of the time,
but I got to go in this exchange program where
starting that next year, I went through Army Range of Training,
Range of Regiment Exchange, Special Forces Group, Airborne Recoon School,
so kind of the I went to the Army Commando

(10:49):
Special Ops Training Pipeline, which was a great experience, met
some amazing folks, learned a ton and because really our
Special Operations Command jay sox so com, it's really an
Army organization. I mean, the vast majority of our special
ops organization in America is Army, like eighty five percent
of it. And you know then you got basically Air Force,

(11:10):
Marines and Navy makeup very small percentages. So the Seals
are a very small part of our of our global
special operations footprint. So it's important to understand how the
Army works and that that was the reasoning there. So
kind of by accident 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 pilot naval aviation is is the best avay

(11:31):
screen in the military. But at the same time, my
personality fit pretty quickly I realized, you know, was with
the with the seal teams, and you.

Speaker 1 (11:38):
Still have to do all the cold water stuff just
like the seals. The but you still had to do that.
I don't know if you did, if you did.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
The validation and seal training, and so yeah, that's the
thing man, Like, yeah, the the my specialty is walking,
like I could do like I could do an elimination.

Speaker 1 (12:00):
Worse about walking, but sitting in cold water.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
Yeah, I just yeah, well that's that's one of one
of the great attriting factors. And training is just the suck,
you know. So you know everyone wants the videos and
thinks it's, oh, 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, whether it's you know,

(12:24):
assembling weapons, jumping on the planes. What gets guys just
the suck, just the continued suck of like not just
that it sucks, but then the knowledge that it's going
to continue to suck for a very long time.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yeah, Like it's not like a hunt.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
It's like, all right, well, you know we'll be out
of here today or tomorrow, the next day, we're to
get the truck running, like this is going to go
on for and then you don't know, it's not like
all right, it's sixty two 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

(12:59):
will be and how long it will go for. When
folks decide, all right, this isn't for me.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
When you got deployed, what kind of like where did
you go and what were you working on? How did
they spend your time?

Speaker 2 (13:09):
It was a crazy period of time. I mean a
lot of times in life, you know, when you're in
when you're in the soccer, when you're in that those
Kadok periods of life. You know, they don't feel katok,
You're just you're just doing it. And as you're 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,

(13:30):
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 and my wife,
she had just commissioned into 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.

Speaker 1 (13:48):
It's not even not based out of the same area.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
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 sent 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 constantly
get the marriage done, and we were like, we're not
going to be together for like two and a half years.

(14:12):
When are we actually going to be physically co located.

Speaker 4 (14:14):
Were you guys even able to communicate with each other
in regularly?

Speaker 2 (14:17):
You know, it was just a pre skype and FaceTime
and all that. So yes, but not like it is now,
not when it's like open a tablet and like have
a meeting. It was like everything was landline phone 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, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, like
it was still landline phones and landline internet. So yeah,

(14:38):
I mean we'd communicate when we could, but it's not
at all. It's vastly improved today. Our service members today
as they should have a far better you know, you
can connect to a Wi Fi connection and still see
your family.

Speaker 1 (14:48):
So in Montana you can get married by proxy.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
That's what we did.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
We were married via double proxy and Montana double bridze,
so neither neither of us were there.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
We're the only.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
State's legal where you can get married via double proxy.
So Carmen figured that out out. She was in Afghanistan.
She's like, hey, I figured how we can get married.
I'm like, all right, how send it? It's like we
can get married through the mail. I'm like, really, I
didn't know that was legal. She's like, well, it's only
legal in one state, Montana. Like wow, she's like, yeah.
We notarize a form and mail it in and basically

(15:18):
they take it to the courthouse and Calispell 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 forums mailed
back to us like, oh we were married. We were
married on February eleventh. Cool, happy anniversary. Yeah. So so
so that's how we did it. It's cool law, though,

(15:38):
you know, because it's got to be for the military. No, no, actually,
well I mean it is now now their whole business
models they target military couples, say exactly the situation my
wife and I dealing with it. But where the law
came from is the homestead days. So you know, only
like half a homestead claims were actually awarded. You know,
the whole perception, you know, from what was that stupid
Tom Cruise movie where terrible Irish accent, you know where

(16:00):
they're front there.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
But also the fighting scenes were away.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yeah, I was like Jesus left.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yeah, I was like, oh my god.

Speaker 2 (16:10):
But anyway, so you know, like run out there and
jam their stake on the ground of boom, here's your land,
like actually surprising. The process is more formal and death,
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

(16:31):
on if you were married with a family and living
on the land. 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're going to get statehood. I mean that wasn't
like a technical threshold, but that was basically once you
had more people and more constituency of state, you had

(16:51):
a better chance of being or in your territory, you
had better chance of being a state. So anyways, want
male to female threshold that was set up, so it
was like ninety six.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
It was crazy.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
So Montana Territory Rifle 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 go out here and helped
helped the process, homestack claims. So anyway, it's kind of
an interesting sure. Yeah, so you were in and out
of I have to imagine Afghanistan. How many times did
you get so, I mean all the times, you know,

(17:23):
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,
you know, more than that, but ultimately in Iraq, Afghanistan,
a couple of times, UH to South America for counter
narcotics and and host nation partnership there, and then a
couple other trips around you know, different type of different

(17:44):
types of missions. So yeah, I had a great, you know,
great experience all over the world, and you know, loved leading, leading,
leading our teams everywhere. It's a huge honor when when
you look at the responsibility. Again, you look back at
the responsibility you're given. I mean a twenty five, twenty
six year old guy. You know, one point between the
Afghan Army troops, I had my seals, my army assignment

(18:05):
that i'd get get an army platoon assigned to me,
and you know, I had like two hundred people under
my command and daily combat operations, you know, you know, gunfights,
every day, air strikes, 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 responsibilit given
to a twenty five, twenty six year old, and now
that's true across the military. I mean, you take twenty

(18:27):
five year old pilot in the Air Force. He's flying
one hundred million dollars aircraft. I mean, so the responsibility
and then he goes home and his dad won't let
them use that's run exactly. It's a total it's where
you come home. And that's that's part of the reason
the veteran transition. You know, I've spoke at a veteran's
banquet last night here in town, and I actually worked
out with our Air Force with our RTC kids. So
I got this patch of my jacket here. You know,

(18:48):
we worked out with their art see kids yesterday at
MSU and kind of impart of that upon them. Like
you know, you get home, it's a totally different. You'll
work at a small business while you know you can't
you can't drive the forklift yet you don't have the
OSHA approval. It's like, dude, I just I used to, like,
you know, drive helicopters. You know, I used to drive tanks.
You know, twenty a nineteen year old kid'll be at

(19:08):
the helm of a of a three billion dollar summer
and you know driving those things.

Speaker 1 (19:11):
So it's a yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
And then so that's sometimes hard for bets to come
home and have like that reduction and scope all of
a sudden. It's like, you know, I used to have
have to.

Speaker 3 (19:19):
Prove yourself again, right yeah, Yeah, that's crazy.

Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, that's a tough transition for everybody.

Speaker 1 (19:24):
So, uh, when you came out of that, how did
you decide to get into wild land? Yeah, it's wild
wild land firefighting, like like we ended up in the seals.
I mean, I make no bones about it.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
I never like almost everything I've done, if to include politics,
which I true, we'll talk about was an accident, like,
it was never a plan. So I basically I didn't
plan to get out steal teams. When I did, you know,
I got injured and for the time being, it was like, hey,
you know you have to go off the duty rolls
of the teams. You can't be an active sealing 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,

(19:55):
Like why don't I do push paper? And basically like, yeah,
but that's okay, you push paper for a while, and
I was like, listen that that's not like if I
can't leave my guys on missions and you're gonna send
me in a headquarters for two or three years, like
you know, all move on with life.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
So so did you not get your twenty year retirement then?

Speaker 2 (20:10):
No, no, I got out. You know, i'd only been
in all in eleven years between active and reserve time
when I when I when I was done, so oh no, yeah,
you have to you have to be in for twenty
years active duty to retire at twenty. So yeah, so
basically we got out and I decided at that point
there was a technology we used in the Special Operations community.

(20:33):
We were we were really the innovators behind the tact
limits put the implementation of this and that is airborne surveillance.
So basically, you know, if you ever watched these Special
Ops Seal CIA movies, you'll always see, you know, the
aircraft overhead with an INFRED sensor, with an electro optics sensor,
whatever it is, basically watching the whole mission take place
and providing a really critical array of situational awareness for

(20:56):
us on the ground. You know, we could see where
enemy fire was coming from, we could locate enemy positions,
We could know where our own people were. So if
we're calling in an air strike, we make sure we
knew where all the friendly forces were before we started
dropping bombs, which has been a any You guys know
what the largest killer of US troops in the First
Golf War was not aviation, friendly fire. Yeah, our own people. Now,

(21:18):
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 two. 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,

(21:40):
every time you see a gunfight, it's like, you know,
the one guy's looking the other guy in the eye
and like the cun comes out and he's like you
know they all you know, this isn't mel Gibson a
leath of weapon. As much as you know, like bolts
are flying a lot of you know, you don't know
where the hell they're coming from. You don't even know
who's shooting at you, especially in places like Afghanistan and
an urban warfare in Iraq. It's like sometimes the biggest
challenge is figure out where you getting shot at from.

(22:01):
And 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. Uh, And that's something the movies never
really capture. It's like, you know, someone gets shot all
of a sudden that like they see the guy in
the bell tower a mile away. There it is, you know,
blow it up. It's like it could be minutes, hours
while you're taking fire before you figure out what's going on.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
So when we're little kids. We don't. Like I'd asked
my dad, like, how many people did you shoot? You know,
he'd be like, you can't tell what's going.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
On exactly one hundred percent, right, I mean, you know
one hundred percent right.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
Is it's like, you know, you just don't just shooting
in the way you would say, you're shooting in the windows.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Love, Yeah, that the fog of war is an absolutely
real thing, one hundred percent. And and but anyways, so
it was we had a capability that we exploited UH
very effectively throughout the warriors, which was that airborne surveillance.
And it came in many ways. You know, you had
light area and hyperspective, we had electroptic infrared, you had
uh communications detectors to identify walky doggs and cell phones.

(22:58):
And really that became a huge, usually important advantage for us.
And about the time so I'd seen that technology, said, man,
if we could take that, give them my pilot background,
if they could 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

(23:20):
a terrible tragedy kind of became public as they finished
the investigation. I was the Arnel Mountain fire down on Arizona,
and if you're not familiar with that, that was they
made a movie about it called Only the Brave. Happened
to twenty thirteen and the ground I remember, Yeah, So
the Grand Mountain hotshots were heading up on this fire
and it was one of those dangerous, real dangerous desert
sage brush fires because when those you know, zephyr winds,
when those winds hit down there and the high deserts

(23:42):
in the southwest like that, those fires rip. I mean
they'll move eighty ninety miles an hour, and I mean
they could be deadly like. 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.
It's hard to put out, but they don't move as
fast as these ones. So as the team got up
there on the ridge line pretty quickly realized this thing's ripping.

(24:04):
We can't fight this thing. We got it. 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 had shifted directions and burned his
whole team alive, killed online. He didn't right there on
the side of the mountain.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
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, Yep, he's got a
two year old, four year old, six year old, next guy,
one year old, two year old, next guy.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
It's like yeah, because they're all like in that yep.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
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 at that they
were at that age you know whatever the hell.

Speaker 2 (24:48):
Like yeap, mid yeah or whatever, where I was like, damn, man,
and that's that 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 mounta, into
the middle of gun fights 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, and then

(25:08):
the seals 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 I mean one of my
seal potones. We had nine seals, all have babies within
on the same team within two months, you know, all
the wives were like breaking 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, that
that was an event that definitely I was like wow.
And what I realized was I felt myself in that

(25:31):
guy's boots. You know, I'd been there. I've been on
the side of a desert mountain, one 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 Bridge Aerospace
and we ended up you know, several other companies spun

(25:52):
out of that as well along the way. But the
point was to bring that airborne intelligence capability that's that
supported ground guys to industry and to public safety tasks.
Other than the military.

Speaker 4 (26:04):
Why did you come to Montana though?

Speaker 1 (26:07):
Yeah, so you know, we.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
We'd come here to train before we go to Afghanistan,
so our seal teams would come out here. Actually, Butte
was our home base. Gun named Rod Allen out there,
and Butte has a group called the Peak and he's
a former Air Force Special Ops guy, so he would
host high out to do training events for UH teams
getting ready to go to Afghanistan. So you know, everything

(26:30):
from heil to do pair of shooting tilt to high
angle shooting. You know, most shooting ranges are level. The
raality 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 those people are shooting down. Yeah, I mean,
you know the peaks over there are twenty two, twenty
three thousand feet high. You know, these aren't eight thousand
foot peaks. I mean, you're you're fighting in the foothills

(26:50):
of the Himalayas. The Hindu kush is the most rugged
basically training in the world. So you're not just shooting
up a few hundred feet, you're shooting up. So, you know,
horseback riding, packing in high angele rope rescue health through medicine. Basically,
we go out there and he assembled these fantastic training
modules for us, and we bring seals out here and train.
So during a couple of those trips, Carmen to come
out and visited, and we kind of decided, hey, this

(27:10):
is this is a great spot, and you think, well,
if we ever get out of the military, if that ever,
you know, maybe we'll come here and raise our family.
And you know, Lord works in mysterious ways. You know,
things happened. I got hurt, you know, timing lined up,
so we decided to start a company here. So me
and my co founder, who was also a military officer,
started our company, and you know, we hoped maybe one

(27:31):
day we'd have like eight or ten employees, but had
no idea. You know, we scaled through Ascent Vision Technology
was spun out of Bridge, which is another great success story,
and a couple of other companies. You know, about five
hundred 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.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
So maybe I misunderstood it. Yeah, as I've become familiar
with you through the race, the Senate race. But you
guys have a heavy focus on wildfire totally.

Speaker 2 (28:02):
Yeah. No, So Bridger Aerospace basically, you know, seventy percent
of that company is all aero wildland firefighting. You know,
we got a base in Spain.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
I wasn't aware of the other applications.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
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 closer support
from our lessons from the war, cut paste that bring
those lessons to wildland fire. And as we've seen in
recent months and as most people live out West, c

(28:34):
like these fires are nasty, and like we have not
been winning the battle. You know, we've just lost America's
biggest city just got you know, burned over by this.
You know, Lahaina a couple of years ago, you know,
in almost every Western stake in point to just a
massive disaster that's happened, and it's like, you know, we
can do better than we're doing.

Speaker 1 (28:52):
How would you sorry, how would you.

Speaker 4 (28:55):
How would Bridge your 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.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
So I mean all of aircraft not in at all.
Ninety nine percent of aircraft flying over wildfires in America
come from a private company. So basically, the government decided
in the nineteen sixties, we're not going to operate firefighting
planes for a while, the government did it themselves kind
of in the actually wrote a book about this called Mudslingers,
about the history of aero firefighting, and all the profits

(29:26):
go to benefit fall and wildline firefighters, but it was
more of a history you wrote the book, Yeah, okay,
so it was something I was interesting because as I
was learning about aero firefighting because I got into thedustry
really by accident, knew nothing about it. And then as
I'm sitting at firebases as a pilot, because I flew
all our planes, I'd be sitting at the firebase. It's
like being a fireman, except your fire engine flies instead
of drive. So you're hanging out the firebase shooting the shit,

(29:48):
talking to folks all day, and you start talking to
somebody's old timers and they're telling you old stories from
the sixties and seventies, and you start to figure out, Man,
the history of this is amazing, flying in, flying through smoke,
dropping slowry, dropping water on wild Like a lot of
these guys were like World War two heroes Vietnam. I mean,
they'd already flowing the toughest stuff in the world and
the toughest conditions and they can basically needed that adrenaline

(30:10):
fixed still and now they start flying wildfire as you
start to see the history of that. But basically most
almost every single aircraft that flies a wildfire is contract
owned and to operated because the government pretty much decided
in the sixties, you know what, We're not going to
own an operator on aircraft. It's too expensive as too
technically complex for us to just manage the way our

(30:31):
budget cycle works. We're going to just hire contractors to
fight fire from the air. We'll do it on the ground.

Speaker 4 (30:37):
So I fire breaks out, you guys are just waiting
for the phone to ring.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
Basically, so we'll get pre staged around and again we
could talk for hours and it's actually the Shahn Ryan 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 are prepositioned
as aircrews and basically they will call something to what
fire to go to? Basically go to this fire today,

(31:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
God, your insurance premium has got to be a bit
in that business man it is, so you know, and actually,
so what are you gonna do again?

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (31:26):
Well, and it's not how expensive is the plane? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Yeah, I mean, well you bring that up because I
mean 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 that lands like wildfire Like the hell.

Speaker 1 (31:45):
I grew up Michigan, we never talked about.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
Yeah, it's just not doesn't does My.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
Neighbor one time had his leaf fire get out of
control for a minute, you know, but it made into
the edge of his yard, sat up.

Speaker 3 (31:53):
The neighborhood for a few minutes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
But these million acre fires where it's like a whole
like you have thousands of guys in the ground, water
bombers come in, that's just doesn't For most of America,
that doesn't really they don't get it. But after LA
everyone's like, oh wow, like this is this is a thing.
But yeah, you know, but the big impact the word
you says, insurance. So the the LA wildfire is the

(32:16):
most expensive disaster in American history ever period, quarter of
a trillion dollars, more than any hurricane, any earthquake.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
Is that right?

Speaker 2 (32:24):
Huge, massive, and where 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 and I'm sorry
of the insurance industry absorbs the impacts of the LA
wildfires on a comprehensive manner, like when all these underwriters
and the reinsurance because insurance all flows down to a
pool of very consolidated reinsurance companies, I don't care whether

(32:47):
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 on too much of a tangent, but this
is just a good example of how insurance can affect

(33:08):
something that appears to be totally unaffiliated. So Ukraine was
the biggest impact in the history of aviation insurance. The
war in Ukraine, there massive amounts of aircraft destroyed on
the ground, like whole airlines repossessed. Like 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

(33:31):
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, so we'll always be there, but like,
but very few airlines have resumed service into Israel because
insurance and a lot of airlines, a lot of airlines
getting attacked at LG know, why aren't you flying your
You're discriminating against the Jews, and they're like no, Like

(33:52):
our insurance companies will not underwrite an aircraft flying into
a war zone because that changes.

Speaker 1 (33:58):
As well, because like the Ukraine War, I mean they've
they've shot down I think right two passenger.

Speaker 2 (34:03):
Planes in relation to the combatants, and thousands of other
aircraft beens right on the ground. So basically insurance won't
underwrite an air 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

(34:25):
homeowner's insurance is more than their mortgage if you can
get it. I mean they've seen nine hundred one thousand,
two thousand percent increases in wildfire premiums for people's homeowns
insurance if they can get insurance. A lot of people
can't get insurance at all. And it's not even a
wildfare prone areas. It's sometimes it's flood prone or hurricane prone.
Because this fire specifically really was like the straw that

(34:45):
broke the camel's back. For home WOS insurance. Now, if
you can't get insurance on your home, what else can't
you get for that home?

Speaker 1 (34:52):
A mortgage?

Speaker 2 (34:52):
Exactly yeah, exactly right. And imagine if ten to twenty
percent of American homes become illiquid as a result of
unaveal ability of homeown insurance. I mean, how many people
need a mortgage of refive their home. They use that
money to invest in a business. How many people depend
on a second home, you know, that's their investment, rental income,
they have attached dwelling it, the airbnb whatever. I mean,
how many people depend on the liquidity of their home

(35:16):
to live? I mean most most Americas have at moorage.
And then that home becomes liquid. You can't sell it
because then the buyer pool goes from anybody who needs
a mortgage. If they find out they can't ensure the home,
they can't get a mortage 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 homeowner's market and everyone

(35:38):
comes up for renewals. I mean, it could be a
bigger impact on the homeowner's market than like the Owait
financial crisis. So like this wildfire thing is not just
a boutique Western issue. It's not a boutique forest management thing.
Don't log this log that it really is like an
existential economic one, because I mean, how do you put
it value on human life? But like the impact directly

(35:58):
of LA is a quarter of a trillion dollars, So
printing a quarter of a trillion dollars right now is
inflationary like that 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 absorbed by the insurance market.

Speaker 1 (36:12):
Do you think that wildfires like me 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? I mean, like our
fires are there like higher intensity, less predictable fires now
than there were twenty years ago. I mean that's the

(36:32):
impression you get, But I mean does it really felt
that way by people involved in that industry?

Speaker 2 (36:36):
Yeah, I mean I think ultimately short answer is yes.
With the caveat that are 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

(36:57):
is exponentially bigger than it's ever been before.

Speaker 1 (36:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
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 orn 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
or cared because it was basically a cow pastor, I
got you. So, but when the fire starts burning down

(37:21):
thousands of homes like so, this fire that happened in
La in January, terrible tragedy. Obviously, that almost exact same
fire happened in nineteen sixty one called the Ballet Bell
Air Fire, and it was bad. But you know, it's
not talked about much because we didn't have the massive
sprawl in La yet.

Speaker 1 (37:41):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
And take a big sky for example. You know, people
can go back and forth as the terrible that big
sky grew, as big sky good, is big sky bad? Okay, whatever,
But it's there all right, whether you like it's there.
We now have thousands of people living there, massive economic
investment around it fifty years ago before chet Hunt rode
his horse up there. I mean, if that area had burned,

(38:02):
probably nobody would have noticed. I mean maybe the local
paper would have written a aricle about it, but honestly,
it would have been Okay, Mountain Valley burns, a couple
of cabins, a couple of ranches, and.

Speaker 3 (38:09):
A bunch of people being like, and the hunting's going
to be great up there today.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
I mean, you've got billions of dollars of investment out
there that area burns. Not only a thou we got
one road in, one road out, Not only are thousand
people are going to die because they can't get out
of there in time. There's going to be massive economic
impact and lost it there.

Speaker 3 (38:26):
So to go back to that insurance footprints right exactly so.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
And couple that with we are coming off really a
forty year period of a huge shift in our forest
management mindset where you know, again it's I don't want
to be political about this because it's just not a
political issue. This affects people. It will burn down your house,
whether it's red or blue, doesn't matter. But it's just
a fact our forest management policies have have radically changed

(38:54):
in the past thirty years. And the impact is you
you guys know better than not. I mean, you know,
I'll be up on our Force Service ly cav right
now at the ranch. I'll be up there today. But
it's like, you know, you walk off the trail and
Forest Service land basically you've got dead beetle killed dead
falls 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

(39:16):
point where they almost don't happen anymore. So I think
a combination of factors of are a change in mindset
of forestry are wildland airban interface has grown massively. I
mean tens of millions of people have moved into wildfire
prone areas that didn't used to live there. Sure, therefore,
people cause fires, tire chains, cigarette butts, fireworks, gender reveal parties,

(39:41):
whatever the hell you want to know. People cause fires,
and then when fires happen near people, the the the
impetus to fight them and put it out. As far more,
when you have a thousand homes instead of just one
thousand acres of sage brush and cheat grass.

Speaker 1 (39:54):
Yeah, which means less stuff getting burnt into a mosaic
pattern and you create more areas that are ready for
massive Yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:02):
So I don't 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 there for uts

(40:23):
are and getting that mindset like re established back out
here in the West, like like what's the next chapter?

Speaker 2 (40:31):
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 fourteen thousand structures, well, I
mean fourteenth. I mean that's basically all of the number. Yeah,
it's like all of the Gallatin Valley. So we're writing
that book right now, and it's all by Parceling. I'm

(40:53):
on my fourteenth bill right now. I mean, this is
my life. So I showed up and I'm not you know,
co chair of the wild Fireclock US in the Senate,
cool Alex Padia from California's CoA chair. And we are
moving at breakneck pace because this woke people up, people
that typically wouldn't have cared about wildfire. Andy came from
New Jersey, great example, he's a New Jersey senator. Our

(41:15):
first like two weeks after we did our orientation, New
Jersey's burning and he calls me because he knows my
Background's like, Tim, like, how come there's nobody. There's no helicop,
there's 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 it
nobody fighting your fire from the air, but there's nobody
going to be coming to fight your fire from the air.

(41:35):
He's like, how is that the case? Like if I
doll a lam on one, a fire engine shows up
in 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, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week,
three hundred and sixty five days year. That fire in
that firehouse just over there is manned, and there's bright
red fire trucks and trained firefighters in there ready to

(41:58):
go all the time, and every American knows that accepts
that and expects that we deal on one right now
and say there's a fire going on, within five minutes
and twenty seconds, a big red fire engine will show
up here and they'll start fighting that fire. And that's
national code, the NFPA four nine seventy ten, National Fire
Protection Association.

Speaker 3 (42:15):
And it's a big line item on your mortgage application.
Yeah fire away, are you?

Speaker 2 (42:20):
Yeah, exactly right, And all of Americans have the expectation
that that's what's going to happen. And NFPA didn't just
happen like National Fire Protects Association, these standards didn't just occur.
They were forged out of the nineteenth century when basically
like every city had their Great Fire, the Great Boston Fire,
Great Chicago Fire, Kansas City, every city essentially burned to

(42:43):
the ground in the eighteen hundreds, 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

(43:04):
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 go to a brewery and get a keg
of beer and it would foam just like firefighting foam
like fire, and they spread on the fires. So in
the wake of all these fires, finally, in like eighteen
ninety six, a lot of folks came to us said,

(43:26):
this is crazy, like our cities literally keep burning to
the ground, Like this is ridiculous. We need to figure
out how to make And actually, at the time it
was the electrical contracting companies gene Electric, Edison Westinghouse came
together and said, we're the only organizations that really are
cross cutting across America, like we're in every city running
electricity to the communities. Let's figure out a way to

(43:48):
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, then happened one
at a time. So then they standardized fire brigades, and

(44:08):
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 horns don't fit our hoses.
We're basically useless now. So they started, Okay, we'll standardize
fire hoses, these sprinklers inside, you know, fire sprinklers, how

(44:29):
we put our eclectrical outlets sixteen inches off the ground,
et cetera, et cetera. These standards became embedded across our country.
And one of those standards of standards of cover in
response time where every city, the way especially Dan Serbans
lay it out, is every address is covered by at
least two, sometimes three different fire stations. That way, when
you down nine one one, dispatch immediately dispatches assets from

(44:52):
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 blocks the road, someone's going to
get to your house time in just a few minutes.
And the whole idea is get a fire while it's small.
You know, when the fire starts in your kitchen. You know,
when you call a fire department say I got a
house fire, they don't say, okay, where is in your house?
In the kitchen? Okay, Well, you know, call us back
when it's in the living room and then maybe we'll

(45:15):
come or could sometimes even worse. All right, well cool,
we just get out of your house, and just if
it spreads to your neighbor's house, then call us and
maybe will come help out. You're like really like, yeah,
we'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,

(45:37):
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.

(45:59):
It has to happen. 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.

Speaker 3 (46:12):
I just say houses in stupid places. But that's not
putting words in your mind.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
Nope, that's that's any any which way you want to
say it. You know, houses, stupid place, whatever it is.
But they're there.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
And that looks like that stings, you know, Yeah, you
could call whatever you can't get he's finding the insurance
problem right now. He's bought his own fire truck.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
Do but you know, but then you know, so stupid.
But but also like, so take the Smokehous Creek fire
last year in Texas. So it's about almost exactly or
goes March last year. That fire burned one point six
million acres, that burned Panhandle, that burned like heart of
ranch country. That those are the houses to places there,
that those are ranchers, tens of thousands of head of

(46:54):
cattle burn. I mean structural impact on the cattle industry
because you know, 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
the binklemin and I and uh, you know about a
month ago the Hampton's Long Island was burning a wildfire
starta there and was burning. You know. Actually in the

(47:14):
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 really is a fifty state issue. You know, Lahina, Hawaii.
Let's not forget about that. The deadliest fire in recent
history was in Hawaii, you know, Lahina. That fire started

(47:34):
on the mountain side. When pushed it through it literally
wiped that city off the map, killed one hundred people,
and it happened.

Speaker 1 (47:39):
Fast, burned to the shoreline, exactly right. And so like
I get I like, I get the point, yeah about
houses in stupid places. But at the same time, like
you said, like it or don't like it. I mean,
if someone builds a house, yeah, people are gonna be out.
There's there's going to wind up being the obligation to Yeah,

(48:00):
like you can't draw a line, you know and be
like these are the ones we put out, and these
are the ones that don't put out.

Speaker 2 (48:05):
It's like driving down the interstate saying, hey, you know
you're driving a nine to ninety between you know, Bozeman
and Butte, and you roll your car and pipestone pass. Well,
I every s built an estate there. Now it was
a stupid spot forre in near estate.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
You know.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
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 at
a point totally taken. But you know, the American people
are there, and when you look at how other countries
deal with it, you know, no one's perfect, but they
do take more of that structural firefighting mindset, which is

(48:38):
our first and primary obligation is public safety. So yes,
nature management, Yes, there's a time for the force to burn,
prescribe burns, all that, but like our first party 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
all add every single bill. I was the first Senator

(49:00):
excuse me, a freshman to pass a bill this this Congress,
and it was around wildfire. And again it was all
by Parson. I mean, every single wildfire bill is not
one party the other. We're all 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 towards for wildfires? So the

(49:23):
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 out exactly right, it's largely you have such
a complicated interconnection of issues, organizations, and interests. So you
guys know better than I do about our public lands

(49:43):
and how many different organizations have a hand in that pot.
You know, you got the Forest Service, which you know,
we can talk about USDA, which owns the Forest Service.
A lot of people assume the Forest Services and Department
of Materier and it's not. That's just 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

(50:04):
they operate dictate the Forest Service. Then you have a
Department of Materior. Within that, of course, you have National
Park Service, you got Bureau of Land Management, You've 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,
checker boarded in you'll have state land shoved in there.

(50:24):
Then you might have county land or city land of course,
private land, and then not so much in our city.
Go out of the states, you can have a lot
of land that's Department of Energy or DoD.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
So you have a big one you see is Corp
of Engineers, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (50:38):
And all those.

Speaker 2 (50:39):
Organizations have completely different policies around acquisition, land management, funding.
And some of them are considering themselves just passive land owners.
They 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.

(51:00):
Each agency has a completely different mindset over 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
BAA 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

(51:21):
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 is you know,
is very common, butted up against BLM or Forest Service land,
now you have different policies, you know, around that. So
the reason it's so hard to solve this problem is
because you have so many different stakeholders with completely different

(51:42):
policies and sometimes different world views coming at the issue.
And that's just talking about landowners. That doesn't even begin
to scratch the service of environmental advocacy groups, legal advacy
groups who are 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.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (52:17):
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 bureaucracy.

Speaker 3 (52:26):
So you got a little momentum.

Speaker 2 (52:28):
As I've told folks, you know, the greatest force in
government and history. 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 it change in direction. To take

(52:48):
the Navy totally on affiliate from this, but a great
example of the Navy. Prior to World War Two, 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

(53:11):
number of guys in the thirties said, hey, you know
what these things called airplanes, Actually you 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 killed
the other ship before their guns can hit us. The
Navy said, that's a stupid idea, that's idiotic, and the

(53:31):
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 Pearl Harbor. All the battleships
got sunk. I used to live when I was stationed
in Hawaii. I looked out my front window and for me,
I could throw a baseball and hit the wreck of
the USS Utah that was still sunk, the hulls still
sitting there in Pearl Harbor, and all the battleships basically

(53:53):
were wiped out. So the Navy had no choice. And
guess what did all that damage? Airplanes? The Navy quickly
all right, not only are our battleship's 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

(54:15):
how we're dealing with this, and it's giving us the
momentum bipartisan to go across these agencies and say, listen,
for service, you want to have a forest treatment plan
that's X and partner here, you want to do that. 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,

(54:36):
and all 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
of views, all these different lawsuits, all these different acts,
and we're something going to say the priority for this
valley is we're going to do force treatment. We're going
to build roads where we have to to get firefighters there,

(54:59):
and we're going to we're going to bolster the fire
fighting capability here in an inner agency cross cutting manner.

Speaker 4 (55:04):
This is a critical fire shed. Want a place where
that has like a certain density of human population.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
Yeah, basically, So that's so the fixed our Forest Acts
was that was we just introduced last week. Yeah, so Westerman, Curtis, Padilla,
Hick and Looper, we all came together based all Western
states guys saying, hey, you know, we need to find
we need to fix our forests and and and one
of the key aspects of that is identify fire sheds.
And you know, part of the problem too is here

(55:31):
of course, you know, we're in a very political, 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. Sometimes nobody's talking about
clear cutting forests like we did in the late eighteen hours.
No one's talking about going in and like you know,
lorax here and just like wiping off the whole. What

(55:52):
we're talking about is forest thinning and prescribe burns. And
you know, no one seems to have a problem. Some
of these environmental 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 Franklin. You know,
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 Force Service used

(56:14):
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 the East harvest in
the eighties thirteen million board fitt a year. Now it's
they struggle to hit three. So we've got to figure
out how to bring that common sense in a narraor
when we had it. We've had a housing boom and

(56:36):
houding 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 that critical fire shed
will be basically a negotiating processing around say all right,
this area that this this as you know, a fireshed
normally follows a drainage. It's like, all right, this drainage
here is a critical fire shed for this town. You know,

(56:57):
we're going to identify this as a fire critical area.

Speaker 1 (56:59):
Only ask on that is that you let me come
in and double check the work, because 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,

(57:21):
can we extend it way over that way too?

Speaker 2 (57:22):
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 and how the lands
around them are managed. And it's funny the public lands issue,
obviously Montana, it's a very unique issue where in Montana

(57:46):
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 the public lands belong to the
public though, and what's happened a lot is the public
lands now belong to the government. That's different. You know,
the public lands belong to the people, and I think
there is a separate and distinct definition between the government

(58:08):
owning the land and the people owning the land.

Speaker 1 (58:09):
The steward of the land. Right like wildlife belongs to
the people, but people don't do vigilanting enforcement of wildlife laws.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
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. You know,
whether it's in danser grizzies, whether it's sage grouse habitat,
whether it's you know, grazing rights. You know, every state
is different. Some states are more about grazing. Some states,

(58:39):
you know that sage browse habitat has been used to
conserve massive tracts of land. To say you can't graze
us anymore, it's sage gross habitat. It's like, oh wow, well, like,
our family depends on that land has for one hundred years.
Now you're just going to take it away and we
can't use it anymore. So I think that there's been
a big disconnect, especially you know in the Western States

(58:59):
between mean how locals feel about how the federal governments
managing land 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 barrow through like a
freight train. And they're like, yeah, well, you know, we're

(59:20):
on a ten 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
if here is great, but what happens when the fire
comes through next fall?

Speaker 1 (59:31):
I understand that frustration.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
Well, like when the Gold family and a golf family,
you know, ranks up near us. You know, we're in
Martins Deel Road with hill there in White Over Springs,
and you know they were that they were you know,
indicted for fighting a fire that was on their fence line.
On their leaks, it was on federal land. But they're like,
we have to protect our ranch as our livelihood, and
that they were basically government took them to the court saying,
you know, you are not allowed to do that destruction
of government property. And you know, obviously we've seen a

(59:56):
lot of these Western lands issues come to heads, you know,
between a ranch 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 prescribe burned that got out of control and was
burning private property. And the sheriff showed up and said, listen,
like you had a prescribe it. You can burn your
federal and all you want, but now you're burning private land.
And there had been years of tensions building here, and

(01:00:17):
the sheriff arrested them, said you're a force of employe.
I don't care that it does not give you the
right to burn down private property, you know, and put
them out of rest. Obviously that that case is still
working its way through the system, but so you know,
and then you look in California and obviously the impacts
of that were folks said, you know, decades of public
lands management decisions impact the fire resilience of a community,

(01:00:39):
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
recon de pendulum always swings. You know, we had a
huge conservation push in the back half of the twenty century,
especially his last forty, which is obviously a good thing

(01:01:01):
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 submit that the Endangered
Species Act has been has been greatly abused, and the
Clean Waters Act Waters the 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

(01:01:23):
using this irrigation water because it connects. I mean that
case in Idaho where the irrigation ditch was fourteen miles
from Priest Lake, yet they called it a navigable body
of water. Yeah, I understand, right, So I think, you know,
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

(01:01:43):
I mean, you know, you talk to folks in Libby,
they come out like, we have been desperate to get
these timber projects going for ten, fifteen, twenty 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 healed lawyers

(01:02:04):
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 timb release, boom, it's no
they judge shop, they sue it. They stop in 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 Blackbeart Copper Company and White Sulfur.
That town wants that mine. It's on private land, and

(01:02:26):
yet you know they get they get, you know, and
junked it. Every time they're about to stick a shovel
on the ground, the mine gets shut down. So I
think you know that there's some common sense application that
needs to happen, and I think this fire in LA
is wagging 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,

(01:02:48):
clean water, 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 want clean water and
healthy for us, and we can also say we can
do that and protect our communities in a common sense
way from wildfire.

Speaker 3 (01:03:10):
In the fix our for I haven't read it since
last session, but 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 secondary tertiary markets for wood,

(01:03:33):
pellets and stuff nearby to be profitable, et cetera. Is
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.

Speaker 2 (01:03:49):
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 for 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

(01:04:11):
time their obligation is to deal with the non dimensional timber,
to deal with the off take, 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
whether and there are examples of this working very well.
Go to Washington State, not exactly a bastion of conservatism,

(01:04:33):
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 twenty sixteen, she started taking a pretty aggressive approach
to active forest management of the state and really leveraged
the very vibrant forest products industry in the Pacific Northwest
to say, listen, I want to fireproof for our communities

(01:04:56):
and I also want to reinvigorate especially a lot of
these tribal communities that are on Colville, who you know,
are always struggling for good economic growth, and they used
kind of this forestry model around both traditional timber products
but also non standard uh forestry products. And you know,
the free mark is a beautiful thing. The free market
will adapt, you know, with amazing speed. And if you

(01:05:19):
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. You
know what it's going to take to get that out
of So so I think the paradigm of worgun the
government's going to write a check and say you here, boom,

(01:05:40):
here's cash. We're going to pay you to go clean
up that forest. H That's that's not the way we're
generally going to try to approach.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
It comes as a chore list tied to a cut, right,
a financial cut. Yeah, so you uh, I know we're
gonna lose you because you have other obligations. So I
try to move quick on a couple of things. You
campaigned really hard on public lands and public hands. Yep,
how are you gonna, like, how can you as an
incoming Republican senator like maybe buck a trend that's coming

(01:06:10):
from your broader party about divestiture from public lands or
allowed to talk about getting rid of public lands access
public lands. What kind of position does that put you in?

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
Well, first of all, so there was a bill that
came out a couple weeks ago that both Dane Senator
Danes and I voted, voted in favor of.

Speaker 1 (01:06:23):
Yeah, thank you you 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.

Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
Yeah, thank you. So there's no question in our minds
public lands, blowing public hands. Again, that's not just a slogan,
it's the fact that's a way of life. But there's
a butt 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,

(01:06:52):
that's inside those are your personal playground. Yeah, a semi
urban area, you know, El Tora Airbase in La Is
a great example like el as La grew Eltro air
bases in like the middle of the growth of La yep.
That was public land, right and the decision was, we're
going to transfer that to the city of La and

(01:07:12):
they will do with it what they deem best. Because
this no longer makes sense based the entire San Francisco base,
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 in 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,

(01:07:36):
you know, politics of 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 Yelosto a national
park and I want to you know, turn Glacier. And
I heard that, but I mean I could picture someone
saying that, Oh, I literally that people in my office
like I heard you're going to sell a Yellowstone, Like

(01:07:57):
I'm like, what are you talking about? But that same framework,
though extends. So take Nevada, and it's interesting how public
the mindseter on public lands changes on where you're at. Like,
there are people in Nevada that view the federal government
owning land. It's almost the inverse of heory. It's like occupation.
Ninety seven percent of Nevada's owned by the federal government,

(01:08:18):
and a lot of Nevadas 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 owns so much land in Hawaii. They view
that it's foreign occupation. So in Alaska, people in Alaska

(01:08:38):
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 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

(01:09:01):
stay fenced off and empty forever? And I think when
you hear Doug Bergham talking about we need to use
our public lands more efficiently, and he starts talking about
we're going to consider affordable housing projects on public lands.
He's not going to build an apartment building, you know
next to you, old Faithful. What he's saying is there's
a lot of Department of Interior own land, or Department

(01:09:24):
of Energy own land or DoD owned land that is
owned by the public that most people would say this
could be used better than it is.

Speaker 1 (01:09:30):
Okay, But if they come in and say, if Burgham
or anybody comes in and says, we're limiting this 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. We're limiting these actions to things
that are not undeveloped. Yeah, wildlife habitat. I think you'd

(01:09:51):
have a huge segment of the conservation community in hunters
and angers be like, well, doesn't it not like my fight? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:09:56):
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 it
with them 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 are working on saying oh,
look he's trying to do this with fire, and it's like, yeah,

(01:10:16):
but put 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 out of context,
it doesn't. So you know, some folks are using this
to attack. You're probably Gonann saying, oh, they're talking about
selling government owned land. Yeah, like military bases that haven't
been used in fifty years, you know, Or you know
there's an old warehouse in downtown Gary, Indiana, Like, okay,

(01:10:38):
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 seventy years. Why don't
we sell that and pay down the debt? So to
your point, I think, you know, we have to, and
that's on us too. We got a message better, but
also the opposition messaging. You know, I never once in
my life said anything closest. Let's sell our public lands

(01:11:01):
yet that became an issue in my campaign because you know,
it was an issue that could easily be be created
by my political opposition, and both sides do it.

Speaker 1 (01:11:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:11:17):
No, I get it.

Speaker 1 (01:11:18):
But but I guess I'm I just go, I'm interested
in what you do and I and I want to
hear what you think.

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
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 I just that's not an accurate narrative, but there
is it. I will definitely say there is a divergence
where some people are more interested in saying, all right,
can we can we have a you know, uh, can
we sell off a piece of BLM land? Uh to

(01:11:44):
you know a mining company? For me, I'm like, no, Like,
it's public land.

Speaker 1 (01:11:49):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:11:49):
We could arrange a lease deal, 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 constant to public land,
and that's that's something so special to America. They don't
have in Europe. Sure, I mean, you know that land
was was, you know, private, thousands of years ago. They don't.
Canada has crown land that's literally owned by the crown.

(01:12:12):
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, in our western states,
and we know what a magical thing it is to
have that, and you know, we just have to fight

(01:12:32):
to protect it. That's a red line for all of us.
I know our whole Montane delegation is aligned on that.
That you know, that's just that's a non starter.

Speaker 3 (01:12:38):
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 own guns. Right,

(01:12:58):
So when we say public land, 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 wait
wait wait, wait wait. I always be represented.

Speaker 2 (01:13:12):
I always have to explain that to people like like
as like for Native Montana, like people live in Montana.
Like parks are actually like almost partially for the tourists.
We're worried about our for service, land, about our b
Do we really like.

Speaker 3 (01:13:23):
Having them for that?

Speaker 2 (01:13:24):
Yeah, that's exactly right.

Speaker 1 (01:13:25):
Yeah, it's good to spill over a mechanism.

Speaker 2 (01:13:28):
Let's match it.

Speaker 1 (01:13:29):
You got to run. I don't want to keep you late.

Speaker 2 (01:13:30):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:13:31):
In all honesty, I would love to have you come
back sometime. I don't know if we ever get done it,
so we don't get much free time. I would love
to have you come back for a couple hours. Uh.
I wanted our listeners to meet you. You know, most
like 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.

(01:13:54):
I think that you know doing what you did with
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.

Speaker 2 (01:14:08):
Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah, And as the fire legislation moves,
you know, I think, you know, probably the 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 that, the bipartisan action on the fire like
taking place. So i'd love to come back as sp
been two hours of summer, and especially in the fire
season when probably a lot of people are going to

(01:14:28):
be what's going on, we can talk through it and
just talk through some of the tactics and what's going on. Why.

Speaker 1 (01:14:33):
Yeah, my brain has been trained in two hour. We
do a two hour show's trained in. I can't get
there in an hour at apologies, but I know you
got to run.

Speaker 3 (01:14:42):
Love to have you back, man, I mean big thank
you too for for standing up for public lands. They're
both on the reconciliation bill on that or the Amendment there,
and then Zinkey's Public Lands and Public Hands Bill that's huge.

Speaker 2 (01:14:55):
Yeah, absolutely proud to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:14:57):
Thanks for having me going back and I appreciate it.

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Steven Rinella

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 696: Wildfire and the Future of Public Lands with Sen. Tim Sheehy