#160 Tim Sheehy - Former Navy SEAL & Aerial Firefighter Breaks Down the Los Angeles Wildfires

Tim Sheehy is a distinguished politician and former Navy SEAL, known for his leadership and commitment to public service. He served in the U. S. Navy for over a decade, participating in numerous combat missions and earning commendations such as the Bronze Star and the Navy Commendation Medal. Sheehy then moved into the private sector and founded Bridger Aerospace, an aerial firefighting company operating across the US - most recently in Los Angeles in the Palisades and Eaton Canyon wildfires. In 2024 he left Bridger Aerospace to run for public office, aiming to bring his military experience and business acumen to government. He emphasizes policies that support small businesses, improve healthcare access for veterans, and enhance national security measures. His book “Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting” chronicles the history of aerial firefighting operations in the US with 100% of proceeds going to firefighters injured or killed in the line of duty. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://hexclad.com/srs https://patriotmobile.com/srs https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner https://americanfinancing.net/srs NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. Call 866-781-8900 for details about credit costs and terms. Tim Sheehy Links: Website - https://timformt.com/ X - https://x.com/TimSheehyMT LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-sheehy-a2362678/ Mudslingers - https://a.co/d/4WNVHPB Bridger Aerospace - https://bridgeraerospace.com/ Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Tim Sheehy, welcome to the show.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Thanks, Sean, good to be here.

• 1:09Shawn Ryan?

  It's good to have you. This is the latest interview I've ever done here at the midnight hour, but I really appreciate you coming down. I know you're a busy guy and especially in congratulations on your Senate.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Well, thank you. It's more like condolences because it's a huge, as you probably see, undertaking for anybody, but we have to do it. Guys like us have to get involved. You know, we were just in the Pete Hegseth hearing yesterday. We got to get guys like us involved in getting this country back on track. So it's not going to do it.

• 1:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, a lot of people are stepping up. It's good to see. And then, you know, our conversation downstairs. So you're only the second ever special operations veteran to enter into the Senate.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  As far as operators, I'm sure there's been guys who've been through commands, but as far as I know, you know, I'm only the second operator. Bob Carey, Medal of Honor recipient, Vietnam SEAL, was Senator from Nebraska previously. And then me.

• 2:09Shawn Ryan?

  That's pretty incredible. That's pretty incredible. And yeah, I saw your remark in the Hegseth hearing. Well, how did that go again?

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Well, you know, it's, to be honest, you know, I'm the most, one of the most junior members of the senate. I just turned 39 and most senators are, you know, 70, uh, or whatever. And that's not to meant be disparaging, it's just a fact. It's a very, you know, they call it the most expensive nursing home in the nation. So, I'm very junior, um, so I was-

• 2:37Shawn Ryan?

  It'll be great to see somebody that doesn't just space out in the middle of a press conference and not know where the hell they are.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  That helps.

• 2:45Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of people are looking forward to that.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, uh, so I was the last guy, this, as you probably saw, it was a five-plus hour hearing, I think, you know, it got, it got to. So I was the last one in line and, you know, at that point, it was, the lines had been drawn, you know, the Democrats were hammering over anything woman-related, you know, and, and, you know, Pete's never said he's perfect. He didn't say, "I'm a saint," you know, "I'm a preacher." He admitted, "Yeah, I, I had, I had some challenges, but now I have a wife I love, we have a lot of kids together, and I've, I've committed to, to our Lord, and I've committed to serve in this country." So they were smearing him, and of course, our side was righteous indignation, rightfully so, defending him. And it got to me as the last guy, and I'm like, you know what, I had all these fancy questions laid out. Nobody wants to hear these questions, you know, so

• 3:29Speaker 03

  I'm gonna ask him, and it wasn't rehearsed at all, when I asked him, 556, 9mm, night vision goggles, how many pushups, I was just, you know, I can ask him questions he knows the answer to, to show all these people in this room that this guy knows what he's talking about. And of course, I asked him how many genders there were, toughest question. This day and age, we shouldn't have to, but we do. And I reminded him that, uh, there are two genders, and I'm a Sheehy, so, uh, I know that better than anybody.

• 3:53Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, that's amazing. But, um, quick introduction here. So, Senator Tim Sheehy, US Senator for Montana and former Navy SEAL officer, like I said, second-ever special operations operator, uh, to enter the senate. Completed numerous deployments around the world, you're a family man. Uh, your wife Carmen is a former US Marine Officer. You both are raising four children, an entrepreneur, founder and former CEO of Bridger Aerospace and Ascent Vision Technologies, and owner and ranch hand at Little Belt Cat Cattle Company. Uh, and most importantly,

• 4:36Shawn Ryan?

  for what we're going to talk about, because we'll be talking about the LA wildfires, you're an aviator and water bomber pilot. So, uh, we'll talk about, you know, your expertise and, and, and what you know about this disaster that's going on in, uh, in California right now. But, um, before we, before we move into the, uh, the nitty gritty stuff, I've got a Patreon. Patreon's our subscription account. Uh, they've been with us since the beginning. They're our top supporters. And so, one thing I offer them is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. And, um, so this is from Amit

• 5:17Shawn Ryan?

  Shamgar. What do you believe is the most pressing moral challenge facing our society today? And how do you plan to address it through your legislative work?

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Apathy. I mean, the greatest cultural threat to America is apathy. That most Americans don't really seem to care about this country anymore. They don't really seem to realize that we live in a pretty damn special place. And not only do we live in a special place, we are so lucky, you and I, anyone in this country. I mean, you've been all over the world as I have. I mean, there's 300 million Americans, give or take, 340 million. There's seven, eight billion people in the world. Our chances of having been born in this country, just statistically, God, the universe, whatever you believe in, the chances of you being born an American are pretty damn small.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  And think about other places you could have been born, Mali, Iraq, Afghanistan. Yeah. You know? Pretty much anywhere. Yeah, Southeast Asia. And there's some beautiful places there, but there's only one country in the world. People are starving in the desert and drowning in the ocean, trying to come there to become part of that country, and that's right here. And I think so many Americans have forgotten that. I mean, that's why I'm sitting here. I've never run for anything before, not even student council. Walked away from a company I love, my ranch, my family, to do this because I think so many Americans have just lost sight of it. And so I think, how do we fix it? Legislation, to him it's question, is education.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  Making sure that our kids are reminded how special America is. And, you know, they've been told these past several years, how bad we are. How racist we are, how broken we are, how evil we are, how our institutions are bad and inherently racist, and, you know, our American power is bad, or the fact that we're economically strong, you know? The list goes on, that we want to tear Lincoln's name off a school, we want to tear statues of George Washington down, we want to erase our history and replace it with something new. And that's a fundamental threat to our existence. And, you know, it's scary that that mindset has been adopted at almost every level in our government. Yeah. So how do we fix it in legislation?

• 7:39Speaker 03

  Number one, we hold government accountable. Number two, we actually make sure we're adhering to constitutional government. Because the thing that set America apart, that's made us so special, is not our government, it's not our military, it's not our geography, although all those things are great, it's the fact that we are the first government that was formed around the concept of a free individual. That every mind, soul, has its own unique destiny, its own unique potential. No other country was ever founded with that entire concept as the foundation of a nation. And we were. And we're not perfect. We've never been perfect, but we're a pretty damn special place. And I think we need to remind our kids how special we are. Because how do

• 8:23Speaker 03

  we expect them? We're all time low recruiting in the military. How do, you know, we have all time low trust in government right now. And that's a product of us telling generations of kids that they shouldn't be proud of this country.

• 8:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, you brought up, you brought up holding the government accountable, and we try to do that here as much as we possibly can. And sometimes we get a little bit of success. Most time it falls on deaf ears. But, you know, when I, when I ask my audience to hold the government accountable, I'll give you an example. They, they always want to know how, how do we do that? And a lot of people, we've lost, you know, it's no secret, America's lost a lot of confidence in the, in the voting system. And, you know, I'll give you an example. We, you know about the Taliban funding stuff?

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And, thank you for highlighting that, by the way. Thank you. A lot of us knew what was going on. I didn't know the extent until you started talking about it and really highlighted it. And, I mean, you kicked off a firestorm. And we have legislation going on. I, I signed on to co-sponsor today.

• 9:28Shawn Ryan?

  In the Senate?

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Yes. No tax dollars to the Taliban.

• 9:32Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  So like, and that's, that was started, you, Scott Mann, the whole crew of guys. I mean, again, we all knew about it. I was aware of the existence of this. But until you started quantifying it, and, and driving that truth home, you know, it didn't rise to the level of consciousness that we can let, now we have legislation on the floor in the 119th Congress to put an end to it.

• 9:56Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's, that's amazing to hear. Thank you.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  It's happening.

• 10:01Shawn Ryan?

  But it took a long time to get there. It took a long, Tim Burchett out of Knoxville like knocked it out of the park. He did not give up. It was bill after bill after bill that he wrote up. And, but we had a petition, and that petition went up to, I think last time I checked, it's at like 400,000 signatures. And we couldn't get Congressman McCall to do anything. And, you know, you would think at the time, I think I brought it up and when I interviewed President Trump.

• 10:32Shawn Ryan?

  You know, there was three hundred and something thousand back then, but I mean, it is just, people get so frustrated because they don't, they don't really know, they don't really know how to hold the government accountable. And so I, I would love to hear, you know, your suggestions on what, what can people do? Does it actually do anything when people write a congressman's office or a senator's office and they get hundreds, maybe thousands of letters demanding change?

• 10:59Speaker 03

  Well, you asked, what do we do? And the number one thing you do is what I'm doing. Get in the arena. I mean, it's not a glorious thing. It's not a fun thing. You want to find a way to lose a lot of net worth fast, you know? The most expensive hobby isn't horses and planes or boats, it's politics. I can promise you that. But I guess unless you're Nancy Pelosi. But, um, the point is, get involved. I mean, the world is run by people who show up. It is. I mean, whether it's school boards, student, I mean, whoever gave a shit who their county health inspector was five years ago?

• 11:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  Who didn't? Nobody cared. Or who was on the school board? No one even thought of that stuff. Like, I'm not wasting my time. Well, guess what? When COVID came and, you know, face diapers and shutting schools down, closing businesses, you can't go to church. You can riot in the streets, but you can't go into a church. People started, who's making these rules? What's going on? I'll tell you who's making the rules. It's the people who showed up. The people that said, no one's, no one else is making the rules, so I'm going to make the rules. And that's, that's how I got here was Afghanistan. You know, watching Afghanistan collapse, being convinced, watching Kabul collapse, a nation I fought in, you fought in, my wife fought there, we lost friends there. At some point, an adult was going to enter the room at the NSC or the Pentagon or the White House, say, hey, guys, pick

• 12:17Speaker 03

  up the phone and press the red button. What the hell's going on, guys? This is ridiculous.

• 12:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  Stop. This is amateur hour. And it never happened. It never happened. And for me, that was like the watershed moment of like, wow. Like, there's, there is no one behind the curtain.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  We better get involved. We, our generation, the generation that lived through the great finance crisis, nine eleven, fought our nation's longest war, we better get involved.

• 12:44Shawn Ryan?

  Good point. You know, I was gonna ask you too, you know, I mean, what, at what level do you think people should get involved? Should it be in, at the, at the, at the city, local level, state level, federal level? I mean, it seems to me like if a lot more people would have gotten involved in LA, uh, we probably wouldn't be seeing the, the mess that we're seeing right now. But I'm, I would, I would love to hear your thoughts on that as well.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  No, you're absolutely right. I think any level. I mean, you gotta figure out what works for your lifestyle, what works for who you are, what issues you're concerned with. Um, you know, I got involved in politics not as a candidate, but as a, as a speaker, as a fundraiser, and as I spoke at events and helped other candidates run, some folks said, hey, we have a really important senate race coming up. You're pretty good at this. Would you consider running? And I think for a lot of folks, maybe you're a farmer in Northern California. I say that specifically because people don't think farmer when they hear California. They think Santa Monica, they think San Francisco. It's our biggest ag state in the nation. I mean, it's the, the Central Valley of California i- is our most

• 13:52Speaker 03

  fertile ag area in the whole nation, arguably. I mean, of course, there's different, you know, whether it's grains or, or, you know, um, soybeans, et cetera, et cetera. But it's one of the most fertile areas in the country. And, um, California farmers are at the center of this fire crisis that we're going to be talking about today. And, you know, common sense policies have been ignored. And, and, you know, when we talk about this modern conservative movement, you know, MAGA, America first, I, I think so much of that is misinterpreted by so many people that America first doesn't mean isolationism. America first doesn't mean nationalism. All America first means is the American people, it's not too much for the

• 14:35Speaker 03

  American people to ask and expect, that the government that they've elected and, and pay for. Makes decisions that are good for them. We put the American people first. We put American businesses first. We put the American border first. We make decisions as elected officials. We may disagree on details and procedure, but ultimately, when we make a decision, it's for what's good for the American people. And what we've been seeing for so many years now are decisions that are bad for the American people. We put the rest of the world first. We put, in Southern California, we're putting environmental groups first. We're putting the smelt fish first. We're putting endangered iceberg lettuce first. We're saying, "You can't pump water out of this reservoir because there's a snail in there that's endangered. Don't touch that

• 15:20Speaker 03

  water." We're saying, "Don't cut any of those trees out of that forest because it's protected area." Well, guess what? That forest burns. We're saying, you know, "We're not going to be ready to have community resilience for this because it violates our Endangered Species Act protections, and then we're not ready for a fire." So, I think this fire, you know, is going to be a wake-up call for the whole country. Because, you know, I started my companies, um, quick background to how I got into fire, you know, how I was a Navy SEAL Senator now, what does wildfire have to do with me? Like you, served overseas, SEAL Team Leader, and as you know, during those war years, we got very good at integrating

• 16:03Speaker 03

  close air support and airborne ISR, real time, into a ground team. And, you know, for years, you know when the first time aircraft were used in support of military operations? No, I don't. Napoleon, of course.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a Superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch. In Bev. Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  They started hot air balloons on a tether up so they could spot for the artillery and defillate.

• 17:39Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. Very rudimentary. They'd look at, you know, and then yell down corrections to their cannons. And of course, that progressed through, obviously, in World War I, early airplanes, Sop with Camel, et cetera, et cetera. Then, you know, World War II, of course, was the first real air war. And throughout all, and then, of course, Vietnam through the Cold War. But the first, during those 20th century wars, you know, we'd take imagery, take pictures. And if anyone's ever watched that movie 13 Days, where it shows the F-8 Crusader flying over Cuba, taking a picture of the Soviet missiles and then landing in DC, and it shows how all the steps the guys had to run the film through before it gets shown to the president. You know, airborne reconnaissance was a tool of the strategic commanders. Generals, secretaries, presidents.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  The average guy on the ground like you and I, we didn't see those pictures in World War II or Vietnam, Korea. But what we saw in our war, in the Global War on Terror, was a closure of that information loop to where every operator on the ground was starting to get access to that information. And that was a game changer. On so many occasions. See how many guys were on the compound? See where the rocket point of origin site's on the ridgeline? See where the enemy's squirting off to? And seeing that information in a timeline that you can make a tactical decision. Not strategic. Not, "We're going to invade the country on the east instead of the west, because that's where the missiles are." But a split-second decision, squirt her out the north end, you know, go.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  So I was part of that era and I started flying planes when I was a kid. My neighbor growing up was a Navy pilot, Harry Tebow, great man, Korean War era Navy pilot. And he took me out flying when I was about eight years old and I fell in love with it right away. I'm like, flying is gonna be my life. And he started teaching me how to fly and his son Steve Tebow started teaching me how to fly. And I got, I started, I was flying planes before I was driving cars. Got my pilot's license right away, sold when I was 16, pilot's license 17. And I went to Annapolis and I went to Annapolis to be a Navy pilot. Like that's what I was gonna do, be Navy pilot and astronaut, you know, like the movie The Right Stuff. That was my, that was gonna be my path. And of course, I get there and the wars are kicking off, Afghanistan, Iraq.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  And realized pretty quickly that me flying planes was really a selfish desire. I loved flying, but this was a ground war. We didn't need guys circling around in jets, no offense to our pilot friends, but this was a door kickers war. And I wanted to be where I was needed the absolute most in that war and that was on the ground. So I went into the teams, but I always had that aviation knowledge and passion. And my first deployment was Iraq, oh nine, and part of a joint task force there out of Baghdad. And we had, we had the integrated ISR all the time. And I really saw the power of those sensor systems. And my next deployment was Afghanistan in ten, did a few others after that. And across those deployments, I saw the impact of, of having real time information being shared with us.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  And then being able to bring in aircraft very precisely, conducting airstrikes in support of troops in contact. And one of the times that I was injured was actually friendly fire and Apache shot at us instead of the enemy. It was a mix up in the coordination, as I'm sure you've heard that. Luckily, nobody was seriously wounded or killed, obviously, but we all got our bell rung and a little bit of, you know, next dents and scratches there. But I came home from that after, after I got out of the military. And there was a fire in Arizona in 2013 called the Yarnell Mountain Fire. They maybe made a movie about it called Only the Brave. And in that fire, the team of hotshots, the Grand Mountain hotshots, were, were fighting a, a fire and, and the fire is in the southwest, in Arizona.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Sagebrush, high desert. Uh, when you have a terrain and wind driven fire and that kind of fuel type.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Moves very fast, very dangerous. You know, all fires are dangerous, but like heavy timber fires in the Northwest are really tough to put out, but they don't move quite as fast. Dry sagebrush and high desert fuels, those light fuels, it rips. And the wind shifted direction. The team leader made the right decision to say, with this fire is getting out of control, I'm going to get my team out of here. I'm going to move them to a safe zone. Well, unfortunately, he made the right decision, but with the wrong information. And instead of moving to a safe zone, you know, they moved into a zone where the fire burned them over and killed them, burned them all alive. Nineteen firefighters killed. And about, as I was getting out, it was about a year and a half after that event, I read

• 22:06Speaker 03

  the debrief on it. And I realized as I read through it, had that team leader had the same, you know, nineteen, that's about how many we'd have on the mission with SEALs, and I couldn't, and in the desert mountains, I was like, I'm, I could feel myself in his shoes in Afghanistan, runner on my guys in Afghanistan. And I said, man, if that team leader had the same tools I had as a team leader in Afghanistan, his team would be alive. So I started my company, Bridger Aerospace, to bring that capability. If I could bridge that gap, and provide that kind of data to our firefighters, we could save some lives and do some good. So we started my company, it was another veteran co-founder of mine. We started my barn with every cent we had, and it was, it was classic, like, shoot first,

• 22:50Speaker 03

  ask questions later. Like, let's just start a company, and we think we can solve this problem, having no idea what we were getting into. And man, it was, it was an adventure. Ten years, it was awesome. We went from two guys in a barn, we created over 400 jobs all over the world. We split into two companies eventually. We spun out our technology that was infrared into a defense company that shot down drones, it was very successful. We sold that, and then we took our firefighting company public, we're one of the largest aerial firefighting providers in the world now. And then Little Belt Catalco, we'll talk about later. My sniper for my SEAL team runs Little Belt Catalco. Farm-to-table beef from the time the calf hits the ground to the time, you know, it's processed, never leaves the state of Montana.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  And it's minimally transported because every time you move that cow, it stresses out the animal. And really proud of the product. It's some of the best beef we're ever gonna have. All-veteran-run operation there. And we're really trying to rebuild the American food supply chain. Because we're sending so much of our food supply chain overseas and it's so unhealthy for our people. We're an unhealthy country right now. Yeah. And we're gonna do everything kind of make our food here again. So... But anyway, so back to fires and Bridger was the core of all these other amazing businesses that I'm so proud of. Our veteran team, all were led by veterans, every single one. And we started bringing this close air support model to wildfire, to say we can

• 24:13Speaker 03

  real-time infrared surveillance, giving the ground team real-time intelligence. Then we can come in, bring water bombers in that specialize in tight, direct attack, high-volume on the fire. We can put that thing out and give the team the best support they can possibly get. And that's what we've done. And you know, one of our pilots actually was one of the guys we got out of Afghanistan. He was an Afghan Air Force pilot who with his squadron snuck out of the country. The Wall Street Journal had a great article about him and the company a few years ago. We got him out of the country, flew to Uzbekistan. As he was flying out of Kabul, they shot at his plane, shot a hole in his fuel tanks. So he ran out of fuel, crashed, landed in Uzbekistan. You know, we're all in touch with him, you know, the whole way.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  The team that, you know, got the noon that were handling him all the way. Got into the States. American dream. We get him out of Afghanistan, get his family to the US. Get him legally set up and now he's flying again, fighting wildfires in America, fighting for our country again. Damn, that's amazing. Yeah, and he's a great guy. But what we're seeing in LA right now is a catastrophe. I mean, it is... The culmination of so many facets of just basic mismanagement and wrong-headed policies come to a head. And unfortunately, this isn't the first time. You know, in the last year and a half, Lahaina, Maui, remember?

• 25:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Hawaii. Who thinks wildfires when they think Hawaii? Very few people. Hundred people dead, Lahaina wiped off the map. New Jersey in November. Who thinks about wildfires in New Jersey? But we had big fires in New Jersey in November. We had the largest fire in Texas history, one of the largest fires in American history, the Smokehouse Creek Fire, last March. And of course, now, we're seeing, literally, our nation's largest city burned to the ground.

• 26:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, we're gonna dive into this, but as of right now, just looked it up, we got 25 dead, it sounds like, from the fire. About 40,000 acres have been burned to the ground. Thousands and thousands of structures gone. And, you know, it sounds like there was a lot of incompetence. Sounds like we saved a lot of fish and snails, but not a lot of people. And, you know, I mean, where are we gonna, where are all these people gonna go? I mean, like you said, this is one of the largest cities in America, and where are they gonna go?

• 26:45Shawn Ryan?

  This is gonna take, this is gonna take years.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  To a different state? I mean, remember what happened in Katrina? When all those folks evacuated New Orleans? New Orleans still hasn't recovered. They all, a lot of them fled to Houston. Many of them never came back. Once they were uprooted and gone, they stayed. I think a lot of these people who are leaving the state to go stay with family elsewhere, packed up the car and drove away, many of them may not come back.

• 27:11Shawn Ryan?

  Man, man. Well, you know...

• 27:17Shawn Ryan?

  Trump called this actually on Joe Rogan's podcast. He talked, what was the fish?

• 27:22Speaker 03

  The smelt.

• 27:22Shawn Ryan?

  The smelt, the smelt fish. Said that they weren't pulling, pulling water from there because they wanted to save the smelt fish. Is it, is, I mean, a lot of incompetencies, we'll get into those, but what were your initial thoughts when you saw, when you saw the fire?

• 27:38Speaker 03

  Knew right away it was going to be a catastrophe. And actually, it was recently about three weeks ago, four weeks ago, I wrote an op-ed before all this.

• 27:45Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 27:47Speaker 03

  I wrote an op-ed, appeared on Foxnews.com saying, "We are not ready to fight wildfire in this country. Our system is fundamentally broken, and we have a big one coming and we're not ready." I wrote a book about it two years ago called Mud Slingers, about aerial firefighting. And 100% of the proceeds of that book go to fallen and injured wildland firefighters. I don't make a cent off it. But in the book, I wrote about it too. I said, "I've been fighting fires for almost a decade. Now, I'm not an expert. This guy's been doing it for 30, 40, 50 years, but I'm telling you, how we fight wars in other countries is such a far cry from how we protect our people.

• 28:26Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  Our own people. And when I see, I'm not criticizing the brave firefighters on the ground, uh, for, let's talk about our firefighters. You know, a structured firefighter in whatever city you're in. You do a 911 by national code, National Fire Protection Association, NFPA 4970, there are a whole list of codes. There'll be a red, big red fire truck at your front door in about 5 minutes 20 seconds. Every city in the country is laid out that way.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  And we pay those firefighters year-round, fantastic salaries, great wages, because they do a dangerous and important job for our communities. We may not need them every day, but when we need them, we need them. And we fucking need them right away.

• 29:07Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  We do the same thing with our police officers, same thing with our military. Right now, our firefighters have been staring down the barrel of a 40% pay cut, our wildland firefighters. We pay our wildland firefighters like hourly seasonal employees.

• 29:23Shawn Ryan?

  40% pay cut?

• 29:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:26Shawn Ryan?

  When did that happen?

• 29:27Speaker 03

  It hasn't happened yet, but that's what they're... If we don't enact legislation to protect their pay, that's what they're looking at having. And every year, that's what our firefighting community that protects our wildland firefighting... Our wildland firefighter community is constantly worried, are we going to get paid next year? Because they are paid as hourly seasonal employees. You know, and you look at the disparity between how we treat a veteran that goes to war. They get paid a salary. It's not the best salary in the world, but it's a salary to live on. They get housing benefits, they get medical benefits. And if they get hurt, injured, or killed, either in the States or on deployment, basically the military and the VA take care of them. Basically. It's not... We all know the VA's not perfect, but there's a system in place. Our wildland firefighters get none of that.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  In fact, my team and I started a foundation, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars specifically for that, the Montana Firefighter Fund, specifically to help severely injured or killed firefighters and their families, because there is no SGLI, there's no VA, there's no Wounded Warrior Project. And when these guys get hurt or, God forbid, killed, their families are kind of left like, what's the big deal? Like, what are we supposed to do? Where is the help? So, it's incredibly sad. But if you look at how we treat the problem holistically, this is such a challenging problem to solve. It's actually very simple to solve, but it's very challenging because it's a whole of government issue. Let's take the LA fires I'm talking about.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  For years, California has led the nation in environmental reform. There's some good things about that. We all want clean air, we all want healthy forests, we all want healthy ecosystems, and we want as many species running around as possible. I know very few people, I actually don't think I know anybody, who doesn't want those things. But those policies come at a cost. And this is, again, going back to America first, policies have impacts. And if you're going to say that the smelt, or the raging snailfish, or, you know, the spotted owl is more important than the safety of millions of residents, that's a decision you have to make openly and clearly, and you have to be honest with your constituents.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody, I know you all want... Spotted owls flying around. Are you comfortable with your neighborhood burning to the ground to protect that owl? And I, people would say, uh, no, absolutely not. Are you crazy? So how we, how our structure firefighting community is, is built, it emanates from the great fires of the 19th century. So, you know, go through history, especially in America, we built our cities fast during national expansion, built them out of wood and they built them without any rules. People just threw up whatever they could. Denver, Kansas City, Chicago, Boston, these great fires, the great Chicago fire really was, was the, was the impetus, I think it was 1893, I might be wrong on a year or two

• 32:19Speaker 03

  there, but late 19th century. And after that fire, everyone came together and said, never again, we're done with our cities burning to the ground. This is happening too often. And actually, who came out and fixed it was private industry. Westinghouse, General Electric, the electric companies who were wiring our cities with early electricity, there was no code of how to run wires. You know, now you can't put an outlet in without pulling out the code book and a guy coming by inspecting it. Back then, it was so new, you just, yeah, whatever, stick the wires in here and let's go. So all these wood buildings jammed together with a bunch of wires running through them that were shorting out all the time and these cities would start on fire and they'd literally burn to the ground.

• 33:01Speaker 03

  So in the, in the wake of the great Chicago fire, the electrical companies came together and formed an association, an association that today is known as the National Fire Protection Association. And they said very clearly, number one, this is morally wrong, it's also bad for business. Like we're burning down cities. We are going to create a system of codes to better protect our cities from wildfire. And fast forward through the 20th century, what they did was building codes. Fire sprinklers, you know, how we wire our rooms to make sure that, you know, uh, the, the outlets in our wiring is, you know, 16, 18 inches off the ground, if anyone was state you're in, you know, how we run the wires through conduit, uh, where fire hydrants are, those early fires, what would happen is, it was before water in the cities, so they'd fight it with...

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Bales, uh, pails of sand, you know, and shovel on the fire and lots of times they create fire breaks in the city. So as, as buildings were burning, instead of spraying water arms, they didn't have fire hydrants, they would just demolish a line of buildings behind them. That's where the saying fight fire with fire comes from and then start them on fire to create a back burn to literally, they'd burn down part of the city to keep the rest of the city from burning when the main fire got there, which is a tactic to fight wildfire. Um, and eventually they said that this is ridiculous. We should be able to fight fires in our city. So they created a system to fight fires and that starts with building codes. It starts with a fire hydrant every street corner. It starts with hoses that match

• 34:25Speaker 03

  the fire hydrants. Cause then as we started to use water in cities to fight fire, you know, different boroughs would help each other out. Brooklyn would go help Manhattan or, you know, Long Beach would go help, you know, Anaheim, whatever. And they'd get there and the hoses wouldn't match because they bought different equipment, you know, or they made their own thing up. And they'd have a fire wagon show up and try to plug their hose in. Ah, shit, these are different sizes. Like what, what good is it if we can't hook the hoses up? So they standardized hose sizes, respirators, how to train firefighters, and it created a national standard for firefighting that as it was adopted, decreased structural firefighting deaths in civilians and firefighters by 80%. And as you well know today, I mean,

• 35:07Speaker 03

  firefighters, we call them firefighters, but really I think 94% of callouts for firefighters now are medical related. They're basically EMTs and car accidents. Yeah. We've largely eliminated structure fire from our nation's regular everyday occurrence. And every, around every city, fire stations are, are located to provide a five minute response time anywhere in the city. And within that response time is a table of requirements. Okay. It's four story building. It'll be a ladder truck. It's a 10 story building, this big. All right. We need two ladder trucks, four rescue rigs, two ambulances. And they basically construct that based on a, on a response matrix. Um, and a five minute response time means you call 911 because you have a kitchen fire. They get there while the fire's

• 35:51Speaker 03

  still in the kitchen. They show up half hour later or an hour later. Now the fire's in the living room or the whole house is burned down or it's moved to the next house. So time is of the essence in fire response, any kind of fire. You know what the response time is nationally for wildland fires?

• 36:09Shawn Ryan?

  I don't.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  That's because there isn't one.

• 36:12Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  There is no requirement. None. That's why, like last year for the Texas fires, it took three to four days for aircraft to be able to be ordered through the system, and I'll tell you why. I'm not blaming anybody. It's not the Forest Service's fault. It's not the Department of Interior's fault. This is just how the system we've allowed to exist works.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  When the fire season's over, season, it's January, and we have the biggest fire, worst disaster in American history burning as we speak, and it's January. So there is no fire season. November, we were burning in New Jersey. All summer, of course, is Colorado, Utah, Montana, the West.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  February last year, we're burning in Texas. Now it's January, we're burning in LA. So there is no season anymore. If there ever was one.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  But when these traditional federal system says the fire season is over,

• 37:08Speaker 03

  they deactivate all the air tankers and all the firefighters, all the engines. They lay off the fire crews and they shut down the fire stations. It's literally like if this, here in this neighborhood, you said, you know, we haven't had a fire here in about a week. We feel pretty good. Hey, Mayor, fire all the firefighters, sell the fire engines for cash and, and shut down the fire stations because we obviously don't need them anymore. We haven't had a fire in a week. So why do we need all these people hanging around? That is the exact paradigm that governs our wildland fire apparatus nationally. And that's why in January, there was not a ready-made response matrix ready to go for this because come winter time, winter time, we sent everybody home.

• 37:54Shawn Ryan?

  How many people have been, do you, do you have any idea how many people are now displaced?

• 38:00Speaker 03

  I've heard, I think we're over 15,000 evacuated.

• 38:03Shawn Ryan?

  15,000?

• 38:03Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm sorry. I think, I think it's over, almost 15,000 structures have been damaged. I think 60, 50 or 60,000 people have been evacuated as of today.

• 38:10Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  I know some people are starting to trickle back in. Um, but yeah, pretty serious numbers. I mean, those are huge numbers.

• 38:17Shawn Ryan?

  How did this, you know, we, me and you had a, we had a phone conversation uh, what, a couple of days ago, uh, when we put the interview together, the timeline here, but I asked you. How did this start? Could this have been? You know, we talk a lot about terrorism on the show. Could it be? Could it be terrorism? I mean, you said yourself, go ahead. You know what Al Qaeda said.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  No, it absolutely could be. And, you know, we recovered plans, you know, not we, but the royal we, you know, special operations, intelligence, community, law enforcement. I'm not sure who is the appropriating, you know, agency. But there were plans recovered from Al Qaeda that's that had a proposed plan to attack America with wildfire. Because anyone who's been to the Western US, spent time out there, you go out there in those dry months, August, September, October, especially like now with the San Antonio winds kicking. It's the cheapest way to wreak absolute havoc on our nation. The cheapest way. I mean, nine 11 was pretty damn cheap, but, you know, they trained those guys for a few years, they had to hijack airliners and it was a complex plan. Well executed.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  Hate those guys, but you gotta respect, that was a well executed plan. Terrible. Think about wildfires. Easiest thing ever. You drive down the interstate with a Roman candle or, you know, a Evian bottle of kerosene, light it and throw it out the window and keep driving. And the fuel is so explosive that especially in winds like this, those fires will move fast. I mean, so last year, the Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas. We'll get back to LA in a second, but I think it's important for folks to realize, everyone's talking about LA, as they should be. But there's so many other incidents in the past many, many years that that illustrate why this is preventable and why we need to act now to fix it.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  The Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas last year was a disaster. The local response, as usual, is great. These local fire departments man up, they get out there, they fight hard, they protect their communities, but they do not have the resources. A local fire truck is not designed to fight a million acre fire. It's designed to go fight a little two veteran house fire in the neighborhood. These guys are outgunned, they're outmatched. That fire at peak spread, when it was being pushed by 80 mile an hour winds, was burning two football fields a second.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  Wow. Visualize that. Wow. That's how fast it can spread. So this isn't the perception of people, they think about a fire, it's plodding along. Two football fields a second? It's plodding along and it doesn't burn in a line, you know, you know, it's, I fought a lot of fires from the air, fought two fires myself on a ranch this summer, you know, if you live out west, especially if you're an egg fighting wild, you better be always ready with your, with your pick and your shovel and your plasky tool to go fight a fire because the hay baler, the hay rake, the swather, you'll hit a rock when you're, when you're pulling hay and you know, it will, it will start a fire. So, um, two football fields a second is how fast that thing is moving. And it doesn't move in a line, especially when it's moving fast, the heat of the fire,

• 41:22Speaker 03

  like when people look at these pictures in California, they'll look at, they'll see trees intact and they see a house gone. And they look at those pics like, how did that happen? How come the trees are standing, but the house is gone? Well, a lot of this because the proximity heat of the fire will cause things to self combust in front of the fire. So it's not even the line of the fire, it's just the heat that it's creating causes the flash point of material to just burst into flames. And then embers will get blown by the wind out in front of the fire line and you'll have spotting. And spotting is where you see spot fires starting in front of it. And that's how sometimes the ash will blow miles in front of the fire and start spot fires that can be a whole new fire. And that's what we're getting, seeing now in LA is a complex fire.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  That's what we call a complex fire where it's not one simple fire. It's a whole area of fires, like we're seeing in LA now, there's multiple fires around the valley that have been started. And now you've got a complex fire. You've got a huge incident of multiple different fires that are all part of the same ecosystem, but they are different incidents. And that makes your, your response to that, that much harder.

• 42:28Shawn Ryan?

  So, I mean, do we, you know, kind of back to the, "Thank you for that, that, that, that explains a lot on how these spread," and that's, I mean, two acres a second, that's, that's moving. Um, you know, the terrorism, do we know how, do we know how this started?

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Not yet, and, and obviously, one thing about arson investigation is, is, you know, it is inherently challenging because the area has been burned. Um, there's definitely been accusations that this is arson. I have not seen any, you know, foolproof evidence that it was. Um, but there absolutely has been arsonists all over the country that started these fires. And one thing that has been a big issue on the West Coast is, is a lot of the, the, the homeless drug population, where they're out there, they've got a stove, they're either cooking their food, or meth or whatever, in these homeless camps, and then fires kick off in there, and then boom, it's gone. Um, that, but when you go back to the terrorist concept, it makes a lot of sense.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  I mean, this is now the most expensive natural disaster in American history. I mean, it's, it's not even over yet, but it's on track to be the most expensive disaster in American history. Billions and billions of dollars. And think about this, Sean, this is the scariest part about this fire. The deaths are, are terrible, the families and the homes destroyed, but this is the really scary underlayment of this issue. Insurance. Wildfire insurance could go away after this. I mean, it's been happening, these fires, we have more people living in wildfire pronouns than we've ever had before in America. You know, Western US, whether it's resort communities in the mountains, whether it's LA, I mean, people are building homes up into the hills, literally in the middle of

• 44:12Speaker 03

  fire country than never did before. And as a result, those homes have to be insured, because normally to get a mortgage, you need to have homeowner's insurance. Well, wildfire homeowner's insurance has already been creaky these last few years, that the, the foundations are starting to crumble after that Paradise fire, the campfire in Paradise, California, Lahaina, uh, so many fires across the Western US. Insurance companies are starting to get far more risk averse on whether we're going to underwrite a home in a wildfire risk area.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  This fire may eliminate it altogether. And if that happens, think how many people will lose homeowner's insurance and will not be able to finance their home, or will lose their mortgage, or their homeowner's insurance will go up so much they can't afford to live there. I mean, this could be a crisis in homeownership, which is, as you know, for the last four generations, has been the main vehicle for American wealth creation. The vast majority of Americans' wealth is in their home. That's where we put our nest egg. That's where we generate long-term wealth. We make a salary, we have a 401K, but really, most of us, our eggs are in our home. And we're betting on that's going to appreciate over our lifetime, and that will be my, that will be the foundation of my net worth.

• 45:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, I mean, the same thing's kind of happening on the East Coast, especially in Florida with hurricanes.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  And they're interlinked, because they all feed back to the same reinsurance pool. They're not, these aren't segregated pools, for the most part. They're all coming back to the same reinsurance underwriters. So they're all exposed to the same risk. And we are approaching a crisis point where almost 08-style real estate crisis, because a third of America lives in wildfire-prone areas. And a lot of Americans live in hurricane-prone southeast, but think about wildfires, far bigger impact than the southeast hurricanes. And not to belittle it all, but a lot more people live west of the Mississippi than live in that kind of Gulf corner.

• 46:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I know, I got a lot of friends down in Florida, moved up here from Florida. I mean, some of these, I think their insurance went up 40%. 40%.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  And that's not done going up. That's just, that's just a short trend line.

• 46:22Shawn Ryan?

  Some of them can't even get insured, depending on where the flood zones are, but...

• 46:26Speaker 03

  And if you already own a house, maybe you can keep your mortgage, but you almost can never get a new mortgage if you can't get insurance. They require it.

• 46:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  So if you're trying to buy a home, and you can't get in hurricane or fire coverage, you may not be able to buy a home.

• 46:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so, I mean, is it... Is it...

• 46:47Shawn Ryan?

  Kind of moving into insurance, I wanted to go back, I mean, I do believe there is, we'll hit on the insurance in a minute, but I believe there is proof.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  They caught that one guy with the blowtorch, that he was biking off, going behind the house with a blowtorch. I have no doubt some of these, again, there's multiple fires, were definitely human started, no question.

• 47:04Shawn Ryan?

  Now, my...

• 47:05Speaker 03

  I guess the point is, I don't know if they're coordinated, I don't know if there's some crazy meth head who's off his rocker, who just feels like doing it, because that has happened several times, where just some jackass who's literally out of his mind, or if it's somebody who's malicious, or if it's a coordinated attack. Because Al Qaeda did have a plan to basically cripple the American West Coast, they wanted to start fires basically from Southern California to Washington, all along the Pacific Coast Highway essentially, and just create a firestorm in the Western US to cripple us. And as we're seeing right now, it would have worked.

• 47:38Shawn Ryan?

  How would they, I mean, how would they even find out what caused this? Will they?

• 47:44Speaker 03

  They will, I mean, I don't know for sure, it sounds like the, you know, the emergency response stuff in LA hasn't been up to par, so I don't know, but I assume they will. And will probably find that some of it was genuine, um, let's talk California policies.

• 48:03Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  You know, the Camp Fire in Paradise was caused by a PG&E gas line, Pacific Gas Electric, I'm sorry, a power line, that shorted out, started the fire. I think some of these were intentional arson, some of them may be utility lines, but you know, PG&E was blamed as a big evil American corporation. These guys didn't maintain their power lines, their corporate greed, and they got multi-billion dollar judgment, they got taken to court, basically put out of business, and you know, you owe all these people billions of dollars for your failures. Fair, got to hold people accountable, I'm not afraid of accountability at all.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  But the reason PG&E's infrastructure and their power lines was so old and faulty, the reason they didn't pay to upgrade it was because the state of California had forced them to reinvest all of their income into solar power, wind power, and DEI, and wasn't allowing them to make the necessary upgrades to their traditional fossil fuel oriented power infrastructure. And for years, management was saying, "We need to upgrade these century-old transmission lines because they are a fire threat. We need to be able to cut trees down around the power lines so they don't start them on fire." And of course, what does the state of California say? "No, you can't cut trees down. Cutting trees down is bad. We don't do that in California. You can't cut trees down. Oh, by the way, we're not letting you spend any more money on these power lines because

• 49:28Speaker 03

  they carry dirty power. Dirty power is bad for Mother Nature and it's bad for the world. So instead, you're going to take that money you want to fix your old, dirty power lines, you're going to build wind turbines." And over the objections of management, that's what happened. And the impacts we feel now. And it's no different that there's a great science experiment you can do with somebody when they ask about, you know, aerial firefighting, which obviously you're seeing a display of that here in California right now. The big yellow planes that come in and scoop the water, that's why I fly, that's where our company would operate. Everywhere else in the world, when those planes drop water on fire, you know, you take a glass and you fill it with a carbonated beverage and you pour it in quick, it fills.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  You know, you maybe pour three ounces and the whole cup's full of carbonation. You pour still water into your glass, it only, however much you pour in is how much you fill. Every other country in the world, when you see those water bombers fly in, they use what's called water additives. So you scoop the water out of the ocean, out of a lake reservoir, you add in gel-based additives, foam additives, whatever it is, retardant-based solutions, and it increases the effectiveness of that water dropped on the fire by five to six x, three to four x, depending on the, but, you know, significantly. And because when it drops on the fire, it foams up and suffocates the fire. But here in America, we don't do that because we're not allowed, because that foam might harm the...

• 50:58Speaker 03

  White-tailed deer population, or the Eurasian snailfish, or the smelt, or the goldfish. Well, we don't want that stuff poured in our forests, so that's bad. We don't like- That's throughout the entire US? Yes. You are prohibited. Not like you're not encouraged not to do it, you are prohibited from putting those things in your airplanes. It's like, if the rest of the world fights this way because it's more effective. Now you're forcing, it's like if you were deployed overseas and they said, "No, you can't carry that AR, it's too effective." And there might be a stray bullet that hit a civilian, "You can only carry your sidearm on this deployment." Geez. And that's, that's the type of rules. I mean, there's many that, we can go on for hours about all these different codes and regulations that restrict effective firefighting of wildland fires.

• 51:42Speaker 03

  But that's just one example of one thing we do in America. And, you know, it's wrong-headed environmental policies that are having these impacts. And we're seeing... The thing about these fires, whether you're a billionaire, a millionaire, or an actor, or a homeless guy, they affect you just the same. It doesn't give a shit who you are, it's burning your community down, and you better get the hell out of the way. And we're seeing everyone on their phones, "What the hell? How could this happen? I pay the highest taxes in LA. We have the more rules than anybody, we're doing more climate crap here than anywhere, and guess what? Our city's the one burning down." And, you know, sometimes you'll be fighting a fire, and, you know, you want to pull water from a reservoir to go fight the fire. And time is critical, as I mentioned in the fire. Initial attack, get there fast.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Well, you have a reservoir right next to the fire. Your turn time could be one minute, two minutes, three minutes, five minutes. Nope, can't use this reservoir. There's, uh, there's an endangered goldfish that lives there. You need to go to that reservoir 20 miles away. Is that what happened in LA? Absolutely. This happens all over California. I personally, personally, it's recently like September, can't go in that body of water. You gotta go over to that one. And now your turn time, instead of two minutes, is 20 minutes. Doesn't sound like a big deal until you realize, over the course of a day, you are decreasing the effectiveness of that asset by 10x. 10 times. And oh, by the way, because you haven't put that foam in the water, now add a 5x on that. So now we're at 50 times less effective than we could be.

• 53:09Speaker 03

  And if you're someone sitting there whose house is about to burn down and you're like, "Hey, over here!" And the plane flies over your head or the helicopter flies over your head and you're like, "Oh, sorry, the goldfish pond can't use that. We gotta go 20 miles away. We'll see you in 20 minutes." And you're like, "Mike, this fire's spreading at two football fields a second and now it's 20 minutes away to get air support?" Imagine being pinned down in a valley in Afghanistan being told, "Sorry, the aircraft's available, but because of the environmental impact of the bomb he's gonna drop, you just keep holding on that firefight for another half hour and we're gonna find a green bomb for you because the dirty bomb's too dirty." Wow. And that's what these people are... And our brave wildland firefighting crews,

• 53:50Speaker 03

  who are underpaid, they don't get medical benefits, they don't get VA benefits, they don't get taken care of, they're on the ground, as you see these pictures, soot-covered faces, underpaid, hacking away, chainsaws and Pulaski tools, without the air support they need. And we don't have enough of them. So, you know, we will spend billions of dollars on protecting other countries. Yeah, I was gonna get to that. In our own country, we can't protect our own people. And that goes back to America First. People are like, "Oh, you know, there's..." All America First means is we owe it to our people to protect them. I mean, that's the first duty of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. That's the first duty of government, is to protect the safety of its people. It's just

• 54:35Speaker 03

  like being a parent, you know? There's a lot of things you need to do as a parent. You gotta educate your kids, wanna make sure they're well-rounded, make sure they're humble, make sure they're God-fearing and respectful, and that's all good. But guess what? The first thing you do is make sure they're safe. The first thing a parent does is make sure the children are safe. The first thing our government should do before they worry about transgender education, before they worry about welfare payments, before they worry about, you know, utilities, before they worry about any other function, it's, "Are our people safe?" And right now, as we're seeing, you know, the largest or the second largest... The big one.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. One of our biggest cities, that's a beacon of the American dream, is not safe.

• 55:23Shawn Ryan?

  I just, I can't, so, so they put a, a fish.

• 55:31Shawn Ryan?

  Or lettuce, or the spotted owl, or whatever the hell it was, they put that, they put that above human life.

• 55:41Speaker 03

  A- and I think-

• 55:43Shawn Ryan?

  And that's, that's, that's a federal law, that's not a California law.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's all above, so, and here's the challenging part of this wildland paradigm, is it is, it is so insidious around us, and, and I want to be clear, there's no mastermind, there's no George Soros back there like, "I'm gonna burn down America and here's how we're gonna do it." This is just the accumulation of decades of bad policy, just bad policy, forest management.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  At one point, the US Forest Service was the largest percentage-wise contributor to the US National Treasury, it was a profitable agency, that's an oxymoron, I mean, executive branch agencies, you don't earn a profit, you are a cost center by definition, if the government was a business, our executive branch agencies are cost centers, we raise money from taxes, tariffs, revenue, and then we spend it in our executive agencies to provide services to our people. By definition, not really supposed to generate revenue, but the Forest Service would, through timber leases, that's why it's under the Department of Agriculture, the US Forest Service sits under USDA, which is weird, the Forest Service should be under USDOI by modern kind of cognitive standards, but because it was a harvestable commodity product, they put it under US Department of Agriculture.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  Well, the USDA is worried about corn subsidies and soybean prices and egg exports around the world, I mean, forests are a tiny pimple on the ass of what USDA does every day, it's not core to their mission. And as a result, what's happened is, the environmental lobbying groups and the very litigious environment that we now have, has shut down the American timber industry, and now we buy our timber from Canada and Chile and everywhere else, but we don't grow timber here in America anymore, because it's impossible, almost, to have a business model that works with American timber. I mean, in Montana, and this connects to fire, I'll circle back here to explain why this is important, there used to be 36 timber mills in the state of Montana.

• 57:43Speaker 03

  Important jobs for these small towns like Libby and Troy and Columbia Falls, where every town would be surrounded by big, beautiful forests. They'd bring the logs in, build timber to build American homes. With American jobs, with American trees. And over the years, as the environmental groups partnered with enviros in government, who were active in wanting to shut down the timber industry, who then partnered with massive donors to conserve and protect wildland, they started shutting down massive swaths of our country.

• 58:21Speaker 03

  I mean, Biden just did a massive grab for national protected wildlife refuge land. Obama did them all over the place, where they're just grabbing millions of acres, saying, boom, wilderness, national monument, national monument. Can't touch this, can't touch that. And, you know, the impacts of that somewhere economic. We can't drill in those areas anymore for oil and gas. We can't pull lithium out of the ground. One of the largest lithium deposits in the world is on DOI land, DLM land in Nevada, where that could be like, they're saying hundreds of billions of dollars of lithium that could go right into the national treasury, pay off national debt, and we're not touching it because we can't pull things out of the ground.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  So, how this relates to wildfires is you have massively overgrown forests. Forests are supposed to burn every few years. That's part of the ecosystem. And if they're not going to burn, we need to be thinning them with logging, like we did for centuries here. Well, that industry was basically shut down in America 30 years ago. It's basically been litigated out of existence. So now you have these wildlife areas where you can't build roads, you can't cut a tree down, and you can't run any kind of utilities because they're wilderness. They have to be left exactly as they are. What happens is you get a buildup of fuel loading. And if you haven't spent time in the forests of the western US, the vast majority of them, you can't walk off, if there is a trail, you can't walk off the trail because there's six, eight, 10 feet of deadfall there.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  It's largely inaccessible. Well, when that fire comes through, a natural fire is supposed to burn through the floor of the forest and rejuvenate, you know, kill the saplings, burn through the underbrush and rejuvenate, bring nitrogen back to the soil. Now with so much fuel loading there, and that fire comes through, it burns about 10 times hotter than it's supposed to, and it scorches the ecosystem. Destroys it. And that fire is hotter and stronger than we were able to fight. And those type of environmental protection policies, wilderness policies, don't touch this land, don't build a road there, build up and make it so we can't fight fire in these parts of the country.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  So fixing this fire issue means we need to bring back common sense, public lands management, because most of these lands that are mismanaged, the vast majority of them are public. They're owned by the federal government. Well, I should say they're owned by the American people. They are public. But a long time ago, the concept that the American people control these lands left. Now, the governments...

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  Runs these lands and it's run by environmentalist groups, it's run by the Enviro Lobby, it's run by environmental lawyers who injunct every single decision. You try to put foam in an airplane tank and say, "We need to..." Boom, they'll injunct that. They're waiting like sniper shot. You poke your head up, boom. "Hey, we want to start logging this 600 acre section." Boom, no, we're gonna sue you for that. "Hey, we want to start mining..." No, boom. "Hey, we want to build a road here." No, sue, you're violating this wilderness code. And they litigate you out of existence. "Hey, we want to use this reservoir to fill our fire hydrants." No, boom, that's an endangered species, classified, body of water can't touch it. And then you think about these fire hydrants going dry in LA, there's a lot of reasons why, but...

• 1:02:44Shawn Ryan?

  Is that, I wanted to ask you that, is that true that the, that there was no water or the...

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  A lot of the fire hydrants were running dry and a lot of reasons for it. Some of it was power was shut down and obviously if you're up higher elevation, like if you're on a promontory out there, you need electric pump pressure to get those hydrants full. Well, when they shut power down, that's not happening, number one. Number two, I mean, what's a, what do you think a fire hydrant's built for? I mean, what do you have a fire hydrant on the street corner? It's for a house fire, right? I mean, it's for one fire truck to pull up, hook up his hose, and spray down the house. So that's what our fire hydrants are designed to do. Again, urban firefighting. Our whole cities are planned for urban firefighting. Pull the fire truck up, plug the hose in, spray the house. Now imagine turning every single fire hydrant on in the city to fight 5,000 house fires at once.

• 1:03:34Shawn Ryan?

  Shit.

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  The water pressure's not there for that. It's like turning every shower in your house on at once and every sink on and flush every toilet and turn your washing machine and your dishwasher on. You probably don't have enough water pressure anymore to keep all that running. So when you turn every fire hydrant, plus every citizen's got their garden hose on, pretty soon, I mean, the system is taxed beyond what it's designed to have. So we're in a great fire period like we were over 100 years ago, when we have now had many US cities wiped off the map.

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  Literally, I mean Lahaina is gone, parts of LA are gone.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  Paradise, California is gone. It's about time we realize we can't keep doing this.

• 1:04:25Shawn Ryan?

  So who's, you know, at the very beginning of this interview, we talked about holding government accountable.

• 1:04:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:04:31Shawn Ryan?

  So for the LA wildfires,

• 1:04:36Shawn Ryan?

  who needs to be held accountable?

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:38Shawn Ryan?

  Is it Gavin Newsom? Is it, there's a lot of talk about the, um, the three, it sounds like the three top

• 1:04:49Shawn Ryan?

  people in charge of the fire departments in that, in, in, in LA or DEI types. I mean, who, who needs to be held accountable there? Or is it the federal government?

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  Uh, all of the above. And, and the best way to hold people accountable is elections. You know, California's got to wake up.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  Why do you keep voting for these people?

• 1:05:11Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know. I mean, shit, Gavin Newsom got recalled and they put him right back in there.

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:05:17Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, you know, I mean, I don't know why this is. I don't, maybe they, I don't, I don't, I just, I can't wrap my head around it. I, I, California just doesn't make any damn sense to me. But, I mean, so let's talk about the...

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  But accountability, it's important. Let's, I want a quick hit on that because accountability matters. And, and there is, as Pete Hex said in his interview yesterday, or is, is, is a hearing, you know, if you lose your rifle as a soldier, you're crucified. If you lose a war as a general, nobody cares. And that same paradigm holds true in wildfire. When these things happen, go through all these disastrous, huge wildfires and go find the chain of command for each of them, whether it's a federal agency or a state. You're very rarely going to find, if ever, that the, after these fires, after these disasters happen, after it'll take four or five days to dispatch aircraft to go fight a fire.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  Why do that takes along? What happened, guys? Well, well, the system, you know? And how technical do you want to get on some of this stuff? Because, I mean, there's some interesting technicalities, but I don't want to get too deep.

• 1:06:27Shawn Ryan?

  I think, I think, I think what I'm kind of leaning towards is, let's, let's go down the, let's just go down the chain of command here. Or let's go down the chain. Who at the federal government needs to be held accountable? How can, how can all these places that are having these wildfires? Hawaii, Texas, New Jersey, California, Washington, Oregon? How, how do they hold the federal government accountable? And who? And why? Why, why?

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  Yep, so he, here is, now you are getting to the crux of the issue with wildfire. Why is such a big problem? And why we have not fixed it? Because there is nobody accountable. There is not a single confirmed or appointed position in the US government that is accountable for wildfire. Not a single one. Not a single one. Now, there are employees down the chain who, you know, are career GS employees that have responsibility. But it's not like the military where boom, it goes up. Secretary of Defense, you are responsible. Fix this shit now or you're gone. There is no train derails, Director of Transportation,

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  get your ass in here, why are bridges collapsing? Fix it or you're gone. Planes are crashing. FAA Director, get your ass in here. If you don't have doors stop falling off Boeing planes, you're gone. NASA Director, Challenger just exploded. Why the fuck are our rocket boosters not? What's up with the O-rings? Fix it or you're gone. There is nobody in the US government that can, can be held accountable.

• 1:08:07Shawn Ryan?

  So there needs to be some type of an, in, in.

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  Crosscutting. Because how it works.

• 1:08:13Shawn Ryan?

  Need a new administration that, that.

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:08:15Shawn Ryan?

  Some kind of Director of Wildfire.

• 1:08:17Speaker 03

  Exactly. And I'm not giving, I, I'm not criticizing anybody in the current government. I'm just stating a fact that there's no one to bring in. Even if you wanted to. If Trump said. Find, get that guy in. Who's our wildfire guy? They'd be like, oh, we don't have one. How do we not have one? Cities are burning down, millions of acres burning. What do you mean, we don't have one? They'd be like, well, we're going through the paperwork, sir. It doesn't appear we have anybody responsible for it. And that's true, we don't. Now, how wildland fire responsibility is dictated is whose land it is. And here's part of the reason that we're delayed when we dispatch our aircraft, or helicopters, or ground crews, is the first thing that happens when a fire starts, it depends on where, but generally, they pull out the land map.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  And they figure out whose land is it. And they will literally argue over whose responsibility the fire is, because it comes out of whoever's budget. Always comes back to money, right? This is BLM land, that's Department of Interior. This is BIA land. This is state park land. This is state trust land. This is county land. This is private land. And they'll look at the checkerboard map, which is what land looks like when you look at land ownership map in the Western US, the checkerboard. And they'll basically argue over whose responsibility it is. And what we need to do is cross-cut, it's like 9/11. When they said, who the hell knew this was coming? And everyone got in the room. No one's putting the intelligence together, from law enforcement to military to the intelligence committee, to say, we better start talking.

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  And in the wildfire world, there is no, there is no cross lateral communication that ensures that there's one responsible organization.

• 1:09:55Shawn Ryan?

  So there needs to be some type of a committee or an appointee?

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59Shawn Ryan?

  That is created to?

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  Hundred percent. And that, and that person, the people that oversee wildland firefighting, who, who they exist under are not, they're, they're farmers, they're bureaucrats, they're administrators, they're not bad people, but they are not an emergency response organization. They are not, it's like taking a SEAL team and putting it under the Parks and Rec Department. Like, we have smoke jumpers, and hotshots, and water bomber pilots, and Hell-Attack crews, and awesome guys that are, are alpha, alpha dudes, and women like us, who are tough. They go through tough training. They're awesome servants for their country.

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  But then they work in an environment that's it's not an agency fit for purpose. You know, you and I always worked, at least at some point up the chain, we had meat eaters up there deciding whether we were gonna go kill the bad guys or not.

• 1:10:47Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:47Speaker 03

  That is not the case in this community. You know, eventually, Department of Agriculture, the Forest Service guys are, you know, 15 layers of grain traders and commodity crop, you know, forecasters and administrators. And the DOI, it's a little bit better, they're a little bit of a thinner bureaucracy, but firefighters are not led by other firefighters. And the decisions are not made about emergency response, they're made with a risk management outlook and a financial management outlook. How do we do this cheaper? How do we keep our people safe? Not, how do I send a team in there to save this town and save this community?

• 1:11:22Shawn Ryan?

  So how do, I mean, how do, how do we start this? I mean, you and you just started the conversation and, you know, hopefully it spreads, but, I mean, how, how does this, how does this, I mean, how, how would that be implemented? Is that, would that be implemented by the president? Would that be implemented by Congress and then go into the senate? I mean, how is that implemented?

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  Both, yeah. It's gotta be both. Again, one of the beautiful things about America is our republic, how our founders who were so wise designed an amazing form of government, it's not perfect, but it works better than anything else in the world. And dual-track it. So, the 119th Congress has to bring in wildfire accountability. This disaster is the wake-up call we've all been warning about for years, that we are not ready. We need to fix this. They need to bring in a real solution, not just more of these stupid hearings and commissions where everyone talks and nothing happens. They need to create a real legislative plan to actually create a National Wildland Firefighting

• 1:12:23Speaker 03

  Service Task Force Accountable Commission, Accountable Agency that says, we are going to be the accountable conduit for all firefighting. President Trump and the executive branch should say, I'm gonna point a wildfire czar or wildfire director, call whatever the hell you want, but I want one guy from the executive branch to support our legislation over here as they craft this to make sure that we build a single point of contact and a single line of accountability. So we can fight these fires because it crosscuts the EPA. We've got to get the EPA out of the way so we can manage the forests and we can not have to be not scooping water from places we should be scooping water. We need to get the Forest Service on board, the Department of Interior on board. We need to get state foresters and state Department

• 1:13:08Speaker 03

  of Natural Resources on board, the FAA who governs aviation. They've got to make sure they craft a specific FAR so that aircraft that fight fires don't have to go through these like circular carding inspection routines that take them so far from airworthiness in the mission that it wastes time and grounds capable aircraft. Right now, our wildfire fighting spectrum is spread across so many agencies that there's no accountability. It's impossible to hold them accountable.

• 1:13:38Shawn Ryan?

  So we need a we need a committee or an appointee with bilateral communication from all these other organizations and agencies. Let's move to the let's move to the state level, California.

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:13:50Shawn Ryan?

  Governor Newsom. Is he held accountable? Does he need to be held accountable? Does he have, I mean, you know, we talk about, you know, why does this guy keep getting voted in? I mean, I think we need to educate on the discrepancies.

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:14:05Shawn Ryan?

  If there are any that he needs to be held accountable for.

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  I mean, they held PG&E accountable for billions of dollars for what they call gross negligence in the maintenance of their transmission lines that started the campfire that destroyed Paradise, killed 100 people. I believe there should be legal repercussions for mismanagement, you know? I believe there should be for city officials, county officials, state officials that said, hey, you ignored the warning signs. This wind event was forecasted that came through. Yes, fires can start, but the conditions the fires start in are will impact their behavior and aggressive, fast-moving fire behavior will be driven, especially in that type of fuel, which is the Southern California, the San Antonio winds come in.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  It's well-known in California. My wife's family farm is that area. It's up north of Camp Pendleton area. Yeah, and they, up here by Camarillo, it's a fruit farm. She has two brothers with Down's Syndrome and they use their farm as a, it's all Down's Syndrome kids work on there. And it's a way to keep them engaged and make them part of something. It's a really special spot. And it was destroyed in November by a wildfire. So again, this is a very personal issue for me. Her parents and kids and brothers got out, but you know, it was a close call. But those fires moved so fast, and this wind event was forecasted. And there should have been dozens of planes and helicopters on standby, ready to go.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  They should have had evacuation plans already communicated in place very clearly. They should have had firefighting crews already deployed, ready to go. And they didn't.

• 1:15:49Shawn Ryan?

  What about the reservoirs?

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  Reservoirs-

• 1:15:51Shawn Ryan?

  Could Gavin Newsom have overwritten that and said, "No, pull from that reservoir right there."

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  I don't know if he, I don't know the legality, but he certainly should have. I mean, that's what you do as a leader. You make tough decisions. "Well, I can't violate this right because I can't..." You know damn well. I mean, you led overseas, "All right, I know this is a rule, but guess what? People are dying. I'm gonna break that rule right now and I'll deal with the consequences later." You know, "If I have to drain this reservoir that's being reserved for some water reclamation project, sorry, man, I got people dying and homes burning, we're gonna use that water and we'll deal with it later." And, you know, the water management is tough. I mean, this is also a consequence of we've built, we're inhabiting areas that, you know, were not designed to be inhabited by 15 million people, you know. They just were not.

• 1:16:42Shawn Ryan?

  Should he have allocated more funds to...

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I mean, him and Karen Bass cut fire funding. You know, and it's funny, again, I go back to the Hagseth hearing because it was just recently. You know, the-

• 1:16:57Speaker 03

  The Democrats were very focused on Pete's ability to fiscally manage an organization. You know, it's amazing the Democrats all of a sudden worry about fiscal management. They've never cared before. And of course, in California, you know, they're constantly spending themselves into oblivion. Yet they wanted to cut firefighter funding and they wanted to cut funding for the Wildland Resilience firefighting apparatus, which they did, they cut that funding. So they want to spend more and more money on homeless camp restoration. They want to dump billions into homeless issues, rehabilitation, free needles for drug addicts.

• 1:17:35Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that's creating a whole business. We know why that's happening. That's creating an entire business to house homelessness.

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  It's an industrial complex.

• 1:17:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but I mean, geez.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  And folks say, well, we don't have the funding for this to fight fires, you know, that costs money. Well, this is now the most expensive disaster in American history. We're spending billions upon billions recovering from these fires. And, you know, there are estimates out there, you know, that 20 to 30,000 Americans a year die from wildfire-related smoke inhalation. You know, and if you're in a valley out in the Western US, breathing that smoke choked air all day, every day, it's not good for you.

• 1:18:22Shawn Ryan?

  How about the, you know, we talked about arson earlier, you know, did, had there been, I mean, California, I believe, was, they were a big defund the police state, correct? And so had there been more police, maybe they could have, you know, mitigated some of the arson, some of the stuff that we saw going on, people posting videos on X. Do you think that had anything to do with any of this as well?

• 1:18:48Speaker 03

  Well, it sure did. I mean, it's, when you have abject lawlessness going on in the streets, you know, when what we reward bad behavior and punish good behavior, you know, when Daniel Pennley gets arrested and tried and carded and feathered for... Rescuing people, uh, yeah, people, you know, people are afraid to step up. There was that video of the citizens intercepting the guy with the blowtorch in their neighborhood a couple of days ago, where he was gonna start another fire. And you could tell they were hesitant to take this guy down because, you know, they see what happens. Eventually, they finally did because clearly they saw what he was about to do. But, um, you know, people are afraid to, to get involved now, rightfully so. They're saying, well, I don't

• 1:19:31Speaker 03

  wanna go, I don't wanna stick myself in a situation where I might be the next Daniel Penny. So that falls on law enforcement, who, as we well know, they've been, um, you know, they've been treated so poorly in places like California these past few years that, you know, so demoralized.

• 1:19:48Shawn Ryan?

  They cut their legs right out from out.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. God bless those guys and girls for doing what they're doing. Thank God they're out there. But, man, it's tough. Tough to know no one's got your back.

• 1:19:57Shawn Ryan?

  Anything else at the state level that could've gone, that could've gone different?

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, CAL FIRE actually is a really good organization, especially, uh, you know, just, I mean, no one's perfect. There's certainly things that, that I'm sure they can and could've done better, but, you know, th- they do a lot with a little. Um, but they should've had more assets on contract. That's not really a decision they can make. That's a decision that's gonna come from, obviously, the state level. CAL FIRE works for the state. Um, but, you know, they have access to emergency funding. Um, but, you know, at the state level, they have to be giving the directives to CAL FIRE. Listen, you need to have all the resources required to be able to respond to fires immediately.

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  You know, California had already lost a whole community in 2017, 18. We had those fires all over this year in Nevada front. And obviously, Camp Fire destroyed Paradise, California. You know, we had some devastating fires near Truckee. Like, this isn't new for California. They need to be ready for this. And they weren't.

• 1:20:59Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move to the, to the local level.

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02Shawn Ryan?

  Fire chiefs would...

• 1:21:05Shawn Ryan?

  How do the, what do, what do we need to hold them accountable for?

• 1:21:08Speaker 03

  So, in LA specifically, I don't know these people personally, but obviously, we've seen their recruiting videos and the priorities. I mean, what does leadership come down to? I mean, it comes down to prioritize and execute. One of my SEAL Team leaders, when I was going through junior officer training, you know, had a great piece of advice that he, right in the windshield of his Humvee in Iraq, you know, prioritize and execute. Because as a leader, especially in emergency management situations, whether it's combat, whether it's fire, you're almost always gonna have more things to do than you have time to do them. So, the most important thing of a leader, the most important thing for a leader to do, crystallize the mission and then prioritize and execute tasks that support the mission outcome

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  that you were expecting or you've been directed to achieve. And as a firefighting organization, your sole mission is to put out fires, save lives and protect your community. It's not to create firefighters that look like the people around them. It's not to create equity in the fire department. It's just not. That's a characteristic, not a mission. The mission is to save people's lives. To have a department that looks like the people you're serving, that's a characteristic. And if you want to have a characteristic, that's fine, I'm not criticizing. But if that characteristic interferes with the mission, you're wrong. And this leadership was wrong.

• 1:22:33Speaker 03

  Because they were focused, and apparently, as fire chief, was making like $400,000 a year, which I did a little bit of research on that. I guess that's fairly normal for firefighter chief salaries in California. Like, they make $300,000 to $400,000 a year. Which, hey, more power to you, we should be paying for responders, you know? But if you're getting paid that much money, you better be goddamn good at your job, because that's a lot of money.

• 1:23:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Do you see, I mean, do you see any similarities, similarities between the, the LA fires and what happened in Maui?

• 1:23:11Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:23:13Speaker 03

  Delay of initial attack. So it is absolutely critical that we get there early and aggressively when these fires start. And with Maui, that was a transmission line start also. That's a very common cause of these urban interface fires. And there was no aerial response, effectively nothing. And I say, I keep going back to air, not just because that's what I used to do, but I mean, that's how you fight a wildfire early. Because by definition wildfires are usually up in the hinterland, up in the hills. It will take time to get enough ground crew there to have effectively fight the fire usually. Now, maybe you can get a hand crew out there quick to, you know, if it's a quick, you know, hotspot and they contain it, great.

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  But more than likely, they're going to get there and what they're going to do is, is maybe start building a defensive fire line. Maybe they'll start getting people evacuated. They might, you know, get a heal in place to start, you know, uh, get an anchor in place to start, you know, flanking out to one end or the other just to get a fire break. But they're going to depend on aircraft being there quickly to get that thing under control. And quickly means like 20 minutes, 30 minutes, hour, two hours. In Maui, there was zero response. In California, they only had like two planes nearby ready to launch in these fires right away. Now, high winds, conditions, but that's the job, you know, and a lot of it's risk.

• 1:24:39Speaker 03

  They say, well, it's too risky to fly. Well, that's the mission, guys. I mean, there's risk in a SEAL mission, there's risk anywhere, and sometimes you don't want to take undue risk. But when you're watching hundreds of homes burn, people being burned alive, like that's a time you're at maximum risk.

• 1:24:56Shawn Ryan?

  Jeez.

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  Don't sit on the ground, go fly.

• 1:24:59Shawn Ryan?

  Um. What about, you know, the, the, you know, a little bit different switching gears here, but we're seeing a lot of, I mean, more, I think, uh, the, the rent, you know, we're kind of moving into relief here. And we're seeing a lot of price gouging with, with rents in California. We have thousands and thousands of people that are now displaced, their, their homes have burned to the ground and, and of course, now you see rent prices going up. People can't afford to rent anything now. I mean, how, how do we mitigate that?

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, having plans in place ahead of time. Um, so it's not scramble and, you know, grab whatever you can. Uh, second, you remember North Carolina?

• 1:25:54Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:25:55Speaker 03

  You know, when they were trying to get hotel rooms? And they couldn't because all the FEMA employees had come to town and FEMA had soaked up all the hotel rooms and then the evacuees couldn't find any.

• 1:26:06Shawn Ryan?

  These people are freezing to death right now.

• 1:26:08Speaker 03

  Yes. And they're like, oh, well, sorry, this hotel's full because the FEMA people came down from like DC or wherever and they're in the hotel rooms working on their laptops. Well, get them the hell out of here, send them back to their home office so these evacuees have a roof over their head. Uh, military bases. We have a lot of military bases in California and they're probably not being utilized. As you know, a lot of these big bases, training Fort Irwin, 29 Palms, like those are training bases, like a whole regiment of guys will go out and train. Open them up, open those barracks up, put up those wall tents, you know, get them out there. Like we have giant bases out there with infrastructure, with showers. I mean, it's not permanent, but it's somewhere for them to go temporarily while we recover

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

  this. Now, of course, once they start coming back in and finding permanent housing, I mean, we're going to be tens of thousands of houses down. I mean, this is, this is the true truth bomb, I think, that's really going to hurt everyone on the back end of this crisis is the housing impact. I mean, it's structural nationally because this will affect home insurance rates all over the country. It's not just going to be localized to LA, but this will have a national impact.

• 1:27:22Shawn Ryan?

  What about, you know, just, um, natural disaster relief or just any disaster relief? I mean, you know, we see billions and billions of dollars going to Ukraine, going to Israel.

• 1:27:38Shawn Ryan?

  What about our people?

• 1:27:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:40Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean, like I said, people are freezing to death in North Carolina that that lost their homes in that hurricane. Maui, still a disaster. Now LA, a disaster. I mean, we're just, it it just, I mean, I think everybody sees it. They see all of our money, what appears to be all of our money, getting shipped to Taliban. You know, we're funding the Taliban upwards of a billion dollars a year. Ukraine, like I said, all all these different, we're we're just, we're exporting all of our money overseas to help problems that maybe we should or should not be involved

• 1:28:21Shawn Ryan?

  in, but I mean, why are we not prioritizing American people and and rebuilding these cities and getting these people out of the freezing cold that lost their home six months ago?

• 1:28:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:33Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean, how do we, how do we, how do we fix that? Everybody in the country is frustrated about that.

• 1:28:40Speaker 03

  And they should be. Again, I mean, I talked about America first earlier, and and I think, you know, that phrase and that concept are are so unfairly portrayed by so many parts of the American media and the American mainstream, you know, the people that read The Atlantic every day and The Yorker and The New York Times, you know, oh, America first, it's this lowbrow isolationism. Like, no, it's not. It's simply saying, it's about time we put our people and our communities first. Before we send $50 billion to another country, we better make damn well sure that those people that lost their homes in North Carolina during a once in a century storm are not out freezing to death, uh, while we're sending the money elsewhere.

• 1:29:18Shawn Ryan?

  It's just, it's just good for, it's just, it's good for everything. It creates business, it creates jobs, it, I mean, it's just pouring money back into our own economy to rebuild what was destroyed. And and I just, I I just cannot wrap my head, rather than just shipping it off and not saying it ever again, you know, how does that conversation start? Where does it start?

• 1:29:42Speaker 03

  I mean, I think it starts in the halls of our elected leadership. It has to, and I think it has. I mean, that conversation happened, the American people spoke on November 5th. They they just did, and they said, Decisively, we're tired of that paradigm. We're tired of seeing our money go everywhere else. We're not isolationists. We don't hate other countries. We're simply saying, you know what? If we got a dollar to spend, we better damn well spend it here on our people first and take care of our people before we send it somewhere else. You know, what other countries sending money to us to keep us afloat? You know, nobody. We've been doing it for the rest of the world for, you know, 80 years. Since the end of World War II, the entire, we've been the tent pole of the free world. And I'm proud to be, and I think

• 1:30:24Speaker 03

  we should continue to be. But the world's also evolved since then. You know, we talk about, you know, the America First construct, and we talk about NATO and our allies there. Yeah, they're allies, and we should be there for them, just like they were for us in Afghanistan. But they've also had 75 years to recover from the economic cataclysm in World War II. They should be able to defend themselves, pay for their own defense of their own GDP, and deal with their own regional issues now. I mean, they've had 75 years of economic training wheels to get back on their feet. We got some stuff we gotta deal with here on our own. You know, so, so these communities deserve investment from, from their own government before it goes somewhere else. And that's not isolationism. That's not nationalism or extremism. That's just common sense. And like, that's what, you know, again, I'd

• 1:31:09Speaker 03

  never run for anything before until 2024, and my whole campaign was based on common sense. And common sense means that most Americans want secure borders, safe streets, cheap gas, cops are good, criminals are bad, boys are boys, girls are girls. Pretty straightforward things. And it's not too much for us to ask for those from our government. So, so I agree with you completely that these, these disasters, when they come in, we need to be prepared for them ahead of time. We know, when a hurricane's coming, we know it's coming for weeks. It's not a secret. For the most part, I think the state of Florida has done a pretty darn good job with that. And I actually think the federal government has gotten pretty good at their hurricane. It was never perfect. Obviously, no one was ready in North Carolina. They were ready in Florida and Louisiana, but they weren't ready up in the Appalachians.

• 1:31:53Speaker 03

  We know that. We weren't ready in California. And California's got no excuse not to be ready for this. I mean, they are seeing major fires every single year. There's no excuse for the complete lack of preparedness that we saw in LA. I'm not pointing fingers. I'm just stating a fact. Mega fires are happening in California every single year. The fact that this response in America's arguably greatest city was just unacceptable.

• 1:32:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Are you gonna be bringing some of this stuff up in the Senate?

• 1:32:24Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I already have. We've already got bills drafted to bring common sense to this. Like for one, for example, is going to, and oddly enough Gavin Newsom like tweeted it out the other day, not mine exactly, but almost the same stuff, which was we are going to expedite permitting for timber projects. We are going to expedite, you know, permits for water use so we don't have a water shortage again. You know, we are going to make sure we have enough funding to have appropriate levels, you know, of firefighters and aircraft available, which this should have happened years ago because, as I said, California gets burned every year, but we're seeing it in California. We're already introducing bills in the Senate, drafting bill language, a lot of partners, bipartisan I might add. You know, although I may be.

• 1:33:08Shawn Ryan?

  That's great to hear.

• 1:33:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you wouldn't believe the, as I started talking about, and on CNN and Fox News all over this last week, scrambling from the rooftops about this. I've had so many Democrats come up and say, hey, I want to work with you on this. This isn't a partisan issue. We need to fix this. We owe this to our people. You know, even Adam Schiff, Adam Schiff and I probably don't agree on much of anything, but he was one of the first guys to come up to me and say, hey, I want to work with you on this because I represent California and they expect a solution. And that was before the LA fires.

• 1:33:40Shawn Ryan?

  Good for you. Good for you. It'd be great to see some, some proactivity in this country.

• 1:33:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:46Shawn Ryan?

  Instead of reactivity. I mean, we're killing ourselves here.

• 1:33:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:51Shawn Ryan?

  We're killing ourselves here and, you know, it's horrible. I hate, I just hate seeing all these people displaced and people dying and, and, and, and it doesn't seem like much, if any, relief is going to them.

• 1:34:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:06Shawn Ryan?

  And, well, Senator, do we miss anything? Is there anything else you want to cover?

• 1:34:13Speaker 03

  Well, um, you know, I, I, uh, I just think, I think, I really think this is a turning point in America. I think this, this fire, not, not to overstate its significance, but I do think this fire will go down in the history books, like the Great Chicago Fire, like Pearl Harbor, like 9/11. This will be a turning point where, you know, there's those times in history where the trend line in history abruptly changes. And I think coming off the election, a historic election, this event is kind of crystallizing a lot of the things that have been going really wrong in this country for a long time. It's almost a perverse, terrible Shakespearean tragedy to say on display, "America, look

• 1:34:55Speaker 03

  at how dumb we've been. We've, we've taken the safety and prosperity of our communities and we put them in the backseat of a lot of really bad ideas." And those bad ideas, we're a free country, you're welcome to have them, but when you implement them and the impacts of those ideas are so raw and obvious and bad for people, those are the consequences and you're going to be held accountable. So I, I think although this wildfire is, in California, specific to wildfire, I think the implications are going to be broader. I think it's going to help us drive a lot of change. I think it's going to wake people up that we gotta bring common sense back. We gotta bring common sense back to everything we do, our foreign policy. We don't have to be isolationist, but we should do what's

• 1:35:38Speaker 03

  right for us on the world stage. That's what every other country in the world does. They make tough decisions that are good for their people. Our military, great, you know, my wife's a Marine. I love that woman in the military, but guess what? Same standards, combat lethality, number one priority, no questions asked. You know, our government agencies, before they worry about, you know, Green New Deal initiatives and solving world hunger and, and sending, you know, free aid to the rest of the world, let's make sure our country is strong. And you know what? When we want to talk about America first on isolationism, when, when America's strong, the rest of the world's strong too. You know, the rest of the world needs a strong America. And, you know, I've been about 94 countries

• 1:36:21Speaker 03

  all over the world and I was in Israel just about three weeks ago, was proud to be there with our allies, getting the first-person view of the war in Gaza and what's going on. I was there when they went into Syria and when, when Assad collapsed, it was a historic time to be there in Israel.

• 1:36:36Speaker 03

  They want a strong America. They don't want us weak sending, you know, spreading ourselves all over the world. They want a strong decisive America. So I think it's a turning point for our country. You know, I never thought I'd be here and never once thought of running for office, to be honest with you, but it was, I saw Kabul fall where you and I fought in. I saw a lot of things happen and said, you know, it's time for a new generation of leaders to stand up and, and that's why I'm here. So we're not going to sit on our hands and, and, you know, make YouTube clips every day. We're here to get some work done and hopefully do a job and go back home to my family and my ranch and fly water farmers because that's what I want to be doing. But the nation needs us here.

• 1:37:18Speaker 03

  You're doing your duty, your duty here, spreading the word to the American people and I'm doing mine in DC.

• 1:37:23Shawn Ryan?

  Good for you. Well, I know we all have big aspirations for you. So Senator Sheehy, thanks for coming on and hope to see you again and keep up the good fight. God bless.

• 1:37:35Speaker 03

  Let's get her done.