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

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with U. S. Senator for Montana Tim Sheehy https://www.sheehy.senate.gov, Ryan Callaghan https://www.sheehy.senate.gov, and Brody Henderson https://www.themeateater.com/people/brody-henderson. Topics discussed: The U. S. military, wildfires, public lands, and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 0:49Steven Rinella?

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• 1:33Steven Rinella?

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• 2:10Steven Rinella?

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• 2:39Speaker 02

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case underwearless.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.

• 2:48Steven Rinella?

  You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Joined today by US Senator Tim Sheehy, represents state of Montana. Senator Sheehy joined the US Special, or no, not US Special Forces. Former Navy SEAL, came out of the service and went into wildland firefighting from with an aviation, from an aviation angle, as he'll explain.

• 3:31Steven Rinella?

  Came out of that business and was just elected to the US Senate. They call you guys freshmen?

• 3:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Freshman Senator from Montana. We're going to talk about background. We're going to talk about wildfires. We're going to talk about public lands and we'll talk about a couple of other things that come up along the way. But for starters, you're from Minnesota. One of our colleagues, Maggie, said you're from her hometown of Minnesota.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, right up across the street there, there was this old army base that used to build, it was a main 50 caliber ammunition plant there. And that closed down like after Vietnam. So we grew up on a five acre plot around a lot of other folks. And then right across the street was the barbed wire fence, this old army base. That was thousands of acres of basically just like abandoned land. And yeah, it was pretty cool. Place to grow up because

• 4:20Steven Rinella?

  Could you go running around in there?

• 4:21Speaker 04

  Well, we weren't supposed to, but of course, you know, of course you do.

• 4:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It's different for little kids. Little kids can do what they.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. Yeah. Like they'd see us sometimes and come, you know, yell at us and like, you know, it's an abandoned base. And they see what going on there. It's, and we go in the old factories. He's huge. One building was 14 acres on the inside. And when they like shut the doors and left, I mean, it's like, I mean, everything was there. You go to the, the filing cabinets, all the orders were there. Really? The keys, the bathroom had toilet. I mean, this place has been abandoned for 30 years and they had toilet paper rolls. I mean, they literally shut the gates and walked away. And for, you know, of course there are things like asbestos everywhere and there's like, you know, holes in the ceiling. So it was not a safe OSHA approved environment for kids to be playing, but that's what we did.

• 5:03Speaker 05

  Yeah. But at that age, if somebody comes and yells at you, it just becomes a game, not an actual warning.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. Yeah.

• 5:09Steven Rinella?

  You know what's hilarious about that with the, the age at which you can just go around and not get in big trouble and then you hit another age and you can't. There's this hill out of my, I don't want to say to me, I don't want to like, uh, call out a neighbor, but there's a hill by our house and our little kids sled there all the time. Never a word. Um, but our 14 year old, his buddies go over there and sled immediately asked to leave.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  Exactly. Totally.

• 5:32Steven Rinella?

  But our 10 year old could sled there all day and no one says anything to him. You know, he's like, yeah, I don't know. There's the age when they're gonna do something dumb.

• 5:39Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, there's, there's that, there's that phase where like, you know, self-awareness is assumed to be present, you know, like, you know, you, you, you were aware enough of yourself that you shouldn't be doing this. Then there's that age where under it's like, whatever. We don't care.

• 5:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Like that kid probably knows.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 5:53Steven Rinella?

  That he's not actually supposed to be on this hill.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  Right. But yeah, we'd go in there and then, uh, once I was in the military, I came home one time on leave and, and went in. I was like, I went to the base at this point. Hey, can I go like, they're like, sure. Like hand me the keys. And I walked around like 10 minutes. This is boring. Like it was so much more fun when like, we knew we weren't supposed to be there. Then it was like, we spent hours running around playing games. And now I could be there. I was like, this is a bunch of abandoned buildings and I'm leaving.

• 6:17Speaker 05

  That's great.

• 6:18Steven Rinella?

  What was your, uh, how did you decide to join military? Like, and, and not only that, but not only join the military, but going into the, into the Navy SEALs? Like, uh, what was that process for you?

• 6:28Speaker 04

  You know, it's, it's, as you guys probably know, I mean, it's like, uh, I just turned, turned 39 a few months ago and it's like, and I was telling someone the other day, I was talking to a, a young man that wanted to go to the Naval Academy and, and, you know, he had his whole life planned out. He's 19 years old and knows, you know, I gotta do this and then that and that. I said, Listen, you know, if you'd asked me when I was sixteen, twenty-four, twenty-eight, thirty-six, where I was gonna be in five years, I would've been wrong every single time, like, every single time. So, you know, I knew I wanted to be in the military, uh, I just did. Um, I, I have no idea why. My mom's like, yeah, from the time you could, like, run, you had a stick in your hand and running around the woods, you know, shooting things, pretending you were, you know, whatever.

• 7:13Steven Rinella?

  What war did you guys do? We did, uh, we did World War II.

• 7:16Speaker 04

  Always, yeah, of course. I mean, all the war movies as kids, you know, and Cowboys and Indian.

• 7:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we did, like, Americans and the Germans.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  Yes, and never the Ja- Japanese, like, it was never the Pacific.

• 7:25Steven Rinella?

  No, we didn't fight, we didn't fight the Japanese.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was always Nazis.

• 7:28Steven Rinella?

  It was all European theater.

• 7:29Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah, you know, I grew up Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, all that stuff. So, yeah, I was always running around the woods, yeah, pretending, you know, Normandy, whatever. So, um, anyways, I knew I wanted to go in the military, and my neighbor growing up was a, was a Korean War Navy pilot. Um, and I didn't have really much relation with my grandparents. My, my mother's side, they, they died off when I was really young, or one before I was born, the one when I was young. And then my, my dad's side, just, we didn't have much relationship there. There was some, you know, just old school familial strife. So, he kinda became my grandfather figure. And he is, uh, Harry Tebow's name, uh, and his son Steve Tebow and their whole family, great folks. So, he, he, um, uh, I knew, I was interested in the military, and he took me up flying in his Cub when I was, like, eight or nine years old. And right away, I was like, I love aviation, like, this is amazing. And as soon

• 8:14Speaker 04

  as I got to reach the rudder pedals of my feet, uh, when I was, like, eleven, uh, he started teaching me how to fly. So.

• 8:18Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 8:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, so at that point, I decided I was gonna go in the military and be a, be, as we were just talking before we started about Top Gun, you know, I'm a child of the eighties, of course, we all watched Top Gun on VHS. So, you know, we watched so many times, the tape was wearing out, you know, and of course, the dogfighting scenes, we rewound and watched so many times, you know, like, you could see the tape had been, uh, you know, uh, degraded over time. But, uh, so I was like, I'm gonna go to Naval Academy and be a fighter pilot. And, um, so I was flying planes, I was driving cars, got my solo to plane before I had my driver's license, got my pilot's license in high school.

• 8:48Steven Rinella?

  No kidding?

• 8:49Speaker 04

  And then, uh, yeah, I went to the academy to be a, be a fighter pilot. So, yeah. And then got there and. You know, I was in high school when nine eleven happened, as probably all were, seemingly all roughly the same age. So, you know, was was was that that was a defining factor of all of our young lives. And then I got a huge jump on you. I was in graduate school. Yeah, really. Well, you age well. You look great. You know, fine wine. Thank you. You answered that well. Yes, yes. But I was, um, uh, so got to the academy. This is fall of oh, four, summer of oh, four. And, um, you know, I, I, you know, there's always perception of organization from the outside. You perceive something from the outside. And then when you're inside, you know, your perceptions normally clash with the reality and things change. So I

• 9:30Speaker 04

  knew I wanted to be a fighter pilot and going in. And when I got there, you know, I was immersed in the military for the first time, really. And, um, you know, we had Iraq was going full swing. Afghanistan was going full swing for the first time in, you know, forty years, America was seeing casualties come home. And we were, we were, you know, that we'd had our first academy grad killed in action in a long time. So being at at the Naval Academy was a very, you know, it was a wartime feel. And I think something you think about the GWAT, Global War on Terror, of course, was, um, people in the military, like the the two percent of people in America that served, like, we were all at war for twenty years, you know? Yeah. Like, my wife, she was a Marine. We met at the academy. Like, her brother served, like, everyone we knew, all of our best friends, all of our families were living the war,

• 10:14Speaker 04

  yet most of America wasn't. They just went on with life as normal. It wasn't like World War Two, where everybody was pitching in Yeah. and rationing food and rationing rubber. And everyone had a brother or a son deployed. For us, it was like a super small sector of America, deployed again and again and again and again and again, and felt the pain and carried the load. Um, so anyways, where I'm going with that is I get to the academy and pretty quickly realize that, you know, this is a ground war. I wanted to fly planes, but, um, you know, the war is being fought door to door, you know, in Sadr City and, you know, rock to rock in the valleys of Afghanistan and flying up above ahead. I mean, you were a supporting act, like, the real action was on the ground. So, um, I actually, uh, quit the academy. My, my fall, my freshman year,

• 10:59Speaker 04

  I was like, hey, I gotta go fight the war. Like, I've got to go typical eighteen, nineteen year old kid full of piss and vigor. I'm like, I've got to go fight because the war will be over by the time I graduate. I got to do my part. So I went to resign from the academy. And, um, you know, I was, I was at the top of my class at that point, very highly ranked that, that, at that point in time. And they were like, hey, why are you, you're like, the top guy? Why are you leaving? I'm like, well, I gotta go fight, you know, like I can't sit here and take calculus while there's guys on the ground fighting, so I gotta do my part. And um, my commanding officer from my company was like, alright, well, you know, fine, you do what you want to do, but you gotta talk to guy before you leave. Uh, here's a name, he's gonna meet you down at the uh,

• 11:39Speaker 04

  at the kind of restaurant on campus tonight, which we weren't allowed in as plebe, so it was kinda like, well, I'm not allowed to go in there. He's like, no, you can go tonight, I'll give you permission.

• 11:46Speaker 05

  Was it kind of like, this is gonna help you or hurt you type of?

• 11:49Speaker 04

  No context at all, no context. Like, hey, cool, alright, you wanna leave, I'm not gonna stop you, but you need to talk to this guy, but you know, just wanna have a conversation with this guy. So, I'm a plebe, you know, which is the lowest possible, you know, you're-

• 11:59Steven Rinella?

  What's that stand for?

• 12:00Speaker 04

  So plebe is, is what you call, um, is it, it, that's what you're-

• 12:05Steven Rinella?

  It's not an acronym?

• 12:06Speaker 04

  No, ple- like ancient Rome, plebeians, like P L E B E, yeah, so plebe, like, which basically means the most common, commoner, like, it's like a, like a pawn in the game of chess.

• 12:16Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 12:17Speaker 04

  So, um, you are the lowest ranking person in the military, basically, is a plebe. So, it, instead of freshman, we call them plebes at the service academy. So anyways, I go down to meet with this guy, and it's a full-bird army colonel, special forces guy. Which, for a plebe, is basically like, you know, getting any higher than that. So I'm like, oh wow, like, hey sir, he's like, oh, you must be ten, I'm like, yep. So I hear you're gonna quit and leave the academy. I said, yeah, you know, I gotta go fight the war, I can't sit here and go to school while the war's going on. And he said, well, I just got back from my third deployment during the war, and I can tell you, you're not gonna miss it, we're gonna be fighting this war for another 20 years, and what I need is smart, young leaders and officers.

• 12:53Steven Rinella?

  He should've taken that message to the-

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:57Steven Rinella?

  He should've taken that message to DC.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. So anyways, he convinced me to, to stick around and, and stay, and finish my education in the process, you know, he, uh, long, long other stories for the front of the time, but I got to go in this exchange program where, starting that next year, I went through Army Ranger Training, Ranger Regiment Exchange, Special Forces Group, Airborne Recon School. So kind of the, I went through the Army Commando Special Ops Training Pipeline, um, which was a great experience, met some amazing folks, learned a ton, um, and, cause really our Special Operations Command, JSOC, SOCOM, it's really an army organization. I mean, the vast majority of our special ops organization in America is army, like 85% of it. And, you know, then you got basically Air Force- Marines and Navy make up very small percentages. So the SEALs are a very small

• 13:44Speaker 04

  part of our, of our global special operations footprint. So it's important to understand how the Army works and that, that was the reasoning there. So kind of by accident, I ended up going to the SEAL teams and you know, once you're at the academy, you know, you, you start to figure out what culturally you fit best in and pilot, naval aviation is, is the best aviation community in the military, but at the same time, uh, my personality fit pretty quickly. I realized, you know, was with the, with the SEAL teams and the special.

• 14:09Steven Rinella?

  Did you still have to do all the cold water stuff? Just like the SEALs, the, but you still had to do that. I don't know if you did, if you did the equivalent.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  There's no course validation in SEAL training, unfortunately.

• 14:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. That's the thing, man. Like the, the, the, my specialty is walking. Like I could do, I could do an elimination course about walking, but sitting in cold water.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:33Steven Rinella?

  It's my, I just, yeah.

• 14:35Speaker 04

  Well, that's, that's one of the great, a triting factors in, in training is just the suck, you know, and everything. So, you know, everyone watches the videos and thinks it's all this really tough physical evolution. You gotta jump, you gotta do this crazy obstacle course. You gotta do this insanely, you know, whatever. What gets guys isn't, isn't the test gates, whether it's, you know, assembling weapons, jumping on the planes. What gets guys is just the suck, just the continued suck of like, not just that it sucks, but then the knowledge that it's going to continue to suck for a very long time. Like it's, it's not like a hunt where it's like, all right, well, you know, we'll be out of here today or tomorrow, the next day. We're going to get in the truck. We're going to go get a hot shot. Like this is going to go on for, and then you don't know. It's not like, all right, 62 more days to go. Or it's like, uh,

• 15:19Speaker 04

  this will just continue to suck until it doesn't. And then that, that unknown is what causes people to quit. That's really, it's the unknown of how bad the pain will be and how long it will go for when folks decide, all right, this isn't for me.

• 15:33Steven Rinella?

  When you got deployed, what kind of, like where did you go and what were you working on? How did they, how did you spend your time?

• 15:39Speaker 04

  It was a crazy period of time. I mean, a lot of times in life, you know, when you're in, when you're in the suck or when you're in that, those chaotic periods of life, you know, they don't feel chaotic. You're just, you're just doing it. And that's your, normally years later, you look back, whether you have a whole bunch of kids close together, you know, uh, whether it was a crazy time in your business, you know, or whether it was like during the war years, at the time you just feel like you're doing your job. And then kinda years later, you look back like, oh my god, like, that was a crazy time, how much we were doing. So like, I mean, during my time in, my wife, she had just commissioned into as a Marine Corps officer, so we were a married couple that was doing, you know, we were both deploying to the war zone separately. You don't like deploy together.

• 16:19Steven Rinella?

  And not even, not based out of the same area?

• 16:21Speaker 04

  No, no, like, you know, like, it's not a couples golf trip, like, I mean, the Marines send her where they need her to go, and the SEALs send me where they need me to go. So, like, we're not, like, we got married through the mail. Like, I'm a mail order husband, literally. So, she was in Afghanistan deployed, I was deployed somewhere else, and we kept trying to actually const, like, get the marriage done. And we were like, we're not gonna be together for like, two and a half years. When are we actually gonna be physically co-located? Were you guys even able to communicate with each other on a regular basis? You know, it was just pre-Sky and FaceTime and all that. So, yes, but not like it is now. Not where you can just like, open a tablet and like, have a meeting. It was like, everything was landline phones still at the bases, and snail mail, and email when you could get access to an internet connection. And at most times, in the, you know, oh nine,

• 17:05Speaker 04

  ten, eleven, twelve, like, it was still landline phones and landline internet. So, yeah, I mean, we'd communicate when we could, but it's not a law. It's vastly improved today. Our service members today, as they should, have a far better, you know, you can connect to a wifi connection and still see your family. So...

• 17:19Steven Rinella?

  Do you know, in Montana, you can get married by proxy?

• 17:21Speaker 04

  That's what we did. We were, we were married via double proxy in Montana.

• 17:24Steven Rinella?

  Double proxy?

• 17:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, neither of us were there. We're the only state that's legal where you can get married via double proxy. So, Carmen figured that out. She was in Afghanistan. She's like, "Yeah, I figured out how we can get married." I'm like, "All right, wow, send it." It's like, um, "We can get married through the mail." I'm like, "Really? I didn't know that was legal." She's like, "Well, it's only legal in one state, Montana." I'm like, "Wow." She's like, "Yeah, we each notarize a form and mail it in, and basically, they take it to the courthouse in Kalispell, and two people, we have, I still have no idea who they are, stand in, and you pay them the proxy fee and they get married for you." And then, you know, a couple weeks later, we get our forms mailed back to us. Like, "Oh, we were married, we were married on, uh, February 11th." "Cool, happy anniversary, yeah." So, yeah, so that's how we did it. It's, it's cool law, though, you know, cause...

• 18:10Steven Rinella?

  It's gotta be for the military.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  No, no, actually, well, I mean, it is now. Now, their whole business model is they target military couples, say, exactly the situation my wife and I are dealing with. But- Where the law came from is the homestead days. So, you know, only like half of homestead claims were actually awarded. You know, the whole perception, you know, from, what was that stupid Tom Cruise movie where terrible Irish accent, you know, where their front, their-

• 18:32Speaker 05

  But also the fighting scenes were great.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  Far and away, yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 05

  Far and away, there you go.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gerald always like, "Joseph loves Catherine."

• 18:37Speaker 05

  And he hit punches the horse, that's great.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was like, oh my god. But anyway, so, you know, like, run out there and jam their stake in the ground, and boom, here's your land. Like, actually, surprisingly, the process is more, far more in depth. And the government didn't want random speculators grabbing homestead claims. Obviously, that happened, but that's not what they wanted. They wanted families to settle on the land, build a home, build a ranch, harvest crops. So, homestead claims, one of the first criteria that they would award them was based on if you were married with a family and living on the land.

• 19:04Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  And during those territory days, before states were states, they were kind of competing for people, because the sooner you had more people and land homesteaded, the sooner you were going to get statehood. I mean, that wasn't like a technical threshold, but that was basically-

• 19:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 04

  Once you had more people and more constituents in your state, you had a better chance of being a, or in your territory, you had a better chance of being a state. So anyways-

• 19:25Speaker 05

  And a male-to-female threshold. That was very real.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  Yes, that up. So, it was like 96%. It was crazy. So, Montana, territorial rifle is like, "Hey, we can make it legal to basically come out here and then mail order a wife, show your piece of paper. Look, I'm married, this is my homestead, I'm going to live here", and it helped to process homestead claims. So, anyways, it's kind of an interesting tidbit, yeah.

• 19:46Steven Rinella?

  Sure. So, you were in and out of, I have to imagine-

• 19:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, Iraq, Afghanistan, uh-

• 19:50Steven Rinella?

  How many times did you get-

• 19:51Speaker 04

  So, I mean, all the times, you know, every time I was ever sent, I mean, basically, mine, I really did four deployments, you know, but ultimately, you know, I was, I was sent overseas, you know, several times, you know, more than that. But ultimately, you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, a couple of times, to South America for counter narcotics and host nation partnership there, and then a couple of other trips around, you know, different type of, different types of missions. So, yeah, I had a great, you know, great experience all over the world, and, you know, loved leading, leading, leading our teams everywhere. It's a huge honor. When you look at the responsibility, again, you look back at the responsibility you're given, I mean, as a 25, 26-year-old guy, you know, at one point, between the

• 20:31Speaker 04

  Afghan army troops I had, my SEALs, my army assignment, that I'd get, get an army platoon assigned to me, and, you know, I had like 200 people under my command in daily combat operations, you know, you know. Gunfights every day, airstrikes, and it's like, I was the commander, like, I was in charge. You think about that in the business world, you know, that amount of responsibility given to a 25, 26 year old, and that's true across the military. I mean, you take a 25 year old pilot in the Air Force, he's flying a hundred million dollar aircraft.

• 21:02Speaker 04

  I mean, so the responsibility-

• 21:03Steven Rinella?

  And then he goes home and his dad won't let him use the quad runner.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's a total, it's weird. You come home and that's, that's part of the reason the veteran transition, you know, I spoke at a veterans banquet last night here in town and I actually worked out with our Air Force, with our ROTC kids, so I got this patch on my jacket here, you know, we worked out with the ROTC kids yesterday at MSU and kind of imparted that upon them, like, you know, you get home, it's a totally different, you'll work at a small business, well, you know, you can't, you can't drive the forklift yet, you don't have the OSHA approval, it's like, dude, I just, I used to like, you know, drive helicopters, you know, I used to drive tanks, you know, 20, a 19 year old kid will be at the helm of a, of a $3 billion submarine, you know, driving those things, so it's a, and then so that's sometimes hard for vets to come home and have like that reduction in scope all of a sudden, it's like, you know, I used to have the authority-

• 21:50Speaker 05

  Oh, and have to prove yourself again, right?

• 21:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it's tough.

• 21:52Speaker 05

  That's crazy.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a tough transition for everybody, so.

• 21:56Steven Rinella?

  When you came out of that, how did you decide to get into wildland?

• 22:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's so-

• 22:00Steven Rinella?

  Like wildland firefighting?

• 22:02Speaker 04

  Like, like me ended up in the SEALs, I mean, I make no bones about, I never like, I, almost everything I've done in life, to include politics, which we'll talk about, was an accident, like, it was never a plan, so I basically, I didn't plan to get out of SEAL teams when I did, you know, I got injured and for the time being, it was like, hey, you know, you, you have to go off the duty roles of the teams, you can't be an active SEAL anymore, we gotta do meta evaluation, I'm like, well, you know, if I can't be a SEAL, I can't lead a team, like, what am I do, push paper? And basically like, yeah, but that's okay, you'll push paper for a while, and I was like, listen, that, that's not, like, if I can't lead my guys on missions and you're gonna send me to headquarters for two or three years, like, you know, I'll, I'll move on with life, so, so that's-

• 22:38Steven Rinella?

  So did you not get your 20 year retirement then?

• 22:40Speaker 04

  No, no, I, I got out, you know, I'd only been in, all in 11 years between active and reserve time when I, when I, when I was done, so-

• 22:47Steven Rinella?

  Oh, wow.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  No, no, yeah, you have, you have to be in for 20 years, active duty to retire at 20, um, so, um, yeah, so basically- We got out and I decided at that point, there was a technology we'd used in the special operations community, we were really the innovators behind the tactical implementation of this, and that is airborne surveillance. So basically, if you ever watch these special ops SEAL CIA movies, you'll always see the aircraft overhead with an infrared sensor, with an electro-optic sensor, whatever it is, basically watching the whole mission take place and providing a really critical array of situational awareness for us on the ground.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  We could see where enemy fire was coming from, we could locate enemy positions, we could know where our own people were, so if we're calling an airstrike, we make sure we knew where all the friendly forces were before we started dropping bombs, which has been a... Any of you guys know what the largest killer of US troops in the first Gulf War was?

• 23:44Steven Rinella?

  Not aviation?

• 23:46Speaker 04

  Friendly fire? Yeah, us, our own people. Now, if we had good data, which we don't, but I promise if you had good data, you'd see the same in Vietnam, Korea, probably World War II.

• 23:56Steven Rinella?

  You'd think so.

• 23:57Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, it's just a reality of conflict is friendly fire is sometimes just as if not more dangerous than enemy fire. The fog of war is real. I mean, you watch these movies and every time you see a gunfight, it's like, one guy's looking the other guy in the eye and the cunt comes out and he's like, you know, they all, this isn't Mel Gibson, a lethal weapon as much, like, bullets are flying, a lot of you don't even know where the hell they're coming from. You don't even know who's shooting at you, especially in places like Afghanistan and urban warfare in Iraq. It's like, sometimes the biggest challenge is figuring out where you're getting shot at from. Then, once you figure that out, all right, now we can deal with it. But a lot of times, you're taking fire inbound, you don't know where it's coming from. And that's something the movies never

• 24:40Speaker 04

  really capture. It's like, someone gets shot, all of a sudden, they see the guy in the bell tower a mile away, there it is, blow it up. It's like, no, it could be minutes, hours while you're taking fire before you figure out what's going on. So...

• 24:52Steven Rinella?

  When we were little kids, we'd always, like, I'd ask my dad, like, "How many people did you shoot?" He'd be like, "You can't tell what's going on."

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Hundred percent right. I mean, you know, hundred percent right. It's like, you just don't know.

• 25:04Steven Rinella?

  Because you're shooting into, as he would say, you're shooting into windows a lot of the time.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, the fog of war is absolutely a real thing, a hundred percent. But anyways, so it was... We had a capability that we exploited very effectively throughout the war years, which was that airborne surveillance. And it came in many ways. You know, you had lidar, you had hyperspectral, you had electro-optic infrared, you had communications detectors to identify walkie-talkies and cell phones. And really, that became a hugely important advantage for us. And about the time, so I'd seen that technology, said, man, if we could take that, given my pilot background, if they could take that and apply it to public safety tasks in America, law enforcement, border security, fire, like, you know, we could probably save a lot of lives and do a lot of good here. And right about the time

• 25:48Speaker 04

  I was getting out, the debris for a terrible tragedy kind of became public as they finished the investigation. That was the Yarnell Mountain Fire down in Arizona. And if you're not familiar with that, that was, they made a movie about it called Only the Brave, happened in 2013. And the Grand

• 26:01Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I remember, yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  So the Grand Mountain hotshots were heading up on this fire. And it was one of those dangerous, real dangerous desert sagebrush fires. Because when that, when those, you know, Zephyr winds, when those winds hit down there in the high deserts in the southwest, like, that those fires rip. I mean, they'll move 80, 90 miles an hour. And, I mean, they can be deadly. Like, and it's not the timber fires up here in northwest Montana, which are their own set of challenges, which is a really thick, heavy fuel that's hard to put out. But they don't move as fast as these ones. So anyways, the team got up there on the ridge line, pretty quickly realized, this thing's ripping, we can't fight this thing, we got it, we got to break contact, let's get out of here. And the team leader made the right decision to take his team out of the way. Unfortunately, he made the right decision with the wrong information. And, you know, the fire, he didn't understand

• 26:46Speaker 04

  the fire had shifted directions and burned his whole team alive, killed all 19 of them right there on the side of the mountain.

• 26:50Steven Rinella?

  You know what I remember about that is, um, when they finally started releasing details, I remember looking down that list, and it was like, the kids?

• 27:00Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 27:01Steven Rinella?

  He's got a two-year-old, four-year-old, six-year-old, next guy, one-year-old, two-year-old, next guy. It's like, because they're all like in that

• 27:07Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 27:08Steven Rinella?

  Kind of like, not all of them, but I just remember being overwhelmed by how many were in that, like, early stage

• 27:15Speaker 04

  Little kids.

• 27:16Steven Rinella?

  Cause they were at that, they were at that age, you know, whatever the hell like.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 27:19Steven Rinella?

  Thirty or yeah, whatever. Where I was like, damn, man.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  And that's the, and that's why. So I felt, I felt myself in the shoes of that team leader. You know, I'd been on the side of a desert mountain in the middle of gunfights with guys blown, legs blown off, guys bleeding out, making those tough decisions. And I'm like, man, you know, his whole team got wiped out. And in the SEALs, we'd had a few of those incidents. Helicopters go down, exactly what you said. It's like, we're all in that age range where, and one of my SEAL platoons, we had nine SEALs all have babies within, on the same team within two months. You know, all the wives were like pregnant at the same time. And so to your point, it's like, man, I'm like, that hit home for me. I felt that, like that, that was, that was an event that definitely, I was like, wow. And what I realized was, I felt myself in that guy's boots. You know, I'd been there. I'd been on the side of a desert mountain, a hundred plus degree heat, full gear,

• 28:06Speaker 04

  sweating, chaos happening, worried about bringing my guys home alive. And I realized if he'd had the same tools I'd had in Afghanistan, his team probably would have been alive. So that led to me starting Bridger Aerospace. Um, and we ended up, you know, several other companies spun out of that as well along the way. But the point was to bring that airborne intelligence capability that's, that supported ground guys, um, to industry and, and to, and to public safety tasks other than the military. Why'd you come to Montana, though? Yeah. So, you know, we, um, we'd come here to train before we'd go to Afghanistan. So our SEAL teams would come out here, um, actually Butte was our home base. A guy named Rod Allney out there in Butte has a group called The Peak.

• 28:51Speaker 04

  And he, he's a former Air Force Special Ops guy. So he would host high altitude training events for, uh, teams getting ready to go, uh, uh, to Afghanistan. So, you know, everything from high altitude parachuting to high altitude, high angle shooting. You know, most shooting ranges are level. Um, the reality is in Afghanistan, you're never shooting level. You're always shooting down. And most of the time you're shooting up, you know, and.

• 29:11Steven Rinella?

  Cause people are shooting down.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, you know, the, the, the peaks over there are 22, 23,000 feet high. You know, these aren't 8,000 foot peaks. I mean, you're, you're fighting in the foothills of the Himalayas. Hindu Kush is the most rugged basically terrain in the world. So you're not just shooting up a few hundred feet, you're shooting up. So, you know. Horseback riding, packing in, high angle rope rescue, high altitude medicine. Basically, we go out there and heat assembly is fantastic training modules for us and we bring seals out here and trained. So during a couple of those trips, Carmen had come out and visited and we kind of decided, hey, this is a great spot. I think we'll, if we ever get out of the military, if that ever, you know, maybe we'll come here and raise our family. And, you know, Lord works in mysterious ways, you know, things happen. I got hurt, you know, timing lined up.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  So we decided to start our company here. So me and my co-founder, who was also a military officer, started our company and, you know, we hoped maybe one day we'd have like eight or 10 employees, but had no idea, you know, but we scaled through Ascent Vision Technology, spun out of Bridger, which is another great success story and a couple of other companies, you know, about 500 jobs worldwide we created. We had bases in Australia and Spain and Italy and elsewhere. So we kind of created an international company and all based right here. So.

• 30:21Steven Rinella?

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• 31:02Steven Rinella?

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• 31:47Steven Rinella?

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• 32:32Steven Rinella?

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• 33:15Steven Rinella?

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• 33:42Steven Rinella?

  Maybe I misunderstood it.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 33:45Steven Rinella?

  As I've become familiar with you through the, the race, the senate race. But you guys have a heavy focus on wildfires, though, right?

• 33:51Speaker 04

  Totally, yeah. No, so Bridger Aerospace, basically, you know, 70% of that company is all aero wildland firefighting, you know, we got a base in Spain.

• 33:59Steven Rinella?

  I wasn't aware, I wasn't aware of the other applications.

• 34:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that, that sensor technology I had mentioned, we spun into a separate product based company called Ascent Vision. So, so basically Bridger Aerospace was our aero firefighting arm, and basically the mission there was to bring military-style close air support from our, our lessons from the war, cut, paste that, bring those lessons to, to wildland fire. And as we've seen in recent months, and as most people live out West Sea, like, these fires are nasty and like, we have not been winning the battle, you know, like, we just lost, you know, America's biggest city just got, you know, burned over by this, you know, Lahaina a couple of years ago, you know, and almost every western state can point to, to just a massive disaster that's happened. And it's like, you know, we can do better than we're doing.

• 34:41Speaker 06

  How would, oh, sorry. How would you, how would Bridger Aerospace get involved with a specific fire? Like, would you get a call from the government and they're like, hey, we need you guys? Or how?

• 34:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, I mean, all of aircraft, not, not all, 99% of aircraft flying over wildfires in America come from a private company. So, the, basically, the government decided in the 1960s, we're not going to operate firefighting planes. For a while, the government did it themselves, kind of in the, actually, I wrote a book about this called Mudslingers, about the history of aero firefighting. And it, all the profits go to benefit fallen wildland firefighters, but it was more of a history.

• 35:18Steven Rinella?

  You wrote the book?

• 35:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 35:20Speaker 04

  So, it was something I was interested in, is, as I was learning about aero firefighting,

• 35:25Speaker 04

  because I got into the industry really by accident, knew nothing about it. And then as I'm sitting at firebases as a pilot, because I flew all our planes, I'd be sitting at the firebase, it's like being a, a fireman, except your fire engine flies instead of drives. So, you're hanging out the firebase, shooting the shit, talking to folks all day, and you start talking to some of these old timers, and they're telling you old stories from the 60s and 70s, and you start to figure out, man, the history of this is amazing. I mean, flying in, flying through smoke, dropping slurry, dropping water on wildfires, like, a lot of these guys were like, World War II heroes, Vietnam, I mean, they'd already... Flowing the toughest stuff in the world in the toughest conditions and they can't even basically needed that adrenaline fix still.

• 36:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  And now they start flying wildfire. Um, as you start seeing history of that, but basically most, almost every single aircraft that flies a wildfire is contract owned and or operated. Because the government pretty much decided in the, in the sixties, you know what? We're not going to own an operator on aircraft. It's too expensive, it's too technically complex for us to just manage the way our budget cycle works. We're going to just hire contractors to fight fire from the air. We'll do it on the ground.

• 36:26Speaker 06

  So a fire breaks out and you guys are just waiting for the phone to ring.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  Basically, so we'll get pre-staged around and again, it, we could talk for hours in this, I actually did the Sean Ryan podcast, you know, a couple of months ago and basically spent three hours talking just about wildfire. But yeah, we, we talked about how that all works and again, I could talk for hours about it, but basically, you know, we, we are pre-positioned as air crews and, and basically they will call us up and tell us what fire to go to. Basically, hey, go to this fire today. And sometimes mid-area gets sent to a different fire. So you could take off, I've taken off sometimes, you know, late morning and I'll fight three or four different fires. You know, go water bomb one, boom, shift to this one, shift to that one. And you'll fight multiple fires on the same tank of fuel in the air and then come back and recharge.

• 37:07Steven Rinella?

  God, your insurance premium's gotta be a bitch in that business, man.

• 37:11Speaker 04

  It is, so, um, you know, and actually.

• 37:14Steven Rinella?

  So what are you gonna do again?

• 37:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, and it's funny.

• 37:17Speaker 06

  And how expensive is the plane?

• 37:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's funny you bring that up because I mean, that's really, I mean, after LA, you know, those of us who lived in western states, you know, we all know wildfire is an issue, we're all familiar with it. But you know, the average New Yorker, average person in Chicago, average person lands like wildfire, like what the hell?

• 37:34Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I grew up in Michigan, we never talked about it.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's just not, doesn't, doesn't like.

• 37:37Steven Rinella?

  Like my neighbor one time had his leaf fire get out of control for a minute, you know, but it made it to the edge of his yard.

• 37:42Speaker 06

  Stirred up the neighborhood for a few minutes.

• 37:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, but these million acre fires where it's like a whole, like, you have thousands of guys on the ground and water bombers come in, that's just doesn't, for most of America, that doesn't really, they don't get it. Uh, but after LA, everyone's like, oh wow, like this is, this is a thing. Um, but yeah, you know, and, but the big impact, the word you said is insurance. So the LA wildfire is the most expensive disaster in American history ever, period. Quarter of a trillion dollars, more than any hurricane, any earthquake.

• 38:12Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 38:13Speaker 04

  Huge, massive. And where, and that's just the cost to recover. That doesn't even start to discuss what that does to insurance premiums. Cause when the insurance agency, and I'm sorry, the insurance industry. Absorbs the impacts of the LA wildfires on a comprehensive manner like when all these underwriters and the reinsurers because insurance all flows down to a pool of very consolidated reinsurance companies. I don't care what whether you're talking about iPhone insurance, whether you're talking about car insurance, but especially homeowner's insurance or airplane insurance. All that flows back down to a handful of reinsurers. And the amount of which insurance affects people's lives, I don't think they really appreciate. Like, for instance, you know, I don't want to go on too much of a tangent, but this is just a good example of

• 38:55Speaker 04

  how insurance can affect something that appears to be totally unaffiliated. So, Ukraine was the biggest impact in the history of aviation insurance, the war in Ukraine. Massive amounts of aircraft destroyed on the ground, like whole airlines repossessed. Like, that shook the aviation insurance industry to its core. And then when Israel, the attack on Israel happened, you know, there still isn't like common, there still isn't full airline service back in Israel now. Like, basically Hamas has been obliterated, like, the active daily threat. Yes, it will always be there, but like, but very few airlines have resumed service into Israel.

• 39:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Because insurance. And a lot of these airlines, a lot of these airlines are getting attacked, Adel, you know, why aren't you flying? You're discriminating against the Jews? And they're like, no, like, our insurance companies will not underwrite an aircraft flying into a war zone.

• 39:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 39:46Speaker 04

  Because that changes the profile.

• 39:48Steven Rinella?

  Like a picture as well, because like the Ukraine war, I mean, they've, they've shot down, I think, two, right? Two passenger planes? In relation to the combatants.

• 39:56Speaker 04

  And thousands of other aircraft been destroyed on the ground. So, basically, insurance won't underwrite an airliner flying into Tel Aviv. So, therefore, the airlines, like, we can't fly in without insurance. Like, that's not legal.

• 40:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  So, when that insurance impact is absorbed by the housing industry, I mean, right now, some people's homeowner's insurance is more than their mortgage, if you can get it. I mean, they've, they've seen 900,000, 2,000% increases in wildfire premiums for people's homeowner's insurance, if they can get insurance. A lot of people can't get insurance at all. And it's not even a wildfire-prone area, it's sometimes it's flood-prone or hurricane-prone because this fire specifically really was like the straw that broke the camel's back for homeowner's insurance. Now, if you can't get insurance on your home, what else can't you get for that home?

• 40:41Steven Rinella?

  A mortgage.

• 40:42Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 40:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 40:43Speaker 04

  Exactly right. And imagine if 10 to 20% of American homes become illiquid as a result of unavailability of home insurance. I mean, how many people need a mortgage, refi their home? They use that money to invest in a business? How many people depend on a second home? You know, that's their investment rental income. They have a attached dwelling at the Airbnb, whatever. I mean, how many people depend on the liquidity of their home to live? I mean, most, most Americans have a mortgage. And then you, that big home becomes illiquid. You can't sell it because then the buyer pool goes from anybody who needs a mortgage. If they find out they can't insure the home, they can't get a mortgage for it. Your home is unsellable.

• 41:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 41:19Speaker 04

  So you think about that. When that starts to affect, which it will now here, it's only been three months as that is digested into the homeowners market and everyone comes up for renewals. I mean, it could be a bigger impact on the homeowners market than like the 08 financial crisis. So like this wildfire thing is not just a boutique Western issue. It's not a boutique forest management thing. Log, don't log this, log that. It really is like an existential economic one. Because, I mean, how do you put a value on human life? But like the impact directly of LA is a quarter of a trillion dollars. So printing a quarter of a trillion dollars right now is inflationary. Like that, that's just on its own. But that doesn't even talk about the impact it's going to have when that whole episode is absorbed by the insurance market.

• 42:01Steven Rinella?

  Do you think that wildfires, like, I mean, not, not the cost associated with them because the insurance industry or the costs associated with them because of housing or whatever, but do you think they're actually worse now? I mean, like are fires, are there like, like higher intensity, less predictable fires now than there were 20 years ago? That, I mean, that's the impression you get, but I mean, does it really felt that way by people involved in that industry?

• 42:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think ultimately, short answer is, is yes. With the caveat that our, our sample set is very thin. And also the, whether the fires themselves are worse, they are exacerbated by the fact that our wildland urban interface is exponentially bigger than it's ever been before.

• 42:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  You know, a great example is the Marshall fire in Colorado, like three years ago now, maybe four years ago. It burned the Denver suburb, burned like a thousand homes down.

• 43:00Speaker 04

  Had that exact same fire happened in the exact same spot like five years prior, no one even would have known or cared because it was basically cow pasture.

• 43:07Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  So, but when the fire starts burning down thousands of homes, like so this fire that happened in LA in January, terrible tragedy, obviously.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  That almost exact same fire happened in 1961 called the Bel Air Fire. And it was bad, but you know, it's not talked about much because we didn't have the massive sprawl in LA yet.

• 43:31Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  And take a Big Sky for example, you know, people can go back and forth, is it terrible? That Big Sky grew, is Big Sky good, is Big Sky bad? Okay, whatever, but it's there. All right, whether you like, it is there. We now have thousands of people living there, massive economic investment around it. 50 years ago, before Chet Huntley rode his horse up there, I mean, if that area had burned, probably nobody would have noticed. I mean, maybe the local paper would have written an article about it, but honestly, we'd have been, okay, mountain valley burns, a couple cabins, a couple ranches.

• 43:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Speaker 05

  And a bunch of people being like, ah, and the hunting's gonna be great up there.

• 44:02Speaker 04

  Today, I mean, you've got billions of dollars of investment up there. That area burns, not only are thou, we got one road in, one road out, not only are thousands of people gonna die because they can't get out of there in time, there's gonna be massive economic impact and loss up there. So, I sure.

• 44:17Speaker 05

  To go back to that insurance footprint, right?

• 44:19Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. So, and couple that with, we are coming off really a 40-year period of, of a huge shift in our forest management mindset where, you know, again, it's, I don't want to be political about this because it's just not a political issue. This affects people, it'll burn down your house whether it's red or blue, doesn't matter.

• 44:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:39Speaker 04

  But it's just a fact, our forest management policies have, have radically changed in the past 30 years and the impact is you, you guys know better than I, I mean, you know, I'll, I'll be up on our Forest Service, we're caving right now at the ranch, I'll be up there today, but it's like, you know, you walk off the trail of Forest Service land, basically you've got dead, beetle kill, dead fall, six feet high. Like you basically have a very hard time getting off a trail now. And, you know, forest treatment, logging projects have basically been injuncted to the point where they, they almost don't happen anymore. So, I think a combination of factors of.

• 45:12Speaker 04

  Our change in mindset of forestry, our wildland airman interface is has grown massively. I mean, tens of millions of people have moved into wildfire prone areas that didn't use to live there.

• 45:24Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  Therefore, people cause fires, tire chains, cigarette butts, fireworks, gender reveal parties, whatever the hell you want to, you know, people cause fires. And then when fires happen near people, the, the, um, the impetus to fight them and put it out is far more when you have a thousand homes instead of just a thousand acres of sagebrush and cheakgrass.

• 45:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Which means less stuff's getting burnt into a mosaic pattern and you create more areas that are ready for massive.

• 45:51Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 45:52Speaker 05

  So I don't, I don't want to make you crystal ball this, but we, I mean, we've the, on the political level, like we've been talking about like active management, active forest management for, you know, very publicly for close to a decade now, right? And talking about, you know, the southeast burns so much and look how healthy their forests are and, and getting that mindset like reestablished back out here in the West. Like, like what's the next chapter?

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Yep. So we're basically writing it right now. I think, you know, LA was a terrible disaster. A lot of people killed, you know, economic 14,000 structures. What I mean 14,000, I mean, that's basically all of.

• 46:32Steven Rinella?

  Is that really the number?

• 46:33Speaker 04

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

• 46:50Speaker 05

  Cool.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  Alex Padilla from California is co-chair and, um, we, we are moving at breakneck pace because this woke people up. People that typically wouldn't have cared about wildfire. Andy Kim from New Jersey is a great example. He's a New Jersey senator. Um, our first like two weeks, uh, after we, we, we did our orientation, New Jersey's burning and he calls me because he knows my background. I was like, damn, like, how come there's nobody, there's no helicopters, no planes putting this fire out? Like what's going on? Like, all right, well, let's, let me give you a quick lesson how this works. Like not only is there nobody fighting your fire from the air, but there's nobody going to be coming to fight your fire from the air. He's like, how is that the case? Like if I had all 911, a fire engine shows up on my house right away. I had to explain to him that wildfire and structure fire are treated completely differently

• 47:33Speaker 04

  in America. They just are. Structure fire, red fire engines, I mean 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, that fire in that firehouse just over there is manned.

• 47:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  And there's bright red fire trucks and trained firefighters in there, ready to go all the time. And every American knows that, accepts that, and expects that. We dial 911 right now and say, there's a fire going on. Within five minutes and 20 seconds, a big red fire engine will show up here and they'll start fighting that fire. And that's national code, NFPA 4191710, National Fire Protection Association.

• 48:05Speaker 05

  And it's a big line item on your mortgage application. How far away are you?

• 48:09Speaker 04

  Exactly right. And, and, and all of Americans have the expectation that, that that's, that's what's going to happen. And, and NFPA didn't just happen. Like National Fire Protection Association, these standards didn't just occur. They were forged out of the 19th century when basically, like every city had their great fire, the great Boston Fire, great Chicago Fire, Kansas City, Denver, every city essentially burned to the ground in the 1800s.

• 48:33Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:34Speaker 04

  And it's because they were all built out of wood. There was no zoning. There was no building codes. And basically a fire would start. They had no way to fight it because there was no fire department. They didn't have fire hydrants. So they'd run out with buckets of sand. And basically what they would do is they would, they would fight fire with fire. They'd like start a backfire to burn down a line of buildings to stop the fire from spreading to the whole city. And it was pretty common, actually. They'd use beer to fight fires because they didn't have pressurized water, but they'd go to a brewery and get a keg of beer and it would foam, just like firefighting foam, and they'd spray it on the fires. So in the wake of all these fires, finally, in like 1896, a lot of folks came to go say, this is cra- like our cities literally keep burning to the ground. Like.

• 49:20Speaker 04

  This is ridiculous. We need to figure out how to make, and actually at the time it was the electrical contracting companies, General Electric, Edison, Westinghouse came together and said, we're the only organizations that really are cross cutting across America. Like we're in every city running electricity to the communities. Let's figure out a way to stop these fires. So they formed the National Fire Protection Association and they started creating standards that said, listen, every block, there'll be a fire hydrant and every city will have a fire brigade. And they would standardize, and of course, these lessons weren't all learned right away. Then happen one at a time. So then they standardized fire brigades. And then the fire brigades realized, well, our hoses have to match because if Manhattan calls a Brooklyn fire department over and they show up to help and they have

• 50:05Speaker 04

  different sized hoses, which this happened many times, our hoses don't plug into your hoses. Your fire hydrants don't fit our hoses. We're basically useless now. So they started, okay, we'll standardize fire hoses, these sprinklers inside, you know, fire sprinklers, how we put our electrical outlets 16 inches off the ground, et cetera, et cetera. These standards became embedded across our country. And one of those standards, the standards of cover and response time, where every, every city, the way especially Dan Serbin's laid out is every address is covered by at least two, sometimes three different fire stations. That way, when you dial 911, dispatch immediately dispatches assets from three of those stations. That way, if there's a traffic jam, or a bridge is out, or a tree gets blown

• 50:46Speaker 04

  over by a storm and blocks the road, someone's going to get to your house in time, in, in just a few minutes. And the whole idea is get a fire while it's small. You know, when the fire starts in your kitchen, you know, when you call the fire department and say, I got a house fire, they don't say, okay, where is your house? It's in the kitchen. Okay. Well, you know, call us back when it's in the living room and then maybe we'll come. Or it could sometimes even worse. All right. Well, cool. Just get out of your house and just, if it spreads to your neighbor's house, then call us and maybe we'll come help out. And you're like, really? Like, yeah, we're, we're just not going to fight that one. Okay. And, or imagine, you know, if the mayor said, you know what, our current policy for this city block is to let it burn. We're just going to let this block burn. And if it spreads to the next block, then maybe we'll fight it.

• 51:30Speaker 04

  And I think, you know, that mindset has largely been, you know, bifurcated between structure fire and wildland fire. For good reason, because fire is a part of our natural landscape, no question. Like, we want fires to burn. We need, fire is extremely healthy for, for, for the landscape. It has to happen. Um, but we also have to recognize that we now have a lot of people, values, infrastructure, interspersed with our forests, with our urban wildland interface.

• 52:02Speaker 05

  I just say houses and stupid places, but that's, you know, I'm not putting words in your mouth.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  Nope, I'd say that's, you, any, any which way you want to say it, you know, houses, stupid, whatever it is, but they're there.

• 52:12Steven Rinella?

  Matt Cook's like, that stings.

• 52:15Speaker 04

  You know, yep, you, you, you could call whatever you want.

• 52:18Steven Rinella?

  He can't get, he, he's finding the insurance problem right now. He's bought his own fire truck though.

• 52:24Speaker 04

  But, you know, but then, you know, so stupid, but, but also like, so take the Smokehouse Creek Fire last year in Texas. So it was about, almost exactly, it was March of last year. That fire burned 1.6 million acres. Um, that burned Panhandle, that, that burned like heart of ranch country. That, that, those are houses, stupid places there. Those are ranchers, thou, hunt, tens of thousands of head of cattle burn. I mean, it, it structural impact on the cattle industry because, you know, they couldn't get air support on the fire quick enough. And that fire, when it was spreading at peak speed, was burning two football fields a second. I mean, think how fast that is. I mean, just in a blink of an eye. And, uh, you know, uh, about a month ago, the Hamptons, Long Island was burning, a wildfire started there and was burning, you know, actually in the worst was about a month ago, about three weeks ago, the same communities in Appalachia that got wiped out by that,

• 53:09Speaker 04

  they were burning in a wildfire. So, you know, it's, it, the point is not just a national forest, western lands issue. I mean, it's really is a 50 state issue. You know, Lahaina, Hawaii, let's not forget about that. The deadliest fire in recent history was in Hawaii. You know, Lahaina, that fire started on the mountainside, wind pushed it through, it literally wiped that city off the map, killed 100 people and it happened fast.

• 53:29Steven Rinella?

  Burned to the shoreline.

• 53:30Speaker 04

  Exactly right. And, um, so like.

• 53:33Steven Rinella?

  But I get, I like, I, I get the point.

• 53:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:35Steven Rinella?

  About houses and stupid places, but at the same time, like you said. Like it or don't like it. I mean, if someone builds a house.

• 53:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:45Steven Rinella?

  People are gonna be, there's, there's gonna wind up being the obligation to.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:49Steven Rinella?

  Like, you can't draw a line, you know, and be like, these are the ones we put out and these are the ones we don't put out.

• 53:54Speaker 04

  It's like driving down the interstate saying, hey, you know, you're driving on I-90 between, you know, uh, Bozeman and Butte, and you roll your car in Pipestone Pass. Well, I never should have built an interstate there. Now, it was a stupid spot for an interstate, you know? It's like, well, my car rolled over. I'm pinned underneath. I, I would appreciate if the highway patrol rescued me. Like, well, you shouldn't be there. You know, so I think, a point totally taken, but, you know, the American people are there. Um, and, and when you look at how other countries deal with it, you know, no one's perfect, but, but they do take more of that structural firefighting mindset, which is, our first and primary obligation is public safety. So, yes, nature management.

• 54:33Speaker 04

  Yes, there's a time for the forest to burn, prescribed burns, all that, but like, our first priority needs to be protecting the lives and homes of, of people. Like, number one. And I, and I think that's why the LA fire really cracked open a lot of frustration bipartisan. And again, I'll add, every single bill I've, I was the first Senator, excuse me, freshman to pass a bill this, this, uh, Congress. Um, and it was around wildfire. And again, it was all bipartisan. I mean, every single wildfire bill, it's not one party or the other. We're all saying, we owe the American people better. Like, we, we, we just owe them a better solution than they're getting.

• 55:05Steven Rinella?

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• 55:50Steven Rinella?

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• 56:34Steven Rinella?

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• 57:16Steven Rinella?

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• 58:00Speaker 04

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• 58:26Steven Rinella?

  What's the theme? Like, what's the theme of what you're driving toward for wildfires?

• 58:30Speaker 04

  So the challenge is, the reason why there's so many different bills. And you hit the nail on the head when you said, I've been hearing about this forestry crap for years. Nothing's changing. And you're exactly right. It's largely. You have such a complicated interconnection of issues, organizations and interests. So you guys know better than I do about our public lands and how many different organizations have a hand in that pot. You know, you got the Forest Service. Which, you know, we can talk about USDA, which owns the Forest Service. A lot of people assume the Forest Service is the Department of Interior and it's not. That's just, or they think it's his own agency. The Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture. That's very important. We can talk about that later, but the policies of USDA and how they operate dictate the Forest Service.

• 59:14Speaker 04

  Then you have Department of Interior within that. Of course, you have National Park Service. You got Bureau of Land Management. You got Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is also a massive landowner. Then you've got Fish Wildlife Service. Then you've got state organizations, of course, state land, which as we know, especially in Montana, checkerboarded in. You'll have state land shoved in there. Then you might have county land or city land, of course, private land. And then not so much in our state. You go, other states, you could have a lot of land that's Department of Energy or DOD. So you have a pretty.

• 59:44Steven Rinella?

  Another big one you see is Corps of Engineers.

• 59:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, there you go. Exactly. And all those organizations have completely different policies around acquisition, land management, funding. And some of them are considered themselves just passive landowners. They don't want to manage the land. They just don't even look at it. Some of them consider themselves conservationists. Like, our job is not to manage the land, it's to conserve the land. Some of them view themselves as stewards. So each agency has a completely different mindset over what. And then, of course, that's the agency. Then you get to the local level. You know, the state forester in one state may have a completely different outlook on logging the state forester in the next state. Or the director of the BIA in that state or BLM may have a completely different outlook than the neighboring state. And then when you put. Especially when you go, depending on who's in charge in the presidency at the

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  time, if it's a red or blue White House compared to a red or blue state, those policies, when you have state land, which as you know is very common, butted up against BLM or Forest Service land, now you have different policies around that. So, the reason it's so hard to solve this problem is because you have so many different stakeholders with completely different policies and sometimes different worldviews coming at the issue. And that's just talking about landowners. That doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of environmental advocacy groups, legal advocacy groups, who, quite frankly, there are a lot of people that make a living off of suing the government over land issues. That's how they make their money. So, they want lawsuits to happen.

• 1:01:11Speaker 05

  But even if you just took three, right? Like federal, state, private. Very realistic that all three of those overlap in an area and they all have different land management plans in place for their own objectives.

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  And that's why this legislation, again, LA was a terrible event, but unfortunately, usually it takes a terrible event to cause structural change to bureaucracy.

• 1:01:35Speaker 05

  So, you got a little momentum.

• 1:01:36Speaker 04

  As I've told folks, the greatest force in government, in the history of government, it's not good or bad, it's not love or hate, it's inertia. It's just the inertia of a massive bureaucracy to make it change direction is incredibly hard, incredibly hard. And unfortunately, it takes a big terrible event to cause a change in direction. Take the Navy, totally unaffiliated from this, but a great example is the Navy. Prior to World War II, the Navy believed battleships were the capital ship. Battleships were big ships with big giant guns on them. And the concept of a capital ship was, we're going to line up ships and they're going to shoot at each other with cannons till they sink. That's how navies thought.

• 1:02:19Speaker 04

  And a number of guys in the 30s said, hey, you know what? These things called airplanes actually are pretty effective and an airplane can sink a ship. So, why don't we invest in these things called aircraft carriers where we basically cut the top off the ship, put a piece of pavement down and we fly planes and we kill the other ship before their guns can hit us? The Navy said, that's a stupid idea, that's idiotic. And the guy that thought of it, they had him kicked out of the military. Had him kicked out, literally discharged, gone. And guess what happened? Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor. All the battleships got sunk. I used to live, when I was stationed in Hawaii, I looked out my front window and from me, I could throw a baseball and hit the wreck of the USS Utah that was still sunk, the hull's still sitting there in Pearl Harbor. And all the battleships basically were wiped out. So the Navy had no choice.

• 1:03:04Speaker 04

  And guess what did all that damage? Airplanes. The Navy quickly realized, all right, not only are our battleships gone, we need aircraft carriers, but also we just saw what a bunch of cheap airplanes can do to a bunch of expensive ships. So, you know, I hate to say it, but I think LA may be our Pearl Harbor moment for fire, where we realize it's time for a fundamental reset of how we're dealing with this. And it's giving us the momentum bipartisan to go across these agencies and say, listen, Forest Service, you want to have a forest treatment plan? That's X. And part of you want to do that? Great. But guess what? If we can identify an area as a critical fire shed, all that other crap goes away. We are going to cut through the bureaucracy, the red tape, and all the litigation, and we're going to prioritize public safety.

• 1:03:48Speaker 04

  And we're going to identify critical fire sheds all throughout the US and say, if you're within a fire shed, we're going to cut through all these different environmental impact reviews, all these different lawsuits, all these different acts. And we're simply going to say the priority for this valley is we're going to do forest treatment. We're going to build, you know, roads where we have to to get firefighters there, and we're going to, we're going to bolster the firefighting capability here in an interagency cross-cutting manner.

• 1:04:12Speaker 06

  Is a, is a critical fire shed want a place that has like a certain density of human population?

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, basically, that, so that's, so the Fix Our Forests Act was, was, we just introduced last week. Yep. So Westerman, Curtis, Padilla, Hickenlooper. We all came together, basically all Western states guys saying, hey, you know, we need to find, we need to fix our forests. And, and, and one of the key aspects of that is identify fire sheds. And, you know, part of the problem too is here, of course, you know, we're in a very polarized political environment, and everyone wants to grab every issue and just, you know, crank up the volume and get everyone pissed at each other. And unfortunately, that makes it hard to have a common sense conversation sometime. Nobody's talking about clear cutting forests like we did in the late 1800s. No one's talking about going in and like, you know, Lorax here and just like wiping off the whole.

• 1:05:01Speaker 04

  What we're talking about is, is forest thinning and prescribed burns. And, you know, no one seems to have a problem in some of these environmental groups letting the forest burn to the ground. Yet they don't want us to use that timber to create jobs and economic activity in towns that frankly didn't. Like go to Libby, go to Columbia Falls. Some of these towns, you know, Pelt grants, payment lieu of taxes have replaced timber revenue. And the Forest Service used to be the most profitable agency in the United States government. It made money every single year, literally contributed to the National Treasury. And now, like every other agency, it's a cost center because they no longer, they used to harvest in the eighties, 13 million board fit a year. Now it's, they struggle to hit three. So, um, we got to figure out how to bring that common sense.

• 1:05:42Speaker 04

  And in an area when we had, we've had a housing boom and housing shortage, you'd think we'd want more timber. Instead, we're buying timber from Canada when we should be getting it from here in America. So that, that critical fire shed will be basically a negotiating process to go around, say, all right, this area, this, this, as you know, a fire shed normally follows a drainage.

• 1:06:01Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 1:06:01Speaker 04

  It's like, all right, this drainage here is a critical fire shed for this town. Uh, you know, we're going to identify this as, as a fire critical area.

• 1:06:08Steven Rinella?

  My only ask on that is that you let me come in and double check the work. Cause what I would, what I would be afraid of here is that people would take that ability and manipulate it and wind up being that they're, they're pursuing other objectives when they draw those lines.

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Steven Rinella?

  So I hope, I hope that follows like that it really is a critical fire shed and not where someone says, can we extend it way over that way too?

• 1:06:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, listen, I mean, that, that's where, so that's where local control comes into the picture. And, you know, for me, and I think most people feel like they want more of a local voice in how the lands around them are managed.

• 1:06:47Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:48Speaker 04

  And it's funny, you know, the, the public lands issue, obviously Montana, it's a very unique issue. Where in Montana, public lands, you know, public lands and public hands is, is the motto, as it should be. Public belongs to the public, but then it's the, the public lands belong to the public though. And what's happened a lot is the public lands now belong to the government. And that's different, you know? The public lands belong to the people. And I think there's a separate and distinct definition between the government owning a land and the people owning the land.

• 1:07:18Steven Rinella?

  The steward of the land.

• 1:07:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:07:20Steven Rinella?

  Like wildlife belongs to the people, but people don't do vigilante enforcement of wildlife laws. The state does.

• 1:07:27Speaker 04

  Exactly. But the state, whether it's a county, whether it's a state or it's a federal agency, has to have the trust of the people who live around it to say, you know, your input matters. You know, whether it's endangered grizzlies, whether it's sage grouse habitat, whether it's, you know, grazing rights, you know, every state is different. Some states are more about grazing. Some states, you know, that sage grouse habitat has been used to conserve massive tracts of land to say, you can't graze this anymore. It's sage grouse habitat. It's like, oh, wow. Well, like our family depends on that land, has for 100 years. Now you're just going to take it away and we can't use it anymore? So I think that there's been a big disconnect, especially, you know, in the Western states

• 1:08:08Speaker 04

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

• 1:08:39Steven Rinella?

  I understand that frustration.

• 1:08:41Speaker 04

  Well, like when the Gault family, you know, Gault family, you know, rants up near us, you know, we're in Martinsdale, they're over there in White Forest over Springs. And, you know, they were, you know, indicted for fighting a fire that was on their fence line on their lease. It was on federal land, but they're like, we have to protect our ranches, our livelihood. And they were, basically the government took them to court saying, you know, you are not allowed to do that, destruction of government property. And, you know, obviously, we've seen a lot of these Western lands issues come to heads, you know, between ranchers, between local, like, there's that sheriff that arrested the fire manager from the Forest Service a couple of years ago out in Washington State, who they were doing a prescribed burn that got out of control and was burning private property, and the sheriff showed up and said, "Listen, like, you had to prescribe, you can burn your federal land all you want, but now you're burning private land," and there had been years of tensions building here.

• 1:09:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:26Speaker 04

  And the sheriff arrested him, said, "You're a Forest Service employee, I don't care, it does not give you the right to burn down private property," you know, and put him under arrest. Obviously, that case is still working its way through the system, but, uh, so, you know, and then you look in California, and obviously, the impacts of that, where folks said, you know, decades of, of, of public lands management decisions impact the fire resilience of a community, and, um, the folks saying, "Well, you know, if I had known that what you were doing was gonna create my, was gonna create a less safe fire environment for my community, I never would've let you do it." So, I, I think, I think what we're seeing is a reckoning, the pendulum always swings, you know, we had a huge conservation push in the back half of the 20th century, especially these last four years, which is obviously a good thing in many respects, but, as you

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  know, in any movement, you know, uh, sometimes we make mistakes on the way, and, you know, I would, I would, I would, uh, submit that the Endangered Species Act has been, has been greatly abused, and, and, and Clean Waters Act, Waters United States Act, has been taken by a lot of advocacy groups, and they've said, "You know what, this is a way to shut down development here, this is a way to shut down ranchers using this irrigation water, because it can, I mean, that, that case in Idaho where the irrigation ditch was 14 miles from Priest Lake, yet they called it a navigable body of water."

• 1:10:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  Right, so, I, I think, you know, both sides, uh, have to come to the table and say, "Listen, uh, the, the land belongs to the people, not to the government, and we need to make sure that people who live," I mean, you know, you talk to folks in Libby, they come out and be like, "We have been desperate to get these timber projects going for 10, 15, 20 years, and all we get is lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit, and we want our town back, we want our timber industry back in our town, and, you know, we have lawyers from five states away, parachute in, and well-heeled." Lawyers with millions of dollars of funding from who knows where it comes from and they pop in and every time we're about to get our timber lease boom. It's no they judge shop they sue it they stop and the town's like this is our forest we live here.

• 1:11:23Speaker 04

  How do these people come in from where they're coming from and and tell us we can't have an economy in our town? You know, go to Blackbeak Copper Company, White Sulfur, that town wants that mine, it's on private land. And yet, you know, they get they get, you know, enjuncted every time they're about to stick a shovel in the ground, the mine gets shut down. So I think, you know, that there there's some common sense. Application that needs to happen, and I think this fire in LA is is waking people up to the fact that. We have an obligation to be good stewards of our land. We have an obligation to be good stewards for clean air, clean water and and and to take care of. Whether the species are endangered or not, we have an obligation there, but at the same time, we also have an obligation to protect our communities.

• 1:12:06Speaker 04

  And two things can be true, we can care about the environment and and want clean water and and healthy forests, and we can also say. We can do that and protect our communities in a common sense way from wildfire.

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  So in the fix our for I haven't read it since last session, but.

• 1:12:24Speaker 05

  I know there was like financial provisions for non marketable timber, which is, you know, there's the the slash that you talk about off trail. Right? It's like you gotta pay to take that stuff out of there. You know, we don't have the second or tertiary markets for wood pellets and stuff nearby to be profitable, etc. Is do you see that happening? Like, are we going to see some funding? To do that type of management that, you know, like the not dimensional board foot lumber.

• 1:12:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, so short answer is yes, and I think this also takes into account where I think we have to have a little more of an organic. Relationship between small business and local communities and and those for treatment projects where you can say. We're going to give this section of forest the lease to a company to come in and they're going to have the timber lease, but at the same time, their obligation is to deal with the non-dimensional timber, to deal with the offtake and create this kind of, it's more of a symbiotic relationship between industry, the forest products industry and the public landowner to say, again, whether, and there are examples of this working very well. Go to Washington State. Not exactly a bastion of conservatism, but Washington

• 1:13:42Speaker 04

  State really undertook their public lands commissioner lady named Hillary France, who's a great lady, super sharp, thought leader in this regard. Many, many years ago, I think starting in 2016, she started taking a pretty aggressive approach to active forest management in the state and really leveraged the very vibrant forest products industry in the Pacific Northwest to say, listen, I want to fireproof our communities and I also want to reinvigorate, especially a lot of these tribal communities like around Colville, who, you know, are always struggling for good economic growth. And they used kind of this forestry model around both traditional timber products, but also non-standard forestry products. And, you know, the free market is a beautiful thing. The free market will adapt, you know,

• 1:14:25Speaker 04

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

• 1:14:55Steven Rinella?

  It comes as a chore list tied to a cut.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:14:58Steven Rinella?

  A financial cut.

• 1:15:00Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:15:00Steven Rinella?

  So you, I know we're going to lose you because you have other obligations. So I want to try to move quick on a couple of things. You campaigned really hard on public lands and public hands.

• 1:15:10Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:15:11Steven Rinella?

  How are you gonna like, how can you as an incoming Republican Senator like maybe buck a trend that's coming from your broader party about divestiture from public lands? There are a lot of talk about getting rid of public lands, excess public lands. What kind of position does that put you in?

• 1:15:26Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, so there was a bill that came out a couple of weeks ago that both Danes, Senator Danes and I voted, voted in favor of.

• 1:15:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, thank you. The only two in your party, but a huge thank you, man.

• 1:15:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, true. No question.

• 1:15:37Steven Rinella?

  I'd like to give you credit for that because I was, I was pleased to see it.

• 1:15:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you. So there's no question in our minds, public lands belong in public hands. Again, that's not just a slogan, it's just a fact, it's a way of life. But there's a but, and I'm not, we'll say government assets, government owned assets. What happens when you have a defunct military base in a, that's been abandoned, that's shut down, that's inside?

• 1:16:01Steven Rinella?

  Those are your personal playground.

• 1:16:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. A semi-urban area. You know, El Toro Air Base in LA is a great example. Like as LA grew, El Toro Air Base is in like the middle of the growth of LA.

• 1:16:11Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:16:14Speaker 04

  That was public land, right? And, and the decision was, we're going to transfer that to the city of LA and they will do with it what they deem best because this no longer makes sense. Basically, the entire San Francisco Bay, same thing. Bunch of military bases, publicly owned lands, that were transferred in a common sense way to say, mainly pushed by Democrats, that hey, we want these to be pushed into the private market.

• 1:16:37Steven Rinella?

  You will get no resistance from me on these issues.

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  True. So, but where I'm going is unfortunately, it's the same legal framework. And I think, you know, politics is politics. Everyone's got to, you know, run their game, I get it. But, you know, in Montana specifically, there's been this effective narrative created that, you know, the Republican Party wants to sell off Yellowstone National Park and they want to, you know, turn Glacier into a China.

• 1:16:59Steven Rinella?

  I haven't heard that, but I mean, I could picture someone saying that.

• 1:17:02Speaker 04

  Oh, I literally had people in my office like, I heard you're going to sell Yellowstone. Like, I'm like, what are you talking about? But that same framework, though, extends. So, take Nevada. And it's interesting how the mindset on public lands changes on where you're at. Like, there are people in Nevada that view the federal government owning land, it's almost the inverse of here. It's like occupation. Ninety-seven percent of Nevada is owned by the federal government. And a lot of Nevadas resent that deeply. They're like, because the government owns our whole state, we can't develop it, we can't, you know, have economic... A lot of the native tribes in Hawaii hate the fact that the US federal government owns so much land in Hawaii. They view that as foreign occupation.

• 1:17:42Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  So, and Alaska. People in Alaska are very supportive of saying, "We want energy development on our public lands." In some cases, that may mean leasing or selling chunks, because we want jobs, we want economic growth. So, it's not selling national parks, not selling BLM, not selling Forest Service, of course, but it is to say, if we have a military base in the middle of a city, thousands of acres, is that just gonna stay fenced off and empty forever? And I think, when you hear Doug Burgum talking about, "We need to use our public lands more efficiently," and he starts talking about, "We're gonna consider affordable housing projects on public lands," he's not gonna build an apartment building, you know, next to, you know, Old Faithful. What he's saying is, there's a

• 1:18:28Speaker 04

  lot of Department of Interior-owned land, or Department of Energy-owned land, or DOD-owned land, that is owned by the public, that most people would say, "This could be used better than it is."

• 1:18:39Steven Rinella?

  Okay, but if they come in and say, if Burgum or anybody comes in and says, "We're limiting this to predeveloped properties, or we're limiting this to things that are not..." You know, I know these are fudgy words, or fuzzy words. "We're limiting these actions to things that are not undeveloped..."

• 1:18:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:58Steven Rinella?

  "...wildlife habitat." I think you'd have a huge segment of the conservation community in Hunters and Anglers be like, "Well, that doesn't sound like my fight."

• 1:19:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, and that's exactly, frankly, that's exactly where it's going. Obviously, again, we have to remember, we're in a... Politics is politics and of course, you know, I've been dealing with, with the, I'm, I, everything I'm doing at FIRE is bipartisan, yet there's people pulling out, people who don't like my agenda are pulling out snippets of, of bills we're working on saying, oh, look, she, he's trying to do this with FIRE and it's like, yeah, but put it in the full context of, of what we're talking about.

• 1:19:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:28Speaker 04

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

• 1:20:05Speaker 04

  You know, I never once in my life said anything close to, let's sell our public lands, yet that became an issue in my campaign because, you know, it was an issue that could easily be, be created by my political opposition. And both sides do it.

• 1:20:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I would never in a million years sit here and ask you questions about like, like, uh, uh, attack ads that, that came at you during a campaign.

• 1:20:26Speaker 04

  No, I get it, but, but I guess I'm more just going to the narrative.

• 1:20:28Steven Rinella?

  What you do and I, and I want to hear what you think, you know?

• 1:20:31Speaker 04

  So, but I, I guess where I'm going is the narrative that's been developed kind of nationally is that, you know, the Republicans are trying to sell off our public lands and, and I just, that's not an accurate narrative, but there is it. I will definitely say there is a divergence where some people are more interested in saying, all right, can we, can we have a, um, you know, uh, can we sell off a piece of BLM land, uh, to, you know, a mining company?

• 1:20:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:55Speaker 04

  For me, I'm like, no, like it's public land. Now, we, we could arrange a lease deal. Uh, of course we did all the time with coal leases and mining, of course, but like, I don't want to see the land sold because I think one of the greatest inventions in the history of our nation was the concept of public land. And that's, that's something so special to America. They don't have in Europe.

• 1:21:12Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:21:12Speaker 04

  I mean, you know, that land was, was, you know, private thousands of years ago. Um, they don't, Canada has Crown land that's literally owned by the Crown. Um, but like, we're the only country in the world really to ever have the concept of the people will own massive tracts of land. Uh, and that's just so special. We can never, you know, we can't chip away at that. And, and if we do, it's a dangerous precedent we start. So, and especially here in Montana and our Western states. And we, we know what a magical thing it is to have that. And, um, you know, we just have to fight to protect it. It's a red line for all of us. And our whole Montana delegation is aligned on that, that, you know, that's just, that's a non-starter.

• 1:21:46Speaker 05

  I get a little nervous, honestly, when I hear national parks brought up. Cause like all we do every single day is interact with people from all across the country who love public lands. And they own dogs that they want to have off leash and they own guns. National parks are not the place to have dogs off leash and own guns, right? So when we say public lands, it's like, the example of a national park is pretty far down the list. But man, when you're paying attention to this, it's like, that is the example that's being used over and over. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Are we being represented?

• 1:22:20Speaker 04

  I always have to explain that to people like, and like, guys, like for native Montana, like people live in Montana. Like parks are actually like almost, parks are for the tourists. And like, we're worried about our Forest Service land and about our BLM.

• 1:22:31Speaker 05

  And we really like having them for that reason.

• 1:22:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah.

• 1:22:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's a good spillover mechanism.

• 1:22:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:36Steven Rinella?

  Listen, Matt, you, you gotta run. I don't want to keep you late. Uh, in all honesty, I would love to have you come back sometime. Um, I don't know if we ever get, I don't, I don't get much free time. I would love to have you come back for a couple of hours.

• 1:22:48Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:22:48Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I wanted our listeners to meet you, you know, most like, you know, most of our listeners are not in Montana.

• 1:22:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:56Steven Rinella?

  I wanted them to meet you. Um, we got some background covered, which I think is important. Um, I respect the service you did. I think that, you know, doing what you did was such a high risk of injury, cost to your family, like earns you a seat at the table, right? Deserves respect. Um, we got that out of the way. I would love it to come back and talk more about fires and more about public lands.

• 1:23:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, let's do it. I'd love to. Yeah. And, um, as, as the fire legislation moves, you know, I think. You know, probably this summer I'll swing back around because in the next few months, obviously it's already late April, you know, some of these bills will be in place. And I think we'll see a lot of the bipartisan action on the fire like taking place. So I'd love to come back. Yeah. Spend two hours of summer, especially in the fire season when probably a lot of people are going to be, what's going on?

• 1:23:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:38Speaker 04

  Uh, we can talk through it and just talk through some of the tactics and what's going on and why.

• 1:23:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. My brain has been trained in two hour, we do a two hour show.

• 1:23:45Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:45Steven Rinella?

  Been trained into our, I can't get there in an hour.

• 1:23:48Speaker 04

  I get it.

• 1:23:48Steven Rinella?

  So apologies, but I know you gotta run. Um, love to have you back, man.

• 1:23:51Speaker 05

  Oh, I mean, big thank you too for, for standing up for public lands there, both on the reconciliation bill and that, or the amendment there and then, uh, Zinke's, uh, public lands and public hands bill. That's huge.

• 1:24:03Speaker 04

  Yep, absolutely. Proud to do it. Thanks for having me.

• 1:24:06Steven Rinella?

  Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

• 1:24:34Steven Rinella?

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