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

Summary

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

Release Date: April 28, 2025

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I. Introduction

In Episode 696 of The MeatEater Podcast, host Steven Rinella engages in a comprehensive discussion with U.S. Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana. The conversation delves into the pressing issues of wildfires, public lands management, and the future of environmental policies in the United States. Drawing from Sheehy's extensive background in the military and wildland firefighting, the episode offers listeners valuable insights into bipartisan legislative efforts aimed at combating the escalating wildfire crisis.

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II. Background of Sen. Tim Sheehy

Senator Tim Sheehy, representing Montana, provides listeners with an overview of his upbringing and early influences. Raised in Minnesota, Sheehy recounts his childhood adventures around an abandoned military base, which ignited his passion for the outdoors and aviation.

[02:01] Tim Sheehy: "We grew up on a five-acre plot around a lot of other folks... It was a pretty cool place to grow up because we weren't supposed to be there, but we always found a way to explore."

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III. Military Service and Transition

Sheehy's commitment to service led him to the Navy SEALs, motivated by a lifelong passion for aviation and inspired by war films from his youth. He shares his experiences at the Naval Academy during the tumultuous times of the War on Terror, detailing his decision to initially leave the academy to fight but ultimately being persuaded to complete his education.

[10:58] Tim Sheehy: "We're going to be fighting this war for another 20 years, and what I need is smart young leaders and officers."

After completing his training, Sheehy highlights the immense responsibilities he held as a young SEAL leader, commanding up to 200 personnel in high-stakes environments like Afghanistan and Iraq.

[19:10] Tim Sheehy: "When you look at the responsibility and you look back at the responsibility you're given, it's like a 25, 26-year-old guy... That deserves respect."

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IV. Wildland Firefighting and Bridger Aerospace

Transitioning from military service, Sheehy ventured into wildland firefighting and entrepreneurship by founding Bridger Aerospace. Motivated by the tragic loss of the Grand Mountain Hotshots in the Arnell Mountain fire, he aimed to apply military-grade airborne surveillance technology to enhance wildfire management and public safety.

[24:08] Tim Sheehy: "I felt myself in the shoes of that team leader... If he'd had the same tools I'd had in Afghanistan, his team probably would have been alive."

Bridger Aerospace focuses primarily on aerial wildfire suppression, utilizing advanced sensor technologies to provide real-time situational awareness and support ground operations. Sheehy emphasizes the company's role in responding swiftly to wildfire emergencies across the nation.

[28:38] Tim Sheehy: "70% of our company is all aerial wildland firefighting... We can do better than we're doing."

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V. Impact of Wildfires on Economy and Insurance

The conversation shifts to the broader economic implications of wildfires, particularly their devastating impact on the insurance industry. Sheehy explains how catastrophic events like the Lahaina fire in Hawaii have set records for disaster costs, severely affecting insurance premiums and the availability of homeowner insurance.

[32:22] Tim Sheehy: "The LA wildfire is the most expensive disaster in American history ever... It could be a bigger impact on the homeowner's market than the 2008 financial crisis."

He elaborates on how rising insurance costs could render homes unaffordable or unsellable, leading to significant economic disruptions for homeowners and broader financial instability.

[35:28] Tim Sheehy: "If you can't get insurance on your home, what else can't you get for that home? Imagine if 10 to 20% of American homes become illiquid as a result."

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VI. Public Lands Management and Policy Challenges

Sheehy delves into the complexities of public lands management, highlighting the fragmented governance involving multiple federal and state agencies with differing policies and objectives. He points out the historical shift in forest management practices over the past 30-40 years, which has contributed to increased wildfire intensity and unpredictability.

[40:11] Tim Sheehy: "Our forest management policies have radically changed in the past 30 years... Forest treatment logging projects have basically been injuncted to the point where they almost don't happen anymore."

Sheehy argues that an expanded wildland-urban interface, driven by population growth in previously undeveloped areas, has exacerbated the wildfire crisis by increasing the vulnerability of communities and infrastructure.

[37:36] Tim Sheehy: "The wildland-urban interface is exponentially bigger than it's ever been before... people cause fires... it's an existential economic issue."

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VII. Legislative Efforts and Bipartisanship

Senator Sheehy discusses his proactive legislative efforts to address the wildfire crisis, emphasizing the bipartisan nature of his initiatives. As co-chair of the Wildfire Caucus alongside Senator Alex Padilla from California, Sheehy is spearheading comprehensive wildfire legislation aimed at enhancing forest management, increasing firefighting capabilities, and prioritizing public safety.

[49:58] Tim Sheehy: "LA was a terrible event, but it's giving us the momentum, bipartisan, to go across these agencies and say, listen, Forest Service... we're going to prioritize public safety."

He highlights the introduction of the "Fix Our Forests" bill, advocating for the identification of "fire sheds"—critical areas prone to wildfires—to streamline forest treatment and firefighting efforts.

[57:35] Tim Sheehy: "We're going to identify 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."

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VIII. Political Perspectives on Public Lands

Navigating the political landscape, Sheehy addresses misconceptions about the Republican stance on public lands. He clarifies that his focus is on responsible stewardship and management rather than divestiture or selling public lands.

[66:38] Tim Sheehy: "Public lands belong to public hands... We are not trying to sell off our public lands. We're talking about leasing and responsible management to enhance safety and economic vitality."

Sheehy criticizes opposing narratives that inaccurately portray his legislative efforts as attempts to sell or diminish public lands, emphasizing the importance of maintaining these lands for public use and environmental preservation.

[72:22] Tim Sheehy: "The land belongs to the people, not the government... We have to protect public lands as a non-negotiable priority."

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IX. Future Directions and Conclusion

As the episode concludes, Sheehy outlines his vision for the future of wildfire management and public lands. He underscores the necessity of collaborative efforts across federal and state agencies, the integration of advanced technologies, and the implementation of pragmatic forest management strategies to mitigate wildfire risks and safeguard communities.

[75:09] Tim Sheehy: "We'll continue bipartisan action on wildfire legislation... ensuring that policies are effective and grounded in common sense."

Steven Rinella expresses his appreciation for Sheehy's service and dedication, inviting him to return for future discussions on wildfire and public lands management.

[75:34] Steven Rinella: "Love to have you back, man."

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Notable Quotes

• Sen. Tim Sheehy ([10:58]): "We're going to be fighting this war for another 20 years, and what I need is smart young leaders and officers."

• Sen. Tim Sheehy ([32:22]): "The LA wildfire is the most expensive disaster in American history ever... It could be a bigger impact on the homeowner's market than the 2008 financial crisis."

• Sen. Tim Sheehy ([49:58]): "LA was a terrible event, but it's giving us the momentum, bipartisan, to go across these agencies and say, listen, Forest Service... we're going to prioritize public safety."

• Sen. Tim Sheehy ([66:38]): "Public lands belong to public hands... We are not trying to sell off our public lands. We're talking about leasing and responsible management to enhance safety and economic vitality."

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Conclusion

Episode 696 of The MeatEater Podcast provides an in-depth exploration of the wildfire crisis and the intricate challenges of public lands management through the lens of Senator Tim Sheehy’s experiences and legislative initiatives. The discussion underscores the urgent need for bipartisan solutions, effective forest management practices, and innovative technological applications to protect communities and preserve America’s natural landscapes.

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Note: The timestamps correspond to key points and notable quotes within the transcript provided.

Transcript

[Steven Rinella]

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[Tim Sheehy]

This is.

[Steven Rinella]

The Me Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt.

[Tim Sheehy]

The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything.

[Steven Rinella]

The Meat Eater Podcast ass is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light.com f I r s t l I t e dot com joined today by u. S. Senator Tim Sheehy represents the 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. Came out of that business and was just elected to the U.S. senate. They call you guys freshmen?

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah.

[Steven 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 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.

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Could you go running around in there?

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, of course little kids can do what they.

[Tim Sheehy]

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. I Think see what going on there. It's. And we go in the old factories, these 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 filing cabinets, all the orders were there. Really. The keys. The bathroom had toilet. I mean this place been banned 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 the 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.

[Unknown]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

That's exactly right. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know what's hilarious about that? With the age at which you can just go around and in big trouble and then you hit another agent. You can't. There's this hill. I don't, I don't want to say too many. I don't want to like call out a neighbor, but there's a hill by our house and our little kids sled there all the time, never a word. But our 14 year old, his buddies go over there and sled immediately has to leave.

[Tim Sheehy]

Exactly. Totally.

[Steven Rinella]

But our 10 year old could slide 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.

[Tim Sheehy]

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 are aware enough of yourself that you shouldn't be doing this then as that age runner, it's like, whatever, we don't care.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. That kid probably knows.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

Right. But yeah, we go in there and then once I was in the military, I came home one time on leave and went in. I was like, I went to the base at this point, like, 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. I'm leaving.

[Unknown]

That's great.

[Steven Rinella]

What was your. How did you decide to join military? Like, and not only that. But not only join the military, but going into the. Into the Navy SEALs, like, what was that process for you?

[Tim Sheehy]

You know, it's. It's. As you guys probably know, I mean, it's like I just turned or turned 39 a few months ago, and it's like. And I was telling someone the other day, I was talking to a young man that wanted to go to the nail academy, and. And, you know, he had his whole life planned out. He's 19 years old and knows, you know, I'm gonna do this, and then that and that. I said, listen, you know, if you'd asked me When I was 16, 24, 28, 36, where I was going to be in five years, I would have been wrong. Every single time. Like, every single time. So, you know, I knew I wanted to be in the military. I just did. I have no idea why. My mom's like, yeah, from the time you could, like, run, you had a stick in your hand and running around the woods, you know, shooting things, pretending you were, you know, whatever.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

Always. Yeah, of course. I mean, all them war movies as kids, you know, and cowboys.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

Yes. And never the Japanese. Like, it was never the Pacific Theater.

[Steven Rinella]

No, we didn't fight. We didn't fight the Japanese. Yeah. It was all European theaters. Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

You know, I grew up Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, all that stuff. So, yeah, I was always running around the woods. Yeah. Pretending, you know, Normandy, whatever. So, anyways, I knew I wanted to go in the military. My neighbor growing up was a. Was a Korean War Navy pilot, and I didn't have really much relation with my grandparents. My mother's side, they died off when I was really young, or one before I was born and one when I was young. And then my dad's side just. We didn't have much relationship there. There was some, you know, just old school familial strife. So he kind of became my grandfather figure, and he is Harry Thiebaud's name and his son, Steve Thiebaud, and their whole family, great folks. So he. I knew I was interested in the military, and he took me up flying in his Cub when I was, like, 8 or 9 years old. And right away I was like, I love aviation. Like, this is amazing. And as soon as I could reach the rudder pedals, my feet. When I was like, 11, he started teaching me how to fly.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, really?

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah. So at that point, I decided I was going to 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 80s. Of course we all watched Top Gun on VHS. So, you know, we watched so many times. The tape was wearing out, you know, and of course the dog fighting scenes we rewind and watch so many times, you know, like, you could see the tape cape had been, you know, degraded over time. But so I was like, I'm gonna go to naval can be a fighter pilot. And so I was flying planes before I was driving cars. Got my solo to plane before I had my driver's license, got my pilot's license in high school.

[Steven Rinella]

No kidding.

[Tim Sheehy]

And then, 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 9, 11 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.

[Steven Rinella]

And then I got a huge jump on you.

[Tim Sheehy]

I was in graduate school. Yeah, really? Well, you age well, you look great, you know. Fine wine. Thank you.

[Unknown]

You answered that well.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah, yeah, but I was so got to the academy. This is fall of 04, summer of 04. And you know, I, you know, there's always perception of organization from the outside. You perceive something from the outside, and when you're inside, you know, your perceptions normally clash with reality and things change. So I knew I wanted to be a fighter pilot and going in and when I got there, you know, I was immersed in the military for the first time really. And you know, we, we had. Iraq was going full swing, Afghanistan was going full swing. For the first time in, you know, 40 years, America was seeing casualties come home. And we were, we were, you know, we 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's unique about the GWAD goal. War on terror, of course, was people in the military like the 2% of people in America that served. Like we were all at war for 20 years, you know.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

Like, my wife, she was a marine. We met the academy like her brother served. Like everyone we knew, all of our best friends, all of our families were living the war, yet most of America wasn't. They just went on with life as normal. It wasn't like World War II where everybody was pitching in and rationing food and rationing rubber, and everyone had a brother or a son deployed for Us, it was like a super small sector of America, deployed again and again and again and again and again and felt the pain and carried the load. 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, you know, the war is being fought door to door, you know, in Solder City and, you know, rock to rock in the valleys of Afghanistan and flying up above ahead, I mean, you were a supporting act. Like, the real action was on the ground. So I actually quit the academy my. My fall, my freshman year. I was like, hey, I got to go fight the war. Like, I've got to go. Typical 18, 19 old kid. Philip Pissen Vega. 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, 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. What, you leaving? I'm like, well, I got to go fight, you know, Like, I can't sit here and take calculus while there's guys on the ground fighting. So I got to do my part. And my commanding officer from my company was like, all right, well, you know, fine. You do what you want to do, but you got to talk to Guy before you leave. Here's a name. He's going to meet you down at the. At the kind of restaurant on campus tonight, which we weren't allowed in his ple. So it's kind of like, well, I'm not allowed to go in. There's like, no, you can go tonight. I'll give permission.

[Unknown]

Is it kind of like this is going to help you or hurt you? Type of.

[Tim Sheehy]

No context at all. No context. Like, hey, cool, all right, you want to leave, I'm not going to stop you, but you need to talk to this guy. But, you know, I just want to have a conversation with this guy. So I'm a plebe, you know, which is the lowest possible.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, what's that stand for?

[Tim Sheehy]

So plebe is. Is what you call. That's what your fresh.

[Steven Rinella]

It's not an acronym?

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

He should have taken that message to the. Yep, he should have taken that message to D.C. yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

So anyways he convinced me to stick around and stay and finish my education in the process. You know, he long other stories for the front of the time. But I got to go 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 to the army commando special ops training pipeline which was a great experience, met some amazing folks, learned a ton. And because really our Special Operations Command, jsoc, socom, it's really an army organization. I mean the vast majority of our special ops organization in America is army like 85% of it. And you know, then you got basically Air Force, Marines and Navy make up very small percentages. So the seals are a very small part of our, of our global special operations footprint. So it's important to understand how the army works and that, that was the reasoning there. So kind of by accident ended up going to the SEAL teams. And you know, once you're at the academy, you know, you start to figure out what culturally you fit best in and pilot. Naval aviation is the best aviation green of the military. But at the same time my personality fit pretty quickly. I realized, you know, was with the, with the SEAL teams and the Special.

[Steven Rinella]

You still have to do all the cold water stuff just like the seals. The butt. You still had to do that. Okay, yeah, I don't know if you did, if you did the equivalent, there's.

[Tim Sheehy]

No course validation and SEAL training.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, because dude, that, that's the thing, man.

[Tim Sheehy]

Like yeah, the, the, the The.

[Steven Rinella]

My specialty is walking. Like, I could do. Like, I could do an elimination course about walking, but sitting in cold water.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah, that's my.

[Steven Rinella]

We. I just.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah, well, that's. That's one. One of the great triting factors and training is just the suck, you know? You know, everyone watched the videos and thinks it's all this really tough physical evolution. You got to jump, you got to do this crazy obstacle course. You got to do this insanely, you know, whatever. What gets guys isn't. Isn't the test gates. Whether it's, you know, assembling weapons, jumping onto planes. What gets guys is just the suck. Just the continued suck of, like, not just that it sucks, but then the knowledge that it's going to continue to suck for a very long time.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

Like, 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, or we're gonna get in the truck, we'll go get our. Like, this is gonna go on for. And then you don't know. It's not like, all right, 62 more days to go, or it's like, this will just continue to suck until it doesn't. And then that. That unknown is what causes people to quit. That's really. It's the unknown of how bad the pain will be and how long it will go for when folks decide, all right, this isn't for me.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

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 as you're normally years later, you look back, whether you have a whole bunch of kids close together, you know, whether it was a crazy time in your business, you know, or whether it was, like, during the war years. At the time, you just feel like you're doing your job. And then kind of years later, you look back, like, oh, my God, like, that was a crazy time how much we were doing. So, like, I mean, during my time in. Because my wife, she had just commissioned in as a Marine Corps officer, so we were a married couple that was doing. You know, we were both deploying to the war zone separately. You don't, like, deploy together and not.

[Steven Rinella]

Even not based out of the same area?

[Tim Sheehy]

No, no. Like, you know, like, it's not a couple's golf trip. Like, I mean, the Marine center where they need to go. And the SEAL sent me where they need me to go. So, like, we're not like, we got married to the mail. Like, I'm a mail order husband, literally. So she was in Afghanistan, Deployed. I was deployed somewhere else. And we kept trying to actually, like, get the marriage done. And we were like, we're not going to be together for like two and a half years. When are we actually going to be physically co located? Were you guys even able to communicate with each other on a regular basis? You know, it was. This is a Pre Skype 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 those, you know, 0, 9, 10, 11, 12, like, it was still landline phones and landline Internet. So, yeah, I mean, we'd communicate when we could, but it's not at all. It's vastly improved today. Our service members today, as they should, have a far better, you know, you can connect to a WI FI connection and still see your family.

[Steven Rinella]

So do you know in Montana you can get married by proxy?

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Double proxy.

[Tim Sheehy]

Neither of us were there. We're the only state it's legal where you can get married via double proxy. So Carmen figured that out. She was in Afghanistan. She's like, hey, I figured how we can get married. I'm like, all right, how send it. It's like, we can get married through the mail. I'm like, really? I didn't know that was legal. She's like, well, it's only legal in one state, Montana. I'm like, wow. She's like, yeah, we 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 February 11th.

[Steven Rinella]

Cool.

[Tim Sheehy]

Happy anniversary. Yeah, so, yeah, so. So that's how we did it. It's cool law, though, you know, because.

[Steven Rinella]

It'S got to be for the military.

[Tim Sheehy]

Right. 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 they're front there.

[Unknown]

But also the fighting scenes were great.

[Tim Sheehy]

Far and away. Yeah. I was like, joseph loves Catherine.

[Unknown]

Then he punches the horse.

[Tim Sheehy]

That's great. Yeah, I 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. And during those territory days, before states were states, they were kind of competing for people because the sooner you had more people and land homesteaded, the sooner you were going to get statehood. I mean, that wasn't like a technical threshold, but that was basically, once you had more people and more constituents in your state, you. You had a better chance of being. Or in your territory, you had better chance of being a state.

[Unknown]

So anyways, and a male to female threshold, that was very real.

[Tim Sheehy]

So it was like 96%. It was crazy. So Montana territory rifle is like, hey, we can make it legal to basically come out here and then mail order a wife, show your piece of paper. Look, I'm married. This is my homestead. I'm going to live here. And it helped help to process homestead claims. So anyway, it's kind of an interesting.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, so you were in and out.

[Tim Sheehy]

Of, I have to imagine, Iraq, Afghanistan.

[Steven Rinella]

How many times did you get.

[Tim Sheehy]

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 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 and you look back at the responsibility you're given. I mean, 25, 26 year old guy. You know, at one point between the Afghan army troops, I had my SEALs, my army assignment that I'd get, get an army platoon assigned to me and you know, I had like 200 people under my command and daily combat operations, you know, you know, gunfights every day, airstrikes. And it's like I was the commander, like I was insuring you. Think about that in the business world, you know, that amount of responsibility given to a 25, 26 year old. And now that's true across the military. I mean, you take a 25 year old pilot in the Air Force, he's flying $100 million aircraft, I mean, so the responsibility, and then he goes home.

[Steven Rinella]

And his dad won't let him use.

[Tim Sheehy]

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 in my jacket here. You know, we worked out with the ROTC kids yesterday at MSU and kind of imparting that upon them like, you know, you get home, it's a totally different, you'll work at a small business while you, 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. Yeah, and 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 these.

[Unknown]

Oh, and have to prove yourself again, right?

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

That's crazy.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah, That's a tough transition for everybody.

[Steven Rinella]

So when you came out of that, how did you decide to get into wildland? Yeah, wild, Wildland firefighting.

[Tim Sheehy]

Like, like me ended up in the seals. I mean, I make no bones about, I never, like almost everything I've done in life to include politics, which I'm sure 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 got to do meta evaluation. I'm like, well, you know, if I can't be a seal, I can't lead a team. Like, what 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 leave my guys on missions and you're going to send me to headquarters for two or three years, like, you know, I'll move on with life. So.

[Steven Rinella]

So did you not get your 20 year retirement then?

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Not aviation.

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

You think so?

[Tim Sheehy]

Absolutely. I mean, it's just a reality of conflict is friendly fire is, is sometimes just as, if not more dangerous than any fire. I mean, the fog of war is real. I mean, you watch these movies and you know, every time you see a gunfight, it's like, you know, the one guy's looking the other guy in the eye and like the gun comes out and he's like, know they all, you know, this isn't Mel Gibson a lethal weapon as much, you know, like, bolts are flying. A lot of you don't even know where the hell they're coming from. You don't even know who's shooting at you. Especially in places like Afghanistan and urban warfare in Iraq. It's like, sometimes the biggest challenge is figuring out where you're getting shot at from. Then once you figure that out, all right, now we can deal with it. But a lot of times, you know, you're taking fire inbound, you don't know where it's coming from. And that's something the movies never really capture. It's like, you know, someone gets shot, all of a sudden, they're like. They see the guy in the bell tower a mile away. There it is, you know, blow it up. It's like, no, it could be minutes, hours, while you're taking fire before you figure out what's going on. So we're little kids.

[Steven Rinella]

We'd always, like. I'd ask my dad, like, how many.

[Tim Sheehy]

People did you shoot? Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, he'd be like, you can't tell what's going on.

[Tim Sheehy]

100. Right. I mean, you know, 100 right is. It's like, you know, you just don't.

[Steven Rinella]

Know because you're just shooting into it. As you would say, you're shooting in the windows a lot of times.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah. That the fog of war is. Is an absolutely real thing. 100%. And. And. But anyway, 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 law enforcement, border security, fire, like, you know, we could probably save a lot of lives and do a lot of good here. And right about the time I was getting out, the. The. The debrief for a terrible tragedy kind of became public as they finished the investigation. That was the Arnell 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.

[Steven Rinella]

I remember. Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Do you know what I remember about that is when they finally started releasing details, I remember looking down that list and it was like the kids, yep, 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, yeah, because they're all like in that.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Kind of like not all of them, but I just remember being overwhelmed by how many were in that, like early stage little kids. Because they were like that, they were that at that age, you know, whatever.

[Tim Sheehy]

The hell, like 30 or.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, whatever. I was like, damn, man.

[Tim Sheehy]

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 I mean one of my SEAL platons, 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 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, 100 plus degree heat, full gear, sweating, chaos happening Worried about bringing my guys home alive. And I realized if he'd had the same tools I'd had in Afghanistan, his team probably would have been alive. So that led to me starting Bridger Aerospace. And we ended up, you know, several other companies spun out of that as well along the way. But the point was to bring that airborne intelligence capability, that's, that supported ground guys to industry and to public safety tasks other than the military. Why did you come to Montana, though? Yeah, so, you know, we, we come here to train before we go to Afghanistan. So our SEAL teams would come out here. Actually, Butte was our home base. Guy named Rod Allen out there. And Butte has a group called the Peak. And he's a former Air Force special ops guy, so he would host high altitude training events for teams getting ready to go to Afghanistan. So, you know, everything from high altitude parachuting to high altitude, high angle shooting, you know, most shooting ranges are level. The reality is in Afghanistan, you're never shooting level, you're always shooting down. And most of the time you're shooting up, you know, and.

[Steven Rinella]

Because people are shooting down.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah, I mean, you know, the, the, the peaks over there are 22, 23, 000ft high. You know, these aren't 8, 000 foot peaks. I mean, you're fighting in the foothills of the Himalayas. Hindu Kush is the most rugged. Basically training 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, how to do medicine. Basically we go out there and he, he'd assemble these fantastic training modules for us, and we bring seals out here and train. So during a couple of those trips, Carmen had come out and visited and we kind of decided, hey, this is, 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 happened, I got hurt, you know, timing lined up. So we decided to start a company here. So me and my co founder, who was also a military officer, started our company and, you know, we hoped maybe one day we'd have like eight or 10 employees, but had no idea, you know, what we scaled through Ascent Vision Technology was spun out of Bridger, which is another great success story, and a couple of other companies, you know, about 500 jobs worldwide. We created, we had bases in Australia and Spain and Italy and elsewhere. So we kind of created an international company and all based Right here. So.

[Steven Rinella]

Maybe I misunderstood it as I've become familiar with you through the, the race, the senate race. But you guys have a heavy focus on Wildfire though.

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

How would you, Sorry, you know, how.

[Tim Sheehy]

Would you, how would Bridger Aerospace get involved with a specific fire? Like would you get a call from the government and they're like, hey, we need you guys or how. Yeah, so I mean, all of aircraft, not all. 99% of aircraft flying over wildfires in America come from a private company. So that 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 wrote a book about this called Mudslingers, about the history of aero firefighting and all the profits go to benefit fallen wildland firefighters. But it was more of a history.

[Steven Rinella]

You wrote the book?

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, okay.

[Tim Sheehy]

So it was something I was interested in because as I was learning about arrow firefighting, because I got into the industry really by accident, knew nothing about it. And then as I'm sitting at fire bases as a pilot, because I flew all our planes, I'd be sitting at the fire base. It's like being a fireman in, except your fire engine flies instead of drive. So you're hanging out the fire base, 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. Flying in, flying through smoke, dropping slurry, dropping water on Wildfires, like a lot of these guys were like World War II heroes, Vietnam. I mean they'd already flown the toughest stuff in the world in the toughest conditions and they came and basically needed that adrenaline fix still. And now they start flying Wildfire as you start to see the history of that. But basically most, almost every single aircraft that flies a wildfire is contract owned and or operated because the government pretty much decided in the, in the 60s. You know what, we're not going to own an operator on aircraft. It's too expensive, it's too technically complex for us to just manage the way our budget cycle works. We're going to just hire contractors to fight fire from the air. We'll do it on the ground. So fire breaks out and you guys are just waiting for the phone to ring basically. So we'll get pre staged around and again at the, we could talk for hours on this. I actually did the Sean Ryan podcast, you know, a couple months ago and basically spent three hours talking just about wildfire. But yeah, we talked about how that all works and again I could talk for hours about it. But basically, you know, we, we are pre positioned as air crews and, and basically they will call us up and tell us what fire to go to. Basically 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 waterbomb 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.

[Steven Rinella]

God, your insurance, insurance premium has got to be a. In that business, man.

[Tim Sheehy]

It is. So you know, and actually.

[Steven Rinella]

So what are you gonna do again?

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah, well, and it's.

[Unknown]

How expensive is the plane?

[Tim Sheehy]

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, Atlanta is like Wildfire. Like what the hell, I grew up in Michigan.

[Steven Rinella]

We never talked about it.

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

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 up the.

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Is that right?

[Tim Sheehy]

Huge. Massive. And where. And that's just the cost to recover. That doesn't even start to discuss what that does to insurance premiums. Because when the insurance agency, and I'm sorry 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 homeowners insurance or airplane insurance, all that flows back down to a handful of reinsurers and the amount of which insurance affects people's lives. I don't think they really appreciate, like, for instance, you know, I don't want to go on too much of a tangent, but this is just a good example example of 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. There's 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

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 because insurance. And a lot of these airlines, a lot of these airlines getting attacked. Adele, why aren't you flying? You're. 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. Yeah, because that changes picture as well.

[Steven Rinella]

Because like the Ukraine war, I mean, they've, they've shot down, I think two.

[Tim Sheehy]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Two passenger planes in relation to the.

[Tim Sheehy]

The combatants and thousands of other aircraft that's right. On the ground. So basically, insurance won't underwrite an airliner flying into Tel Aviv. So therefore the airlines, like, we can't Fly in without insurance, like that's not legal.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

So when that insurance impact is absorbed by the housing industry, I mean right now some people's homeowners insurance is more than their mortgage, if you can get it. I mean they've, they've seen 900, a thousand, 2,000% increases in wildfire premiums for people's homeowners insurance. If they can get insurance. A lot of people can't get insurance at all. And it's not even a wildfire prone areas. 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 homeowners insurance. Now if you can't get insurance on your home, what else can't you get for that home?

[Steven Rinella]

A mortgage.

[Tim Sheehy]

Exactly. Yeah, exactly right. And imagine if 10 to 20% of American homes become illiquid as a result of unavailability of homeowner 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 an 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 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

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 homeowner's market and everyone comes up for renewals. I mean it could be a bigger impact on the homeowner's market than like the 8 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.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

I got you.

[Tim Sheehy]

So but when the fire starts burning down thousands of homes, like, so this fire that happened in LA in January, terrible tragedy, obviously, that almost exact same fire happened in 1961 called 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Tim Sheehy]

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. Fifty 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 would have been okay, Mountain Valley burns a couple cabins, a couple ranches.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

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 a thousand people gonna die because they can't get out of there in time, there's gonna be massive economic impact and loss up there.

[Unknown]

So to go back to that insurance footprint.

[Tim Sheehy]

Right, exactly. So and couple that with. We are coming off really a 40 year period of a huge shift in our forest management mindset where, you know, again, it's. I don't 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, but it's just a fact. Our forest management policies have radically changed in the past 30 years. And the impact is, you guys know better than I. You know, I'll be up on our forest service we're cabin 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 almost don't happen anymore. So I think a combination of factors of a change in mindset of forestry, our wildland airman interface has grown massively. I mean tens of millions of people have moved into wildfire prone areas that didn't used to live there.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure.

[Tim Sheehy]

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, the impetus to fight them and put it out as far more. When you have a thousand homes instead of just a thousand acres of sagebrush and cheatgrass.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Is that really the number?

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah, it's like all of the Gallatin Valley. So we're writing that book right now and it's all bipartisan. I'm on my 14th bill right now. I mean this is my life. So I showed up. I'm not, you know, co chair of the Wildfire Caucus in the Senate. Cool. Alex Padilla from California's co chair. And we are moving at breakneck pace because this woke people up. People that typically wouldn't have cared about wildfire. Andy came from New Jersey is a great example. He's a New Jersey senator. Our first, like, two weeks after we did our orientation, New Jersey's burning. And he calls me because he knows my background's 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 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 dial 911, a fire engine shows up at my house right away. I had to explain to him that wildfire and structure fire are treated completely differently in America. They just are structure fire red fire engines. I mean, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. That firehouse just over there is manned, and there's bright red fire trucks and trained firefighters in there ready to go all the time. And every American knows that, accepts that, and expects that. We dial 911 right now and say there's a fire going on. Within 5 minutes and 20 seconds, a big red fire engine will show up here and they'll start fighting that fire. And That's National Code NFPA 409, 1710, National Fire Protection Association.

[Unknown]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

Exactly right. And all of Americans have the expectation that's what's going to happen. And NFPA didn't just happen, like, National Fire Protection Association. These standards didn't just occur. They were forged out of the 19th century, when basically, like, every city had their great fire, the great Boston fire, Great Chicago fire, Kansas City, Denver. Every city essentially burned to the ground in the 1800s. And it's because they were all built out of wood. There was no zoning. There was no building codes. And basically a fire would start. They had no way to fight it because there was no fire department. They didn't have fire hydrants. So they'd run out with buckets of sand. And basically what they would do is they would fight fire with fire. They'd 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, like fire. And they'd spray it on the fires. So in the wake of all these fires, finally in like 1896, a lot of folks came together and said, this is crazy. Like, our cities literally keep burning to the ground. Like, this is ridiculous. We need to figure out how to. 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 the Brooklyn Fire Department over and they show up to help and they have different size hoses, which this happened many times. Our hoses don't plug into your hoses. Your fire 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 is standards of COVID 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 over by a storm, 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 a fire department, say, I got a house fire, they don't say, okay, where isn't 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 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. And I think, you know, that mindset has largely been, you know, bifurcated between structure fire and wildland fire. For good reason, because fire is a part of our natural landscape. No question. Like we want fires to burn. We need. Fire is extremely healthy for the landscape. It has to happen. But we also have to recognize that we now have a lot of people, values, infrastructure interspersed with our forest, with our urban wildland interface.

[Unknown]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

And Matt cooks like that stings, you know.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You could call whatever he can't get. He's finding the insurance problem right now. Yeah, he just bought his own fire truck though.

[Tim Sheehy]

But you know, but then, you know, so stupid. But, but also like, so take the Smokehouse Creek fire last year, year in Texas. So it was about almost exactly March of last year. That fire burned 1.6 million acres. That burned panhandle, that burned like heart of ranch country. That those are no housing stupid places there. Those are ranchers. Tens of thousands of head of cattle burn. I mean, structural impact on the cattle industry because, you know, they couldn't get air support on the fire quick enough. And that fire, when I was spreading at peak speed, was burning two football fields a second. I think how fast that is, I mean, just in the blink of an eye. And you know, about a month ago, the Hamptons, Long island was burning. A wildfire started there and was burning, you know, actually in the worst was about a month ago, about three weeks ago. The same communities in Appalachia that got wiped out by that they were burning in a wildfire. So, you know, it's the point is not just a national forest western lands issue. I mean it 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Burned to the shoreline.

[Tim Sheehy]

Exactly right. And so Like, I get.

[Steven Rinella]

I, like, I get the point.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah.

[Steven 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.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

People are going to be. There's a. There's going to wind up being the obligation to.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah.

[Steven 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.

[Tim Sheehy]

It's like driving down the interstate, saying, hey, you know, you're driving on i90 between, you know, Bozeman and Butte, and you roll your car and Pipestone Pass. Like, well, I never should have built an interstate there. And it's a stupid spot for 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 point totally taken. But, you know, the American people are there, and when you look at how other countries deal with it, you know, no one's perfect. But they do take more of that structural firefighting mindset, which is our first and primary obligation is public safety. So, yes, nature management, 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 people, like, number one. And I think that's why the LA fire really cracked open a lot of frustration. Bipartisan. And again, I'll add every single bill. I was the first senator, excuse me, freshman, to pass a bill this Congress, 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 just owe them a better solution than they're getting.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

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 in Department of Interior and it's not. That's just. Or they think it's its own agency. The Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture. That's very important. We can talk about that later. But the policies of USDA and how they operate dictate the Forest Service. 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, checkerboard. And you'll have state land shoved in there. Then you might have county land or city land, of course, private land. And then not so much in our state go other states. You could have a lot of land that's Department of Energy or DoD, so you have a big one you see.

[Steven Rinella]

Is a Corps of Engineers.

[Tim Sheehy]

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 land owners. They don't want to manage the land. They just don't even look at it. Some of them consider themselves conservationists. Like, our job is not to manage the land, 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. State or BLM may have a completely different outlook than the neighboring state. And then when you put. Especially when you go. Depending on who's in charge in the presidency at the time, if it's a red or blue white house compared to a red or blue state, those policies, if you. When you have state land, which, as you know, is very common, buttled up against BLM or Forest Service land. Now you have different policies, you know, around that. So the reason it's so hard to solve this problem is because you have so many different stakeholders with completely different 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. They're. Quite frankly, there are a lot of people that make a living off of suing the government over land issues. I mean, that's just. That's how they make their money. So they want lawsuits to Happen.

[Unknown]

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, 100% for their own objectives.

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Unknown]

So you got a little momentum.

[Tim Sheehy]

As I've told folks, you know, the greatest force in government in the history of government. It's not good or bad, it's not love or hate, it's inertia. It's just the inertia of a massive bureaucracy. To make it change direction is incredibly hard. Incredibly hard. And unfortunately, it takes a big terrible event to cause a change in direction. Take the Navy, totally unaffiliated from this, but a great example is the Navy. Prior to World War II, the Navy believed battleships were the capital ship. Battleships were big ships with big giant guns on them. And the concept of a capital ship was, we're going to line up ships and they're going to shoot at each other with cannons till they sink. That's how navies thought. And a number of guys in the 30s said, hey, you know what? These things called airplanes actually, you know, 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 for 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. And guess what did all that damage? Airplanes. The Navy quickly realized, all right, not only are 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 power material, 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 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 gonna, we're gonna bolster the firefighting capability here in an interagency cross cutting manner. Is this is a critical fire shed. Want a place that has like a certain density of human population. Yeah, basically that. So that's. So the fixture for us acts was that 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 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. What we're talking about is forest thinning and prescribed burns. And you know, no one seems to have a problem in some of these environmental groups letting the forest burn to the ground. Yet they don't want us to use that timber to create jobs and economic activity in towns that frankly need go to Libby, go to Columbia Falls. Some of these towns, you know, pelt grants, payment, lieu of taxes have replaced timber revenue. And the Forest Service used to be the most profitable agency in the United States government. It made money every single year, literally contributed to the national treasury. And now like every other agency, it's a cost center because they no longer, they used to harvest in the 80s, 13 million board feet a year. Now it's, they struggle to hit three. So we got to figure out how to bring that common sense in an area when we had. We've had a housing boom and howling shortage. You'd think we'd want more timber. Instead, we're buying timber from Canada when we should be getting it from here in America. So that critical fireship 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, right? It's like, all right, this drainage here is a critical fire shed for this town. You know, we're going to identify this as a fire critical area.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

I mean, so I hope.

[Steven Rinella]

I hope it follows like that. It really is a critical fireshed and not where someone says, can we extend it way over that way, too.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah, well, listen, I mean, that. That's where. So that's where local control comes into the picture. And, you know, for me, and I think most people feel like they want more of a local voice in how the lands around them are managed. And it's funny, the public lands issue, obviously, 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 the land and the people owning the land.

[Steven Rinella]

They're the steward of the land.

[Tim Sheehy]

Right?

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

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 danger grizzlies, whether it's sage grouse habitat, whether it's, you know, grazing rights. You know, every state is different. Some states more about grazing, some states, you know, that sagebrush habitat has been used to conserve massive tracts of land. To say, you can't graze this anymore. It's sage grass habitat. It's like oh, wow. 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 between how locals feel about how the federal government's managing land and also saying, well, we want to say in that, okay, like we want to say, and what's going to happen here? Because, you know, I share a fence line with this forest Service and I see the fuel load in that forest and if a fire comes through there, like it's going to 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?

[Steven Rinella]

I understand that frustration.

[Tim Sheehy]

Well, like when the Galt family, you know, golf family, you know, ranched up near us, you know, we're in Martins, the other over the hill there in White Silver Springs. And you know, they were. They were, you know, indicted for fighting a fire that was on their fence line, on their lease. It was on federal land, but they were like, we have to protect our ranch as our livelihood. And they were basically, the government took them to court saying, you know, you are not allowed to do that destruction of government property. And, you know, obviously we've seen a lot of these western lands issues come to heads, you know, between ranchers, between local. Like there's that sheriff that arrested the fire manager from the forest Service a couple years ago out in Washington state, who they were doing a prescribed burn that got out of control and was burning private property. And 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

And the sheriff arrested him, said, you're a forest service employee, I don't care. Does not give you the right to burn down private property, you know, and put them under arrest. Obviously that. That case is still working its way through the system. But so, you know, and then you look in California and obviously the impacts of that, where folks said, you know, decades of. Of. Of public lands management decisions impact the fire resilience of a community. And the folks saying, well, you know, if I had Known that what you were doing was going to create my, was going to create a less safe fire environment for my community. I never would have let you do it. So I think, I think what we're seeing is a reckoning. The pendulum always swings. You know, we had a huge conservation push in the back half of the 20th century, especially these last 40 years, which is obviously a good thing in many respects. But as you know, in any movement, you know, sometimes we make mistakes on the way. And you know, I would, I would, I would submit that the Endangered Species act has been, has been greatly abused and the Clean Waters act, waters United States act has been taken by a lot of adversary 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 connect, I mean, that case in Idaho where the irrigation ditch was 14 miles from Priest Lake, yet they called it a navigable body of water.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I don't understand.

[Tim Sheehy]

Right. So I think, you know, both sides have to come to the table and say, listen, the land belongs to the people, not to the government. And we need to make sure that people who live, I mean, you know, you talk to folks in Libby, they come out like, we have been desperate to get these timber projects going for 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. How do these people come in from where they're coming from and tell us we can't have an economy in our town? You know, go to Blackview Copper Company, White Sulfur. That town wants that mine, it's on private land. And yet, you know, they get, they get, you know, injuncted. Every time they're about to stick a shovel in the ground, the mine gets shut down. So I think, you know, that there's some common sense application that needs to happen. And I think this fire in LA is 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 to take care of whether the species are endangered or not. We have an obligation there. But at the same time we also have an obligation to protect our communities. And two things can be true. We can care about the environment and want clean water and healthy forests. And we can also say we can do that and protect our communities in a common sense way from wildfire.

[Unknown]

So in the fix our for I haven't read it since last session, but I know there was like financial provisions for non marketable timber which is, you know, there's the slash that you talk about off trail, right. It's like you got to pay to take that stuff out of there, right. 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? You know, like the not dimensional board foot lumber right side of things.

[Tim Sheehy]

So short answer is yes. And I think this also takes into account where I think we have to have a little more of an organic relationship between small business and local communities and those for treatment projects where you can say we're going to give this section of forest the lease to a company to come in and, 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 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 force management of 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's a beautiful thing. The free market will adapt, you know, with amazing speed. And if you give them an economic outlet for any product, whether even if it's just slash, they'll find a way to use it and they'll find a way to make it processable into something useful. And if not then they'll bake into their proposal to do a broader forest treatment project. You know what it's going to take to get that out of it? So I think the paradigm of 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.

[Steven Rinella]

It comes as a chore list tied to a cut.

[Tim Sheehy]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

A financial cut.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah.

[Steven 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 things. You campaigned really hard on public lands and public hands.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yep.

[Steven 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, or a lot of talk about getting rid of public lands, excess public lands. What kind of position does that put you in?

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Thank you. The only two in your party. But huge. Thank you, man.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah, true. No question.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah. Thank you. So there's no question in our minds, public lands belong to public hands. Again, that's not just a slogan, it's just a fact. It's a way of life. But. There's a but. And I'm not gonna. We'll say government assets. Government owned assets. What happens when you have a defunct military base in a. That's been abandoned, that's shut down, that's inside.

[Steven Rinella]

Those are your personal playground. Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

You will get no resistance from me on these issues.

[Tim Sheehy]

True. So. But where I'm going is, unfortunately, it's the same legal framework work. And I think, you know, politics is politics. Everyone's gotta, 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.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

I literally have 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 mind center 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 fear. It's like occupation. 97% of Nevada is owned by the federal government. And a lot of Nevadans resent that deeply. They're like, because the government owns our whole state, we can't develop it, we can't 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. So in Alaska, people in Alaska are very supportive of saying, we want energy development on our public lands. In some cases, that may mean leasing or selling chunks because we want jobs, we want economic growth. So it's. It's not selling national parks, not selling blm, not selling forest service, of course, but it is to say, if we have a military base in the middle of a city, thousands of acres, is that just going to stay fenced off and empty forever? And I think when you hear Doug Burgum talking about we need to use our public lands more efficiently, and he starts talking about we're going to consider affordable housing projects on public lands. He's not going to build an apartment building next to Old Faithful. What he's saying is there's a lot of Department of Interior owned land or Department of Energy owned land or DoD owned land that is owned by the public, that most people would say, this could be used better than it is.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Wildlife habitat. I think you'd have a huge segment of the conservation community and hunters and anglers be like, well, it doesn't sound like my fight.

[Tim Sheehy]

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. I'm. 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, like, yeah, but put it in the full context of what we're talking about.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

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 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, there's an old warehouse in downtown Gary, Indiana. Like, okay, why does the federal government still own that piece of land for the Defense Logistics Agency? DLA doesn't need that land anymore. The factory that used to make those ships there has been shut down for 70 years. Why don't we sell that and pay down the debt? So to your point, I think, you know, we have to. And that's on us too. We got a message better. But also the opposition messaging, you know, I never once in my life said anything 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.

[Steven Rinella]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

No, I get it. But. But I guess, yeah, I'm more just.

[Steven Rinella]

Going, I'm interested in what you do and I, and I want to hear what you think.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, so.

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

For me, I'm like, no, like, it's public land now. We could arrange a lease deal. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure.

[Tim Sheehy]

I mean, you know, that land was, was, you know, private thousands of years ago. They don't. Canada has crown land that's literally owned by the crown. But like, we're the only country in the world really to ever have the concept of the people will own massive tracts of land. And that's just so special. We can never, you know, we can't chip away at that. And, and if we do, it's a dangerous precedent. We start so. And especially here in Montana and our western states, we know what a magical thing it is to have that. And, you know, we just have to fight to protect it. 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.

[Unknown]

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

[Tim Sheehy]

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

[Unknown]

Really like having them for that reason.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

It's a good spillover mechanism.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Listen, you gotta run. I don't want to keep you late. In all honesty, I would love to have you come back sometime. I don't know if we ever get. I don't get much free time. I would love to have you come back for a couple hours. I wanted our listeners to meet you. You know, most like, you know, most of our listeners are not in Montana. Yeah, I wanted them to meet you. We got some background covered, which I think is important. I respect the service you did. I think that, that, you know, doing what you did was such a high risk of injury, cost your family like Earns you a seat at the table. Right. Deserves respect. We got that out of the way. I would love it to come back and talk more about fires and more about public lands.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yeah, let's do it. I'd love to.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Tim Sheehy]

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? We can talk through it and just talk through some of the tactics and what's going on and why.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. My brain has been trained in two hour. We do a two hour show. Oh, yeah, he's been training two hour increments. I can't get there in an hour, so apologies, but I know you got to run. Love to have you back, man.

[Unknown]

I mean, big thank you too, for standing up for Public Lands. They're both on the reconciliation bill on that or the amendment there. And then Zinke's Public Lands and Public hands bill. That's huge.

[Tim Sheehy]

Yep. Absolutely. Proud to do it. Thanks for having me.

[Steven Rinella]

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