The Humanity Behind Wildfire Fighting Through “Hotshot” With Gabriel Kirkpatrick Mann

When discussing or covering wildfire situations, most people and media outlets focus more on their destruction rather than the humanity behind it. In this episode, Brandon Dunham sits down with Gabriel Kirkpatrick Mann to discuss the making of his cinematic masterpiece documentary "Hotshot," which tells the story of some of the most elite, the most hardened, and the most skilled men and women on the fireline. He talks about the movie’s six-year filming process, which involved catching firefighters in action and getting in the middle of the most dangerous wildfire areas. He explains how the documentary can help reshape public perception about wildfires, shifting the focus to firefighters’ pay and experiences. Gabriel also discusses why he avoided tackling climate change in “Hotshot” and how to get rid of dirty politics when it comes to wildfire fighting.

---

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Humanity Behind Wildfire Fighting Through “Hotshot” With Gabriel Kirkpatrick Mann

What's going on, ladies and gentlemen? This episode is going to be brought to you by Mystery Ranch, built for the mission. If you've been rocking a Mystery Ranch backpack for your fire career, you're hunting game, or any of those load-bearing necessary adventures, you're doing it wrong. Aside from making our viewable the most comfortable, durable, and badass wildland fire packs in the game, they make a ton of other load-bearing essentials. Now, they also have some new accessories out there. It should swing over there if you're looking for a new radio holder for your pack. No one likes smacking their elbow. They're funny bone is on their radio, but they made the Talk Box 5000.

It's a pretty cool little piece of equipment and it's affordable. Clips on to wherever the hell you want to put it on your Mystery Ranch fire gear, so go check it out. It's pretty neat. While you're at it, you might as well go check out the Big Ernie Pack as well. I happen to be rocking one of those for my day job with BurnBot and rock that thing while I’m doing prescribed fire. It's comfortable and it kicks ass. It brings back to a little bit of helitack days because it is most definitely designed for air operations like helitack, repelling, or smoke jumping. It's pretty badass so go check those out too. While you're at it on the website, you might as well go check out the Mystery Ranch Backbone Series.

Mystery Ranch crew got together and because they give a shit about the boots on the ground, they decided to make it worthwhile for you to go over there and check out some of their stories. Also, submit your own story for $1,000 scholarship called the Mystery Ranch Backbone Series Scholarship. If you like what you see and you think you can add to the storytelling game, go over to www.MysteryRanch.com. Check out the Backbone Series and submit your story because there is a $1,000 scholarship up for grabs for your professional development.

The show is always going to be caffeinated by none other than our premier coffee sponsor. That's going to be Hotshot Brewery. It's kickass coffee for kickass cause. A portion of the proceeds will always go back to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. If you're looking for some good coffee or tools that trade to get your morning started off right or a whole slew of Wildland Firefighters-themed apparel, look no further than Hotshot Brewery. You can go over there and check it out. Get all your tools of the trade and help support a good cause at the same time. Go over to www.HotshotBrewing.com and check out all of the tools of the trade to get your morning start off right, the apparel, and some kickass coffee for a kickass cause.

Go check them out. Last but not least, they're not sponsored and they're not brought to you by but it is one of those close relationships I have with Bethany over there at The American Wildfire Experience. I want to show her some love for as long as I possibly can because I believe in her cause and mission and she's got some rad stuff going on. If you don't know what the American Wildfire Experience is, they house the Smokey Generation. I know for a fact a lot of people out there have seen that rolling around. It's pretty freaking awesome. It is basically a digital storytelling platform telling the story of Wildland Fire. There have to be over 250 of these stories out there now, but it's preserving the legacy of the folks in the field and the story of Wildland Fire.

Some of these stories even date back to the 1940s. It's pretty freaking bitching. If you want a little history lesson or if you want to sign up for the Smokey Generation Grant Program, if you got a compelling story and you're telling the story of Wildland Fire through the lens of a camera, the video camera, still camera, a blog, or some animations, there was this one dude out there who made We Move Mountains With Spoons and it's freaking kickass. They're a Smokey Generation grant recipient. The sky is the limit. Tell the story. It's freaking awesome. Anyways, if you want to find out more, go over to www.Wildfire-Experience.org and you can check it all out. Bethany, you have a kickass organization over there. Keep it up.

What's going on, everybody? I hope everybody is doing well. I do hope that everybody is salty because our Federal government has let us down. Now I don't have to answer to fucking anybody on Capitol Hill. I’m going to keep sitting here and doing my thing. I’m going to keep fighting the good fight for those boots on the ground. If I had it my way, if I had a magic wand to fix this fucking problem, I would but I would add something on top of that. For every day that the government shuts down or every stupid fucking reason that a good bill doesn't pass it because someone wants to stand on their soapbox and put their back against the wall, I’d find them. I’d find all those assholes on Capitol Hill, $100,000 a day to prove a point.

I digress and I’ll get off my soapbox now. I hope everybody is doing well genuinely. I know that we have some hard times ahead, but as I said, I’m going to keep fighting. I hope that everybody else does because Grassroots and NFFE are not letting down. Anyway, in this episode, we're going to talk all about the movie Hotshot. We're going to talk about this extraordinary documentary. I am a huge fan of it and I had the luxury of getting early access to this film before it even came out. I got to see the evolution of the process of what you're going to see in its final form on Amazon and all the other streaming services that it's going to be released on. It's freaking awesome. It's a great story. It follows around a Hotshot crew, a Hotshot in particular and we all know who that is.

Justine, shout out to you. He documents a day in the life and some of the most destructive wildfires in California. This movie took six years to create and Gabe, the cinematographer/director, has everything. He had some help producing it but he's shot-edited it. He produced it. He's doing all the distribution, marketing, everything. He’s rolling solo. He's going real hard to the paint and I appreciate it. If you have an opportunity to check this movie out, go check it out. It's at www.HotshotMovie.com. We're going to talk all about the process and stuff that goes into the making of this movie. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce my good friend, Mr. Gabriel Mann. Welcome to the show.

---

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode. On the show, we've got the legendary documentary filmmaker, Gabriel Mann. What's going on?

Living a dream in Tennessee. I feel like I got my fill in California. I live as California life as I could. I grew up by the beach and went to wildfires for a decade. I got my fill. I’m out in Tennessee raising chickens and probably going to start a family soon to live my life.

Congratulations. It must be going well and then the whole organic gardening because we banter back and forth about how to get rid of fucking squash bugs. Apparently, chickens are the answer.

Ever since we've got seven chickens, all of a sudden, all the insects in the backyard are gone.

No ticks and squash bugs.

People told me that it would happen. Chickens cleared out. It’s incredible.

I might have begun to get some chickens and bees. I need bees. I need a bee hive for sure.

Once you start going down that rabbit hole, you're going to have a full-on farm. We're getting a donkey. I don't know why but we're going to have a donkey.

Are you going to have an alpaca next?

Maybe an elephant. Who knows?

Whatever floats your boat. Tell us about yourself.

I’m a bro with a camera and I was an athlete in college. I got into film in my own weird independent way because I’m very antisocial. I’m not a good ladder climber so I never had any prospects in Hollywood. I do commercials, some documentaries, and music festival stuff. In 2013-2014, I met a girl, Justine, who you've interviewed who's a Wildland Firefighter. We were together for eight years this 2023. I remember she never wanted to talk about her job because it was so difficult. We had our first date and then she went on to a fire for two weeks in the middle of nowhere on the Wind Fire.

That's a hell of an introduction to Hotshot life.

No cell phone service for two weeks. That became emblematic of what our entire relationship was. The job is so difficult as you well know. She never wanted to talk about it ever. I was one of these guys that make fun of, “There’s some smoke in the air.” The red trucks and green trucks go by. Those are the ones we noticed and then three weeks later, there's no more smoke and we never know what happens. I was that guy even while dating a firefighter because she never wanted to talk about it. One day in 2016, about 100 meters from our house, the Sand Fire on Angeles broke out. It was in our backyard and this fire became a ripper. It took out a bunch of homes and things are cranking.

That was the first time I ever had a front-row seat to what you guys do. I remember seeing her crew buggies roll by, the jets flying overhead, and helicopters. It’s the closest thing to war that you will ever see in this country. I remember I grabbed my camera and sprinted up the hill. I was in basketball shorts. It was 108 degrees, a typical summer day in Santa Clarita, but I remember the visuals that I got were unbelievable. It was like filming Godzilla and it's free production value. I remember thinking, “This is what she does for a living?” I was blown away. I immediately caught firebug. I was like, “I need to figure out how to film this. I have to.” I initially tried to make inroads with the Feds to see if I could get permission to go and film. That wasn't an option. They told me to go screw myself.

I’m about to say that's a pretty tall order to feel right there.

In California, if you have a press badge, it doesn't matter how silly the press badge is, you have full unfettered access to wildfire zones.

Do you mean to tell me that you can go to Chuck E. Cheese and get a press pass? You can print it at home and go document.

Yes, and that's the thing. There are a lot of fire pornographers and journalists who will probably get mad at me for saying this. You'll see them on Twitter complaining when sheriff's deputies will block them from getting access to any given fire as if they're the most important thing. However, there is this law in California that facilitates access and there are two rules. You’re responsible for your own safety. If you get in trouble, it’s like, “We are not going to help you. Don't get in the way of operations.” As long as you adhere to those two principles, there are no rules. Any journalists or anyone with a press pass, you order it online, doesn't matter, you can go anywhere you want on a fire.

It only needs to be registered with the Associated Press or anything.

Not at all. You don’t have to prove anything. It's crazy. It's nuts. You'll get dudes out there. I’ll send you a picture of this one dude who is out there in his Mercedes Coupe on the lake fire wearing shorts, sandals, and a button-up Hawaiian shirt taking pictures.

It might have been you for all I know.

It wasn't a Tacoma, for sure. It's nuts but I exploited it because I am a credentialed member of the press. The first assignment I ever got was I went all the way to New York to cover some protests for the Iraq War. I even got arrested for doing that. I do have press credentials and as silly as the law is, it did give me the ability to go wherever I wanted and nobody could tell me to leave. If anybody did, I would because I’m not the priority and I did take it very seriously. I took all of the same courses that you would have to take to get a red card. I would do a pack test every night as I cool down. I would do the Hotshot hike to try to get in shape. I’ll put my weight on and do the weight vest.

I took it very seriously. I got all the appropriate PPE and fire shelter. In living with a Hotshot, you learn a lot about operations and get an understanding of how they communicate. I had one of the dudes program my radios so I had their crew TAC. I was able to listen in and have all the same intel that they were getting. I was able to use their lookouts as my lookouts and it helped keep me safe. It helps me locate them and find where they're buggies are when they're in the middle of nowhere. I would go anytime there's a fire.

You’ll disappear off into the woods.

I load up my backpack with a bunch of batteries and water. I’ll grab my red and go and film and see what I can get. I filmed for six years every fire season. Once hell week was over, I would wake up in the morning and put on my boots and my pants, turn on the scanner, and edit and wait for the fire. Being in Santa Clarita, we had a ton of IIAs. Santa Clarita is one of the most volatile fire regions in the world. There are 5 Hotshot crews within a 20-minute radius. There's no other forest in the country who got five crews. There's a very dynamic interface so I had a lot to choose from but I wanted to tell the story of Hotshots.

As we all know, there's some IIA action but at the end of the day, podcasts come to life on those campaign fires when they're doing the big landscape-scale work deep in the cut where nobody else can go. That, to me, was the biggest challenge so that was taking the Jeep down some forest roads in the middle of nowhere and trying to find them. It's like trying to find ghosts. If you do it for long enough, eventually, you find yourself in the right place at the right time and you capture some of these moments that are pretty unbelievable. To see a 1,000-foot fire tornado, it changes the way that your brand operates.

It makes you respect Mother Nature real goddamn quick.

That's one of the key things that I touch on in the opening of my movie. We have this false sense that we have dominion over nature. One of the best experiences in being in your world, and it didn't take me long to learn this lesson, is that it's the dead opposite. Nature is in charge of us and we're renting. To witness the power of this natural phenomenon because extreme fire behavior is the most powerful force on the planet.

Humans think they have dominion over nature when in fact it is the one in charge of us. We are just renting.

It has a noise to it.

That's another thing. What I noticed is when people would tell me stories about burnovers or if they ever had to deploy, they never talked about how hot it was and what it looked like. They would always talk about what it sounded like. That was the one thing people would harp on. It’s like, “It was so loud. It was like a freight train.” Until you go out and experience that for yourself and witness it, it's hard to describe. I spent a lot of time in post-production trying to recreate some of those sounds. For example, the Lake Fire in 2020 in Lake Hughes near Castaic in Santa Clarita. That was one of the most insane IIAs I’ve ever seen, if not the most. There were six column collapses in the first couple of hours on that IIA.

It was 100 years of no burn history in that area so you got old-growth timber mixed in with 10-foot-tall chaparral and it’s super steep. It was these massive uphill runs through heavy timber and brush. It’s nuking off. I remember I iced out before I even got to it. I lived twenty minutes away. It was already collapsing before I even got there and I got caught in two of the collapses. That moment is in the movie where it turns into this swirl of embers and fire all around you. You get totally disoriented. The thing that stood out to me was the noise. It sounded like ghosts. It was so difficult to describe and that's the thing. If I had had to delegate the work to a sound designer like, “Do fire sounds,” they wouldn't do it because you don't understand until you get caught in something like that.

It does have a weird sound to it and it's very haunting. It sticks with you. I spent weeks combining the weirdest sounds imaginable to recreate what the real thing sounded like. Especially in Hotshots, we've seen a lot of fire. That's the one thing that they comment on a lot. It's the real thing. I’m hopeful that when people watch it, they realize you are getting a real sense of what it is like out there. It's not a traditional documentary. I don't waste any time looking at somebody describing 200-foot flames, a 1,000-foot fire tornado, or fire raking across the road and burning up the vehicle.

We go out and film it because my whole motto is, “Show. Don't tell.” I didn't want to waste any time listening to people talking about it. I want to go and get it. That's why it took me so long. I’d keep going out there for six years to try to find myself in those situations. It was dumb. I almost died a few times. I don't understand how you can do justice to what the experience is like for what you guys do unless you go and capture those things because until you see it yourself, you have no idea.

It's a very visceral experience. That's one thing that even to this day, if I hear radio traffic on a TV show that even mimics the sound of a wildland tone out or radio traffic on a wildfire, it gets me looking around like, “We're not there.” It's something that sticks with you forever. Between the sounds and the smells, those are the two things that are closest tied to my personal memories because there's nothing like describing the smell of the inside of a Shot buggy, what your PG bag smells like, what it sounds like when you're half-asleep time traveling across the country in the back of a Hotshot buggy, or embers like fire branch hitting your windshield and you're trying to get the fuck out of somewhere. There's the scary sound.

This shows how in tune we are and what a common experience it is when you are actually there because all those things are triggering goosebumps. I remember everything you said. Whenever you write an essay, the first thing you say is what your whole essay is about. There's a whole bunch of fluff in between but you'll notice the first things that I say in the movie are the most important things. One of the first things that I talk about is the smell. The smell of old-growth cedars burning on the Angeles Crest. I remember it smells so good. It made me stop. I remember stopping and sitting there. I crawled up this rock’s tree, sat there, and watched this entire bowl nuking off. I didn't even bother filming because it smelled so good.

To witness that power and smell, it felt like it was cracking open a 100-year-old bottle of cognac or something because these are 100, 200, or 300-year-old trees giving you this sensory experience and it is very overwhelming. I think about what you said. That sound of embers hitting your windshield. I remember having to back down a forest road because I was in my creeper van and there was no turnaround. I had tried to drive through what I thought was a flank. I thought it was this thin ribbon of fire I’d be able to drive past it. I get over this berm and sure enough, it is not a thin river fire. It's like 20-foot flamelegs. It was head fire. I didn't realize that it wasn't a flint. I had to back out 30 miles an hour to try to outrun this thing and I’m crashing into trees.

That sound of pine trees hitting my side mirrors and seeing spot fires in my peripheral vision outside my passenger side. It's already spotting around me. That sound of embers hitting your windshield adds to that intensity of feeling like, “I got to get the hell out of here. I don't know if I’m going to make it.” That sound sticks with you. It's not like anything. It doesn't quite sound like rain or hail. It's something in between and it's creepy. Those things do stick with you and the moment you hear or smell anything like that, it immediately triggers that experience.

I use that radio tone a lot as a backdrop or soundtrack like radio transmissions. I went through the archives of some of the fires that I was showing in the movie and played a lot of the radio traffic because I felt like, “That is the ultimate soundtrack for this stuff.” It's the same thing with me. Whenever I hear that teeny voice coming over the radio or some of the tones that sound like fire tones, it takes me right back. It's crazy.

It gives goosebumps. We're talking about this and I know there's going to be some people that are going to be armchair quarterbacking this conversation like, “What the fuck was that guy doing over there? He's getting himself in danger.” I know plenty of Wildland Firefighters that have been in the same situation. Tell me that you haven't been in the same situation as you, me, or any of the other operational people out there like the boots on the ground. They're full of shit because oftentimes, it's not a big deal but it feels like a big deal at that time. Again, as you said earlier, Mother Nature can turn on you at a second's notice.

Surprisingly, I was very conservative. My partner at that time was a Hotshot. I’m accountable to her and to her crew. I never wanted to make them look bad. It was important that I didn't get in the way and understood operations so that I never became a burden. That dictated how I behaved, especially when I was around other personnel.

I would always try to get indicators that I knew what I was doing. I’ve deliberately stood in certain places to show that not only do they have to not worry about me. You don't even have to think about whether or not you need to worry about me. I know what I’m doing. I’m never going to be in your way. I know what direction you guys are putting your operations. I know what part of the block is safe and I would be very intentional about that. The times when I got into trouble, it didn't happen a lot.

It was in remote areas where I was by myself. I’m taking my own risk. Even in that situation, I had two options. I might lose my vehicle with one of those options but I knew that I was going to be fine and I always gave myself contingencies because I took the lesson seriously. Every time I would go somewhere, I was time tagging every single turnaround and safety zone that I identified along the way. I would get out of my vehicle and scout up a windy road on foot before taking my vehicle up there to make sure there are no apparatuses up there and those who are pushing through. I was very meticulous about being diligent and responsible, and not getting in the way. Showing hourly, you don't have to worry about me when I’m out here.

I’ll wear it if I screw something up. I went out there for six years and never died. I never put anybody at hazard and frankly, I missed a ton of good opportunities because I was conservative. There were times when Hotshots were getting something but there was no way to get up there except through this narrow P line. I’ve got dudes who are getting the anchor point and the hose leg going down here. If I go up that P line, I might throw some rocks at these guys. Now the Hotshots were throwing rocks at them, but they were supposed to be there. I don't need to be there. It's inexcusable if I drop a rock on somebody. There were multiple times that I wouldn't go somewhere because I didn't want to be that guy that created a problem.

Ultimately, whenever I did show up, especially in the last two years of filming, it got to the point where most people knew who I was because they'd either seen me on fires before, seen my footage online, or knew Justine. They knew that I wasn't going to make them look dumb or get in their way. I wasn't going to ask stupid questions or film things that I’m not supposed to film and I’m judicious about what I do.

A lot of times, the big hesitation around journalists is that they're dumb and they don't understand wildfire and the technicians in it. They don't have any accountability to any of the firefighters. Whenever firefighters do talk to the press, the press ends up writing some BS story that doesn't, in any way, accurately reflect their actual feelings about things or operations. They get so annoyed with it. They don't want anyone around but if you can operate respectfully and tell the story honestly, then it's a very open and welcoming community.

Many journalists don’t understand wildfire. They don’t have any accountability to the firefighters, which results in them writing some BS story that doesn’t reflect their actual feelings or operations.

They wanted to take care of me and give me intel. They wanted me to know what their crew TAC was and I could listen to their lookout. I’ve said a million times that it's tricky to know if this is the right project to do because I want to respect Hotshot culture. I’m not a Hotshot. I never was. I was connected to it and part of the family. I would cut together their crew videos every year. We would host the crew party at the end of the year and spend a lot of time in the station. In a lot of ways, when you are the fire wife or you're the one who's left behind, your job is difficult.

I have to make sure your car is registered and book your dentist appointment. If anything goes wrong with the house, it's entirely my responsibility. We don't see each other for six months and then when you get it back or if you get back from a role for two weeks, you dump your red bag. You smell like shit and there’s dust everywhere and then you come in like, “I have my way of doing things around the house.” All of a sudden, you're coming in after being with the crew for two weeks. We're going to butt heads and hate each other. I had a lot of exposure to the culture. I was a part of the family, but I’m not an operator. I always wrestled with, “Is this my story to tell? Who else is going to tell it?”

We're at a point with Wildland Fire where it feels like a very serious inflection point, it's no longer a cutesy time with the pay issues, or with sleeping out of the cars. It's at a point where things are so expensive in life. Those guys can't make ends meet. They can't raise a family. I’m seeing dudes who were Hotshots their entire adult life but from the moment they were eighteen, all they ever wanted to do was Hotshotting. They're leaving in their late 30s or early 40s to go shave their head and be a boot rookie at a municipal agency and go clean toilets with their toothbrush.

This is someone who was called up maybe even a sup like super respected in the Wildland Community. Hump is such a stud. I love that dude. He set up his crew with this legacy where you have people like Ben now who are the perfect transition. These dudes are so talented and honorable. They have to give up a job that they genuinely love and feel compelled to do.

At the end of the day, if we don't tell this story, nobody knows because even for the first couple of years of my relationship with a firefighter, I didn't know anything about fire. I was one of those ignorant people. How can we expect John Q. Public to have any sense of the work that you guys do, what the requirements are, what the sacrifices are, what needs everybody has in order to maintain this, and how having experienced people keeps people alive because it's not the quals. Someone who's been a Hotshot for 15 years is going to end up going to the same fire twice because after 12, 13, or 14 years, you start seeing that shit.

It is so similar that it is quite almost the same.

Dolan Fire 2020. This is the dude I’m talking about, the Captain. They're in the slot canyon on the Dolan Fire up in Monterey. The way that it looks with fire coming downhill and it's still a few drainages out, to anybody else, it's two hours out. We got two hours to prep this road and then fire it. The Q is on a fire in the same exact canyon fifteen years prior.

He's got that slide already built.

They thought back then we got two hours, but for some reason, with the thermal belt there, things get an alignment once fire gets established in this one drainage. It runs and takes off and it's there within twenty minutes. He alerted everybody in the division, “We got to go now without timing.” He had a hard time convincing everybody. It’s like, “I’ve seen this before.” Sure enough, things started to run. He got his crew. They were burning out of the back of the pickup trucks. They would be driving and holding the drip torch out of the trucks. They were next to the pickup truck.

Gloves on and everything.

This was a type 2 crew or some contract crew. There was a burnover and a deployment on that fire on that division and the folks who got burned over and had to deploy lost the fire station that they deployed around because it caught everybody off guard. His qualifications had nothing to do with rescuing his crew and the rest of the division by having that slide deck built in. That's time on the crew and that local knowledge. As you well know, it's the lack of local knowledge that can get you in trouble. That's where a lot of bad incidents happen. It is when you don't know that.

In Lake Elsinore at 2:00, you get this lake effect with down canyon winds and it's going to run downhill a lot faster than you're used to if you're from Northern California. Having that length of experience where you are retaining these people like that old school tradition of the American corporation that would employ you for 30 years until you retire because you're happy. They take good care of you and get good benefits. That is going to save people's lives. That dude is no longer there.

Why would you stick around? Can you blame him for leaving?

The thing is that incident happened in 2020. He leaves in 2021. What if that fire happened in 2021? Does this whole crew get burned over?

No one would have known. Potentially. I’d sure quarterback it.

You can do that about anything but at the very least, it would have been a dicey situation and he made it less dicey because he had that core knowledge. We're at a point where if you can't retain these studs and these veterans because they need to take care of their families, people are going to die. You can have less experienced dudes on the fire line. It's nobody's fault in terms of they aren't skilled enough or don't have enough calls. It's the reality. If you care about this community, these people, and the job that they do, someone's got to advocate in a way that, frankly, the agency is not good at doing.

If the wildfire fighters cannot retain veterans because they need to take care of their families, people will die. Someone has to advocate for them since the agency is not taking care of them that well.

They're too risk-averse. Their PR games suck. I’ve told them that they're at the Washington level, PAO. I was like, “You guys have a problem with PR.”

As you said, there is a level of pucker factor, they’re risk-averse, and controversy-averse but this always ends up fighting them in the rear. As you see all the time, it's something adverse happens. I won't call it bad. Let's say you lose a burn.

Let’s go to Hermit’s Peak or whatever it was. Let's use that as an example. What was the knee-jerk reaction there? It’s all burning. Done.

It’s all done. That's not very smart. It was Cerro Pelado which they came out and identified that that one was an escape burn. They had kept it very quiet for the longest time because they didn't want to look bad. Now they look shady. They look like they’re covering something up. This tendency to be risk-averse or be like, “We can't say that. We can't show that. We can't watch our Hotshots working because sometimes, they don't wear an undershirt, their gloves, or goggles. Sometimes they cuss and they smoke tobacco because they need to stay up all night.”

They shot Red Bulls and bang energy drinks.

This is real life.

It's what you need to do to survive.

These are the dudes doing the work. Frankly, even some of the Hotshots where I filmed were nervous about what I captured.

That's part of the culture.

Even beyond that, they're afraid, “He’s going to make me look bad.” You'll be surprised that people aren't going to get offended if you are cussing, making a joke, or you're using a little bit of snuff to stay awake. You're a human being and this is what we're losing sight of with the whole discussion. The human beings who are on the ground doing the physical work that has to get done that drones, AI, and this mechanical bureaucracy cannot do. There's utility for some of these tools but at the end of the day, Hotshots fight fire the same way that my ancestors did 10,000 years ago. They’re walking to the forest and putting fire on the ground.

As it turns out, that is the solution for everything. It is a human-based solution. It's a human-caused problem. It’s the idea that we would avoid telling the human story and connecting with other humans. The taxpayers can connect the dots and understand why we need to value these people in this way by passing the Tim Hart Act, getting permanent pay increases, and giving them the dignity of calling them firefighters before their funerals. That's a big one. You have to tell that story and no one is going to do it. Nobody within the Hotshot Community is going to do it in a way that the mainstream can grab onto like a movie.

I’m glad you said that because there are plenty of documentaries out there that have been made internally. They're all great. The thing is, in a way, it doesn't pertain to a wide audience. It doesn't pertain to your fucking normies, the general population, or normal people the way yours does.

There's cringey stuff in the movie.

We do cringey shit though. That's why we're humans.

There's a line where I got to introduce Hotshot. I go, “They’re like the Navy SEALs Wildland Fire.” I know that's cliché, but you got to understand. There's this debate in philosophy and anthropology of who's best suited to study and tell the story of a culture or of a civilization. An insider or an outsider? There are merits to both rights. An insider knows a lot of the old traditions, the language, and certain streets to go down. Here's the thing though. An outsider is going to notice a lot of nuance and details that the insider takes for granted in the same way that Michael Jordan would be an awful basketball coach because he had so much talent.

He will not be able to communicate to a lesser being how to do the things that he does. It's automatic. There's merit to having an outsider study something because they're going to pick up on all that contrast that they have being an outsider. Ultimately, you want some synergy, which I had. I had this unique perspective where I come from Hollywood and marketing. My partner at that time is a Hotshot so I have a front-row seat. I got a good education. I get to learn all the jargon. I can understand operations. I can learn all these things.

You did the reps, too. You got your Basic 40 and all that stuff. You train with the crew and all that stuff. You walk the walk for the most part.

Beyond that, I would do the Hotshot hike about every day and put on usually 45 and 60 pounds and try to do it. I remember going to some fires and when I finally got some, it was not just an IIA close to the road but deep in the cut or off the 5 freeway where you got a hike uphill. That place is a nightmare straight up. I broke off and missed some rad stuff. I miss Hotshots going direct right at the fire's edge. If you're 30 seconds late, you miss a lot because that stuff is out quickly.

You can't show off for the time.

I realize I have to get better at this or else I’m never going to be able to accomplish this. I did that hike God knows how many times and I put in the work and I do a pack test as my cooldown every night. I put on a podcast. I walk around the neighborhood for 3 miles with a weight vest on and meditate. Until you go, do that work, and understand the people who are in it, you're never going to be able to tell the story in the first place and the mainstream press has no interest in doing any of that. There are a lot of people who want to do that.

I remember the crew from The Deadliest Catch. They tried to do a Hotshot doc. They couldn't get through one day because they couldn't hike. I’ve heard other dudes tell me these stories like film crews or the press would come in and be like, “I want to document what you guys do.” Good luck because it's basically impossible. I don't think people understand how hard the work is. I don't even get it and I knew Hotshots. I’ve been on a bunch of fires too, but until you get those bigger IIAs or the campaign fires where you're deep in the cut, there's no option taking your vehicle anywhere near it. You realize these people are savages. They're on a whole other level.

I committed to try to do it right but back to the point of being an outsider and bringing the perspective of Hollywood, you got to understand that there are certain things that you guys take for granted. The public doesn't understand. I have to try to figure out how to translate this stuff, how to communicate why fuels matter, or explain the fire ladder in 30 seconds. How do you do that?

It’s lights to medium shit, medium shit lights on heavy shit, and then it's awesome races.

How do you show it?

The way you explained that in the film is fucking brilliantly done. It's something that's innocuous as a chain dragging which you used. I don't want to give away too many spoilers but think of how many roads starts that we have that come into these areas like cone pass and you have all of a sudden, a configuration going ripping up the freeway in this shitty steep terrain. It's hard.

You touched on a point that, to me, was very important. It's the most powerful force in the universe starts the tiniest little spark and people, in the mainstream dialogue about wildfire, are very much obsessed with the source of the ignition. Is it a space laser?

The most powerful force in the universe starts in the tiniest things.

Don't give me almost no box.

I know. This is so much fun dealing with regardless of whether or not it's something stupid like a space laser. Arsonists are a problem. Again, the fixation on ignitions is not as important as securing the fields around the stuff that you don't want to burn. What I tried to do with my flick was to show how easy it is for a fire to start. We obsess over all these things. We focus on ignitions, weather, and things that frankly we're never going to stop or change. In the wildfire triangle, the three ingredients that you must have in order to have wildfire are the right weather, fuel, and ignition.

We focus on the two that we can't change because even if we stop every ignition stuff lightning, the car fire. One of the most destructive fires in California history was some dude's tire blew out. Stuff happens. You're not going to be able to stop every ignition or change the weather. Those two elements are out. Notice, those are the two things we focus on. We only focus on climate and how the fire starts but the one thing that we can control like the fields, we never focus on.

It’s because it's hard.

It's simple.

It's simple but it's hard. It takes a lot of work.

It's a simple idea but it takes a lot of work. It takes the commitment of resources and a realignment of what our values are. Frankly, shifting the focus of the wildfire industrial complex away from putting money into suppression. It's easy to get a blank check for suppression because fires are scary. When fire is racing down towards your home, you'll shell out whatever it takes to stop that thing but people won't take a couple of hours to take a weed whip and clear out the brush behind their home.

There are fine fields. This is a stretch so bear with me. If you're to clear out all of the fine fields, grasses, and stuff like that out of your yard, you could take an angle grinder to a piece of steel and spray it into some brush. It's probably not going to ignite.

I have this argument with people all the time, especially with all these stupid theories about Maui. Again, this is what drove me to try to do as real a documentary as possible about this because I witnessed the discussion about wildfires. When suddenly it enters the mainstream and people in the general public are talking about wildfires, it reveals how dumb they are.

People will point out, “This home was reduced to ash but the trees are still standing.” “It’s a living thing, you fucking moron.” When you go to Home Depot to get studs to build a wall in your house, it says KD on it for a reason. Everything in your house is built with oxygen in the middle. It's built exactly how you want a furnace to be. It’s full of hydrocarbons, plastics, and petroleum. It's so absurd. Anyone who's been in a wildfire knows that if you only see the aftermath, it looks like a nuke went off. Sometimes, it is crazy. I’ve been in a lot of urban conflagrations.

What's the reality is a house takes 3, 4, 6, or 7 hours to burn and turn to ash. It takes a long time. Sometimes, it's pretty boring. There's been a lot of times that I left. There's a whole neighborhood on fire. I left because it's boring. It’s like, “There's a ton of hydrocarbons in there. It's going to burn all night.” You come back the next day and it's flat and gray. It looks like a nuke went off after the fact but the actual process of it was rather benign. These trees can take a ton of heat. When people see this aftermath where they see an entire neighborhood that's white ash, they don't realize that the fire was probably spreading from house to house.

You're getting flame impingement from house to house at that point.

Also, ember cast but you're not getting this running crown fire that steamrolled the neighborhood. That's not how it happened.

Even if crown fire did pass through that neighborhood, it's long past and the homes burned down well after. This is a well-documented thing. It even teaches you your S courses. You use a fucking home as a safety zone for ground fire. It got passes once it's all clear. The house may be on fire, but it's going to burn a hell of a lot slower than the surrounding fields that have already burned.

Again, you know this because this is in the firefighting manual literally. If you don't have a safety zone, you need to let the fire front push through, come back when it's safe, and try to save some structures if you can.

It’s Structure Triage 101.

I’ve seen these multiple times where some of the municipal guys who are on structure protection went inside the house and they can't get out. Sometimes, they would put on their SCBAs and they would let the fire front push through and then come out and fight fire.

That's the way to do it.

Homes take a ton of heat. You will be surprised. I saw more homes burning down remotely because of ember cast than when the fire front was ripping through the backyard, homes can take a ton of direct radiant heat. However, when that ember gets in through your vent and gets into the attic, sometimes you'll see a home that's on fire that's not even remotely close to the Wildland interface. It's deep in the neighborhoods surrounded by concrete, but that one ember found its way in. Coming back to the point of we're so fixated on climate and ignitions, we'll spend money on drones and stuff but we won't take ten minutes to seal up the eaves.

That's most likely going to save your home and then you'll end up being that home that the crazy people are theorizing about, “Why are those older homes burned but that one didn't? That must be Oprah’s home.” That's like, “No. That was that one person who used to be a firefighter. He cleared out his vents, and the gutters, and was responsible.” This stuff happens. It's normal. If you're in operations and you have wildfire experience, none of this stuff is weird. Look at what the public sees.

They see the sound bite or the 30-second video clip with no nuance attached to it. No background information, a crash course in fire behavior, or how fuels burn.

Who's going to tell that story? We didn't tell that story and that was the big challenge.

That's another thing too though. You told that story very well but a lot of people are going to be remaining cognitively dissonant about it. This is the pessimist in me because no one cares about the happy homeowner who's got this shit saved. They want to see the destruction. I swear to God. It's like the algorithms on Facebook and Instagram. If you start seeing negative shit and you like it, it starts feeding me more negative shit.

To that point, not only does the public want to see the destruction, but the journalists want to see the destruction. I have that segment in my film that I know a lot of people might rub them the wrong way.

It might not win some friends but it needed to be said.

I don't care about that because these people are clowns. The media have clowned themselves in so many ways. The amount of times that I would have these stringers and news guys cheering on the destruction. I remember going to the Woolsey Fire and this old restaurant that my mom used to take me to because we grew up in Agoura Hills right on PCH. I’m sitting there watching it burn to the ground, thinking about my childhood. I was the only one there because resources were so scattered. There's no one there to do structure defenses. It's gone and then these three stringers show up and they come running up the driveway with their cameras like, “Burn, baby, burn.”

This is someone's livelihood.

It is so disgusting to me and that's just one example. I should go through my footage because I may have been rolling when they came up. I might even have that audio.

It’s not a good collar to wear on anybody. Don't get me wrong. A lot of Wildland Firefighters pray for a fire. There are two reasons for that because 1) They want to help, first and foremost, but 2) They got to make that over time because, as we previously said, the fucking pay sucks. They're completely reliant on overtime and hazard pay in order to survive. There's a major difference there. No one likes to hear that. No one wants to hear that part out loud. It is called the disaster profiteering or tragedy profiteering.

That's not profiteering. You know this as well as anybody. Anything about the salaries that these guys make and the dependence on overtime, not just a little overtime. As a Hotshot, you guys get $1,000-plus like $1,100 or $1,200 hours of overtime. For people who don't, they're not good at math like me. That's over six months’ worth of full-time, 40-hours-a-week work on top of that small window.

During that the 5 months where you're concentrated in fire season, that's when you're pulling 6 months’ worth of full-time overtime. That's to be able to pay your rent in Los Angeles County, the most expensive county on the planet. They have to position these dudes around multimillion-dollar homes because those are the resources that they're tasked to protect but they can't afford to live there.

These dudes are living out in freaking Palmdale or they're sleeping at the barracks. Some dudes are even sleeping in their own freaking cars. We're dating some old chick who's got some money who will be okay with them being on for six months out of the year because they got a hustle. This is pretty crazy, but to your point, needing or wanting the forest to burn so you have some work that is different from watching houses burn and cheering it on. Fire is healthy for the forest. We need to burn it. We don't have a fire-adapted ecosystem in the West. We have a fire-dependent. The lodgepole pine, for example, can't even germinate until that resinous pine cone burns, explodes, and the seeds pop up.

Wanting the forest to burn so you can have some work is different from watching houses burn and cheering on them.

I’m not too familiar with the lodge poles, but I know the giant sequoias are fire-dependent as well. There are a lot of species out there that are fire-dependent. They can't even propagate unless you put the right amount of intensity fire underneath it.

Even beyond the propagation aspect, there are all the other ancillary benefits that our indigenous ancestors understood. They had reasons for putting fire on the ground.

Look at all the game that returns. All the fresh fronds come up and deer come in, and birds start coming in.

You're tracking grazing animals that you can then hunt but also, it gives you a little bit more visibility on predators. The other thing that I learned, and you see all the wildfires that come in afterward, is the return of pollinators. All those beautiful wildflowers attract more pollinators. Everything thrives in the wake of a fire and it doesn't take long, especially if it's a late-season fire.

I’ve got some footage to show you how quickly pollinators return to a burned environment. In less than fifteen minutes, all these pollinators were back. There's a lot of prescribed fire that we did. They're actual bees. There are some wasps in there too, but they're looking for stuff that might have gotten a little bit barbecued. They want a hot meal.

I heard about this but I never saw that in person. That's so cool.

I’ll show it to you in a little bit after we get done rolling here. You're going to trip.

I saw almost immediate benefit return, especially on late-season fires like the Woolsey Fire, which is a November fire.

It’s low intensity good fire.

The thing is they're going to be high-intensity because we have such a backlog of fuels. We're on a pretty tight spot. To your point earlier about how we have to be more judicious, there are certain fires that we can't let them do their thing.

There's a time and place for it.

We've put ourselves in that corner and we need to get ahead of it. However, to the point of the way that journalists cheer on fire versus how a firefighter may want to go and make his living, we're talking about a forest fire with ecological benefit and his work which has ecological benefit. They're taking a scalpel to the forest and steering things where they need to go versus someone cheering on the destruction of somebody's life. Many of these newspeople thrive off of that. They may only profit from the destruction. That's all they focus on. A lot of times, like on the Bobcat Fire, in particular, there are tons of news bands because it was in LA proper.

Every camera crew is out there. These news vans would drive up to me because I was watching Valyermo tie in this corner and secure this piece. They're not interested in watching that but they would drive up and see me and they would say, “Do you know where the homes are burning?” I’m like, “No. They caught it right here.” This dude is like, “Fuck.” He’s cussing out loud and pissing. The dude says, “I’ll go home now.” Have some dignity, even if that's what you're thinking internally, “I can't sell this footage. I can't sell footage of Hotshots doing work.”

I understand that they make a living too.

Have some dignity that you don't swear. You see this in the film. I’ve seen news people freaking taking selfies in front of burning homes.

That’s flat-out disrespectful.

I’ve seen it so much.

I’ve seen it too in my fire time.

I started filming it and that's why I have that segment on the fire pornographers in the movie because it's gotten so bad. It's become such a circus that it does stand out. It's more distracting than the fire itself to watch how these people behave. They put themselves in front of a running headfire so they can get the cool shot for their remote and then they end up getting cut off by the fire and have to run out of there. They don't have the proper PPE. They're not taking it seriously and when they tell the story, they're bullshitting you the whole time. They make sure that you never understand what needs to happen or fix it. Again, they're going to focus on the two elements of the fire triangle that we can't control.

We're not going to get to the core issue so this stuff never going to get solved. Guess who's going to get blamed when that fire went to that neighborhood? You are. It's the fault of the Forest Service. Why did you guys let it burn for so long before taking action? It's like, “If this thing runs away from us, it’s because we haven't got rid of enough fuels because you guys won't support it. This is your fault. You have to take personal responsibility.” The thing is the media is not interested in telling that story and they have too many perverse incentives to tell other stories. That's why I felt this needed something that has got to be out there that's honest, straightforward, and unbiased.

Here's another complication of that too. The media wants to sensationalize this. There are some fires that should be sensationalized like August Complex. That’s million-plus acres. That's fucking insane. We've had bigger fires. The big burn in 1910 went 3 million acres in 3 days. A million acres a day. In Pulaski, 10 AM Policy, now we're fucking ourselves for the future. It’s known but the thing is back to the PR problem with the Forest Service, they're not good at telling the story because they're too risk-averse, and they don't know how to tell a story, why they tell a story, or even where to begin.

Here's another thing. Do you know why Cal Fire gets a wave, hugs, praise, and all that shit? Everybody is widely respected. General, public-wise, respects Cal Fire. Do you know why? It’s because there are PR agencies with a firefighting side hustle. They tell their story so we're as bad as some of these fire pornographers. However, it's a different nuance. We don't tell the story. They tell the story and it's all like raining fire and brimstone. Sometimes it's not but then again, I’m biased because I’ve normalized this stuff over the course of the filming of your documentary.

If I spent two years shooting this, I would have made a raw generic wildfire film. It was only by being in it through the course of entropy over six years and getting beaten down by it that you start to shake off those preconceived notions about what the wildfire world is, the physics of the fire, the traditions and all that, and what the needs are. I got very humbled and progressively more conservative as I filmed and learned more. Cal Fire is great with their PR. They’re straight out of Hollywood. They're outstanding. A lot of them do great work there.

They differ from the Forest Service. I’ve seen a lot of conflict between Forest Service employees and Cal Fire employees on the fire line. I’ve seen Cal Fire division guys pushing one of the Hotshot crews to burn faster. They're like, “I don't care if it takes us all night. We're going to feather the sand.” There are other times they didn't want to put any fire in the ground and it took a Hotshot to what you would describe about the gushing fire. I saw a similar thing. I’ll keep names out of it, but it was this one crew that was up in Northern California.

Every day, this fire was making a big push of almost a 30,000-acre push every single day because right around 3:00, you get this onshore flow that was pushing it through the forest out towards the desert. Now it's coming over this rock escarpment and it's now established coming downhill into this town on the desert floor. Fire would always moderate at night. They're there. It’s 8:00 at night, the fire is moderated, and it's mid-slope. They get their dose or line established. They get two blades. That's it and then they were going to leave it at the total slope.

Why are you going to let it slam your line? It removes the field.

Hotshot’s sup is talking to the division. He’s like, “We need to burn this piece. We don't want to put any unnecessary fire on the ground.” You're talking about that risk-averse mindset. He's like, “Okay. That's fine. It’s 3:00, the winds pick up, and things going to slam across your line. It burns up all these homes, jumps the railroad tracks, runs up some more homes, jumps the highway, and runs all the way across state lines of Nevada. That's fine.” He said it just like that. The deficiency was embarrassing. He’s like, “Fine. You can burn your piece but we're not going to do any other firing.” They stayed up all night. They've been on the day shift.

They stayed and ran a 24-hour shift so they could secure their burn. They slept. They rested monitoring and babysitting that burn to make sure that the fuels consumed and didn't shuffle on. The next day at 3:00, what happened? Winds picked up, jumped the dose of line, burned up all the homes, jumped to the railroad tracks, burned up some more homes, jumped the freeway, and ran all the way into Nevada with a couple of fire tornadoes along the way. The one piece that didn't do that was where this crew had burned. The thing is they had gone to bed. They were waking up in the middle of this shit running through this whole thing. They wipe and sleep out there. That's like, “A lot of people are screaming.”

They probably wrangled a couple of private dozers and were like, “Over here,” and they went and saved two more homes. They went to work all night. I went back to the piece that I’d watched them burn the night before. I drove through all this destruction. I see 30 homes pristine like nothing had ever happened right behind that corner that they burned because he took the initiative to shame the division into letting him burn and saved 30 homes. I drove all the way back to the other division where they're at so I could let them know. I’m like, “Just so you guys know, that piece that you burn, you guys probably saved 30 homes.” They're like, “That's cool.”

It's a lot.

That's the thing. It made me realize nobody ever tells them that they saved 30 homes. God knows how many times that's happened where it's not necessarily directly tangible. It made me realize that moment that no one had ever come back and said, “You guys saved our lives. All of our memories were in there. Our pets were in there.” No one's ever going to come and let them know. They'll say it generically. You'll see those signs, “Thank you, firefighters.” They're not firefighters. They’re forestry technicians. No one's thanking the forestry technicians. No one's ever letting them know the results of their work.

This is someone who went above and beyond. He or she could have accepted his orders. They could have accepted their orders and then they lost all those homes. Nobody would know the difference and they would move on and do the work the next day but these forestry technicians decided, “This is important. We know better. We're going to try to nudge a little bit.” They got the work done and they saved a bunch of homes. Who's telling that story? Who's ever going to know this part?

Nobody. It's not to say that Cal Fire is bad at fighting wildfire. It is that they have a different mission. That's another thing. It's easy to say Hotshots are not the end-all-be-all. They are a very crucial component of the wildfire game. There are also engines, Cal Fire, dozers, and dispatch. They are often underrepresented and underappreciated part of that because, without dispatch, we would be done. There are all these things. There are smoke jumpers and all these cooperators. They all have their specific missions and specialties but at the end of the day, when you have an all-risk department like Cal Fire, you're deluding your experience.

You're not specializing, which I see total value in but when you're primarily responsible for medicals, MVAs, structure fires, and that shit with a wild inside hustle, we need your help. I’m not going to tell you to get off the fucking fire line and you don't know what you're doing because there's plenty of Cal Fire people that know what the fuck they're doing. Even some of that came from the Feds, career Hotshots who did the fresh boot rookie school with Cal Fire. For the most part, they have a different mission than the specialty of these Wildlands-specific departments, whether that's BIA, BLM, Forest Service, or whatever.

That wasn't a Cal Fire screw-up. These are individuals making decisions. You describe all these different people from dispatch to smoke jumpers and everything along the spectrum. It's about synergy, sharing knowledge, wisdom, and expertise. What happened there was a synergistic approach. He had a dialogue with the division sup. He had his own way of explaining it and then he got permission to do it. You have to step outside the lines.

You had to help him understand it from his perspective. Anyone who's fought fire along with 395 in that area, there are some FLAs out of Doyle from the ‘80s and ‘90s and that's where that sense of urgency comes from. It is having that wisdom of what happens over that when the fire starts coming down towards the 395 next to Honey Lake. You're going to get fire tornadoes and some nasty fire.

You're going to get spotting potential for mile-plus.

That's why you can't put two blades down at the total slope and then leave it. At the end of the day, I’ve seen Cal Fire do some great stuff. I will say that there are some conflicts sometimes between the Forest Service approach and the Cal Fire approach. Cal Fire is very focused on point protection and not necessarily going direct. There are times I agree with that. It’s not that hills. It’s just go behind structures.

There are no valleys at risk. Are the valleys at risk worth the life or the potential risk in counter by either the public or the personnel that are engaging that fire? That's the big decision there. A lot of people don't understand that too.

Also, the public pressure is going to dictate some of the policies. I guarantee you that the dude who was not eager to put fire in the ground, it’s not that he didn't want to put fire on the ground. He didn't see the value of it because clearly, he okayed it. It had to be with a dude whose dial has a great reputation in the wildfire community that he could trust. Ultimately, his reticence to put fire in the ground comes from, “I don't want to get crucified if something goes wrong.” It comes down to better education. We have to educate the public. The normies can understand fire behavior and understand why they do what they do or whether they're not doing it, like, “Why are you guys letting the fire come down the hills?”

It’s like, “It's backend fire. It's not going to be that strong. We want this to come down because once the fuels are gone, there's no threat.” The normies don't even have the remotest sense of this. The news media are not helping them do that because they reduce it to this clown-like show. They're not getting adequate information. The Forest Service has fucking smokey bear stomping out campfires. That's the problem. Nobody is doing the education. I saw it as my personal responsibility to try to do a film that gives a crash course so people can understand the bare essentials and fundamentals of missions are easy and understand the fire ladder.

If you get rid of the fuels, you don't have a fire. You’ve got to take personal responsibility and have better urban planning. I have that scene from the Silverado Fire where you have 85-mile-per-hour winds throwing this fire down at this super wealthy community, but they had great urban planning. They had this huge green belt around the community and the fire didn't do anything because it couldn't. There's nothing to burn.

It’s the fire triangle. If you take away one part of it, it's going to fall over.

Again, focusing on all these variables that don't matter when you could focus on one. If you kick out that one leg of the tripod, the whole thing falls out. Step one is education. The only way that we're going to educate, it's not some dude wearing a GoPro while he's cutting line. There has to be something that's entertaining, officially compelling, and feels like a movie that's digestible. The reality is most people don't care about wildfire. It is a faraway problem until it's not. The moment that it's not a faraway problem, it's a real big problem. Stop wasting your time putting solar panels on your roof. Spend a day getting rid of the fuels around the house. That's going to do a lot more.

Hotshot: The only way to educate the public is to produce entertaining and digestible content because most people don’t care about wildfires. It is a faraway problem for most until it is not.

This was a big part of my mission. It was education. I’m trying to introduce some of this stuff in a way that is digestible because I’m a normie. I was one of those guys who until the fire was in my backyard, I started taking more seriously. I didn't know anything about wildfire so through the six years of making the movie, I had that experience of learning this stuff.

I felt like I was in a position to instill that into a crash course so that you too can have the normie to wildfire understanding the experience. I do hope that people take that away but more than anything, I hope they take away the human experience of what these folks do. It's not a bitch fest as you well know. You've seen the movie probably a couple of times. It's not a bitch fest.

I’ve seen the OG cut. You send me the OG cuts.

I did. It's too bad that people don't get to see the original version but it's not about complaining about stuff. Frankly, the reaction that I get from most dudes who were operators is it makes them miss the job. To your point about the Forest Service being so risk-averse, they would never make this movie.

They're going to see this in any course. You're not going to see this in your fire refresher. I’m sorry. I wish it was played in your fire refresher.

It might. The thing is there are people in the agency who are getting more receptive and are more forward-thinking. They've reached out to me and expressed that they do like what the film does. Being risk-averse means that if I gave them a choice, they wouldn't want to convey the messages that I put in the film. The thing is the moment it hits the public, they're going to realize the public likes this. People are going to respond very positively to this. You're robbing the public of a good education because you think, “They're not going to like it. They're going to freak out.” No, they’re not. They're going to connect these people. They're going to see human beings.

They're going to think, “These dudes and chicks work their butts off. This is incredible. Look at the sacrifice that they're making. I had no idea that's how fires work. That's why they put out fire. That's why we see that helicopter with the helitorch. That's not conspiracy stuff.” This is good stuff to be conveying to the public.

If I were cooperating with the agency, if weren’t me being a bro with a camera and press pass going to doing it, it would never get done. Think of how deleterious that is to cause. People being risk-averse about something that ultimately is fun and makes people want to do the job. This ironically, I guarantee you, is going to increase recruitment within the Forest Service. It's not going to make people think, “That Forest Service sucks. Hotshot sucks.”

There are a lot of idiots in the room. Those are people who know that shit about that.

It's only the do-nothing people who complain about this stuff. You don't have to like the movie and you can disagree with a couple of my conclusions the way that I framed things. The thing I always tell people whenever they disagree with something I put in there, I’m like, “You should make a movie about it. I’ll be the first one in line to pay to see it.” Don’t spend a decade to do it.

That's why conversations like this are so important. It’s long-form, unscripted, and unedited. You lay it out there. You're being 100% authentically yourself. You're describing what your mission was, what everything the meaning behind it, and why you did it, and that's admirable man. More people need to understand that instead of a 30-second sound bite or a fucking minute and a half teaser like, “This is fucking stupid.”

Ultimately, I have to try to market the movie or figure out how to do a trailer or what language to use, there are always going to be people who are annoyed by it. I see some of the Hotshots roll their eyes on the part where it's like, “They're like the Navy SEALs.”

We don't think that but the general public is going to understand that.

This was something that I ran into. I’m trying to convince some of the people who are on camera that this is okay. You don't look like a dork. Your colleagues are going to make you buy them beers. Everyone is going to teach you our rules but it's not going to be fire chasers where everyone is going to be laughing at you. I’m telling you that the reaction to this film has been overwhelming. When people watch this, and I’m talking from 30-year veterans in wildland fire like grizzle old men who look like Forrest Gump when he decides to stop running, are in tears talking about how much it affected them.

I’ve gotten phone calls from some guys. There were very hardened dudes. They’ve been on the fire line a long time and it moved them very deeply. Even people who I don't know who have no connection to fire, no understanding of it, or whatsoever are reacting to it viscerally because what we did right is I did what you said I should do years ago.

Don't you blame this on me.

For everyone, it was Brandon who told me years ago over a frigging Instagram DM, “The fire footage is rad. You need to go get staging. You need to go when we're shooting the shit.” All of that interpersonal and interstitial stuff, that's where the real soul and humanity is. You were 100% right and that was the most difficult stuff to get because the fire porn is easy to get. It's everywhere. Getting those quiet moments and the culture meant staying up all night staging with them or being on a 24-hour burn show all night. Sitting down next to them when they're eating on the fire line and then getting all of that in-between stuff is what makes it real and makes them human beings.

It doesn't look dorky. People look cool even in their crappy moments where they're going this up on the line, throwing out some shit.

That's part of it. It looks cool. That struggle is cool. It's admirable. It's raw and real and the normies are resonating with it in a way that the Cal Fire shows that are out there are so dorky or fixating on inmates. Everyone wants to do a movie about inmate firefighters. That's like, “There's these dudes who are out there for many years doing this work.” Nobody is telling their story. Only the brave. It was pretty good, but it was still hokey. I know some dudes who were on that fire. It was a complex incident and you're never going to be able to tell that story properly or do it justice, especially in a Disney setting.

We're very not a PC culture. We’re Rated R right off the bat.

I had to be a little judicious about that. There are some cuss words in the movie. It's raw and real but there's nothing in there that's dangerous, bad, or offensive. All the fear of being risk-averse is totally misguided and it's resonating with people. It's resonating with people across the political spectrum and it doesn't feel like a political movie.

You would never be able to guess how I vote based on watching this show. I guarantee you. If anyone can guess who I voted for in 2016 from watching this movie who doesn't know me personally and doesn't know my actual voting record, I will give you my camera because you will never guess, I promise you. People from the far-left wing of the spectrum love it for certain aspects that frankly I was surprised by.

Do you have an example without giving spoilers?

I don't spend any time talking about climate.

It's a bullshit argument to be had because it is so polarizing like we talked about earlier. Do I believe in climate change? I do to some degree. Do I believe in taking that word or phrase out of the conversation? Abso-fucking-lutely. Why don't we replace that with environmental change? The climate is macro. The environment is directly what's in front of us. We can have the whole rock analogy. You pick up a rock and skip it across the lake. You change the environment.

Las Vegas gets more rain now because there are more swimming pools. All of a sudden, all these water sources are in the middle of the desert so there's more evaporation and precipitation. It's real. In California, we've been doing weather modification in terms of ionizing particles in the air to try to induce rainfall for 60 years.

That's been going on since the 1930s or ‘40s.

It's well over 60 years and I know it sounds like conspiracy theory stuff. The power companies are doing it because they're trying to help fill the reservoirs.

The military-industrial complex, too.

That's where it started.

It was designed like a silver iodine or something like that. They try to take all the water molecules out and stick to the silver iodine and then precipitate so they keep the enemy down. They can plug anything. They couldn't do any logistics.

If you rely on a network of tunnels, get this massive monster of rain that doesn't stop, and every bit of moisture in the air comes down, you're going to flood them out.

It's well-documented. It's real. Is it being used to control some Alex Jones-style weather event shit? I highly doubt it.

Here's the unsexy thing. Most problems in this world are pretty simple and most people's motives are pretty banal. Most people want to make more money. It's often not some doctor evil stroking a white cat.

Most problems in this world are pretty simple and most motives are quite banal. It is just that many people want to make more money.

What's that movie? It’s like the end of the world movie with the meteor that's going to crash into the planet. Have you seen that?

Which one? Armageddon?

No. it is a recent one. It's a whole riff on society.

Don't Look Up. That was an allegory for climate change. It's very obvious. That's Leo's pet project. He likes to fly all over the world in his private jet to lecture you on what you can't do. This is why this discussion is so frustrating because it is so political, vitriolic, and so full of people who don't give up flying fuck about the environment and lecturing you about the environment.

I am a barefooted California hippie. I always have been. My mother's chuck tying me in. We would spend all of our summers outdoors. We have a foundational respect for the environment and it drives me crazy that because I don't shit my pants about climate every day, I’m not considered an environmentalist as if I want glyphosate in my rivers and micro plastics everyone’s bullshit.

I don't want to giant fucking garbage patch of plastic the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean. I don't want that.

Most of the dudes I know in wildland fire are environmentalists. Most of them are also hardcore Republican or Libertarian dudes who would be castigated by the urban city dweller who likes to lecture people on social media. As you said, let wildfire be wildfire. Regardless of what climate is doing with wildfire, climate is always changing. Colder is not better. Colder can bring droughts. It can bring insane winds. The worst fires in the history of humanity occurred in October of 1871. It is called Peshtigo, the Great Michigan Fire, and the Great Fire of Chicago. It all happened on the same day. It’s crazy.

I didn't know that until you pointed that out in the film and then I went back through. I’m like, “Holy shit.”

People theorize that there was a meteor strike like some meteor storm hit because of the sheer volume of fire that hit the ground. It was a cold year so you had a drought. It’s very common. People don't understand that drought is a cold-weather phenomenon typically. Our resident image of drought is like the desiccated cow skull in the Nevada desert. It's orange, dry, and hot but cold weather brings less evaporation. Chances are you're going to get nasty droughts when you have cold spells. Throughout history, when we've had many ice ages, we lost all of our crops.

Lots of people die. We had the Bubonic plague. In warm periods like the medieval period, you have the Renaissance and more growth. All of these things are distractions from wildfire because at the end of the day, whether the climate is getting worse or it's getting better, the fuels to me are the lynchpin and it is the way you can immediately impact your environment. It’s the way that you said it. You have an immediate impact right now. This idea of, “We got to rapidly decarbonize,” that's not happening.

What does that even mean?

Do you know what it's going to do? Even if I take it at face value that if you're able to vacuum 50% of carbon out of the air, the temperature is going to back off one degree, really? That's going to change all the wildfires? Maybe it will but look at some of the nasty stuff that's been happening in 2023. We don't have a lot of big fires this year.

No, but we have a lot of fatalities. It is very slow. We only have 2 million acres across the United States.

2 million acres at the end of August. It's unheard of. This is one of the slowest seasons in our lifetime shit.

I didn't even see if we're in PL5. We were we're still in PL4.

Regardless. There’s a ton of personal up in NorCal but 99% of California has zero fire. It's not even remotely close.

They're doing prescribed fires in August.

It's crazy but look at how many fatalities we're having. Look at how many near fatalities were having. You can lose your home in a quarter-acre fire depending on where that ignition happens.

The lightning strike can hit your house and you can lose your home.

Even the Bel Air Fire in 2019. I remember I was up on the Kincade Fire when this thing hit and it ran up the 405 freeway. I’ve been to Lebron James's neighborhood in Bel Air. That knocked out a ton of multimillion-dollar homes. We're talking over $1 billion of damage on a tiny fire. I was up on an 85,000-acre fire. It didn't take out nearly as many homes as this tiny fire because again, the fuel is immediately around your home. That's the big concern. It comes down to education. People don't understand the dynamics of wildfire and they're so fixated on this distraction with climate. It's this nebulous thing that the average individual doesn't see their connection to it.

It's too big. It's macro. The climate is macro.

We got to take a million cars off the road. We’ve got to fire nuclear plants.

It’s the whole environmental thing versus climate change. The climate will always change. Do we have a direct impact on it? We probably fucking do. At this scale, we have billions of people on Earth. We probably have a direct implication in climate change but the environmental change, we know how to control the environment. We can have inflation.

This has become such a cult discussion. What you and I are saying is we both be called anti-diluvian Luddites.

I’m going to let kids shit on my Twitter bash from this episode by saying what I said and I don't care. I can't control it. I’ll do my part. I’ll fucking recycle. I’m not going to buy an electric car because 1) I can't afford it and 2) Tesla is pretty sick. Let's be honest here. Tesla Model S will be fucking dope, but it comes with coal. You plug into your house and it's burning coal still.

If you care about the environment and transportation, the best thing you can do is drive your car until it's dead.

The best thing you can do if you care about the environment and transportation is to drive your car until it is dead.

Out of necessity, I have to do that because I’m poor.

I’m going to have to keep my creeper van for as long as I can but Volvo has a study where they finally compared apples to apples on the same assembly line with the same resources. They were manufacturing the same model vehicle. The only difference was an internal combustion engine, an electric motor, a battery, and a fuel tank. Those are the only differences. The carbon footprint difference between manufacturing that battery and that electric motor was the equivalent of 90,000 miles of driving with an internal combustion engine, which for the average person is 8 to 10 years of driving.

That's not helping. It's not breaking even for another ten years. You're dumping ten years’ worth of driving emissions into the environment right now at a time when you're claiming the world is going to end in the next 10 years, which they say every 10 years. When you tell normal people that the world is going to end in ten years and then it doesn't, they start tuning out.

That's Machiavellian.

To me, it's a distraction.

It's even beyond that. It's something that's wildly out of our control.

To your point, there's something called an opportunity cost. People will argue, “We can do all of the above. We can get rid of the fuels and we can put solar panels everywhere.” It’s like, “If you were spending any time money resources on doing this thing or discussing this thing, that's time, money, and resources that's not being spent on this thing.” It's not this innocent thing that the solar panels aren't going to affect the fires, but it can't hurt.

Imagine, if you were to put that money immediately, it reduces production into paying your workforce enough that they can be a full-time resource and they can do large-scale complex firing operations when it's appropriate to do so and get this part under control. What I tell people is the solution with wildfire. It can be solved tomorrow if we want to. We can get rid of the fuel anytime we want. People get mad at me.

Why?

It’s because they're so committed. The climate discussion has become so irrational that people cannot have a nuanced discussion about it. They like to use fire as a cudgel to scare you into buying solar panels and buying a $100,000 luxury EV because they think that somehow that's going to make the weather less angry. They love to use this stuff to scare you. They don't care about the wildfire destruction. They love it as a scare tactic because they have an agenda.

If you're an honest normal person, you're trying to figure out solutions to a change in climate in a world where you care about your environment. If somebody tells you, “One of those natural disasters that you're worried about, we can fix that tomorrow. We don't have to wait 50 years for the client solution to kick in.” You'd be like, “Thank God. Let's fix that.” “Wildfires are taken care of. We're going to do fuel reduction. We're going to have permanent anchor points around all of our community so we can fire them off whenever we need to every few years. Get that habit going so it's permanent. It’s the way that our ancestors do.”

Now let's deal with hurricanes or whatever else we're worried about. You can't. It would be a relief to tell people, “We are in control of this solution with wildfire. You don't have to worry about the red flag warnings. We can go and take care of this proactively.” People get pissed. It's absurd. This is why I’m saying the thing that I’ve run into. If you make a wildfire movie, it's not enough to skip the climate change issue the way that I did. I don't get into it. You have to light your hair on fire about it.

You have to make a stand and a point.

Otherwise, people get mad at you but it's a distraction. The movie is called Hotshot. I give some fire history and fire education but it's about the people. Ultimately, these are the people who are going to provide the solution in terms of proper fuel reduction and managing the fires that do need to be attacked. As you said, we can't paint with this broad brush or it's like, “Let all of them burn.”

It doesn't work like that.

Nature is too violent. The Native Americans didn't let nature run its course. They were very proactive. Don't get it twisted because we think of the Native American era as the natural era. That wasn't the natural era. The natural era was characterized by long gaps and then nuclear fires and shaking the Etch A Sketch fire. That's too much. I appreciate that there's someone like you out there with a platform who can have this nuanced discussion. When I say, “I don't care about the client thing when it comes to wildfire,” you don't freak out, lose your mind, and call me a climate denier.

Are you a climate denier? I don't think so. We had that discussion. You prove that you're not a climate change denier. This is the thing. We've only decided to pick a fight with Mother Nature in one regard and that's with wildfire. That’s the only thing that we have the capacity, the ability, and the knowledge on how to fight or harness. We wouldn't have evolved as a species without fire. We wouldn't have antibiotics, language, art, your film, this show, or any of that shit without fire.

If we're bitching about a lot of smoke like the East Coast did in 2023, I think that we know how to solve this fucking problem. The problem that I can't solve right now is that goddamn hurricane that fucking hit Florida. You can't do anything. You defend against earthquakes in California, which you're well accustomed to. You can defend against it but you can't fight it. You can fight fire. I was on it for ecological benefit when you change your relationship with fire.

It's a lot of breathing. Breathing is both an involuntary and voluntary process. If you're not paying attention, you're still going to breathe but you can also choose to stop breathing. You breathe more deeply. It's this transitional process in our bodies whereas peristalsis digestion and your heartbeat, you don't control those. It's going to happen whether or not you think about it and you can't slow it up the speed of a ton. You can through breathing. You can use breathing to affect your heart, but it's still fundamentally involuntary. You don't have control over it. I hesitate to refer to wildfire as a natural disaster.

It's not doing its thing. It's nature's garbage disposal.

That's the other thing. There's so much resource benefit to it but beyond that, it's something that we can steer. We can work around and harness it the way you said it. We need to reshape our perception of fire. It doesn't have to be a love affair. The education I got growing up with my particular background is that fire is medicine. This is something that certain people are starting to champion, which I appreciate. It's not like I’m the first person to describe this, so I’m trying to take credit for it. I said it earlier, the first thing that you say in your essay is the most important thing. What the movie is about? What the story is about? The very first thing that I say in my movie is wildfire is the greatest force of fairness in the universe.

People come in and expect this big scary wildfire movie and yet the first thing that I say is wildfire is the greatest force of fairness in the universe. That's the conclusion that I reached over all my years on the fire line. The wildfire is fair. Everything that can burn will burn. If it isn’t ready to burn, it isn’t going to burn. It's going to reduce everything into the same fundamental element. It's going to reduce everything into carbon. We need to have this approach where we don't think of it as a mess. We don't have to be in love with it. That's what fairness is. It's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. It's balance and ultimately, you're going to see a decrease in the destruction when we seek balance.

When we start to get the balance right of where we put our homes, what we allow in terms of the fuels suppressing the fires, letting these go for resource benefit, managing these ones, and suppressing these, it's all about balance. Step one is we have to stop demonizing it. We have to stop sensationalizing it in a way where the only response to wildfire is panic. If everybody panics about it, then they don't understand how it can be harnessed for positive attributes. It's then always going to be dumb retarded on it.

Call the Jets. It keeps spending billions of dollars putting it out, even if it hurts them because they don't understand it. If anything, the tone that I take with my film is meant to be neutral and straightforward in a way where we're trying to start to look at balance at the end of the line. The way that it ends and the conclusion of the film is a nod to the permanence of this process. To the point of not having dominion over nature, we have this inability to accept the inevitability of wildfire. It's been here forever. It's always going to be here. We need to accept it. We need to accept the permanence of it and stop banging our heads against the wall with this hubris like we're going to stop it. We're not going to stop it.

Hotshot: We have this inability to accept the inevitability of wildfire. It has been here forever and certain as death and taxes.

You're not going to stop the tides from coming in either. Stop trying. Live with it. Adapt to it. Take the lesson from the people who lived here for 12,000 years and found harmony with it. We need to do the same thing. We have to stop thinking from this nerd perspective of like, “We can. Technology is our way out of it.” You can't. Again, we don't have dominion over nature. Lose the hubris. You can still use your toys. There are benefits to some of that stuff. Accept it. At the end of the day, we are creatures of this planet and we need to strike a balance with these permanent fixtures here. We aren't the only residents here. Wildfire is a resident. It deserves to be here like we do.

Was that closing thing that you said or it’s one of the things that you said in the film? I know where to find you next time.

Showing the regrowth and the burn scar where I went to the Kincade fire. Again, this was a late-season fire so you see the regrowth so soon after because the only thing that stopped that fire was snow. It is immediately hydrated and ready to start regrowing. That area was replete with wildflowers. It’s stunning. It’s gorgeous nuclear green. Wildflowers are everywhere. You couldn't tell unless you're a firefighter and you can see the telltale signs. You're not going to have any idea that anything ever happened. It's like, “Look how beautiful it is. The other side of the coin is death saying, “Good. Now I know where to find you next time.”

To understand that as much as you may celebrate these trees that are here, you can go, “I love this tree,” we get so sad when it burns. Understand that that's the nature of it. All things are impermanent. Don't get too precious about this piece of brush and that tree. It's their destiny to go to the gods. That's why I say wildfire is the greatest force of fairness in the universe because it reduces us all to the same fundamental element. We have the same destiny as those trees. Even down to operations, what do they always tell you with these FLAs? That piece of brush and that house is not that fucking important.

It’s not worth anybody's life.

It is not worth your life. Let it go. It's a micro bit of information and instruction that is applicable on a larger scale. People who wail overseeing these trees going up, it's sad but there’s going to be another one. Your little snapshot of our ecosystem is so tiny compared to the scale of geology and things that have come and gone in the past you never knew existed. Just chill. Understand it’s part of nature. Accept it and find the balance.

Your little snapshot of our ecosystem is so tiny compared to the scale of geology that has come and gone in the past.

There's a lot to be said about that. Don't get me wrong. I would love to have my little slice of heaven out in Truckee, up in the Plumas, or somewhere in Montana on the river but the reality of it is that you have to live with fire. The farther you get away from the concrete jungle, your hardships might be a little bit different. They might change a little and unfortunately, it takes a lot of personal accountability with fuel management and removal of all this stuff but you got to accept that fire is a part of nature. It's a very real and visceral thing. It's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when.

I remember the Hennessey Fire in particular in California in 2020 during that lightning siege. This was a multi-fatality fire. This is a nasty fire and things around Napa burn so freaking hot. It's crazy.

It’s brutal.

I was up there when the fire ran through Vacaville and nuked a bunch of homes. I was going down some of these windy roads. It's one home getting nuked after another. I stopped because fire was going to rip across the road and I couldn't see where it was curved inside. I was like, “I’m going to wait until it blows through.” I’m in the black and fine and then all of a sudden, somebody knocks on my window. It scared the shit out of me. It's this old dude.

He's all sweaty. He's smudged and he rolls down the window. I’m like, “Are you okay?” He's like, “Yes. I was going to ask if you need any water.” I’m like, “I’m good. Do you need any water?” He's like, “No.” This was in his 70s or late 70s for sure. He's like, “We saved our home. It's me and my wife with a couple of buckets.” I’m like, “Are you serious? Good for you.” He's like, “We do our brush clearance every year. We had to put out a couple of grass spots or little spots.” What's everybody else's excuse?

There is not. I understand it too if there's a financial hardship to pay somebody. Don't get me wrong. There are some communities out there, especially in rural America and forested areas or even in the rangeland like out in my neck of the woods in Nevada, there's a lot of poorer communities out here that cannot afford to do this shit. They don't order their elderly and they're out of shape or they have some health concerns that they can't do it themselves. I feel for these people.

I’ll get to this. English Hills in Vacaville where I was at is not a poor community. These are mansions that we're getting busted. This isn't about resources. When I lived in Santa Clarita, we did our brush clearance. We had a half an acre. It's not a ton of land but that's a few hours of work to clear out the brush on our hillside. It's a few hours of work with the weed. That's not a big deal. Most people could do it, but to your point, some of these deeper rural communities where clearing fuel is a bigger thing.

Frankly, given the fuel type, the timber, or the massive scrub stuff that's out there, you could clear around your property line if you don't have a giant property. If the Forest Service hasn't cleared the hillside below you and reduced fuels with prescribed fire, that fire is going to run up so freaking hard. It's not going to matter.

That's another thing too. Here you go. Sometimes you get into those situations that there's not a fucking thing you can do. I hate to use this as an example, unpopular opinion, but Hawaii. The reason for fires in Maui is that type of fuel with 80-mile-an-hour winds plus, you could have a fuel break a mile wide and there isn't a goddamn thing you can do about it. I’m sorry, and it sucks.

It's true. People don't want to accept that. They're harping on the issue like, “They wouldn't release the water.” You know this because you've been on these fires. Anyone who's been on a wind-driven fire, especially one where the winds are over 60 miles an hour, what are you going to do? There's nothing you can do.

You have no infrastructure. You have nothing and no comms. You aren’t got shit.

Even if you had water. Somehow you had a source, water shuttle going, and engines doing structure pro, it's not going to do anything. A structure is already fully involved and you have wood structure after wood structure with 60, 70, or 80-mile-per-hour winds blasting like a furnace. No matter what, water cannot do anything about that.

If you're standing in front of that thing as a firefighter, even in probably turn out SCBA and the whole thing with an inch and a half or two-inch line, you're pissing in the wind and going to die.

People are not going to understand that. People don't want to accept that. That's one of those situations that is like, “Oh, man.” Frankly, the same thing happened in the Paradise Camp Fire. The Camp Fire was more of a wildfire than the fire in Maui. Maui was primarily in urban conflagration. It started as a grass fire. One of those homes caught fire because somebody knocked over their barbecue.

The same result would have happened because that fire was spreading from house to house. That thing wasn't going to stop. With Paradise, it was much more of an established wildfire but once it transitioned into that urban interface, there were a lot of areas where the trees didn't burn. The fire was clearly moving from house to house. The homes were the fuel. I saw this on the CZU Complex up in Boulder Creek where car fire is the same thing. That was in the neighborhood.

It kills the dozer operator for Cal Fire.

Who's flipping over vehicles? There's a level of, “I can't do anything about it.” When you're that deeply entrenched, you don't have good infrastructure. You don't have good ingress and egress. Egress is more important. You don't have a good understanding of fire behavior. How many videos have you seen from Paradise where people are frantically driving out of the black towards the flaming front to get to the green? The average person doesn't understand why that's so bad. There are so many videos that I’ve seen whether people are trying to escape the Woolsey Fire or Paradise where I’m like, “You're in the black.” I get it. There are some traffic polls and smoldering and it looks scary but it's over. Stay there.

Nobody knows that. Everybody panicked. I had an incident during the Bond Fire in 2020. It’s a wind-driven fire and late-season fire in Orange County. I found this triangle as a good safety zone. It is a dirt triangle surrounded by brush on all sides and three road intersections. That's why I have this dirt triangle. It's a good spot. There's a hand crew that was stationed. They were staging right there. Fire looks like it's about half an hour away. I’m going to go scout down this road, take a piss, and see if I can see what the fire is doing. I go around this edge and take a piss. I see there's a house over here.

There's a dirt baseball field and then I start heading back. I wasn't gone for more than 90 seconds. I get back and my safety zone is already completely overrun. The fire must have spotted ahead of itself. It is nuts. It ran so much faster than I thought. I got into that dirt area. I was in a good spot. It was hot but it was fine. I see this car last past me at 40 miles an hour down that dirt road. We're talking 60-mile-an-hour winds so that smoke is laying straight down. You can't see it damn thing.

I’m like, “It must be a local because I sure wouldn't speed down that road like that. You can't see a thing.” Maybe 45 seconds later, I see this dude stumbling up the road back towards me. Tears all messed up and black all over his face. He comes running up in panic. I opened the door but I couldn’t get in. I told the chief that he was freaking out. He was like, “We're going to die. We're going to burn up.” I’m like, “No. We're good.”

I tried to explain to him in a dorky way and distract him that it was a safety zone. I was like, “That brush over there is only 3 feet. It's only going to burn about 10 feet high. We're 30 feet away. It's hot but we're going to be okay.” He started to calm down. He had crashed his car into the side of the road because he couldn't see where he was going.

It’s panic. He didn't know. He didn't have a baseline knowledge of no fuel equals no die.

He lost his vehicle. It’s burned up. I drove him out to the vehicle because the vehicle was on fire. I’m like, “Do you have anything in there like a phone or wallet? If you have a phone and wallet in there, go get it.” He’s like, “Are you sure?” I’m like, “Do it now before it gets worse.” He was evacuating. He had all these prized possessions in there. He lost it all. He managed to get his wallet and his phone. He didn't die or get injured. I drove him out to meet his mom and get him to safety. He came from that house next to the baseball field.

He was safe the entire time.

He could have walked onto the baseball field. He had no idea. That is a traumatic incident. That's going to live for the rest of his life. Let alone the things that he lost and he could have died easily. All he had to do was scoot his vehicle out to the baseball field. The home didn't get burned up because it had tons of fuel clearance around it.

It had a road and a baseball field. That small bit of education is missing even in the most dynamic fire landscape in the country. People had no idea about how wildfire operates. The lack of education with the normies is going to get people killed. A lot of people die trying to evacuate and some of these people may have been in a better spot like a sheltering place like we talked about before. Your home can take the heat. I don't want people to get it twisted and think like, “Don't evacuate.” We need education to understand when you're safe and when you're not. If the fire already burned through and you find yourself driving through the black and you're headed towards the flaming fronts, you have to stop.

Bringing it back to the whole fuel mitigation, re-education, and re-establishing our relationship with fire conversation that we had, I’m a firm believer in the all-hands-all-lands strategy. If there's a free basic Wildland Firefighting course or anything that's going to make you more fire-resilient, educated, and adaptable to fire, especially in the American West, or even all over the world, because there isn’t a freaking continent besides Antarctica without wildfire.

Go out there and educate yourself on the very topics that we are talking about because knowledge is power. If you remove the fuel and all this other shit, you'd take care of your property, and be a good steward to land, a lot of your problems are going to be solved with this climate change wildfire crisis thing that we're experiencing because it's not going anywhere.

At least you can check the wildfire danger off the list. You can have your anxiety about all the other things that you associate with whatever we're doing either bureaucratically, politically, or environmentally. You can at least take wildfire off the list. As you said, if you live in the American West, this is a part of your life unless you live in Downtown Los Angeles. It's a part of your life and you should learn about it.

If you are in Downtown Los Angeles, look at the Oakland Fire. That was an urban conflagration. It killed hundreds of people.

A lot of people will tell you that the climate back in the ‘90s was better. That's a thing. You tell me when the optimal climate was since everyone seems to have this notion that we have a sub-optimal climate now. When was the optimal one? You tell me that era and I will tell you about a fire that ruined people's lives. Understand that this is not going anywhere. Stop trying to avoid it, suppress it all the time, or eliminate it from the landscape. You need to learn to live with it because that fuel keeps growing out of the ground every year. It's not one-and-done even with prescribed fire.

It's not like you can do it once. You have to do it all the time. It has to become a routine and the more you do it, the better your landscape is going to look, and then it becomes easier and easier. Right now, we're behind the eight-ball. It should be very tricky. It's going to take a lot of balls and uteri. We might lose some homes and burns that get past us because we've got a lot of fuel. We have to do it. There's no choice.

My hope with this movie is that it's entertaining enough that the normies will watch it even if they don't care about wildfire and they will get a baseline understanding of how this stuff works and who the important players are. I feel like in a perfect world, they will reach out to their congressman and tell them, “We need to take care of these dudes and girls who are serving our country and protecting our natural resources because unlike me on Twitter in the city, these people are sleeping in the dirt sucking smoke, sacrificing their health, and getting their asses work.” It's a great experience and awesome.

Hotshot: Hotshot is an invitation to viewers to reach out to their congressman and tell them to help the men and women who fight wildfires to protect our natural resources.

It's also a very thankless job.

The only thing we can do is make them whole. It goes a long way. Call them firefighters. Stop calling them forestry technicians. You have to give people dignity, some square meals, and a good paycheck. They’ve got to be able to take care of their kids. Everything is getting more expensive and the pay has not kept up.

My hope is that I captured the culture in a way that can connect Hotshot who is an elusive creature with the average person who doesn't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. There's enough humanity in it. I spent enough time getting the stuff that you told me to get going so that people can identify with these elusive creatures with beards. I don't know if it's empathy or an understanding that we live in a community.

There are people who you don't know exist on that wall. You need them on that wall and you need to take care of them. I hope that that's the reaction that this film gets. I made a website because I did this fully independently. I can do whatever I want with the movie. I can send it to you, John Golden, and to Congress. We had Senator Romney's office reach out to us directly. His office asked if they could take the movie and show him because they saw a segment of it and were very moved by it.

They saw the sense of urgency and understood that these people needed to be taken care of and soon we lost all of them but because I did it fully independently and I never sold it, we had a few offers that we turned down. We got rejected by a few big companies for various reasons. A lot of them were like, “You didn't talk about climate.” They wanted it to be more about climate.

The messaging about climate is already built into it. It’s control what you can't control.

Leo is going to do his movies about climate. My movie is called Hotshot. It's about Hotshots. Let it be about the people. It was slated to have this thing out and October 2nd-ish, 2023. They're telling us to not advertise that but for whatever reason, we got delayed on Amazon until October 2nd, but since I didn't sell it to anybody, I have it up on my website. It’s HotshotMovie.com and people have been renting and buying it. They've been watching it and sharing their feedback. People can go and watch it now and send it to their congressman and encourage them to spread the word because the people who I’ve spoken to are doing the real boots-on-the-ground work, advocating on behalf of these guys.

They've been doing it for years. They're not carpet baggers. People like Luke and John with Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. What they tell me about it is that it tells the story that they've been wanting someone to tell for the longest time in a way that's digestible, you can feel, doing advocacy in Washington DC, and having these circle ups and meetings. It's very difficult to talk about it. You need to be able to see it for the people who haven’t experienced it. You know what it's like.

I’ve been there. I put my foot in the black for eleven years of my life.

That's why when you smell something, you immediately feel something. If the average person smells cedar, they don’t immediately think of that so they need some digestible story. What they're telling me is that when people see this, they have a very deep visceral reaction to it. That's firefighters and non-firefighters alike. What I’m hoping is that enough people can step out of this bureaucratic mindset when it comes to where we're putting our tax dollars. See the humanity in this work. See the balance that we need to find with nature. Understand that wildfire is the biggest threat to our national security in this country.

Wildfire is taking out more homes than the Taliban. We spent a lot on them. We're spending all this money on these foreign wars and meanwhile, we're going to lose another thousand homes in California every single year. Wildfire is totally preventable and within our grasp. It's not like a hurricane. We can do something about this. We need to make that human connection to wildfire and to the wildfire operators. What I hope that people do is get in touch with their congressman and share the story. I know a lot of dudes will rent it and then share it with their entire station. That’s awesome.

Wildfire is the biggest threat to the national security of the United States. It takes out more homes than the Taliban.

I don't care about the money. The reason I made the website is so it can be out now. I’m not at the mercy of whenever Amazon or Apple puts it up because they might delay for God knows how long. We have this pay cliff coming September 30, 2023. That's why I made the website. I’m feeling that sense of urgency. I want to be sitting on the sidelines with this story about Hotshots when God knows how many Hotshots are about to get.

They're going to voluntarily leave. We won’t play the fuck around and find out. I don't think it's going to be a good outcome because I like to hunt fish and enjoy my public lands. I used to be one of these groundpounders out there too. I have an intimate connection with a lot of these folks out there. I have that relationship and camaraderie still. We're losing generational knowledge and hundreds of years of wildfire experience every year to better-paying jobs or different departments even. They might not be out of the wildfire game entirely but they're at a different department.

I know sup who left to go to the law enforcement side. As you said, how many years of knowledge does that dude bring to bear? He was the Sup in the Angeles forest. The original Hotshot crews came out of the Angeles like Dalton. These are the OGs. Think about the legacy, the traditions, and the wisdom that's now being hemorrhaged.

I know personally everyone in the Angeles already has in their applications or prepped for Cal Fire. They're ready to go. This is very serious. The Forest Service has already been hemorrhaging employees. This is beyond the Forest Service. This is up to Congress. Forest Service can only do so much and frankly, I’ve seen encouraging signs from the Deputy Chief. She seems to take this very seriously. She wants to do the right thing. She listens to people on the ground and doing all the right things but they're at the mercy of Congress. They can't magically conjure more pay so they need to rely on your representatives to get this thing into the end zone.

I had a discussion with Representative Curtis from Utah who is Co-Chair of the Wildfire Caucus in Congress. Someone had asked him, “What do we have to do? What's going to get Congressman to move on this?” He said, “You have to tell a story. Storytelling is the key. If you have someone who lost their house in a fire, bring them to talk about it.” It seems a little clunky and awkward.

I know so we could have prevented it if they lost it in a wildfire. We could have gotten ahead of the curve a long time ago.

Also, think of some of the widows who are advocating.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and Michelle is at the forefront of that fucking fight.

She's such a stud. I was so heartened to meet her and talk to her if she got a chance to see the flick. It moved her very deeply but it was very upsetting to see what an uphill battle she's had to endure after she's already lost so much. She's doing this advocacy work on behalf of a lot of people who will never meet her whoever impacts her life. She doesn't have to do it but she's still doing it.

You could say, “Bring someone who's been a victim of some tragedy and that will tug at their heartstrings.” Is that working? It’s not. We need more than one person fighting alone. We need to collective of people to have solidarity, organize, and speak up. Hotshots, especially active Hotshots, are not inclined to speak up. The culture is you put your head down, do the work, and talk shit to your boys.

I love that. It's totally admirable. At the end of the day, a lot of people are going to get steamrolled. The consequences for our homes and our natural resources are very significant. Someone has to say something. I love that that people like Luke, John, you, and other people with a platform are advocating and it's interesting to see that wildfires are becoming a more broadcast platform between some of the podcasts that are coming out. People are taking an interest in this stuff. We have this moment in the coming days where we need to try to use this momentum, use all the storytelling and advocacy that we can, and try to get this thing across. I worry that the consequences can be pretty dire. I wouldn't be surprised if the Forest Service loses 50% of its workforce.

The wildfire fighting system must learn how to use storytelling to push their advocacy forward. Otherwise, the forest service might lose half of its workforce.

I’m estimating upwards of 60% to 70% based on a random sample of people who have boots-on-the-ground experience that follow me. That's a very small sector.

It's going to be devastating. I spent a lot of money making the movie but I’ve already dropped the cost. I don't care about the money part. I don't care if one dude rents it and shows it to 30 dudes. People have asked if they can do a screening to raise money for Hotshot crews or whatever and ask, “How much do I have to pay you to do a screening for a fund reason?” I’m like, “You don’t have to pay anything. Take it but assure me that you're not going to give the money to the fucking Forest Service. Just do it.” I say the same thing to John and Luke.

I’m like, “Guys, if this can help you advocate when you're having a conversation with the senator or some bureaucrat, by all means, go for it. Take it. Use it. Broadcast it. Share it. Try to communicate this stuff because people do have a visceral reaction to the movie.” If people can connect with the humanity of the people on the fire line, nothing is going to change. The priority is going to be the drones and the AI stuff. To the other people in wildfire journalism, stop nerding out on fucking aircraft.

Don't get me wrong. I love some good retardant porn or helicopter porn. That is a very specific tool for a very specific purpose. The real work gets done by people swinging tools.

Swinging tools and fire on the ground. It's never going to change. You might add some drones to help drop some of those PSDs out to the remote areas. It’s awesome. It’s a great merging of technology and synergy.

Take a prescribed fire bus. They are an artist. This is a very intuitive feeling sport. If you don't have the slides and the experience to support that intuition of fire, you're going to lose your burn as an artist with a fucking paintbrush. The same thing with operational suppression folks. If they're lighting something on fire, that's why they're walking it and taking the same pace or have X amount of lighters deep. That's all it is.

That was one of the more interesting things that I learned observing the sheer volume of firing operations that I did. It is how much of an art it is. There are Wildfire Whisperers. Some dudes are better at it than others. There is an intangible sense of knowing what the fire is going to do and feeling what is happening. It's almost a sixth sense that these nerds don't understand. You cannot replace this with AI. I remember sitting in on this demonstration where this dude from an aviation company was showing up, “You guys do your five operations. Imagine, if you have the version of ChatGPT, it's like calculating the weather in two hours.”

I’m watching this dude and they’re shaking their heads like, “What the fuck are you talking about? You have no understanding of what this is.” You're right. It is an art. I even say it like that in the movie because observing the way that they do that, I wasn't able to figure out the paint-by-numbers guy. I’ve seen so many firing operations and I filmed so many of these things and watched it so many billions of times. I’m like, “I could lead a course on this stuff. I could qual up technically, but I’m telling you, there are inexplicable things that some guys do to feather this stuff in, get it right, get it to suck the fire in on itself, and guide it. It's alchemy.”

People need to see that to understand why the human element is so important. That was so critical in my filmmaking process. Even my producers at times wanted me to cut up the scene about painting with fire and the firing operations segment. You don't understand how important this is. There is an art to this. There is an alchemy to it and these specific humans are doing it.

There’s no replacing that.

I’m drawn to Hotshot culture because it feels like a time capsule. I’m a fan of the Old West. I feel connected to it. I’ve always been a nerd about Westerns and stuff and Hotshot culture feels like a time capsule. It feels preserved. When I see these dudes on the line, I feel like I’m filming World War II in a way. It looks ancient and time-tested. The risk of sounding like a dork, there's something magical about that. I was very moved by that and that informed a lot of my filmmaking process. I hope that comes out. If it does, you are going to feel that sense of humanity. This isn't just a mechanical war that's being rage.

You can recognize or automate a lot of it with drones and all that other shit, especially on the fuel removal stuff. You could but you still need human input. Were you putting fire on the ground? Anybody can put fire on the ground but to get fire on the ground to do what you want, when you want, and have the effects and the outcomes that you want, that's fucking art.

It's more important now than it ever was. My ancestors could light a stick on fire and throw it. We have too much of a fuel backlog from the 10 AM Policy for the last time we have. The fire death is too severe and we've placed ourselves in the middle of it, too deeply entrenched. I’m sorry but we don't have the luxury of being cavalier about it. You need very well-seasoned experts to do this work. Otherwise, you and I both know it's going to co-sides real quick. Now more than ever, it's more important to take care of these folks and preserve the legacy and the tradition because if we lose it, we're going to lose a lot more. We’re going to lose homes, lives, and all the pretty trees that we love.

Wildfire fighting requires seasoned experts. Preserving their legacy and tradition is important now more than ever. If they are lost, more people will lose their homes and lives.

Pretty much, that's what it is. As we're saying earlier, it's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when. It's an inevitability, not an eventuality.

I had the hubris knocked out of me. Being on the fire line humbled me and having some experiences made me understand my mortality.

It’s something very life-altering when you come face to face with your own mortality.

It's humbling and healthy. I needed it. I needed a paradigm shift where I saw something bigger than myself. For some people, it's nature. For some people, it's God. I think all of us need it. We need to see something bigger than ourselves. When I look at the way that we approach wildfire now, it feels like hubris. It feels like us deciding in our modern world that it's man over nature. I hope we can shed that. This isn't about self-flagellation like, “We, humans, suck.” My movie doesn't strike that tone at all. We're part of this world.

Take care of the fucking thing. You wouldn't shit in your living room, would you?

Also, don't immediately take things that seem scary as scary bad things. Have an open mind. Have a paradigm shift and understand that God and nature are going to move things in ways that we can't. That's okay. It doesn't have to be a scary thing. Let's maybe take a step back, view our place in nature, and take a look at our traditions because there's a lot of wisdom to be gleaned from 10,000 years of tradition.

Strike a balance so that the nerds in the lab coats aren't making all these decisions like they did on Jurassic Park. Ian Malcolm is saying, “You guys were so obsessed with whether or not you could. You never stop to think whether or not you should.” We live in this technocratic society where we've allowed ourselves with all of our fancy gadgets to think that we know best and that we can conquer everything.

We don't have to land over shit. Tomorrow, we don't even know if we could have a gamma-ray burst from somewhere off in Alpha Centauri or whatever microwave us and turn this whole planet into a microwave.

Imagine if Yellowstone blows. They say it's a mega volcano.

It will get dark real quick because we can’t see the sun. We could be our own demise and nuke each other.

That, too, or load all of our water with glyphosate and we all get cancer. It's not to be nihilistic and say we could die tomorrow. Fuck it with nothing matters. That's not the approach.

It's not important. It's 1999.

All things are impermanent. We have this tiny little slice of this planet. We get to have our experiences. It's our turn to be stewards of the environment and this planet. Pass on the traditions and honor the past traditions and not think that we're so fucking special. The richest dudes in the world are all going to die. You can't take any of it with you. Having a little bit of humility in the face of nature is very important. That is a lesson that I learned very starkly and harshly in my process of making this film. It changed me deeply. There's a lot of loss that I experienced and witnessed. My relationship went to shit and it burned up.

Now I have a new one. Justine has a new one. Justine has a family. She has this new destiny and she's so happy. I moved out to Tennessee. I’ve got my lady. We're starting our own family. We got chickens. We're happy. With every death, there's rebirth. This is a permanent infinite cycle. There can be sadness in it but you got to let it go. Embrace the beauty of nature and understand that. It’s like, “Amen. This is all part of it. It's all part of the ride. We get an interesting little slideshow that we get to view.” We are not that important. Even in death, there is new life. Again, at the very beginning of the movie, I asked that question. If life feeds death, death creates life. How can you separate the two? You can't do it. It's a permanent cycle. Have a Coke and a smile and enjoy the ride.

With every death, there is a rebirth boom. This is a permanent infinite cycle.

More importantly, while you're here, do some good shit. Everybody is capable of bad shit, but it's hard to do good shit. Do your part. Don't be a fucking tool.

Don't be a tool. Swing a tool and cut some lines. Serve and join a crew, even if it's a CCC crew. Put in a couple of years and serve your country. Go work out in nature and do something to protect your natural resources. I encourage everybody to do it. It's a great experience. When people watch the movie, a lot of folks are going to be inspired to do the work.

Absolutely, because we're hurting for people. There's a lot of shit behind that, of course.

We're going to get it done. I’m going to do clockwork orange style. I’m going to make every Senator and Congressman in DC watch the movie and hold their eyes open so they understand what's going on. We're going to get this thing passed. I don't want to be too idealistic but we all have a responsibility, whether it's personal responsibility, removing fuels, taking accountability, being stewards of the land, and personal responsibility within government and the society in which we live. Call your reps. Email them. I’ve been posted on Twitter that I emailed my two senators and my congressional representative in Tennessee. I posted one of the things that I wrote to them. Copy and paste it. I did a version for a Republican. I did a version for a Democrat.

I know we all have different angles that we look at this stuff on. That's fine. Different narratives work for different people but take five minutes and do it. There are widows who depend on this who feel fucking abandoned by not just the agency but by us. The Hotshots are serving us. They're serving our country and our community. We need to serve and take care of them. We can't abandon them. I’m doing the best that I can to try to make this movie. I’ve been giving way too much to charity because they've been way too many fucking injuries and fatalities. It's been a devastating year. I’m sick of it.

You have to rely on a GoFundMe and the luck of gambling on the internet to see if anybody is going to donate to pay for your fucking medical bills if you get injured on the job or worse, you pay the ultimate sacrifice. That's tragic.

It's insane and the family who you leave behind are not getting taken care of. We need to serve you guys. We, normies, need to serve the people who are serving us. It's that people don't even know that you are all serving. People aren't even aware of it.

There are so many miles on what we do. That's why I love your documentaries because it captures the essence, the culture, the work, and the importance of what we do. It makes it digestible to where everybody can understand it.

Hopefully, it's not so hokey. I don't think it's too bad. The reaction I’ve had has been overwhelmingly positive. It's been very humbling and it’s a big relief because I lost a lot of hair in the process of making this movie. Some of it was frankly worried about what the reaction would be from you guys.

That's compassionate in the highest form. You didn't want to let the people that you loved down.

There was a high level of trust that they let me come in, be next to them, and film. I feel very blessed that I got that opportunity. To me, I felt an obligation to honor that and to do my best. It took me a year and a half to edit this thing because I was trying to make it worthy. It can't be perfect. I wanted it to be worthy. That's it because what I witnessed over six years was an immeasurable effort by Hotshots and Wildland Firefighters in general. I felt like I had to rise to that level in what I do. That's why I worked so hard on getting my body in enough shape to get up there and spent the hours, the days, and the weeks camped out going to these fires. I’m doing the due diligence of trying to tell the story in a way that feels like it honors the level of work that you guys do.

I also think you captured it very well. You put your heart and soul into this film. I can't even begin to recommend it enough. This film is a fucking much must-watch. In fact, if anybody is tuning into this, which they should be, I hope they are because this movie kicks ass. Send it to your friends. Show it to other people, even to our own family members. You can circumvent a lot of the bullshit conversation behind the family dinner. You can circumvent a lot of the awkward conversations around, “What do you do for a living?” show them this fucking movie and they'll spell it out for you.

I know this full well having gone through a lot of Thanksgiving dinners back when Justine and I were together. Her family has known her whole life, let alone her career. They still think she slides down a pole and shit. They had no idea what she does. She didn't like talking about it. Also, how do you get people to understand it? This is a good point. Play the movie for your family and they will have a thorough understanding of what you do. They get a crash course and they're probably going to be sobbing by the end of it because they're finally going to realize how much you sacrifice in the process.

There are some heavy parts in there. I watched it with a couple of my buddies. That time, I asked you if I could show it to my co-workers. They're grown-ass men sobbing at some of the parts. It's wild, powerful, and moving.

Thanks. I will say that's been pretty common. I got a lot of texts from a bunch of dudes who haven't heard from in a long time. I didn't send them the movie but they got wind of it and said they were choking up. These are people I would never conceive of ever crying. That's not necessarily the measure of anything in particular but firefighters and non-firefighters alike are responding to it. The story of what you guys do has a lot of value. On a cultural, emotional, and societal level, it has a lot of value. I don't know if it has any financial value, but I doubt it. The reality is if New Yorkers aren't choking on smoke, nobody cares.

That's a faraway problem.

It's going to be difficult to market. As I said, I’ve already absorbed the cost. I don't care about that. The story has value on an interpersonal level. I encourage people to share it because we're so close. It's a community that I genuinely care about and I feel like we are at an inflection point in the coming days. There's going to be a serious reckoning if we can't get that pay increase. It's going to be bad. I don't know if we're going to be able to recover from it honestly.

If we don't get our shit together, we're not going to be able to recover from it.

I don't see that happening because where I see all that energy going is towards drones and AI. It's a huge mistake. For all the reasons that you outlined very eloquently earlier, it's a huge mistake. We need to preserve the human workforce. We need to see them as humans and as firefighters, not forestry technicians. We have to remove this technician's view of what they do and restore the humanity of it. It’s not just nerdy sentimental bullshit. I’m not in this world. I live in fucking Tennessee. I am a chicken farmer.

Putting all our energy towards artificial intelligence is a huge mistake. We need to preserve the human workforce.

You’re still doing well to live on.

Absolutely, 100%, but at the end of the day, I am out of that world. I’m not going to fires anymore. I have my own separate life. This isn't about sentiment. This is identifying an issue that we have in this country. If you are an environmentalist like I am, you care about our natural resources and you also care about the people who enjoy living amongst them. If we want to hang on to that, we need to hang on to these people.

We need to circle the wagons and support them because they've been serving us for decades with not a fucking mention. No one ever calls them a hero. You can't even call them a fucking firefighter. We just call them forestry technicians. We have to do better and serve the people who serve us. I can't stress that enough. This film was my effort to serve that community. Hopefully, I do no harm and not embarrass anybody. This was my effort to try to serve the community,

I’ve been doing some things behind the scenes that I know you're aware of to try to do my part and help be a storyteller and influence people who maybe need a little nudge to do the right thing. People need to understand they're all part of this. We’re all part of this Earth, wildfire, nature, this community, and our country. I feel like we were so polarized, divided, and disassembled. We had to satellite culture where we’re all in our own bubble.

It’s super tribalism too. The tribalism thing going on, which I can't deny. I’m part of it. I tried different shit.

We all fall into it. The thing is that's all make-believe. These are artificial divisions between us. It’s like, “You're a MAGA guy. You're a liberal. You're a woke person. You're a conservative.” All these tags are not real tags. The reality is we need to breathe oxygen. We need natural resources and clean water. We have to take care of the people who are serving us. You can't stand in the middle of an ocean fuel while it's on fire. There are real-life Wildland Firefighters who do not operate on paper fires. They operate on real fires. They operate in the real world.

Everything about your work life is very fucking real. It doesn't matter what you call it. It doesn't matter if the dude on your left is a Republican. If you're on your right, it's a liberal. It doesn't matter if he's gay, Black, a woman, or something in between. What matters is bare mineral soil. That's all that matters. Firefighters operate in the real world. I hope that the film can do something to ground us back into this community and realize that we get past the division. I see people coming at me from political perspectives. It's fucking nauseating like I said before. You never be able to guess what my politics are. It's so annoying. It's so important.

I don't even argue with those people. The number one thing that discredits anybody in a conversation is, “Do your research.”

Go on the fire line for six fucking years. Go out in the real world and do something. All this stuff is maddening. There is an element of tiny miss in the wildfire world, especially in the wildfire journalism space. I get heat from people for bizarre reasons. Again, the tribalism is so intense. If you don't talk about climate in a certain way, you have to cancel. It was like, “It's always a climate tonight. I don't talk to them.” Fuck you, dude.

There are nuances and there's no silver bullet to any of this shit that we're talking about either. There's no one-size-fits-all solution to any of it whether it be climate change, wildfire, or fucking politics. The conversation that you and I are having right now, there's nuance to all of this.

I guarantee you disagree with me a lot of shit. I’ve said some stuff on Twitter that probably makes you cringe.

There's some shit that I disagree with you like the year-round fire season. You say that fire season is not year-round. I do agree with you. However, the nuance of why I disagree when you say that is because the reality is that we can be deployed anywhere in the country year-round. We can return to service in our off-season and that's why I say it's a year-round fire season.

Fire is still popping up in Florida or somewhere in California. They're burning.

Just because September 2023 hits, it doesn't mean fire season is necessarily over.

This speaks to why we need all of our voices, answer bullshit, and be like, “You're not allowed to talk because you're a client of mine. You’re not allowed to talk because you said it's not a fire year.” Here's the reason why we differ. I’m on a crusade when I talk about that to educate people on fire behavior and to get more educated on wildfire because I’m primarily interfacing with a public who needs to understand fire behavior better because that is the big issue. They don't understand that they can do things in their direct life to mitigate these things. There's a time of year to do it. If you don't want to do your brush clearance in February, you want to do it on May 30th or even June. If you're in California, for example. I’m speaking about SoCal.

Having an understanding of what fire itself does, I understand the cultural approach of getting people to think that we need to have a year-round approach to tackling the issue of wildfire. This means you need to be paying people as full-year employees and do mitigation work before the fire shows up. My issue is that there are too many people, politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists, who will deceive you about fire behavior. When I talk about fire season, I’m speaking from a behavioral point of view and trying to get people to stop panicking and have a more rational approach to these things.

When you look at my commentary on social media, a lot of it is tamping down panic. It's tamping down this hysterical narrative that comes out of the media because it's not helpful. Panic doesn't help anything, but having a rational discussion demystifying how fires operate, I see as vital in terms of educating the public. I can certainly appreciate not wanting people to think, “These people should only be working between July and the end of October.” That means we need you a better job of telling the story.

Fires do happen in the middle of December. Look what happened in Colorado a few years ago. It’s the Marshall Fire.

Also, the Thomas Fire in Santa Barbara, my hometown. At that point, that was the biggest fire in California's history. That burns in December where we had nine straight days of Santa Ana winds.

They're anomalies for the most part on a matter of scale.

This is a rudimentary understanding of wildfire. What do you need for wildfire? You don't need a date on the calendar. You need fuels to be dry and ignition. Those fuels are going to stay dormant through winter.

It can be receptive fuel beds through the winter.

I have to push back on some of these nerds online who think that they're fire experts who were like, “We're now fine. We're starting to see what I’ve been warning my colleagues about, fires in winter.”

I found a fire in February in Nevada, Carson City.

It's maddening. You'll have multi-thousand-acre fires in February. It's less common, of course. Obviously, the peak fire season, we get it. There's always going to be some anomalies and nuance, but at the end of the day, understanding why a fire in winter is possible, even if not probable, but it's also something that happens every year. We do catch winter fires every year.

If you understand the fundamentals of wildfire, that's not a surprise. It's not some new thing that I’ve been warning my colleagues about would happen because of climate change. That's not happening because of freaking climate change. This is remedial stuff. Your fuels are still dormant. They're not taking water yet. It doesn't matter if there's snow on the ground. If those fuels are still exposed, they can still burn. Even after the green-up, there's a lot of dead grass that is still there underneath the green. That shit can run.

Again, this is remedial stuff. What are we talking about? We’re talking about fuels. We're not talking about the climate. I’m talking about carbon. I’ve seen fires burn in April that look like it was the middle of August in 80% humidity. The Palisades Fire a few years ago was 58 degrees and 85% humidity. This is on the coast. It rips off 1,200 acres. It looked like freaking August and it was because the fuels were so bad into paying a canyon. Some of the old people there are like, “That’s burning my lifetime in this canyon.”

We’re talking 70 years of no-burn history. That should be burning every few years. It looks like a rat's nest. The fuels were so bad. It overcame the climatic conditions that would normally suppress that fire and that's what people have to understand. When you're not taking care of the fuels, you can get bitch slapped when you're not expecting it like on these fires they were discussing. These anomalous fires are more likely if you're not taking care of those fuels. I take your point 100% in terms of trying to paint an image of fire being an annual thing in a full-year process.

That's including prevention, some suppression of the anomaly fires, and all the other shit. That's why conversations like this are so important to have the nuance behind it. It’s explaining what you mean by that because a lot of people are going to take it at face value and they have no frame of reference to go off of it without the education.

The thing is I will readily concede. You might be right that my approach in my rhetoric is not helpful. As I said, my perspective is I want people to have a better fundamental understanding of wildfire so they're empowered to take personal responsibilities. Ultimately, they can't rely on you risking your lives to be out there. They can't rely on the government because what if the fire starts right outside their house? The government is not going to have time to show up. My bias towards action is in the action of getting people to be well-informed so they can take their own actions and take personal responsibility. Part of that is rigid and direct education and strict enforcement of the normal application of fire principles.

I get a little too fixated on being stubborn about, “Peak fire season is not here. It's in August.” I’ll admit that I get a little too stubborn about that stuff because it annoys me. What annoys me is when I see politicians, journalists, and tribalist people who have an agenda about whether it's climate or some other political or bureaucratic thing. When I see them bullshitting people to try to scare them, that drives me nuts. Treat people like adults. Tell the truth and, as you said, let them ingest a nuanced discussion rather than something that's manipulative. I feel like when we try to tell people, “You got to be ready for fire year-round,” that's a little disingenuous.

Politicians, journalists, and tribalists with an agenda about climate change tend to scare people and push them to panic. They let them ingest nuanced discussions rather than something manipulative.

Again, it's going to be August. That's what we got to work. That's what we're gearing up for and timing our operations like I said. If you're like, “We got to get rid of our brushing in February,” don't do that. You're going to have to do it twice. As you said, this is a multifaceted approach, and responsible landowners, in other parts of the country, were burning and it isn't considered scary. They'll burn their property annually by themselves. They'll run the tractor and dozer around the property. They'll burn it off and do it a couple of times a year. You have to be diligent in order to be a good steward of your property.

Ultimately, what you said is possible. It's a nuanced conversation and we need to hear more voices and not have this weird cult tribalism because I don't think it's helpful for anybody. There's room for disagreement and it has to be predicated on some measure of humility. My baseline is God and nature are bigger than me. I try to filter my discussion points through that lens at all times. I’m not perfect and my ego will get away from me, especially on Twitter because everyone will give a shit because I hate social media.

To get the arguments with keyboard warriors, it's so futile. It's a waste of my time.

I know. I can't wait until the movie is set off to see so I can delete my Twitter account and never be on social media ever again.

That's-it-and-forget-it reproach.

You're right. I’ve had some intelligent people tell me to post and ghost.

Post and ghosts are a great tactic. I don’t get sucked into this shitstorm. Nobody wants that and I don't have time for that stuff. I get more important shit to do. I got to cut this one short, but there's a lot of stuff that we missed that we could talk about. Do you want to do another episode? Come on maybe before the thing hits whatever platform is going to be. You say Amazon, right?

Amazon should be the first but it's going to be on Apple, Vudu, and the Google Play Store. All the non-curated platforms where you can submit to Netflix are purely curated. It has to go through their approval process. They hand-select what goes on there but we'll be on Apple iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, and Google Play.

Copy that. I can't wait until it comes out and more people have access to it on a wider network because this film needs to be seen by a lot of people, particularly on the West Coast. It tells a very vivid story and it educates quite well. I love this movie. Fucking kudos to you.

That's very kind of you. I’ve been very humbled by your support and by the support of your colleagues. It's been a very rewarding experience. Thank you. If you'll have me on, I’d love to come back. I always love chatting with you.

We got to have another one because I feel like we have a lot more stuff to cover. For the end of this episode with Gabriel Mann, I always give the opportunity for you to give out some shout-outs to some homies, heroes, or mentors. Who do you got for us?

There are too many to name. First off, I want to thank my dime, Ashley. This is a very difficult process. I’ve got this movie that features an ex. She and I have our own life and she's going to live with that. I admire her so much for being so supportive and helping me get this movie out despite that emotional mind field. It's super impressive and it's not something that a normal person in any relationship should have to deal with.

You better keep that one forever if she's willing to navigate that.

Thank you to Justine and to her man because, in a very similar way, it's freaking weird. The ex is making a movie about her and this is a time capsule from years ago. They've got a family and they're happy. Both of them are excellent firefighters and good people. I’m very happy for them. I’m glad that we're able to get their blessing and get this movie out because I do think it's important. The patience that everybody's had is pretty impressive. God bless my producers, Sage and Phil. I’m very grateful to you. Honestly, you helped me along the way even though you didn't realize it. It's a small comment but I did fixate on it years back. They help guide me in the right direction. Thank you for your support and your feedback.

I appreciate guys like Jonathan Golden and Luke Mayfield. They're doing a lot of work behind the scenes. I’m swooping in at the tail end of the fruits of all their labor and providing a little extra flavor to it. I don't want to make it seem like I’m doing a lot. They're the ones doing the work. You guys have been doing the work and you do a lot. There's a part of me that wants to shout out some of the folks on the fire line. There's also a part of me that doesn't want to name them because they're still working. People need to understand that nobody gave me permission to do this. I just did it. If people asked me to leave, I would leave.

It's better to beg for forgiveness and ask for permission sometimes.

The thing is the California Laws are so liberal. I can do whatever I want. I think people were afraid to break the law and tell me to leave. These folks know who they are. The story that I told earlier about saving that corner of homes up North in Doyle, they know exactly who they are. I hope if they do read this, they understand that somebody noticed. Thank you to Ben Strahan. I’ll name him because he's been a strong voice, not only in the community but personally. He's helped me quite a bit and gave me some good support throughout this process. He's a very special dude.

Ben is a rad dude for sure. I appreciate what you're doing and the story that you're telling. The way you captured it is so unique and it's so easily digestible. It tells a bigger message to not only the general public but also tells us a lot about ourselves. I even picked up some nuances of the film like little things that I could relate to that I didn't think about before. Thank you for producing this film. It fucking kicks ass.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

We'll get you on for another one.

I’d love to.

Last but not least, where do we go to find your movie?

HotshotMovie.com. If you can't spell it, you fail at life.

Stop writing your applications for USA jobs and crayons.

HotshotMovie.com is up. It's available for rent and for purchase. I will leave it up there forever. If you purchase it, you'll always be able to stream it there forever. It should be coming out on Amazon Prime on October 2, 2023. It won't be free on Amazon Prime. You have to rent it or buy it the same way you would on my website. The only difference is that money is going to go to Jeff Bezos and his yachts and steroids. In HotshotMovie.com, it goes to me and my chickens.

We’ll support the film. I’ll keep pushing it out there. Thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate the hell out of you.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

We’ll catch you on the next one.

---

Ladies and gentlemen, another episode is in the books with my good friend, Gabriel Kirkpatrick Mann. There are two of them in Hollywood so the Kirkpatrick thing is important. Thanks so much for being on the show and giving us a little bit of the inside knowledge on how this movie was made, what it took, and some of the finer points in cinematography and the storytelling process that you so beautifully put together. I highly recommend this movie and it kicks ass. Support this guy directly. If you want to buy or rent the movie, by all means, please go directly to www.HotshotMovie.com. That way, he gets the proceeds. As he said, he spent about $500,000 out of his own damn pocket.

He probably has no plan on recouping that cost. Either he's high, crazy, passionate, or somewhere in between all three or a combination of all three. I don't know but support this dude because he is telling a very fucking powerful story, especially when it comes to the whole pay disparity thing. I appreciate that whole part without giving too many spoilers away.

Gabe, one more time, thank you so much for being on the show. As I said, go to www.HotshotMovie.com and check it out. As for the rest of you, you all know the drill. Stay salty. Stay vigilant. Hopefully, this whole shit show on Capitol Hill will start to shake out. I have some very unpleasant words to say about the way it went down.

That's Civics 101. Unfortunately, people that want to be obstinate on Capitol Hill decided to do that. Special shout-out to our sponsors. We've got Mystery Ranch, preparers of the finest damn packs in the damn country. It doesn't matter if you're walking a Wildland fire pack or other load-bearing essential pack. It’s hunting, fishing, backpacking, and all of that jazz. Not to mention that they got the name in the game when it comes to the Workforce Development Scholarships.

Go over to www.MysteryRanch.com and check it out. We got Hotshot Brewery, kickass coffee for kickass cause. A portion of the proceeds will always go back to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. Go to www.HotshotBrewing.com. Last but not least, we've got this movie generation AKA The American Wildfire Experience. Go check them out at www.Wildfire-Experience.org. It's awesome. Bethany, you have a kickass organization over there. Keep it up. That being said, you all know the drill. Stay safe. Stay savage. Peace.

Important Links

• Mystery Ranch

• Wildland Firefighter Foundation

• Hotshot Brewery

• The American Wildfire Experience

• We Move Mountains With Spoons

• Hotshot

• GoFundMe

• Luke Mayfield – Past Episode

• Ben Strahan – Past Episode

• https://www.HotshotMovie.com/Watch-Now

• https://www.Instagram.com/TeamsIqfuti/

• https://Twitter.com/Hotshot_Movie

• https://www.IMDb.com/title/tt22742316/

About Gabriel Kirkpatrick Mann

Gabriel Kirkpatrick Mann is a documentary film maker, cinematographer, film director, and producer with a love of all things nature (as well as his pig and chickens) who spent 6 years training with Hotshots, and following them into the biggest, most destructive infernos that California has ever seen.

Fire SoundsFilmmaking Processdisaster profiteeringFire PornographersClimate ChangeFuel Mitigation

The Anchor Point Podcast fire