Ben: 0:00

A lot of people don't know what a hotshot is. You know, I'm cruising around in green pants and a gray T-shirt, and I look like I, you know, work at a park somewhere cleaning bathrooms.

Dan: 0:12

That's Ben Strahan. He's a hotshot, an elite wildland firefighter, and he ain't cleaning bathrooms.

Ben: 0:20

So we are a crew of 25 people, and we go to the hottest, most dangerous, most complicated aspects of wildland fire across The United States. So we go to Alaska, to Florida, to the Western United States, all over, wherever the need is at.

Dan: 0:36

Ben's crew is based in California.

Ben: 0:39

Roughly, there's a 100 hotshot crews spread out across the nation, and 50-ish percent of those crews, reside in the state of California.

Dan: 0:50

Which makes sense given California's wildfire history. It's those big, seemingly unmanageable fires that hotshots are up against.

Ben: 0:59

Really, the bread and butter of a hotshot crew is we go to fires that are gonna be burning for a long time. These are the ones that you see burning and hear about on the news that are burning, you know, large scale 100,000 acres or more.

Dan: 1:11

Ben doesn't really think of what he does as firefighting.

Ben: 1:15

I don't really actually buy into the firefighting analogy much anymore as as a wildland firefighter. It's and as silly and weird as it may sound, like, I consider myself someone who really dances with it because you really have to, like, coexist with this element that is, you know, can be very aggressive and and very unpredictable sometimes if you're not paying attention. And it's about understanding, you know, what that environment is telling you. And there's so many things that are that are showing up in the moment.

Dan: 2:00

I'm Dan Heath, and this is What It's Like to Be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession. A seismologist, a hospice nurse, a Christmas tree farmer. We wanna know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Ben Strahan what it's like to be a hotshot. We'll talk about how a fire can create its own weather, what you can do to try and starve a wildfire, and what it takes physically to be a hotshot, and it's a lot. Stay with us. When hotshots are called in, they report to an incident command base.

Ben: 2:46

And that's where your operations, your incident commander, your logistics is all there, and all of these things. And there's usually a chow hall there, they bring in caterers. It's this place that we go, we call it Fire Camp. Most of the resources go in there at night, they get their food, they get their logistics reestablished for the next following operational period, and and things like this.

Dan: 3:06

So the crew gets its orders and then they have to get close to the fire. And of course, the wildland fires Ben fights don't conveniently burn near paved roads. So sometimes, hotshot crews will take a helicopter to the fire, but they're more likely to hike to it, carrying all of their gear along the way.

Ben: 3:26

So it's, you know, hand tools, it's medical gear, it's the ability to communicate to helicopters, it's radios, it's maps, it's compasses, it's GPSs, it's water and food to sustain us for thirty two hours, it's, you know, our packs, our gear, fire shelters, chainsaws, anything that you could think of for us to be able to contain and control the fire. And and what hotshot crews are primarily known for is creating fuel breaks. So we go out and we dig line, removing vegetation and ground fuel.

Dan: 3:58

When you say dig line, help me understand that.

Ben: 4:01

Yeah. So digging line, if you think of just like a single track trail that you might run or walk on

Dan: 4:07

Yeah.

Ben: 4:08

That's essentially kinda what we're looking at doing. We go in there with tools, various names of these types of tools. One of the famous ones is called a Pulaski. It's a axe with a a hoe end on the other side.

Dan: 4:20

Okay.

Ben: 4:20

And we're literally just making trails, you know, from a rudimentary kind of standpoint to contain the fire. And we can do that in two different ways. We can do direct attack, which is right on the edge of the fire, or we can do indirect attack, which could be like multiple ridge lines away. And so that's kind of our bread and butter, and we use chainsaws to remove brush, cut dead trees down, and so we make these swaths and trails out in the woods, so that when the fire gets to these containment lines, or if we're right on the fire putting in the containment line, there's nothing for the fire to burn.

Dan: 4:53

That's so interesting. And the trail thing is a really useful, I know it's not exactly that, but it's useful just to have in my head. Like, how wide does that have to be before you know a fire is not gonna be able to like jump over it and get to the resources on the other side?

Ben: 5:08

Yeah. Great question. So if we're doing a direct attack right on the fire's edge, typically, you know, the the flame lengths, the heat, the vegetation maybe is more conducive for us to be that close, and our specs are usually, we would say, ten and two. So a 10 foot chainsaw cut removing all brush and burnable material from the ground level all the way up through a canopy of trees, and two would be our scrape or our trail system that we would be creating as a two foot bare minimum soil scrape.

Dan: 5:38

Two foot. Okay.

Ben: 5:39

Uh-huh. Two foot. Yeah. And it works better than you would think honestly.

Dan: 5:43

That is shocking to me. I would have thought it had to be like 15 foot or something like wow, two feet.

Ben: 5:49

Yeah. And if we're in more of an extended attack situation, it could be multiple ridgelines away and we could be looking at using dozer line on top of ridgelines. It could be our two foot scrape trail, but it could be like a 50 to 200 foot cut where we're actually taking a lot more vegetation away because we're away from the fire. So instead of being right on top of it where we can kind of control the risk a little bit more

Dan: 6:15

Mhmm.

Ben: 6:16

We may need to put a much bigger cut in because the fire has burnable fuel before it gets to us. So you could have taller, more aggressive flame lengths and fire.

Dan: 6:27

And how frequently are you able to see the fire versus, you know, maybe working at the periphery where you think it's headed or something?

Ben: 6:36

Sometimes you can see it really well. I mean, there's a bunch of factors that play into that. Depending on the time of year, where we're at. Sometimes you do not see the fire actually. You just have a general idea of where it's at. You know, we have a our lowest level, like, marching orders for fighting fire, and it's called LCES, which is Lookouts, Communications, Escape Routes, and Safety Zones. And a lookout is somebody who is able to actually see the fire.

Dan: 7:02

Okay.

Ben: 7:02

It's really hard to get into an area if you don't know where the danger's at.

Dan: 7:07

But it's one thing to be able to see a fire, and another thing entirely to predict where it's going to go.

Ben: 7:14

Fuel and topography and weather are the primary motivators for the direction of where a fire wants to run. Right?

Dan: 7:21

Fuel, topography, and weather. Okay. Good.

Ben: 7:24

Yep. Yep. So wherever the wind is blowing is like a factor. Right? Because fire runs uphill primarily. If there was no wind, the fire would just move with the topography, move with the terrain. And it would follow the contents of the fuel that are in those particular areas. So if you have a very heavily brushed area versus something that's not, you know, it's gonna wanna run to where the fuel's at based on the topography. So if we have not a lot of wind, then we can predict that the fire is gonna want to move with the terrain and where the dense fuel is.

Dan: 7:57

Mhmm.

Ben: 7:58

Now, there's contradictions to that too because you could have something like a Santa Ana wind, which we see in Southern California, and then those winds come out of the east, and they'll push fire straight to the ocean downhill for multiple days in a row. So weather and wind can basically cancel out the topography in in many different situations.

Dan: 8:21

Have you ever been working on a fire where it was actively moving toward a town or a residential area?

Ben: 8:29

Yeah. More times than I can count. One one particular fire that was very impactful for me was the Carr fire, and the Carr fire was in the Reading area on 2000 either '17 or '18. I can't remember the year, but it made a massive push down into this town of Reading in Northern California and and got into that town, and it was a moment in my life where I had to question whether or not this is something I wanted to continue to do.

Dan: 9:00

Oh, wow.

Ben: 9:01

Because it felt very much like I had zero effect on mitigating any risk in the fire environment, and my sole purpose in that particular fire was to make sure people didn't die.

Dan: 9:15

What Ben and his crew encountered is what's called an inversion. Usually air gets cooler the higher you go, but an inversion flips that. There's cool smoky air close to the ground, and then a layer of warm air sitting above it. It's almost like a lid, and it temporarily suppresses the fire. But what crews worry about is when the inversion breaks. Ben described the break as being like a wood burning stove with a dampener. When you open the dampener, oxygen rushes in and whoosh, the fire gets intense fast.

Ben: 9:54

It was a very traumatic experience at the time where we had this massive break in an inversion where oxygen starts to flow back into the fire and you get this extreme combustion that takes place to where the smoke column rises super high and starts to develop these what we call pyrocumulus clouds, or it's like what you would see from like a lightning storm. These cauliflower mashed potato looking clouds really really high. And as that heat rises, it condenses in the colder air and that mashed potato cloud gets really heavy and it collapses. And when that collapses, it brings down superheated air down to the ground level and shoots it out in every direction and you can have massive amounts of combustion in an area very very quickly and instead of air being very directional, it's going everywhere.

Dan: 10:48

That's terrifying. It's like the fire's creating its own weather.

Ben: 10:52

Correct. It is exactly doing that. Yeah.

Dan: 10:55

And were you and your crew at risk during that time?

Ben: 10:59

No. We we saw it coming, fortunately. Again, you know, we're paying attention to the fire environment. This is our skill set. Paying attention to the fire environment and we're seeing cues. We're seeing, oh, you know, an inversion sits down and you can't see the sky. It's like being in fog. And when that inversion's down, air is not getting into the actual fire on the ground, so it's kind of keeping everything kind of tampered down a little bit.

Dan: 11:23

Mhmm.

Ben: 11:23

But once the inversion breaks, you start to see blue sky a little bit, or you start to notice trees moving a little bit, like, okay, the inversion's getting ready to break. And we noticed these cues start to happen, fire starts to pick up, and we are like, hey, we need to start getting people to a safe place. So we already had established a safety zone, so we started heading down there and starting assessing where the fire might potentially want to go, so that we could prepare for that fire to get there and take action. But in this particular case, the combustion was so intense that the column actually collapsed over the top of us and there was really nothing we could do.

Dan: 11:58

So the wildland fires Ben and his crew are trying to contain are sprawling and complex. And Ben says the fact that we even have hotshot crews mobilized against them is remarkable.

Ben: 12:10

I had this idea about this not that long ago. Wildfire is like the only natural disaster that we're actually trying to influence.

Dan: 12:19

That's a great point.

Ben: 12:22

You know, we're not trying to put a cork on a volcano, you know, or it's like it's mother nature. It's very powerful. And if you don't respect that and work with it, instead of like putting pressure on it to like manipulate it, a lot of times you're gonna get bit in the butt. So we very much take that perspective of like, hey, we can do work here to maybe contain and control a specific area and guide it into a place and or remove enough burnable fuel ahead of the fire so that when it reaches that point, it it doesn't wanna move any further in the direction we're trying to keep it away from.

Dan: 13:00

I'm just trying to get I I still feel like I'm struggling with the basic idea that a crew of 20 people can just, you know, not with fire trucks or we're talking about just backpacks and axes and and other hand tools

Ben: 13:14

Mhmm.

Dan: 13:15

Can, like, meaningfully influence a wildfire. Like, that's a kinda superpower. I mean, it just seems like the ultimate David and Goliath story, is it not?

Ben: 13:24

Yeah. Totally. I mean, it feels that way sometimes. You know? There's there's lots of times you put put work in for multiple days or weeks in a row and the fire just says, don't care what you just did. I'm gonna go over this thing and then you gotta start over again, you know. And and but we also use other tools too, like we fight fire with fire.

Dan: 13:43

How so?

Ben: 13:44

Yeah. One of our greatest tools as a hotshot crew is to if we are doing an indirect attack, so we're away from the main edge of the fire, main body of the fire, say a couple of ridgelines away, we put in the work necessary to hold an area so that when the fire gets there, it doesn't want to move past that line. And one of the ways that we do that is we will do something called back burning.

Dan: 14:08

Mhmm.

Ben: 14:08

So we'll actually use fire, we'll put fire on the ground burning off of the control line that we used and creating a much bigger buffer before that fire gets there. So you could have that ten and two situation that I talked about with our cut in our hand line, could be a two foot hand line and a 3,000 foot backburn that removed all of the ladder fuels that a fire would burn to before it approaches that area. So it basically hits that burned area that we already put in, and it just stops. After the break, where a hotshot crew sleeps while they're on assignment, stay with us.

Dan: 14:56

Hey, folks. Dan here. A hearty hello to the many new listeners who have joined us during the air travel series. Welcome to you all. One thing you may not realize is that this is not a big corporate show. It's just Matt and me, a labor of love. And because of that, we rely so much on our listeners for help in making the show. So just as an example, of the five guests that were in the air travel series, two came directly from suggestions you made and a third saw a LinkedIn post of mine and volunteered themselves. So for all of you, newcomers and old timers alike, we always want to hear your ideas for professions and your recommendations for specific people who love their work and are good talkers. Just email us anytime at jobs@whatitslike.com. And now, back to the show. Before a hotshot crew start to work on a fire, they identify two things, an escape route to follow in case things go bad, and the location of a safe zone where the fire can't touch them.

Ben: 16:14

It's described often in our documents as a place that you could lay out a lawn chair and sit and watch the fire go by.

Dan: 16:23

So no vegetation, rocky, or like what concretely would be the characteristics?

Ben: 16:29

Yeah. It could be a large gravel parking lot. It could be an actual parking lot. It could be a body of water. It could be a place where there's no vegetation at all. It could be large rock outcroppings. It could be the top of a ridge line where a bunch of bulldozers like leveled out a place that's nice and flat with no burnable material. So it's like a dirt parking lot on top of a ridge. It could just be getting in our trucks and driving away.

Dan: 16:55

I asked Ben where his crew usually slept, and he said, sometimes it's near the incident command base, which we talked about earlier. But he said, they actually prefer to stay closer to the action.

Ben: 17:07

We prefer what we would call spiking out. So it looks like camping, but we call it spiking out because we're just sending a spike into the ground, we're gonna lay down right here, throw our sleeping bags out, sleep, wake up, and be right where the fire's at so we can get to work right away.

Dan: 17:22

Wow.

Ben: 17:23

Especially when there's a need for it. So we work from zero six hundred to twenty two hundred, sixteen hour days.

Dan: 17:31

Wait. That's the routine? Sixteen hour days? Like that's normal?

Ben: 17:36

Yeah.

Dan: 17:36

Holy cow.

Ben: 17:38

And during the off time, we're just sleeping in the dirt. So sixteen hour days, sleeping in the dirt, rinse and repeat, two weeks at a time from basically June to December.

Dan: 17:49

Holy cow. Man, that's a lot of time away. I mean And it's not like you can jump on a Zoom in the middle of the forest, know, it's probably hard to communicate even given that.

Ben: 18:01

Oftentimes we're in places we can't. Yeah.

Dan: 18:04

So what I mean, what effect does that have on your life just that time away?

Ben: 18:11

Well, I'm divorced, so that paints a little bit of a picture.

Dan: 18:14

Yeah.

Ben: 18:17

And a lot of us get divorced, know. I think it takes a very strong family dynamic. It takes a partner or significant other back at home that is independent for sure and has the, again, the mental fortitude to get through things with you being gone, then it's it's can be rare.

Dan: 18:36

As you might imagine, given this description, it takes a special kind of person who not only is willing to do this work, but is physically able to do it.

Ben: 18:47

You know, science tells us that our energy expenditures at the highest peak are during the hike in and the hike out of our work site. So I tell people, you should be at least able to run 10 miles if I say today we're running 10 miles.

Dan: 19:02

Mhmm.

Ben: 19:03

You should be able to calisthenically move your body in a healthy way that allows you to do a certain amount of pull ups, certain amount of push ups, certain amount of sit ups, things of this nature. Know, it's just can you get through it? Can you work your body enough to get through that recovery and keep working?

Dan: 19:17

That is I mean, just the sheer endurance factor just seems like the thing that really pops out here, on for sixteen hours a day. Like, if if you ran a half marathon with your buddies, that that is a very different animal than the eighth consecutive day of sixteen hours of swinging an axe and hiking through difficult terrain. Does that mean this is primarily, like, a a young person's game?

Ben: 19:41

I think so. You know, I'm I'm I'll be 44 in June and, you know, my body's although I've taken really good care of it, you know, it's I can't show up the same way that 20 year olds can. That's for sure.

Dan: 19:56

What kind of mistakes did you make early as a superintendent that you wouldn't make now?

Ben: 20:04

Trying to prove my worth. You know, as I when I got the job, like I said, there's maybe maybe a 100 hotshot crews, that means there's maybe a 100 hotshot superintendents. And when I got the job, I was very hungry to prove myself that I deserved to be there.

Dan: 20:25

Yeah.

Ben: 20:26

And we didn't make any mistakes where people were at more risk than they should have been or you know, we didn't have any close calls, but I burned the candle at both ends immensely. And that had a huge effect on who I was and how that was bleeding into the crew in terms of just rest and recovery. I just wanted a hard charge all of the time and be the tip of the spear all of the time. And as I've learned how to exist in this role, you don't have to do that that much. And and in fact, it's allowed me to step back a little bit further and be more in an observation role and actually see where we need to push hard, where we need to let off. And I would say that that was probably you know a mistake or a very a learning point in my career for sure.

Dan: 21:20

Was there a particular moment when that that bias that you had of you know, trying to be the best, trying to push for a little bit more became apparent to you?

Ben: 21:32

Yeah. For sure. So I got the job in 2020. In 2020, we had this I don't know if anybody remembers, there's this thing called COVID.

Dan: 21:42

Rings a bell. Yeah.

Ben: 21:44

Yeah. So first year superintendent and COVID was going on, and we happened to have, in my opinion, the most aggressive fire season that I've ever been a part of. We had a million acre fire in Northern California along with multiple 100,000 acre fires all over the country, definitely in the state of California too. So it was, to say the least, very very very aggressive. And so we were pushing so hard that year partly because we kinda had to, but partly because I didn't know how not to. And again, I was trying to prove myself. And it got to the point where at the end of that fire season, I was shot. I was so shot physically, emotionally, mentally that I started experiencing depression for the first time in my life. And in December, I actually tried to commit suicide.

Dan: 22:38

Oh, man.

Ben: 22:39

And so that was a huge wake up moment for me as an individual in terms of what it is that I how am I showing up for myself, and how is that version of myself bleeding into the people that I lead. And how do I navigate that space so that I can be present of mind, body, and spirit, so that the individuals who who follow me willingly are learning from my mistakes on how to navigate just not only the fire environment but life in general. Like I again, fire is a job that I've chosen to do but this is life stuff. Everything we do in these paths that we choose has trickle effects in every aspect of things that we do whether that's with our family, ourselves, whatever.

Dan: 23:28

What helped you come back from that time?

Ben: 23:34

The realization that I think a lot of people can relate to this but specifically first responders and veterans and these people that I work with now outside of this and from breathing from this experience is like we identify with what we do. We identify with what a hotshot is, what a firefighter is, and we label that and slap it on our forehead. And you know, a hotshot to me was this rough, tumbly, nothing can affect you, you can push through anything situation. And that only gets you so damn far when one of your friends dies, or somebody you know passes away from a fire, or someone that you know commits suicide, or whatever challenge that you may be existing and and you start to feel things that don't relate to the identity that you've created in your mind anymore.

Dan: 24:29

Because you're supposed to be impervious.

Ben: 24:32

Exactly. But now you're emotional. Now you're now you can't connect with your family. Now you can't connect with yourself.

Dan: 24:39

Mhmm.

Ben: 24:39

Some people lose their faith. Some people can't, you know, run and work out anymore. Some people just they they start to question things. Who am I now after all of this? And to me, going through that it was a wake up call to realize that being a hotshot is just an aspect of my life, it's not who I am. It's just something I I do and it is a part of my identity but it's not the whole picture.

Dan: 25:06

What what is the culture like on your hotshot crew? Like how would you describe it to an outsider?

Ben: 25:13

Well, they're a bunch of really hungry people that enjoy suffering together. So that part's pretty cool, know.

Dan: 25:23

Communal masochism.

Ben: 25:25

Yeah. Shared suffering is a really great place to grow a family, you know?

Dan: 25:32

You know, on that point, I mean, you're half joking, but, you know, there's there's a fair amount of research that says when groups, especially, like if you ask people that have been part of groups what they remember, a lot of times what they recall are not like the happy, fizzy, bubbly moments, but the but the moments when they suffered in the service of something important, which is exactly what you're describing.

Ben: 25:55

Absolutely. And putting all joking aside, it is something that I have come to appreciate. Maybe not the most, but definitely it's up there in the top three probably is how trained individuals who come together willingly to dedicate their lives and their service for something bigger than themselves knowing that they're going to suffer through things and how they're going to do that together is something extremely profound. It builds relationship and bonds that never break. And even though you can experience something tragic from time to time, you have people you can lean on that understand you. They experienced it next to you sometimes. And and those types of individuals, they become with no joke at all, the essence of what a true family member is. Someone that you truly love.

Dan: 26:49

So Ben, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. What is a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know, and what does it mean?

Ben: 27:02

Sure. Embrace the suck.

Dan: 27:05

Embrace the suck. Okay.

Ben: 27:07

Yeah. So what it means is obviously when things get sucky and hard, embrace it. Don't get sucked into it.

Dan: 27:15

That's the shared suffering.

Ben: 27:17

That's the shared suffering. Yep.

Dan: 27:20

What is the most insulting thing you could say about a hotshot's work?

Ben: 27:25

Two more chains. What does that mean? So a chain is 66 feet, that's how we measure things out in the wildland area. When a hotshot's cutting line all dang day and I come up, I'm like, man, you only got two more chains left and it's more like 10. So you know when I say two more chains that I'm lying to you.

Dan: 27:44

What is a tool specific to your profession that you really like using?

Ben: 27:49

It's more this tool is more of something that we use to for planning and it's called the time wedge.

Dan: 27:55

Okay.

Ben: 27:55

And what this means is an 80% plan now is better than a 100% plan too late.

Dan: 28:01

Give me an example of how that would play out like in a real situation.

Ben: 28:05

Yeah. So when you're fighting fire, you may not have all of the information yet. And so it can be easy for individuals to get caught in this place. Well, we're gonna wait until things evolve and we have that 100% plan, but the fire environment's changing all the time.

Dan: 28:20

Yeah.

Ben: 28:21

So what we say is like, okay, well, we we may not have the 100 plan now, but we have an 80% plan. We can get to work in a safe way while the plan is still developing. So that way when the 100% plan shows up, we've already started it.

Dan: 28:35

What phrase or sentence strikes fear in the heart of a hotshot?

Ben: 28:41

Standby for emergency traffic. So when we are on a fire, we have something called an incident within an incident, IWI, and that's when typically somebody gets hurt. And so when when someone says standby for emergency traffic over the radio, everybody holds their breath.

Dan: 29:01

Right.

Ben: 29:02

Yeah.

Dan: 29:03

And how common is it for people to be hurt or killed on the job?

Ben: 29:09

I mean it's fairly common. I mean I hate saying that but it is very common. It doesn't happen every assignment that we go on that we're a part of but it does happen about every fire for sure.

Dan: 29:21

Oh wow. I mean it's it's gotta be one of the most dangerous jobs out there.

Ben: 29:27

Yeah. Maybe outside of being in the military and getting shot at, I would say it's probably up there for sure.

Dan: 29:35

What's a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?

Ben: 29:40

The blissful humming of chainsaws running, the sounds of hand tools, metal hitting rocks, the clinging clink clink clink. Or the three beeps when a when a call comes in. Beep beep beep and then we know standby, you know, there's a fire.

Dan: 30:00

What about the fire itself? What do you hear when you're near a fire?

Ben: 30:06

Yeah. Depending on how aggressive it is, it could be just crackling or it could sound very much like a freight train where it's so loud you can barely hear the person standing next to you.

Dan: 30:15

Really?

Ben: 30:16

Yeah. Literally just sounds like loud engine noise. Why do you think this job appealed to you? There's something so raw and simple about what we do. In in terms of all the things that are taking place in the world in terms of technology and and all of this stuff, like we're kind of fighting fire the same way we've always done it. You know, we're using the Native Americans used fire to suppress fire. They built hand line, they removed fuel, like, and we've been doing it the same way since our ancestors have done it. And when you're out there in some of the most remote places in the country, you get this sense of peace that is just It's so hard to match in other places and you're doing something that feels like you're giving back to this life that we all share. And it's really incredible.

Dan: 31:24

Ben Strahan is the superintendent of a hotshot crew based in California. Something's been bugging me since I talked with Ben. Money. So based on what I learned, many hotshots earn between 50 and $80 grand annually based on a bunch of factors and crew leaders like Ben might see six figures in a busy season. But something about those numbers just feels off. I mean, these are people working sixteen hours a day through fire season, sleeping in the dirt so they can get up and cut line again in the morning, all to prevent devastating property damage and to protect human life. And we pay them like call center managers. Now, look, I've taken my economics, so I know the objection. Supply and demand, nobody's forcing anyone here. People know the pay scale. So why do so many of them choose the work anyway? Isn't the obvious answer here that people are hungry for a job with meaning, adventure, a mission, camaraderie, the chance to do some good? Notice though what economics does with that hunger. It says, since these people are getting non monetary value from the work, we can pay them less. The meaning is treated as part of the paycheck, which means that the more meaningful a job is, the less you have to pay someone to do it. We all understand this trade. I mean, I suspect every last one of us would take a low paid teaching job over a higher paid job at the slaughterhouse. But step back for a second, notice who's paying for that arrangement. It's not the school district, and it's not society. It's the teacher. It's the hospice nurse. It's the 22 year old hotshot with a chainsaw at the edge of a fire. I don't have any grand answer here. I'm not an economist or a politician, but it just seems like a very strange feature of our world that there is effectively a tax on meaningful jobs, and it's collected from exactly the people doing the work we admire most. Dancing with fire instead of fighting it, spiking out close to the action, cutting ten and scraping two, building bonds through shared hardship, and turning physical endurance into a public service. Folks, that's what it's like to be a hotshot. Thanks to everyone who's left a review on Apple Podcasts, KA Johnson, Kms2nnnn, Karl Kranich, M Senn, Yufyu. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.