The Wildfire Crisis: The Causes, Consequences, and Solutions w/ Steven Kotler | EP #144

Most experts believe that almost all the forests in the American west are going to burn over the next 10 to 20 years.

This is not the first fire. This is just the canary in the coal mine.

The downstream health consequences are really, really severe.

Here I am every day, working out, being healthy, watching what I eat, my sleep, all of those things, and I'm like, I'm sitting here consuming all of these poisonous chemicals that are going to take years off your life. We need support for the government to get out of the way of these entrepreneurs because they can solve this and they can make wildfires a thing of the past. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots, a special episode with my dear friend, my co conspirator, Steven Kotler. We're talking about the disaster after the disaster. While the world has almost forgotten about the Pacific Palisades fire, here in la, the disaster is just beginning. Or talk about how, first of all, you should be incredibly pissed off that all of this could have been prevented. Number two, that we're on the verge of the American Northwest burning. Not just la, we're talking about the entire American Northwest, as well as portions of Canada potentially being destroyed in the next five to 20 years. We'll talk about the data there. We'll talk about the incredible toxins released when, you know, hundreds of thousands of Teslas and flat screen TVs go up in smoke, melted and go up in smoke. And when you're looking at the AIQ index and its blue skies above and there's little smoke particles, low ozone, well, honestly, that is something that doesn't really matter because what you're not measuring is all the volatile chemicals in the atmosphere, all the metals, everything that is not being measured by today's systems. And we're going to talk about all that. Stephen, welcome, buddy.

Hey, Peter, it's good to be with you. Terrible circumstances, but good to be with you.

So I'm working at my desk the day the fire starts and it's about 11 o'.

Clock.

I look out my window, I see these black plumes rising. I'm like, what the hell is going on? I'm on a zoom, I'm trying to Google. I call Frankie, who's our domestic support at the house, over. I say, can you find anything? And nothing's being reported for like the first half hour, right? And ultimately this becomes the Palisades fire. And the numbers are traumatic. The fact that it started in the first place is no surprise. We can get into the details there. But I'm pissed. I'm pissed that we are not putting the tech in place to get this figured out. And while the world was watching I was getting WhatsApps and text messages and emails from, you know, Abundance members, Singularity members, XPRIZE members from around the world. Because this was front page news day on day on day as LA burns. And of course it's out of the news now. It's we've moved on to the inauguration and bitcoin and other things but guess what? This is not the first fire. This is just the canary in the coal mine. Stephen, let's talk about about this. Most people know you as my co author and an incredible author of multitude of books. Brilliant writer and I'm grateful for you and my life. But you've been studying this field. You've written an incredible white paper which we're going to link to in the show notes. What's the potential future here?

Let me put a little context around this. When I lived in New Mexico for two different summers, our house was, we lived in the country. Our house was completely surrounded. We had fires, three says it was raining ash down. And this was in a really rural poor community. Structures were burning. Was it, didn't it? We ended up, we were saved but our neighbors were not as lucky. And then in Nevada three, four years ago my wife was evacuated. I was actually out of town and she's evacuated. The fire got within kind of a half mile of our house. And then the next summer was the summer that most Tahoe burned. And after two years in a row of being evacuated, of living under black spies for three months and just the friends who lost their, their everything like like many friends in LA have at this point, it just spurred me into action. I just, I really took the, I, you know, I took a singularity university abundance like what can entrepreneurship and technology bring to this problem? And I brought you know, 25 years of my journalism skills and I, you know, I don't think I'm an expert but I sat in the experts for three years and I tried really hard to move the needle on this. Let's just start with what like the simple things that I learned because there was sort of startling. The first thing I learned is that most experts believe that almost all the forests in the American west are going to burn over the next 10 to 20 years. That's California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, up into Canada, Seattle or Washington or like all of it. And the craziest thing about it is when you actually get in the rooms with the experts, they're resigned to this fact. They're resigned to the fact that the, that the Amer, like literally the entire American west is going to burn. And honestly, if you own a home in the American west, they sort of think your home is going to burn too. And the only disagreement about the data I found, people nitpick it and look at it, but was it 10 years or was it 20 years? But what all the studies show is that once cataclysmic fires start, they don't stop for over a decade until all the fuel is consumed. And the fires started right over the past five years in California alone. Forget the other states that have also been plagued. We saw 12 of the largest wildfires in history were recorded right. In 2020, two fires crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains, which experts have believed for hundreds of years was impossible. They didn't think it could happen and it happened twice in the summer and, and obviously by 2025, the problem had become a cataclysm. When, you know, the Palisades and the Eden Fire, you know, but it doesn't stop.

But that, you know, the burning of the forest is just the beginning, right? Because it is just.

No, it is, it is, it is absolutely just the beginning. It's worth like the, the number you want to think about is it's sort of like woody biomass. Right? That's all the crap in the forest between the healthy trees and. Yeah, and what we know is if you can get woody biomass below 59% content in a forest, the fires will put themselves out. They won't explode. They'll put themselves out. Unfortunately, like fuel loads are basically north of 60% throughout the entire American West. In Lake Tahoe, where I, I live, it's 248 million bone dry tons of wood that need to come out of the forest before it's safe. Like you got to start, you got to process that. And that's just, that's just top right.

It sounds like you're sitting on a, on a powder keg of dynamite.

Well, that was, I mean, so the first thing that I learned when I, when I dove into this space is, oh my God, the American west is a powder keg. And it's, it's, it's very clear going to explode. And the experts have, they all know it's going to explode. Like that was what was so, like astounding to me is we have technological solutions. We have, everybody says LA is going to, like everybody had been saying for five years it was going to happen. In my experience, I think I spent three years with a team, an amazing team, of people, really talented people trying to, you know, start efforts in L A in Nevada, in Utah. We did meeting after meeting after meeting and couldn't get anywhere. Could like I have never failed so completely in an effort ever. And it. Fire is massively. It's hard. It's just a hard problem. There are a lot of stakeholders.

Well, here's, here's what I want people to be hearing here. This isn't over. This is just the beginning and it is going to get worse. Number two, you know, first of all, you can read the white paper. We'll put in the show notes here that Stephen has written. It's brilliant and provides all the data. Number two, there are things we can do to prevent it and preventing it, you know, we'll talk about. This includes a number of businesses, a number of approaches and strategies multimodal surrounding it that Stephen outlines his white paper. It also includes our $11 million X Prize wildfire that we launched. You know, I had my equivalent moment to you five years ago when I live in Santa Monica, right on the border of Santa Monica and Palisades again. You can see the fires and the smoke from the house and thank God our house was, was spared. And I'm living here in a friend's home, Georgios home here in northern Beverly Hills. And I'm grateful for his lending it to the family. But so going back to five years ago, we're being evacuated and evacuated. And I'm like, WTF is going on here? Why aren't people catching these fires at the beginning? So my first reaction on things like this is let's solve the problem. This is. That's always a solvable problem and the technology we have in hand should be able to solve it. And that gave birth to the X Prize. I'll tell us, we'll tell the story a little bit more later because it took five years to get that prize funded, which is pathetic and ridiculous that more resources aren't going. I mean I don't, you know, the estimates right now. What do you hear the estimates at for the losses in.

Yeah, so I like I that number's in the white paper, but I or that what number was in the white paper and I pulled it out. I the number that, that I've seen the most consistently is $250 billion worth of damage. Now that. And I put that. That's the number that put in the white paper. The numbers and the damage in the American west are hard to come by. Cal Fire, who may have the some of the best Numbers says it's 70 to $150 billion a year up till now. But even those numbers, it's what's uninsured, what's insured. The downstream health you've just pointed out, the downstream health consequences are really, really severe. I was from, from the fires in Nevada. I ended up with double pneumonia and then I got Covid and that was really complicated.

Yeah, we're going to get to this. If you can stick with us over this hour and talk about the disaster after the disaster, which means we've dealt with getting the fires out and people losing their homes and there's a whole slew of mental health issues and stress that comes along with that. But the reality is here we've burned how many total structures were.

12,000. 12,000 right now.

Right. And so an equal number of cars, if not double the number of cars and probably four times the number of flat screen TVs and all kinds of electronics. When those things melt and the fumes go up in smoke, they are not detectable by normal air quality systems. The systems that are measuring 2.5 and 10 micron sized particles and such are not measuring nickel, lithium, you know, volatile chemicals that are what can cause severe disease and damage. You know. And so here I am every day, working out, being healthy, watching what I eat, you know, my sleep, all of those things. And I'm like, I'm sitting here consuming all of these, these poisonous chemicals are going to take years off your life. So we'll talk about that because I think people need to realize there's a real tragedy that comes thereafter because there's this incentive to get back into your home, put the kids back in school. And honestly I've been wearing an N95 mask. They're not easy to wear for long periods of time and they're painful. Thank God my Tesla has got HEPA filter mode so I can crank it up to the top. Let's begin with some of the stats on this fire. I know people have heard a lot of it, but what originated the Pacific Palisades fire maybe was arson. The numbers I've heard, the details I've heard is it's winds causing above ground power lines to spark, its tree branches falling on power lines causing those to spark. And you know, the fact that we've got these high tension power lines running through wooded areas seems insane to me. Your thoughts?

Well, I have no more information than you about causes the fire. But the winds, you know, the winds that started there came, by the time they reached here, we had 200 mile an hour winds at the top of the mountains, which like, you know, that's unprecedented. Yeah, and it was unprecedented. I was with you in Los Angeles, right. Right before the fire started. And when the, our plane took off, it was, it was actually the most frightening I've been on a plane in a while because the wings nearly hit the tarmac. The wind hit it so hard, the wings dipped and on takeoff was really crazy. And I, and that windstorm that morning was frightening. Those were, you know, some of the worst Santa an I've, I've seen. And, but you know, having fires most of the time are down power lines and winds.

You know, 150,000 people have been displaced. I just this morning my family and I went to Santa Monica College and we were volunteering, sorting clothing for, for people who've lost everything. And by the way, if you live in la, this Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday, Santa Monica College has got incredible resources that they're distributing. So please consider going there if you need help. 12,000 structures destroyed, entire neighborhoods reduced to ash. You know, I won't go into the fact that State Farm, the largest insurer in LA, dropped 1600 policies in July of 2024. You know, did they know anything? I'm not a conspirist, but what they knew was the winds were coming and LA wasn't prepared.

They've been doing, they've been, you know, most of the big major insurance companies have been bailing on the American west more and more and more each year. And it's. If there was ever, you know, if there was ever a need for a blockchain based new kind of fire insurance, we're certainly, we're certainly looking for it.

Let me share a rant with you about insurance. I think insurance is a perverse and inappropriately incentivized institutional structure. What do I mean by that? Today, fire insurance pays you after your house burns down. Life insurance pays your next akin after you're dead. Health insurance pays you after you've gotten sick. There's a new approach and we wrote about this in future is faster than you think in which insurance prevents that from happening. Imagine if you bought fire insurance and they were able to use technology and the best, and we'll talk about these things to prevent your house from ever burning down. That's their first goal. What if life insurance prevented you from dying and helping?

Yeah. So I mean, like here's something, this is something like. Let me give you like just a really amazing quandary because this is, I had to deal with this after my House is on the edge of BLM land, which means myself and my neighbors were the firebreak. And so everybody who lives on the fire line has responsibility. So you're either, either your house is fireproof. We put in dust. We buried $20,000 gallons worth of underground water storage and put in industrial sprinklers that face in and out to create, to be able to create a fire break for it. We didn't want to do that. We wanted to put sprinklers on our roof because that's what the data shows is the very best thing to do. And if we were really smart about it, it'd be like a fountain where the water is recycled. Right. And it would be a closed lift system. But if you put sprinklers on your roof, it voids your homeowners insurance because it's an aftermarket addition. So it avoids your roof insurance and then avoids your homeowner's insurance. So you can lose your homeowners insurance for not being fire ready. But you can't get fire ready because by the way, that will void your homeowners policy.

So insane. You know, listen, I am so pissed off at the state government and LA government for their misappropriation and their lack of, of intelligence. Bluntly, I mean, it's funny.

Let me, let me say something because I, I'm annoyed and I'm annoyed actually at like our, our people entrepreneurs. I'm annoyed, I'm really the venture capitalists, like all the people, our community. That's who I'm annoyed by. And the reason is this. You and I have said this for a long time. When your deal governments move slowly, there are all kinds of entrenched stakeholders and entrepreneurship is faster into these things and can produce a lot of change. And the fire technologies have been developing for 10 years now. There's one fire fund, there's literally one venture fund for it. I think they're funded to the tune of like $35 million. So $250 billion worth of damages. The is the figure for LA. And there's one fucking fund trying to solve this problem and somebody gave him $35 million. I mean, to me, you know, like that's, I, I mean the state government is like, government is behaving the way government seems to behave. And I wish it were different, but it does. I don't seem to have any, any power here where, you know, I've seen, you know, things change is through entrepreneurship. But I don't like there are so many climate funds. Great, fantastic. What about like, why aren't we seeing the same attention play to disaster mitigation? Because we've been watching, we've been watching the disaster year after year, whether it's flooding in the American south versus fires in the wet. Like we're watching the extreme weather mountain, mountain mount. And I look at this and I'm like, okay, this is entrepreneurship to the rescue. And I'm not seeing the response.

It's a massive marketplace. Just to be clear, it's a trillion dollar marketplace. So let's make a call out to entrepreneurs. Let me tell you my reaction to this. And then I want to talk about the business ideas in your white paper, which are elegant. So five years ago, thereabouts, I, you know, I'm on my third evacuation. It was never this close, never this bad. And I'm like, there's got to be something we got to do here. And I said, obviously, the way you fight a wildfire is you put it out at inception, you know, when the fire begins. When's the best time to find a cancer? At the very beginning, at inception. Not when It's a stage 4 metastasized cancer that you're fighting on all fronts. And that's what we're doing today with wildfires. We're not fighting them at the beginning. We're fighting them when they're a conflagration. And we're trying to fight them with everything we've got. And we've got incredible heroes out there. Just to be very clear, the men and women who are on the front line, fire truck technology is amazing. All of the helicopters and aircraft. And I'm like, I snuck into my house in Santa Monica, don't tell the cops to go and gather one of my kids medicines and some clothes. Because I didn't take it seriously when I first heard about it. We went with minimal stuff. And I'm seeing the helicopters doing drops and I'm seeing the planes and it was like, go. Yes, go. It was amazing. But why aren't we finding it at inception? So I had the idea for an X prize that was monitor 1,000 square acres of land. And if you detect a fire that's 3 meters, 9ft or larger, or if it's moving, put it out within 10 minutes. That's the rules. Super simple. I'm not able to fund this anyplace. And people are saying it's a natural part of fire control, that forests need to have controlled burns. I'm like, that's not the point. There are places in our society where you should not have something that's 3 meters or size or a fire moving like in downtown Pacific Palisades, just don't expect it there. So let fires burn where they should burn in natural, you know, natural cycles of nature. But let's protect other parts. And so one day I finally got a hold of Dick Merkin, an incredible physician and entrepreneur. Michael Milken introduced me to him and I said, dick, I need you to fund the design of a prize. And I explained it to him, he said sure, and that's what I love. Elon Musk said sure instantly to $100 million carbon removal prize. And Dick Merkin gave us a half a million to design this prize. The prize was very simple. There are two parts of it. One part is from space. Can you monitor the earth for any sign of fires? That's one part global monitoring. The second part is can you provide a system that monitors a given thousand square acres, Call it Napa Valley, call it Pacific Palisades, whatever you want. And if it detects any fire within that area, again, not a, you know, not a person roasting weenies on a grill, something that's three meters or moving, put it out within 10 minutes. And that put it out within 10 minutes is probably the most important rule because in high winds, if you're waiting more than 10 minutes, you've lost it. So long story short, it took a while to get this prize funded. We ended up getting the Gordon and Betty Moore foundation as a co title sponsor. Along with Pacific Gas and Electricity. We got Minderoo foundation out of Australia, the Hilton foundation, the Lockheed Martin foundation, the American family mutual insurance company TEMIS out of Greece because Greece was being decimated by wildfires. The Roddenberry Foundation, Fairfax Financial, a couple individuals, Scott Painter, who had lost his home, committed a million dollars to this prize. And I just learned a couple of days ago that in the Palisades fire, he lost his home for a second time. You know, we've had a number of people. Steve Brown, my, you know, my chief AI officer, lost his home for a second time. And it's kind of insane. Long story short, we announced the prize. We have had 135 teams enter the competition. We're down to a final, 29 teams that are in the semifinals. And these teams are going to be using aerial drones, they're going to be using sound cannons, they're going to be using high lift UAVs, they're going to be using swarms of drones. They're going to be attacking this from every way possible. In order to go to the fire at inception and put it out immediately. See, that's what I think fire insurance should be in the future. They should be installing that. If you buy insurance.

I like your insurance ideas for sure. You definitely have my vote.

Okay, so.

And by the way, one of the things I, you know, it's interesting because when I wrote the white paper, I paid kind of the least amount of attention to fire extinguisher because I knew you were starting the X prize. I was like, okay, Peter might have this one. Like he's got that element, you know, in it though some of the, you know. I know and I this. The satellite data. I don't know. Like the satellite stuff is kind of amazing. We're already like I think.

Like Planet Labs 2000.

Well yeah, I think Cal Fire said that like it's, it's or NASA Fire detection is 95 accurate. Like the. We definitely, we definitely. The accuracy from the satellites is there. Planet boom is definitely well positioned. Will Marshall is well positioned. This is definitely a job for cubesats.

You said something before we started this podcast that I think was prophetic about. This is a job for robots.

Yeah, that's that. Maybe we'll. Let's start there with the technological discussion. The reason I was thinking about it is you and I were talking maybe two or three days ago about melting Teslas and flat screen T beans and the pollutants and the level of toxicity. And the first thing I thought was if there was ever a job for Elon and the. And the Optimus robot, it's this. And the reason is for your cleanup. Pardon me? Well, yeah, if you look at so many of the developments in robotics, early ones were coming out of Japan and they were disaster responses. Right. The. The Fukiyama Fukushima. Thank you. We're at the Fukushima in L town. Really triggered a whole new generation of disaster even wasn't am I wrong but didn't Boston Dynamics start out making disaster response robots?

It was for the military, including. Disaster response. Yeah. The Fukushima nuclear disaster where they couldn't get anybody into the reactor to turn the damn thing off spawned the DARPA challenges. Robotic challenges.

Right. That was it. Thank you. That's exactly it. So yeah, I mean we've just obviously we're working on a new book and we've just finished a couple of chapters on the future of robots. And you and I know that human eyed robots are really the next frontier. They're here, they're now. It's just about getting them to scale. And here's a phenomenal Opportunity.

You know, we launched this wildfire prize. It's $11 million purse. It should be $100 million purse. By the way, if you want 10x the purse size, just give me a call, please. And we announced it at the Capitol. And Palmer Luckey was there from Anduril, right, The founder of Oculus, but really has built a massive multi billion dollar defense company. And he got it and he said, listen, at the end of this competition, we are going to make wildfires a thing of the past. And I've seen the technology that he plans to use. There are other companies that are using these aerial jets, which can literally fly to the point of fire in a couple of minutes and then land and then blow those fires out. That's the kind of technology we're seeing. I think we'll have ground UAVs. I think we'll have humanoid robots on the ready. I mean, honestly, there's no reason that these should exist. So just to provide a few more details on the timeline here, April of 25, semifinals for the track A, which is the orbital portion. August of 25 is the finals for the ground detection and extinction. Let me do a call out here to anybody from the FAA listening, anybody from state government, federal government listening. I need your help right now. We do not have permission to run this competition in the United States because all of these teams are going to be flying aerial drones at high speed to be able to demonstrate and win this competition. You're monitoring a thousand square acres, and you need to get from one location to the next at high speed and be able to put out a fire. And when we run this competition, it's going to be real fires being lit. There'll be decoy fires, like, you know, a grill or a small campfire that the teams need to avoid and hit the fire that's 9ft, 3 meters or moving. And so we need permission to do this. So I remember, you know, Steven, you were there with me at the early days of the Ansari X prize for spaceflight. I had to go to the head of the FAA to get permission for the teams to compete. We need that again. Otherwise, we're taking this wildfire prize outside the US To a permissive government. And we would much rather, since the majority of the teams are in the United States. So we need support for the government to get out of the way of these entrepreneurs because they can solve this and they can make wildfires a thing of the past.

I'm thinking it sounds like somebody needs to donate an Air Force base. You Need a thousand. Right? Like that's. That sounds like a job for an Air Force base.

Sounds good. Okay, so any Air Force base commanders listening? We'll need you to donate your base and allow us to fly operations there.

At light fires, you can squirrel off.

The UFO someplace else. You can go after those. But let's get the fires lit and put out instantly. I'm excited about this competition. I've seen a lot of the technology. It's incredible. Let's talk about the ideas in your white paper and listen up. If you're an entrepreneur looking for a moonshot, here you go. I think there are incredible ideas for companies to be started, technology to be built, and solutions to be had. This is a multi trillion dollar. Let me just begin this way. If I owned a large vineyard and you had built technology to be able to monitor my vineyards and put out a fire at inception, I would pay for that service. Right. I think cities and towns should pay for those services. It's the way we should be ensuring our future here. Let's jump into some of your ideas here, buddy.

Where do you want to start?

I guess, you know, you've got a.

General high level plan before we get into technologies.

I always love starting with technologies, but we can go wherever you want.

Yeah, I mean, I'll just like, yeah, let's start with the technologies then. That's fine. The thing I want to say here is with the technologies I was looking at and the plan itself, like, I saw, like I'm interested in trying to solve any problem. And I learned this from you. This is literally stolen from Peter Diamandis. When you decided you were going to open the space frontier, you built a company everywhere around the space frontier you could possibly start. You just surrounded the space frontier and I watched you, I was like, oh, so that's how you do this? Peter figured it out. Okay. So when I was looking at the fire space, I was like, no, no, no, we got to absolutely surround the problem. There's a lot more going on. As you, as you pointed out, fire is a healthy part of an ecosystem. So if you're, if you don't want fires to burn up the American west, you have to solve a lot of other problems along the way. You have with drought, you have to deal with a lot of stuff. So I just wanted to surround the problems. So when we go into these technologies, some of them are, you know, at different levels. The, the cool one is because we talked about like, woody biomass loads are ridiculous. So when I first got into this space, there were Zero solutions really. And in the past five years there are now two really cool robot robotic Burn Bot and Treemack are both tree clearing autonomous robots. They've been using a friend of mine helps work with the Tahoe Fund. So is protect charged with protecting Tahoe and they bought some of these and the robots are amazing. They can do in two days what teams used to do in two weeks.

So these are, these are robots, they're.

Trying, these are robots, they climb up the trees, they will take dead trees, they will leave living trees, they will take brush and they reprocess the whole thing and like and mix it with this soil so you get the woody biomass gets mixed in with the soil so it's better for soil health that gets sort of destroyed and integrated in and just clears out the brush, integrates what it can into the soil load and they're really, they've got lidar, right. They're using AI terrain mapping, they're they target fire prone vegetation. Right. One of the big issues in la, well in California is that in the early years when the fires happened, what did we do? We imported eucalyptus from Arizona or from Australia because it grows really fast and it turns out you can't build houses with it and it explodes in fires. Right. It's deadly. And we've planted it all over California in reaction to fire actually. But we saw there was the burn but I think was demonstrated in, in Colorado and I think it was like a 30 reduction in fuel load and forest which is what you need to get it below that hazardous cataclysmic level. And if, and the other thing about it is if you see the terrain that's got to be cleared, it's really, I mean it's super steep, it's super rocky. You need technical climbing skills to be in there and work. It's not easy to get in there. So the fact that there's now robots that can help here is a really big deal but just doesn't have to go to scale.

On this note Stephen I'm assuming that there's plenty of room for innovation and improvement on this.

There's so much room for innovation and improvement and yeah, and there's, we need, they have to be taken to scale. Right. Like you've got two companies that are making these things. We need a, like a competitive marketplace and you know, what's the cubesat version of a, you know, that kind of robot? One of the other technologies again didn't exist back when I was first started looking at it. It's one that's most interesting to me is you can basically take a jet engine and use it to steer wildfire. So a company called firewirl that came out of the University of Alberta sort of started this and you can reduce. And they. They tested it in 2022 and they found they could reduce spread by 50%. This is like spear steering. You're steering a fire with a jet engine. And they mount them on tank tracks and move them around. So again, needs to go to scale. These should be on the fire. Like la, for example, Topanga Canyon, which has one entrance in and one entrance out. Like guard the edge of the forest with these jet engines that blow it, you know, in a place that it's safe and not in a place where everybody lives is one.

You'd think that officials would be like all over this tech, right? That they would be just, you know, so. An incredible member of the. Of the X prize team, Peter Houlihan, runs our biodiversity track of prizes and runs this wildfire prize. He just finished running our X prize in the Amazon, which was going into large tracts of land and finding by DNA across all species how to value that land from the DNA and the different species that are in the land versus clear cutting it. And he's bringing incredible technology to this competition. I was assuming, speaking to him this morning, he's. This guy travels around the planet more than I do. He's circumnavigating. He's somewhere in Southeast Asia at the moment. But.

So one of the. One of the other things you really have to talk about is this is one of the. So when I said earlier that fire has all these, like, weird entrenched stakeholders and everybody's at odds. So one of the reasons we're having such problems in our forests is it's not even if you clear the fuel. It's what do you do with it once you get some of this stuff out of the forest? There are not enough sawmills all over the American West. I love this. Closed. Pardon me. They've. They've been shut down. And now you've got this weird. It's these weird things. Like you've got. Wealthy people are like, no, no, not in my backyard. We can't have a sawmill here. And environmentalists hate sawmills because they think, okay. Because for years the lumber companies were just raping the. The western forest and they've changed and they're better and all this stuff has gotten smarter and more environmentally friendly. But there's residual anger. So a lot of the sawmills closed through one. People were Moving to the American west and not in my backyard. But like just to give you an example, we recently got, we meaning the communities in and around Tahoe, got a couple of sawmills open finally. One on the Washoe native reservation, amazing work they're doing there. And another we got an old mill to reopen, but otherwise they were having to take lumber. I think it was 100 to 200 miles away. So like you're, you're trying to get the fuel out of the forest at like you're putting carbon into the atmosphere to do it and you're just, you're creating more of the problem.

So how many sawmills do we need?

Well, that's an interesting question based on like throughput, right? Put it this way. The sawmill industry between 85 and 2016, 1985 and 2016 was a 40% decline, right? So this is if you're looking for a single number of why what happened in the American West, 40% of the sawmills went away. And so we have no place to take a lot of wood now. What you need is, are you don't and you don't, you don't want to create a single sawmill. That doesn't make any sense. What you want is a, is modular sawmills for sure. It's a, you want modular construction. You want. We were thinking about it when I talked about this in the white paper. You could build modular modular sawmills and franchise them. And they have to be environmentally friendly as possible. Right? They have to be carbon neutral, water wise, waste free. Right. Flexible design. And all this stuff has been done like this is not the innovations already. Like people have figured this out. It's just not at scale again. So the solutions are actually there. This is why I was so mad at venture capital. I was like, wait a minute, the west is going to burn. It's a trillion dollar opportunity. The solutions are there. All we actually need is money and.

Innovation incubators really to the entrepreneurs out there. I love this one, right. If you build modular sawmills that can be on demand and can be repositioned as the forests are cleared, you know, if, if some entrepreneurs and build it, I think it's a great X Prize opportunity as well here.

The better X Prize might be. And this, this is, this is where there's really cool innovation coming. But it really needs it. You want a market for woody biomass, right? The stuff that gets processed. There's no current really good market for it. There's a way to take these soft woods and turn them into what's known as Cross lateral timber that works. A really cool thing that we were looking at is biochar because you can take these, you can, you can use a lot of these software to make biochar. Biochar is amazing, right? For forest health. If you pre process biochar in the forest it starts absorbing moisture and brings back forest health. But there, there's a company, I want to say Korea, Japan, we were talking to them three or four years ago, they had found a way, a non toxic eco friendly metaverse molecular way to get treat soft woods to get them to behave like hardwoods. So all again the technology is there and what I wanted to do is sort of surround the problem with stakeholders. So I was like why don't we have Home Depot and Lowe's and all these kind of target. Right. All these companies in the conversation. Their stores are in the American. Right. They're going to burn too. And they should be in the conversation from, from start, from the beginning. This is like everybody can sort of win here if everybody's at the table.

There's another idea that you had in your white paper which I think is either an X prize or it's a business which is the biodegradable fire retardants. Talk about that.

Yeah. So those already exist, right. This was a really like it's a big issue right. When you're fighting fires all over the west and you can't poison the ecosystem afterwards or you're. Well you're la right now, right. Like that's, that's the issue. So Perimeter solutions has developed an eco friendly fire retardment made from plant based polymers and you can spray it from drones and aircraft and it uses create temporary fire breaks and in 2021 I want 2021 Cal Fire used it to protect, I think it was 20,000 acres of redwood and there was minimal long term damage. So like we've tested this at scale already and again this is sort of. There's a lot of innovation that can be done here because one of the things that you really want to think about is not just okay we've got eco friendly fire retardant. The question I would start asking is how do we make fire department that's actually good for the ecosystem. Like if we're going to have to spray this all over the place, why aren't we using this as a way to restore forest health? Which like if you want to solve the problem in the American west, restoring fortis health has to be a huge part of it. You have to restore aquifers and forest health and all this stuff. So we like you want, I say this in the white paper. Entrepreneurship alone will solve this problem, but it won't solve it fast enough. So you need a lot of money, a lot of capital, a lot of entrepreneurship, but you need multi tool solutions, a single solution that will solve six or seven problems at once. So if we know we have to restore fire, forest fire health, and we know we're going to be putting out wildfires, let's put it together. Right? That's, that's where that, and you, you know this from all your work with innovation. Whenever these things come together into a new category, that's, that's where you get kind of the most opportunity for innovation and money. Really?

Yeah. And you've made the, you've made the request for, is there a venture fund that could be built around this technology? If there's any time, I mean, if people realize, listen, the American west is going to burn. It's not a matter of if, it's only a matter of when. Is it 5 years, 10 years? Is it on the outside? 20 years? And if you live there, are you prepared to use the existing lack of systems as your, as your protection? Or are you going to say.

It's funny, Peter, I just, I want to mention that somebody called me up recently when the LA fire started. Somebody I worked on this original project with and they said, are, do you want to reboot this project? Are you ready to do it again? I was like, I, like somebody else will build it. I'm happy to be the figurehead. But I, like, I spent three years, I got nowhere. All I learned is that I'm not, I'm not the guy for this. But I mean, that's not, that's not my point. What he. But so the next question was, okay, if I, if I rebooted this, who should be at the table? And I was like, who should be at the table? Well, for starters, like the governor of every single western state. Like, like every major company in the American west. The governor of every major western state that everybody, I mean, like what it's gonna burn. And so it's either LA or we fix it. Like that's, it's an either or.

And honestly, if you're hearing this now and you ignore this, you can't, you have to say, we've got to change the game here. So as an entrepreneur, you build tech. As an investor, you back tech. As a, as a citizen, you vote in politicians who are going to support a change here. You know, we have the climate crisis is only going to make this work and accelerate things. And they completely screwed up Environmental regulations and building regulations that prevent you from doing what's intelligent and smart just is beyond me. Listen, I want to talk about something that is near and dear to my heart right now, which is the disaster after the disaster. It's the environmental fallout in the air and water, it's toxic exposure. And I don't think people realize this. There's an overwhelming urge and I'm fighting it right now, to go back to your old way of life, to be able to wake up in your bed and go and do your exercise routine and your normal everything. And so there's this desire to go back into your house and you're just not going to wear a mask and do the type of cleanup that you need to. So let's talk about what's in the atmosphere. So you've mentioned this before, right? Fire smoke contains particulate matter PM2.5 and PM10. And that's what typically can be measured. My kids school bought a device to measure that particulate matter. And I'm saying honestly that's not what I'm worried about. It's the dioxins, it's the furanes, it's the heavy metals that there isn't the technology. I'm looking online to find machines that can detect that accurately. And because that's what I care about, the stuff that you can measure, sure, let's minimize that. Hopefully the rains and winds will slowly move that away. But it's the other stuff. Thoughts?

It raises a lot of high level it made. When we first started talking about this, what I started thinking is does that like if does disaster preparedness in the face of climate change mean that we have to start building things that can be flooded, be burnt. Right. Like these things. Unless, unless we're actively solving climate change at the rate that we need to be actively solving climate change. The other option is right there's, these seem to be the options. Either we, we create stuff that can be waterlogged and burnt without poisoning all species, or I like, I don't know what Los Angeles does because everything that doesn't clean get cleaned up is going to leach into the groundwater which is already, I mean it's not like LA has an abundance of groundwater. If, if this is, you know, I think one of the things that you're going to see out of this and at least that, you know, the good news is five years ago this didn't exist at scale. But we can now build solar Power D cell and I think, you know, I think this is gonna like that's good. Seems to be, you know, can we do that fast and at scale and modularly. Right like that. That seems to be a challenge that LA is going to have to face very quickly because the water supply I like, I don't, I don't have. My thoughts are. Oh, that's my thought.

Yeah. Here's some numbers. PM2.5 which is a pollutant in wildfire smoke was found to be 10 times more toxic and causing respiratory issues compared to non smoke PM2.5. So again but this is nature going up in smoke and I get that it causes asthma. It's impacted you significantly from your, from your fires. Right?

Yeah, I got we, I like I and I, I've got good filtration indoors and I wore a mask but I have dogs and I had to walk like I had to you know, walk, walk the animals and you know, and definitely shorten the lives of my pets. You know what I mean? Like the other thing I need, we need to say about LA is the devastation for the plants, animals and ecosystems is just, it's awful. You know, we're already at the, in the work we do with dogs. We're bringing in dogs from la. We've got friends who are bringing them to places all over America at this point. But like the fallout for the plants, animals and ecosystems is.

And for the children who are going back to school and I'm sorry, the kids are just not going to be wearing masks in school. Here's another stat, right? Burning materials. These are the materials that are in the homes. The materials that our modern world of abundance has given us release volatile organic compounds like benzene and methyl chloride which are incredibly harmful even in low concentrations. After the fires at paradise, the benzene levels in the drinking water were 1,000 times above legal limit, which is insane. The long term risks involved increased cancer rates, cardiovascular issues, neurotoxicity. These are the same sort of things that we found after 911 when the towers came down and all of the workers and all of the local citizens were out in trying to support. This is the disaster after the disaster. Just to be clear, I want people to realize that this is very real. And you know, as I drive around town here it looks, you know, if you're not seeing the devastated parts of Pacific Palisades, it looks normal. It's a sunny sky, people are out jogging without masks. It's just not safe. We've seen toxic particles like lead that have traveled over 100 miles after a burn site, you know, and guess what? Once we start doing the ash removal and the cleanup in the urban areas, this can scale for scale the pollutants in the atmosphere for up to two years. So what do you do? You know, I'm like, do I. I.

Don'T know what you do. I also, I mean, the other thing that, that, you know, we haven't talked about is there's a level of the mental health, like people lost their lives, their business. I mean, our friends, they lost everything. Lost absolutely everything. The mental cost of that is extraordinary. The, like, identity gets ripped away. A lot of like, really core human things get ripped away really fast. And even the solutions, even from a mental health perspective, before we even get into the long term, just thinking on that side, the salute, like, there are a lot of mental health solutions. Flow, mindfulness, you know, all. All the things, they seem insane in the face of the catastrophe. You know what I mean? Like, fight back, but like, it's the only way to sort of recon, get control of your life again. And I think that rebuild alongside the, you know, the rebuild of la. I just keep thinking about. My wife, who's from California, once said that the California in the songs hasn't really existed since 1979, which is an interesting ide. But what I thought was essentially what burned was the California that has existed. Like, that's like the California that I know, which is post 1979. I got to California for the first time in 86 large swatches of that are like, it's gone. The whole memory, whole memories are gone that, you know, and won't be back in our lifetime, which is, you know.

The stat that I'm reading here in the research is that there's a 23% increase in suicide rates observed in the three years following disaster.

Yeah. One thing I want to. I want to say, just so people know, not that this is very helpful, but this is work that came out of the FLOW Research collective and was published in Neuroscience and Bad Behavior Reviews, if anybody wants to look at this. But it does re. There's the evidence has been growing that FLOW is a very useful tool for overwriting ptsd. And I'm not going to go into that, but, like, if that's I. And I don't know about you, but like, the two times that we. We dealt, like, I. I had legit PTSD for a very long time. I was waking up in sweats every night with nightmares. I was, yeah, I was, I was, I was. I did not take the fires well, when, when we were threatened with them and flow was useful for myself. So it sounds like a ridiculous thing like prioritize trying to get into flow, but you have to prioritize your mental health after a fire. And the reason I'm saying this after everything you just said is I was like, fuck it, I don't want to wear a mask. I want to go walk outside with my dog in the sunshine. Because I hadn't prioritized my mental health and I was sort of like scrap and I was making bad decisions and I. You were. I did. I ended up very, very, very sick afterwards for a while. I ended up with COVID and what should have been like a two week covet battle stretched into like three or four months before I was breathing right normally again.

I want to summarize this for our listeners here. First of all, I think the most important thing that was said was while the LA fires are no longer on the national and global news and people have moved on to the next disaster and the next problem. This is not the end of wildfires. The experts, as Steven said, predict that we're going to see the American Northwest, not just the U.S. america, including Canada Northwest, burn over the next five, 10, 20 years and we need to do something about it. If you're an entrepreneur, build tech and companies to address this, it is all solvable. That's the second point I want to make. You should be pissed off as I am that this was not addressed and you know, the water supplies being empty and the fire hydrants being dropped and all of those things. Yes, those were issues here. I'm pissed at a higher level that this has been known for a while. And why isn't the resources going in to address the technology that could solve this in the first place before it begins to become a wildfire? So if you're interested in that, check out xprize.org Please support the work of Xprize. It's working to help reinvent the future. And watch out for the XPRIZE semifinals coming this summer. Hopefully with technology that's going to solve it. Hopefully in time. If you're an investor, hey, I think creating a wildfire tech investment fund would be a brilliant idea. This is a problem that's only growing secondary to the climate crisis. If you are impacted by the wildfires here in Los Angeles, please realize this is the beginning of the disaster. After the disaster, I came back to my home with signs posted every place the water is dangerous. Do not drink. Do not bathe in it. Even so, we've got water Issues. But no one's out there saying, listen, don't breathe the air. Put not a KN95, put on an N95 mask. I went out and bought filtration systems. These are both HEPA filters and ionization filtration systems put in the house, in the kids bedrooms to try and clean up the air. But guess what? Every time you open the door and you trudge things in, there's lots of people out there saying, you got to wet wash, don't. No leaf blowers, no dry sweeping. We're going to have this gunk, this poisonous material being floated up into our lives for months, maybe years to come. Yeah, I can't wait for figure robots and Tesla robots.

Yeah, I really, I think once again, I'll listen to you. And I'm just thinking this is a job for like Elon. You want a place to test your robots at scale, baby.

Yeah. Anyway, listen, thank you for the white paper you've written, for your brilliance, for your passion, commitment. Stephen, I love you as a partner, as a friend. Please go in the show notes, get a copy of Stephen's white paper. I'll put information in the show notes about the X Prize Wildfire. Nousha Ansari and Peter Houlihan, thank you for all the work you're doing to run that. Thank you to our sponsors of that competition and support the xprize if you can. And please take care of your health. There's also a great. It's a two hour YouTube about the disaster, after the disaster, talking about water and air. I'll put a link to that YouTube video as well. It was a group of experts who were involved in other fire cleanups as well as the 911 cleanup. Education is your best friend. I don't want to cause fear mongering. That's not me. You guys know I'm the abundance guy. But longevity and health is, you know, the most important thing you can focus on. Steven, any thoughts to close us out?

Just that for all those impacted by the LA fire, my heart goes out to you guys. Thinking of you.

Yeah. 150,000 displaced people. I've met some incredibly strong individuals through this process. People have lost their homes twice. People with kids, people who have said, you know, we're learning what's important in our lives and it's our family. So. All right, brother, be well.

Love you. Peter, thank you. Thanks for doing this one.

Of course. Thank you.