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 and the coal mine the downstream Health consequences are really really severe here I am every day working out being healthy what 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 they’re 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 Cotler we’re talking about the disaster after the disaster while the world has almost forgotten about the Pacific Palisades
[00:01:01] fire here in La the disaster is just beginning we’re 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 uh potentially being destroyed in the next 5 to 20 years we’ll talk about the data there we’ll talk about uh 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 it’s 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
[00:02:00] in the atmosphere all the metals everything that is not being measured by today’s systems um 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 11:00 I look out my window I see these black plumes Rising I’m like what the hell is going on uh I’m on a zoom I’m trying to Google I call Frankie who’s our domestic support at the house uh over say can you find anything and nothing’s being reported for like the first half hour right and ultimately this becomes the Palisades fire uh and the numbers are are traumatic the fact that it started in the first place is no surprise we can get into the details there but uh I’m pissed I’m pissed that we are not putting the tech in place to get this this uh get this figured out and while
[00:03:02] the world was watching I was getting you know whatsapps and text messages and emails from you know abundance members Singularity members ex prise 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 and the coal mine uh Stephen let’s talk about about this I most people know you as my co-author and an incredible uh author of multitude of books a brilliant writer and I’m grateful for you in 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 uh what’s the potential future here let me put a little context around this uh when I lived in New Mexico uh
[00:04:00] for two different Summers our house was we lived in the country our house was completely surrounded we had fires on three s it was raining Ash down and uh this was in a really rural poor Community structures were burning was it didn’t it we ended up uh we were saved but our neighbors were not as lucky and then in Nevada three four years ago uh 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 of Tahoe burned and after two years in a row of being evacuated of living under black skies 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 uh I you know I took a singularity University abundance like what can entrepreneurship and Technology bring to this problem and I brought you
[00:05:01] know 25 years of my journalism skills and I you know I don’t think I’m an expert but I sat in the room with experts for three years and I tried really hard to move the needle on this and let’s just start with what like the simple things that I learned because there it 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 dtas 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 America 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 people nitpick it and look at it
[00:06:00] 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 cross the Sierra Nevada mountains which experts have believed for hundreds of years was impossible they didn’t it could happen and it happened twice in the summer and obviously by 2025 the problem had become uh a cataclysm when you know the Palisades and the in fire you know but it doesn’t stop but that you know the burning of the forest is just the beginning right because no it is it is it is absolutely just the beginning it’s worth like the the number you want to think about uh is it’s sort of like Woody biomass right that’s all the crap in the forest between the health trees
[00:07:00] yeah and what we know is if you can get Woody biomass below 59% Continental 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 SA you got to start you got to process that and that’s just that’s just tough right it sounds like you’re sitting on a on a powder keg of dynamite that’s well that was I mean so the first thing that I learned when I when I dove into the 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
[00:08:00] 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 LA in Nevada in Utah we we did meeting after meeting after meeting and couldn’t get anywhere couldn’t like could I 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 um this isn’t over this is just the beginning uh and it is going to get worse uh number two you know first of all you can read the white paper we’ll put in the show notes here that Steph is written it’s brilliant um and provides all the data uh number two uh there are things we can do to prevent it and preventing it you know we’ll talk about this includes uh a number of of bus businesses a number of approaches
[00:09:01] and strategies multimodal surrounding it that stepen outlines his white paper it also includes our $1 million xprize wildfire that we launched you know I had my equivalent moment to you uh 5 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 um and um living here in a friend’s home uh Georgio home here in Northern Beverly Hills uh and I’m grateful for his lending it to the family but uh so going back to 5 years ago we’re being evacuated and evacuated and I’m like WTF is going on here um 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 it’s always a solvable
[00:10:00] problem and the technology we have in hand should be able to solve it and that gave birth to the X prize um I’ll tell a we’ll tell a story a little bit more later because it took five years to get that prize funded uh 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 uh like I that number’s in the white paper but I or that number was in the white paper uh and I pulled it out I the number that that I’ve seen the most consistently is $250 billion worth of damage now that uh and I I put that that’s the number that that uh uh put on the white paper the numbers in the damage in the American West are hard to come by calfire who may have the some of the best numbers says it’s 70 to $50 billion a year up till now um but even those numbers it’s
[00:11:00] what’s uninsured what’s insured the downstream Health you’ve just pointed out the downstream Health consequences are really really severe I I was from from the fires in in in Nevada I ended up with double pneumonia and then I got covid and that was um really complicated yeah I want we’re going to get to this if you’re can stick with us over this hour going to talk about uh 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 burned you know how many total structures uh were 12,000 12,000 now right and so you know an equal number of cars uh if not double the number of cars and probably you know four times the number of flat screen TVs and all kinds of electronics and when those things melt
[00:12:00] and the fumes go up in smoke they are not detectable by normal Air Quality Systems you know the systems that are measuring 2.5 and and 10 Micron siiz particles and such are not measuring nickel lithium you know uh uh volatile chemicals that are what can cause severe disease and damage you know and so here I am every day working out being healthy what 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 they’re going to take years off your life so we’ll talk about that because I think people need to realize um 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 N9 5 mask they’re not easy to wear for
[00:13:01] long periods of time and they’re painful thank God my Tesla has got you know HEPA filter mode so I can like you know crank it up to the top um let’s begin with some of the stats on this fire I know people have heard a lot of it uh but the you know what originated um the uh the Pacific Palisades fire you know maybe it was arson um the numbers I’ve heard the details I’ve heard is it’s winds causing above ground power lines to spark it’s tree branches falling on power lines causing those to spark um 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 uh I I have I have no more information than you about uh causes of the fire um but the winds you know the winds uh that started there
[00:14:02] came by the time they reached here we had 200 mph winds at the top of the mountains which like you know that’s unprecedented and um it was unprecedent um I was with you in Los Angeles right right before the fire started and when the our plane took off it was the it was actually one the most frighten I’ve been out of plane in a while because the wings nearly hit the tarmac the wind hit it so hard the wings dipped and um on takeoff was really crazy and I and that wind storm that morning was frightening those were you know some of the worst Santa anas uh I’ve I’ve seen and um but you know having fires are most of the time are down power lines yeah um and winds um you know 150,000 people have been displaced I just this morning my family and I went to San Mona college and we were volunteering sorting uh clothing for for people who’ve lost everything
[00:15:01] and by the way if you live in LA uh this Wednesday Thursday Friday and Sunday Saka college has got uh uh incredible resources that they’re Distributing um so please consider uh going there if you need help 12,000 structures destroyed entire neighborhoods reduced to Ash uh you know I won’t go into the fact that State Farm the largest insur in La dropped 1,600 policies in July of 2024 uh you know did they know anything I’m not a conspir 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 uh it’s if there was ever you know if there was ever a need for a blockchain based new kind of fire
[00:16:01] Insurance um we’re certainly we’re certainly looking for it let me share a rant with you uh about insurance I think insurance is a perverse and uh inappropriately incentivized uh institutional structure what do I mean by that today fire insurance pays you after your house burns down life insurance pays your next toin after you’re dead health insurance pays you after you’ve gotten sick uh there’s a new approach and we wrote about this in futurist 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 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 I mean like here’s something this is like let me give you like just a really
[00:17:01] amazing quandry 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 fire break and so everybody who lives on the fire line has responsibility so you either either your house is fire approved we put an indust 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 um 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 LIF system but if you put sprinklers on your roof it voids your homeowners insurance because it’s an aftermarket addition so it voids your roof insurance and then it voids your homeowners insurance so you can lose your F homeowners insurance for not being fire
[00:18:00] ready but you can’t get fire ready because by the way that will Avid your home owners policy so insane um you know listen I am so pissed off at the state government and La government uh for their misappropriation and their uh lack of of intelligence bluntly I mean h 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 um our community that’s what I’m annoyed by and the reason is this you and I have said this for a long time when you’re deal governments move slowly there are all kinds of entrenched stakeholders and Entrepreneurship is faster yes in into these things and you know can produce can produce a lot of change and the fire technologies have been
[00:19:02] 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 damage is the is the figure for LA and there’s one [ __ ] fund trying to solve this problem and somebody gave him $35 million I mean to me you know like that’s I I I mean the state government is be like government is behaving the way government seems to behave and I wish it were different different but it does I don’t seem to have any any power here where you know I’ve seen you know things change just 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 um because we’ve been watching we’ve been watching the disaster year after year whether it’s you know flooding in in in the American South versus fires in the west like we’re watching the extreme weather Mount
[00:20:00] and mount and mount and I look at this and I’m like okay this is entrepreneurship to the rescue and I’m not seeing the response and and so it’s a massive Marketplace um just to be clear it’s a it’s a trillion dollar Marketplace so let’s make a call out to entrepreneurs let me tell you my my reaction to this and then I want to talk about the business ideas in your white paper which are which is which are elegant uh so 5 years ago there about I’m 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 for metastasized cancer that you’re fighting at all fronts and that’s what we’re doing today with with wildfires we’re not fighting at the beginning we’re finding them when they’re conflagration
[00:21:00] 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 the men and women who are are on the front line um you know fire truck technology is amazing uh 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 my one of my kids medicines and some clothes because we didn’t I didn’t take it seriously when I first when I first heard about it we went with minimal stuff um and I’m seeing the helicopters doing drops and I’m seeing the planes uh and it was like go yes go it’s amazing but why aren’t we finding an Inception so I had the idea for an X prise that was monitor 1,000 square acres of land and if you detect a fire that’s 3 m 9 ft or larger or if it’s moving put it out within 10 minutes that’s the rules
[00:22:01] super simple I’m not able to fund this any place and you know people are saying it’s a natural part of Fire Control that you know forests need to be 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 m or size or fire moving like in downtown Pacific Palisades just don’t expect it there so let fires burn where they should burn earn in natural uh you know natural cycles of nature but let’s protect other parts and so one day I finally got a hold of Dick murkin uh an incredible physician and entrepreneur Michael milin 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 you know that’s what I love like Elon mus said sure instantly to $100 million carbon removal prize and Dick murkin gave us a half million to design this prize and the prize was very
[00:23:01] 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 3 m 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 uh we ended up getting the Gordon and Betty more Foundation uh as a co-title sponsor
[00:24:02] along with Pacific Gas and Electric um we got minderoo Foundation out of Australia the Hilton Foundation the Lockheed Martin Foundation the American Family mutual insurance company Tas out of Greece cuz Greece was being decimated by wildfires the rotenberry Foundation Fairfax Financial a couple individuals uh Scott painter um who had lost his home committed a million this prize and I just learned a couple days ago that in the Palisades fire he lost his home for a second time um you know we’ve had a number of people Steve Brown my my uh you know my chief AI officer lost his home for a second time and uh it’s kind of insane long story short we announced the prize uh we have had 135 teams enter the competition we’re down to a final 29 teams that are in the semi-finals uh and these teams are going
[00:25:02] to be using aerial drones they’re going to be using sound cannons they’re going to be using um high lift uh you know 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 uh I when I wrote the white paper um I paid kind of the least amount of attention to fire extinguish it because I knew you were starting the exerprise I was like okay Peter might have this one like he’s got that element you know in it um though some of you know I know and I
[00:26:00] this the satellite D I don’t know like the satellite stuff is kind of amazing we’re already like I think uh um like Planet Labs 200 yeah Cal I think Cal Fire said that like it’s it’s or NASA uh fire detection is 95% accurate like the we definitely we definitely the accuracy from the satellites is there planet um is definitely well positioned will Marsh was well positioned this is definitely a job for cube SATs you said something before we started this podcast that I think was prophetic about this is a job for robots yeah that’s a that maybe we’ll let 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 and 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
[00:27:01] and the Optimus robot it’s this and the reason is for you’re saying clean up 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 fuka Fukushima thank you right the Fukushima in elown uh really triggered a whole new generation of disaster rots 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 uh nuclear disaster where they couldn’t get anybody into the reactor to turn the damn thing off uh spawned the DARPA challenges robotic challenges right that was it thank you that’s exactly it um so yeah I mean you know we we’ve just you we’re obviously we’re working on a new book and we’ve just finished a couple of chapters on the future of robots and um you and I know
[00:28:01] that human Andi robots are 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 $1 million purse it should be a $100 million purse by the way if anybody wants to 10x the purse size just give me a call please um and we announced it uh at the capital uh and Palmer lucky was there from andal right the the founder of oculus but really has built a massive multi-billion dollar defense company and he got it and he said listen uh 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 you know aerial Jets you know which can literally fly to the to the
[00:29:02] 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 a few more details on the timeline here um April of 25 semifinals uh for the uh track a which is the orbital portion uh August of 25 is the finals uh for uh the uh 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 uh right now we do not have have permission to run this competition in the United States
[00:30:02] because all of these teams are going to be flying aerial drones at high speed uh to be able to demonstrate and win this competition you’re monitoring a th000 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 Deco fires like you know a grill or or a small campfire that the teams need to avoid uh and hit the fire that’s 9 ft 3 m or moving uh and so we need permission to do this so I remember you know Steve and you were there with me at the early days of the ensari ex prise for space flight I 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 here in the United States
[00:31:00] 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 based commanders listening uh we’ll need you to donate your base and allow us to fly operations there you light fires you can squirrel off the UFOs someplace else we can go after those but you know let’s get the fires lit and put out instantly uh 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 uh here you go I think there are incredible ideas for companies to be started technology to be built uh and
[00:32:00] solutions to be had this is a multi-trillion dollar I mean let me just begin this way if I owned a large Vineyard and you had built technology to be able to to uh you know 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 uh it’s the way we should be ensuring our 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 um I the the thing that you the thing I I I want to I want to say here is uh with the Technologies I was looking at in the plan itself like I solve like I I’m interested in
[00:33:00] trying to solve any problem and I learned this from you I this is literally stolen from Peter dandis when you decided you were gonna 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 do that I was like oh so that’s how you do this Peter figured it out okay so when I you know was looking at the firespace I was like no no no we got to absolutely around 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 to deal with drought you have to deal with a lot of stuff so I just wanted to surround the problem 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 first got into this space there were Zero Solutions really
[00:34:01] and in the past five years there are now two really cool robot robotic burnbot and uh treech are both tree clearing autonomous robots they’ve been using uh a friend of mine uh helps work with the Tahoe fund so is protect charged with protecting Tahoe and uh 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 so these are these are robots they’re tring 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 the soil so you get the Woody biomass gets mixed in with the soil so it’s better for soil Health um uh that gets sort of destroyed and integrated in it just clears out the brush integrates what it can uh into the soil load and they’re really uh they’ve got liar right using AI terrain mapping
[00:35:00] they’re they target fir prone vegetation right one of the big issues in La uh 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 um in reaction to fire actually but uh we saw there was a the the E burn but I think uh it was demonstrated in uh 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 uh to get in there so the fact that there’s now uh robots that can help here is a really
[00:36:00] big deal 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 um uh yeah and there’s there we we need and they have to be taken to scale right that like you’ve got two companies that are making these things we need a like a competitive Marketplace and you know what’s the cube sa version of a you know that kind of robot um one of the other Technologies again didn’t exist uh back when I was first started looking at it it’s one that’s most interesting to me is um you can basically take a jet engine and use it to steer Wildfire so a company called firew world that came out of the University of Alberta sort of started this um and you can uh reduce and they they tested it in uh 2022 and they found uh they could reduce
[00:37:01] spread by 50% B 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 to panga Canyon which has one entrance in and one entrance out like guard the edge of the forest with these jetes that blow it you know in a place that it’s safe safe and not in a place where everybody lives 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 EX prise Team Peter Hulan runs our biodiversity um uh track of prizes and runs this Wildfire prize he just finished uh running our uh X prize in uh the Amazon which was going into large tracks of
[00:38:01] land and finding by DNA uh 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 uh to this competition I was just 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 at the moment it’s insane but uh so one of the uh one of the other things you really have to talk about is this is one of the so when I said earlier that that fire has all these like weird entrenched stakeholders and everybody’s at odds that so one of the reasons we’re having such problems in our forest 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 closed pardon me they’ve they’ve been shut down and now you’ve got this weird
[00:39:02] 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 Sawmill 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 uh we meaning the communities in and around Tahoe got a couple of Sawmills open finally one uh on the wash native uh 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 it’s
[00:40:01] you’re creating more of the problem so how many how many mills do we need well that’s an interesting question based on like throughput right put it this way The Sawmill industry between uh 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 saw one away and so we have no place to take a lot of the wood now what you need 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 in the white paper you could build modular uh 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
[00:41:02] 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 a burn it’s a trillion dollar opportunity the solutions are there all we actually need is is money and Innovation incubators really so listen I 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 as the forests are cleared um you know if if some entrepreneurs didn’t build it I think it’s a great exerprise opportunity as well here the better X prise might be uh and this this is I 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
[00:42:01] market for it though there’s a way to take these soft woods and turn them into what’s known as cross lateral timberl 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 soft words to make biochar biochar is amazing right for Forest Health if you reprocess biochar the forest it starts absorbing moisture and brings back Forest Health but there are there’s a company I want to say Korea Japan we were talking to them three or four years ago they had found way uh a nontoxic eco-friendly might even molecular way to get treat softwoods to get them to behave like Hardwoods so all again the technology is there and what I wanted to do was 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 Target right all these companies in the conversation their stores are in the American West right they’re going to burn too and um
[00:43:00] they should be in the conversation from from start uh from the beginning this is like everybody can sort of win here if everybody’s at the table uh there’s another idea that you had in your white paper which I think is either an xprize or it’s a business which is the biodegradable fire retardant 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 just and um you can’t poison the ecosystem afterwards or your well your LA right now right like that’s that’s the issue so um perimeter Solutions has developed an eco-friendly fire retirement made from plant-based polymers uh and um you can spray it from drones and aircraft and it uses uh create temporary fire brakes and in 2021 I 2021 calire used it to protect I think it was 20,000 Acres of Redwood and there was minimal long-term damage damage so like we’ve tested this at scale already um and again this is sort
[00:44:02] of there’s a lot of innovation that could 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 restore in Forest 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 wild fire let’s put it together right that’s
[00:45:00] that’s where that and you you know this from all 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 uh if there’s ending of time I mean if people realize listen the American 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 you’re as your protection um or you going so 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 them I said are do you want to reboot this project are you ready to do it again I was like I like somebody build it I’m happy to be the figurehead but I like I spent three years I got nowhere all I learned is
[00:46:01] that I’m not I’m not the guy for this but um I 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 going to burn and so it’s either LA or we fix it like that’s it’s an either or and honestly I if you’re hearing this now and you ignore this um 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 um you know we have the climate crisis is only going to make this works and accelerate things
[00:47:00] and they completely screwed up environmental regulations uh and building regulations that prevent you from doing what’s intelligent and smart uh just is beyond me um 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 of in the in the air and water it’s toxic exposure and I don’t think people realize about realize this uh there’s an overwhelming urge and I’m fighting it right now to go back to your old way of life you know to be able to wake up in your bed and go and do your exercise routine and you know 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 uh that you need to so let’s talk about what’s in the atmosphere so uh you’ve
[00:48:01] mentioned this before right fire smoke uh contains particulate matter uh PM 2.5 and pm10 uh and that’s what typically can be measured you can I my kid School bought a device to measure that particular 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 they’re isn’t the technology I’m looking online to find uh machines that can detect that accurately uh and because that’s what I care about uh the stuff that you can measure sure uh let’s minimize that uh hopefully the rains and winds will slowly move that away but uh it’s the other stuff thoughts the you know it it raises a lot of like a high level it made when we first started talking about this what I started thinking is
[00:49:03] 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 water logged 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 leech into the groundwater which is already I mean it’s not like La has an abundance of groundwater if um 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 it scale but we can now build solar
[00:50:01] power Dell and I think you know I think this is goingon to like that’s seems to be you know can we do that fast in its scale and modly right like that’s that seems to be a challenge that La is going to have to face very quickly um because the water supply I like I don’t I don’t have my thoughts are oh [ __ ] that’s my thought yeah um here’s some numbers uh PM 2.5 which is a pollutant in Wildfire smoke was found to be 10 times more toxic in causing respiratory issues compared to nonm smoke PM 2.5 so again but this is nature Going Up in Smoke and I get that uh it causes asthma it’s impacted you significantly from your from your fires right yeah I got um 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
[00:51:02] and um 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 uh the devastation for plants animals and ecosystems is just it’s awful you know we’re already at the in at the the work we do with dogs we’re bringing in dogs from La um we’ve got we’ve got friends who are bringing them you know to places all over America at this point but like the 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 um here’s another 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 uh which are incredibly harmful even in low concentrations so after the fires at Paradise the Benzene
[00:52:00] levels in the drinking water were a thousand times above legal limit which is insane right the long-term risks involved uh increased cancer rates cardiovascular issues neurotoxicity these are the same sort of things that we found after 9/11 when the towers came down and all of the workers and all of the local citizens were out in uh 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 uh that have traveled over 100 miles after burn site you know uh and guess what once we
[00:53:00] start doing the ash removal and the cleanup in the urban areas uh 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 um there’s a level of the mental health like people lost their lives their business I mean our friends they lost everything Lo AB lost absolutely everything the mental cost of that is 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 um before we even get into the longterm just thinking on that side the Sol like there are a lot of metal elf Solutions flow mindfulness you know
[00:54:02] all all the things they seem insane in the face of the catastrophe you know what I mean like fight back with but like it’s the only way to sort of Rec uh get control of your life again um and uh I think that rebuild alongside the you know the rebuild of La I just keep thinking about my wife uh who who’s from California once said that the C in the songs hasn’t really existed since 1979 which is an interesting idea but I 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 um a large swatches of that are are like it’s gone the whole me whole memories are are are gone that you know and won’t be back in our lifetime which isn’t really you know the stat that I’m reading here um in the research is that there’s a 23%
[00:55:00] increase in suicide rates observed in the 3 years following disaster um one thing I wantan to I 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 uh and uh was published in neuroscience and B Behavior reviews if anybody wants to look at this but um it does re there’s the evidence has been grown that flow is a very useful tool for overriding PTSD M um and um 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 um when when we were threatened with them and uh 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 um after a fire and the reason
[00:56:01] I’m saying this after everything you just said is I was like [ __ ] it I don’t want to wear a mask I want to go walk outside with my dog in the sunshine to because I hadn’t prioritized my mental health and I was sort of like SC 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-e CO battle stretched into like three or four months before I was breathing right nor normally again I want to summarize this for our our listeners here uh first of all I think the most important thing that was said was you know while the LA fir is 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 uh the experts as Stephen said predict that we’re going to see the American Northwest not just the US America including Canada Northwest burn over the next five 5 10 20 years and we you to do something about it if you’re an entrepreneur build
[00:57:02] 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 you know the the uh water supplies being empty and the fire hydrants being dry 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 you know before it begins to become a wildfire so um if you’re interested in that check out express.org um please support work of X prise it’s working to help reinvent the future uh and watch out for the x- prise semi-finals uh coming this summer uh hopefully with technology that’s going to solve it hopefully in time uh
[00:58:03] if you’re an investor hey I think creating a wildfire Tech investment fund would be a brilliant idea uh it’s this is this is a problem that’s only growing secondary to uh the climate crisis if you are impacted by the wildfires uh here in Los Angeles please realize this is uh the beginning of the disaster after the disaster you’re you know 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 um you know put on not a kn95 put on an uh you know n95 mask uh and I went out and bought filtration systems you know these are both hepo filters and
[00:59:00] ionization filtration systems put in the house in the kids bedrooms uh 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 got to wet wash don’t no leaf blowers no dry sweeping we’re going to have this Gunk this poisonous material being uh floated up into to our lives for months maybe years to come yeah I can’t wait for figure robots and Tesla robots I really I think once again I’m listening to you I’m just thinking this is a job for like Elon you want a place to test your robots at scale baby yeah uh anyway listen thank you uh for the white paper you’ve written for your Brilliance for your passion commitment Stephen uh I love you as a as a partner as a friend uh please uh go into the show notes get a copy of of Steven’s white paper I’ll put information in the show notes about the xprize Wildfire uh
[01:00:03] Newan sari and Peter hulahan thank you for all the work you’re doing uh to run that thank you to our sponsors of that competition uh and support the exerprise if you can and please take care of your health there’s also a great it’s a 2-hour YouTube about the disaster after the disaster talking about water and air I’ll put a link to that you YouTube uh video as well it was a group of experts who were involved in other fire cleanups as well as a 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 uh longevity and health is you know the most important thing you can focus on Stephen any thoughts to close us out just that for all those impacted by the LA fire my heart goes out to you guys thank you yeah 150,000 displaced
[01:01:00] people um I’ve met some incredibly strong uh individuals through this process uh people have lost their homes twice uh people with kids people who have said you know uh 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 and of course thank you [Music]