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, and monitoring my sleep. Then I'm sitting here consuming all of these poisonous chemicals that are going to take years off my life. We need support for the government to get out of the way of these entrepreneurs, because they can solve this and 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 Palisades Fire here in Los Angeles, the disaster is just beginning. We're going to talk about how, first of all, you should be incredibly pissed off that all of this could have been prevented. Second, we're on the verge of the American Northwest burning—not just Los Angeles, but the entire American Northwest, as well as portions of Canada, potentially being destroyed in the next 5 to 20 years.

We'll talk about the data. We'll talk about the incredible toxins released when hundreds of thousands of Teslas and flat-screen TVs go up in smoke. When you're looking at the AIQ index and there are blue skies above with low smoke particles and low ozone, honestly, that doesn't really matter, because what you're not measuring is all the volatile chemicals in the atmosphere, all the metals, and everything else that isn't being measured by today's systems. We're going to talk about all of that.

Steven, welcome, buddy.

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

I was working at my desk the day the fire started, and it was about 11:00. I looked out my window and saw these black plumes rising. I thought, "What the hell is going on?" I was on a Zoom call, trying to Google it. I called Frankie, who's our domestic support at the house, and asked, "Can you find anything?" Nothing was being reported for the first half-hour.

Ultimately, this became the Palisades Fire. The numbers are dramatic. 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 technology in place to get this figured out.

While the world was watching, I was getting WhatsApp messages, text messages, and emails from Abundance members, Singularity members, and XPRIZE members from around the world, because this was front-page news day after day as Los Angeles burned. Of course, it's out of the news now. We've moved on to the inauguration, Bitcoin, and other things. But this is not the first fire. This is just the canary in the coal mine.

Steven, let's talk about this. Most people know you as my co-author and an incredible author, a brilliant writer, and I'm grateful to have you in my life. But you've been studying this field. You've written an incredible white paper, which provides all the data. What's the potential future here?

Let me put a little context around this. When I lived in New Mexico for 2 different summers, our house was in the country and completely surrounded by fire. We had fires on 3 sides, and ash was raining down. This was in a really rural, poor community. Structures were burning. We ended up being saved, but our neighbors were not as lucky.

Then, in Nevada, 3 or 4 years ago, my wife was evacuated while I was out of town. The fire got within about a half-mile of our house. The next summer was when most of Tahoe burned. After 2 years in a row of being evacuated, living under black skies for 3 months, and seeing friends who lost everything, like many friends in Los Angeles have at this point, it spurred me into action.

I took the Singularity University and Abundance approach: What can entrepreneurship and technology bring to this problem? I brought 25 years of journalism experience to it. I don't think I'm an expert, but I sat in rooms with experts for 3 years and tried really hard to move the needle on this.

Let's start with the simple things that I learned, because they were 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, Washington, and Oregon—all of it.

The craziest thing is that when you actually get in rooms with the experts, they're resigned to this fact. They're resigned to the fact that literally the entire American West is going to burn. Honestly, if you own a home in the American West, they sort of think your home is going to burn, too. The only disagreement about the data was whether it would be 10 years or 20 years.

All the studies show that once cataclysmic fires start, they don't stop for over a decade, until all the fuel is consumed. And the fire has started. Over the past 5 years in California alone—forget the other states that have also been plagued—we saw 12 of the largest wildfires in history recorded.

In 2020, 2 fires crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains, which experts had believed for hundreds of years was impossible. They didn't think it could happen, and it happened twice that summer. By 2025, the problem had become a cataclysm with the Palisades and Indian fire.

But it doesn't stop at that. The burning of the forest is just the beginning, right? Because it—

No, it is absolutely just the beginning. The number you want to think about is woody biomass. That's all the stuff in the forest between the healthy trees.

What we know is that 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, fuel loads are basically north of 60% throughout the entire American West.

In Lake Tahoe, where I live, it's 248 million bone-dry tons of wood that need to come out of the forest before it's safe. You've got to start it, and you've got to process that. And that's just Tahoe.

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

Well, that was the first thing I learned when I dove into this space: Oh, my God, the American West is a powder keg, and it's very clear that it's going to explode. The experts all know it's going to explode. That was what was so astounding to me.

We have technological solutions. Everybody had been saying for 5 years that Los Angeles was going to burn. In my experience, I spent 3 years with a team—an amazing team of really talented people—trying to start efforts in Los Angeles, Nevada, and Utah. We had meeting after meeting after meeting and couldn't get anywhere.

I have never failed so completely in an effort. Fighting fire is massively hard. It's just a hard problem. There are a lot of stakeholders.

Here's what I want people to be hearing: This isn't over. This is just the beginning, and it's going to get worse.

There are things we can do to prevent it. Preventing it includes a number of businesses, approaches, and strategies—a multimodal approach to the problem—that Steven outlines in his white paper. It also includes our $11 million XPRIZE Wildfire, which we launched.

I had my equivalent moment 5 years ago when I was living in Santa Monica, right on the border of Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. Again, you could see the fires and smoke from the house, and thank God our house was spared.

I'm living here in a friend's home, Georgios' home in northern Beverly Hills, and I'm grateful that he lent it to the family. Going back to 5 years ago, we were being evacuated again and again, and I was thinking, "What the fuck is going on here? Why aren't people catching these fires at the beginning?"

My first reaction to things like this is, "Let's solve the problem." It's always a solvable problem. The technology we have in hand should be able to solve it. That gave birth to the XPRIZE.

We'll tell the story a little bit more later, because it took 5 years to get that prize funded. It's pathetic and ridiculous that more resources aren't going toward this. What do you hear the estimates are for the losses in—

That number's in the white paper, but I pulled it out. The number I've seen most consistently is $250 billion worth of damage, and that's the number I put in the white paper.

The numbers on the damage in the American West are hard to come by. Cal Fire, which may have some of the best numbers, says it's $70 billion to $150 billion a year up till now. But even those numbers are difficult: What's uninsured? What's insured? The downstream health consequences you've just pointed out are really, really severe.

From the fires in Nevada, I ended up with double pneumonia, and then I got COVID, which was really complicated. Peter Diamandis

We're going to get to this. If you can stick with us over this hour, we're going to 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 that here we burned—how many total structures? Twelve thousand. Twelve thousand structures now. An equal number of cars, if not double the number of cars, and probably 4 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 PM2.5 and PM10 particles are not measuring nickel, lithium, and volatile chemicals that can cause severe disease and damage.

Here I am every day working out, watching what I eat, watching my sleep—all of those things—and I'm sitting here consuming all of these poisonous chemicals that are going to take years off your life. We'll talk about that because I think people need to realize there's a real tragedy that comes thereafter. There's an incentive to get back into your home and get the kids back in school.

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 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 it was arson.

The details I've heard are winds causing aboveground power lines to spark, tree branches falling on power lines and causing those to spark, and 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 the causes of the fire, but the winds that started there—by the time they reached here, we had 200-mile-per-hour winds at the top of the mountains. That's unprecedented.

I was with you in Los Angeles right before the fire started, and when our plane took off, it was actually one of the most frightening flights I've been on in a while because the wings nearly hit the tarmac. The wind hit it so hard that the wings dipped, and takeoff was really crazy. That windstorm that morning was frightening. Those were some of the worst Santa Anas I've seen.

Most fires are caused by downed power lines and winds. Peter Diamandis

150,000 people have been displaced. Just this morning, my family and I went to Santa Monica College, and we were volunteering, sorting clothing for people who've lost everything.

By the way, if you live in LA, this Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, Santa Monica College has incredible resources that they're distributing. Please consider going there if you need help. Twelve thousand structures have been destroyed, and entire neighborhoods have been reduced to ash.

I won't go into the fact that State Farm, the largest insurer in LA, dropped 1,600 policies in July 2024. Did they know anything? I'm not a conspiracist, but what they knew was that the winds were coming and LA wasn't prepared. Most of the major insurance companies have been bailing on the American West more and more each year.

If there was ever a need for a blockchain-based new kind of fire insurance, 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 of kin after you're dead. Health insurance pays you after you've gotten sick.

There's a new approach, and we wrote about this in The 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 the best technology—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 helped you not to die?

Here's something—let me give you a really amazing quandary, because I had to deal with this after my house. My house is on the edge of BLM land, which means my neighbors and I were the firebreak, so everybody who lives on the fire line has responsibility. Your house is either fireproof, or you're responsible for creating a firebreak. We buried 20,000 gallons of underground water storage and put in industrial sprinklers that face in and out to create a firebreak.

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. If we're really smart about it, it'd be like a fountain where the water is recycled, right? It would be a closed-loop 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.

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. Listen, I am so pissed off at the state government and LA government for their misappropriation and their lack of intelligence, bluntly. Honestly, I wish it were different, but I don't seem to have any power here.

Yeah, I'm annoyed—and I'm annoyed actually at our people: entrepreneurs. I'm annoyed at the venture capitalists, all the people in our community. That's who I'm annoyed by. The reason is this: you and I have said this for a long time—when you're dealing with governments, governments move slowly. There are all kinds of entrenched stakeholders, and entrepreneurship is faster and can produce a lot of change.

The fire technologies have been developing for 10 years now. There's 1 fire fund. There's literally 1 venture fund for it. I think they're funded to the tune of about $35 million. So $250 billion worth of damage is the figure for LA, and there's 1 fund trying to solve this problem, and somebody gave them $35 million.

To me, the state government is behaving the way government seems to behave. I wish it were different, but I don't seem to have any power here. Where I've seen things change is through entrepreneurship, but I don't like it. There are so many climate funds. Great, fantastic. Why aren't we seeing the same attention paid to disaster mitigation?

We've been watching the disaster year after year, whether it's flooding in the American South or fires in the West. We're watching the extreme weather mount 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.

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.

About 5 years ago, I'm on my third evacuation. It was never this close and never this bad. I'm like, there's got to be something we can do here. Obviously, the way you fight a wildfire is you put it out at inception, 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. That's what we're doing today with wildfires. We're not finding them at the beginning. We're finding them when they're a conflagration, and we're trying to fight them with everything we've got.

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, all of the helicopters and aircraft—it's amazing. I snuck into my house in Santa Monica—don't tell the cops—to 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.

I'm seeing the helicopters doing drops, and I'm seeing the planes, and it was like, go, yes, go. It's amazing. But why aren't we finding it at inception? I had the idea for an XPRIZE 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. Those are the rules. Super simple.

I'm not able to fund this anyplace. 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 m or larger, or a fire moving, like in downtown Pacific Palisades. Don't expect it there.

Let fires burn where they should burn, in natural cycles of nature. But let's protect other parts. One day I finally got ahold of Dick Merkin, an incredible physician and entrepreneur. Michael Milken introduced me to him. I said, “Dick, I need you to fund the design of a prize,” and I explained it to him.

He said, “Sure.” That’s what I love. Elon Musk said “sure” instantly to a $100 million carbon-removal prize, and Dick Merkin gave us $500,000 to design this prize.

The prize was very simple. There are 2 parts to 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 1,000 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 person roasting weenies on a grill, something that’s 3 meters or moving, put it out within 10 minutes? 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.

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 Electric. We got the Minderoo Foundation out of Australia, the Hilton Foundation, the Lockheed Martin Foundation, the American Family Mutual Insurance Company, TEMES out of Greece—because Greece was being decimated by wildfires—the Roddenberry Foundation, Fairfax Financial, and a couple of individuals. Scott Painter, who had lost his home, committed $1 million 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.

We’ve had a number of people—Steve Brown, my chief AI officer, lost his home for a second time. It’s kind of insane. Long story short, we announced the prize. We’ve had 135 teams enter the competition, and we’re down to a final 29 teams that are in the semifinals.

These teams are going to be using aerial drones, sound cannons, high-lift UAVs, and 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.

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.

One of the things that’s interesting is that when I wrote the white paper, I paid kind of the least amount of attention to fire extinguishing because I knew you were starting the XPRIZE. I was like, “Okay, Peter might have this one. He’s got that element in it.”

The satellite stuff is kind of amazing. CAL FIRE, I think, said that—or NASA’s fire detection is 95% accurate. The accuracy from the satellites is definitely there. Planet 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: this is a job for robots.

Yeah, maybe let’s start there with the technological discussion. You and I were talking a couple of days ago about melting Teslas and flat-screen TVs, the pollutants, and the level of toxicity. The first thing I thought was, if there ever is a job for Elon and the Optimus robot, it’s this. For me, it’s the cleanup part of it.

Well, yeah, if you look at so many of the developments in robotics, the early ones were coming out of Japan and were for disaster response, right? The Fukushima meltdown really triggered a whole new generation of disaster-response bots.

Wasn’t Boston Dynamics originally making disaster-response robots?

It was for the military, including disaster response. The Fukushima nuclear disaster, where they couldn’t get anybody into the reactor to turn the damn thing off, spawned the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

Right, that was it. Thank you. Exactly.

We’ve just finished a couple of chapters on the future of robots, and you and I know that 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.

We launched this wildfire prize. It’s an $11 million purse. It should be a $100 million purse, by the way. If you want to 10× the purse size, just give me a call, please.

We announced it at the Capitol, and Palmer Luckey was there from Anduril—the founder of Oculus, but someone who has really built a massive, multibillion-dollar defense company. He got it, and he said, “Listen, at the end of this competition, we are going to make wildfires a thing of the past.”

I’ve seen the technology that he plans to use. There are other companies that are using aerial jets, which can literally fly to the point of fire in a couple of minutes, land, and blow those fires out. That’s the kind of technology we’re seeing. I think we’ll have ground UAVs, and I think we’ll have humanoid robots on the ready. Honestly, there’s no reason that these should exist.

Just to provide a few more details on the timeline: April 2025 is the semifinals for Track A, which is the orbital portion. August 2025 is the finals for the ground detection and extinguishment.

Let me do a callout here to anybody from the FAA listening, anybody from state government or the 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 1,000 square acres, and you need to get from one location to the next at high speed and be able to put out a fire. When we run this competition, it’s going to be real fires being lit. There’ll be decoy fires, like a grill or a small campfire, that the teams need to avoid and hit the fire that’s 9 feet, 3 meters, or moving.

We need permission to do this. Steven, I remember you were there with me in the early days of the Ansari XPRIZE 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 U.S. to a permissive government.

We would much rather do it in the United States, since the majority of the teams are here. We need support from the government to get out of the way of these entrepreneurs, because they can solve this and make wildfires a thing of the past.

I’m thinking it sounds like somebody needs to donate an Air Force base. You need 1,000 acres, right? That sounds like a job for an Air Force base.

Sounds good. Any Air Force base commanders who are listening, we’ll need you to donate your base and allow us to fly operations there. You can light fires. You can squirrel off the UFOs someplace else; we 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. If you’re an entrepreneur or looking for a moonshot, here you go. I think they’re incredible ideas for companies to be started, technology to be built, and solutions to be had.

This is a multitrillion-dollar opportunity. Let me just begin this way: if I owned a large vineyard and you had built technology to monitor my vineyards and put out a fire at inception, I would pay for that service. I think cities and towns should pay for those services. It’s the way we should be insuring our future here.

Let’s jump into some of your ideas here, buddy. Where do you want to start?

I guess you’ve got a high-level plan before we get into technologies?

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

Yeah, let’s start with the technologies, then. That’s fine. The thing that I want to say here is that I was looking at the technologies in the plan itself. I’m interested in trying to solve any problem, and I learned this from you.

I love this—it’s 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 that you could possibly start. You surrounded the space frontier. I watched you and thought, “Oh, so that’s how you do this. Peter figured it out.”

When I was looking at the fire space, I thought, “No, no, no. We’ve got to absolutely surround the problem.” There’s a lot more going on. As you pointed out, fire is a healthy part of an ecosystem. 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, and you have to deal with a lot of stuff. I just wanted to surround the problem.

When we go into these technologies, some of them are at different levels. The cool one is that we talked about how woody biomass loads are ridiculous. When I first got into this space, there were zero solutions, really. In the past 5 years, there are now 2 really cool robotic solutions. BurnBot and TreeMech are both autonomous tree-clearing robots.

A friend of mine helps work with the Tahoe Fund, which is charged with protecting Tahoe, and they bought some of these. The robots are amazing. They can do in 2 days what teams used to do in 2 weeks.

So, these are robots. They climb up the trees. They take dead trees and leave living trees. They take brush, reprocess the whole thing, and mix it with the soil, so the woody biomass gets mixed in with the soil and improves soil health.

The material gets destroyed and integrated, and the robots clear out the brush and integrate what they can into the soil. They’ve got lidar, right? They’re using AI terrain mapping, and they target fire-prone vegetation.

One of the big issues in L.A.—well, in California—is that in the early years, when the fires happened, what did we do? We imported eucalyptus from Australia because it grows really fast. It turns out you can’t build houses with it, and it explodes in fires. It’s deadly, and we planted it all over California in reaction to fire, actually.

We saw that even BurnBot, I think, was demonstrated in Colorado. I think it was about a 30% reduction in fuel load in forests, which is what you need to get it below that hazardous, cataclysmic level. The other thing about it is, if you see the terrain that has to be cleared, it’s super steep and super rocky. You need technical climbing skills to get in there and work; it’s not easy. So the fact that there are now robots that can help here is a really big deal.

But just on this note, Steven—I’m assuming there’s plenty of room for innovation and improvement here, yes?

There’s so much room for innovation and improvement. We need these technologies to be taken to scale. You’ve got 2 companies making these things; we need a competitive marketplace. What’s the CubeSat version of that kind of robot?

One of the other technologies, again, didn’t exist back when I first started looking at it. It’s 1 of the most interesting to me: you can basically take a jet engine and use it to steer a wildfire. A company called FireWorld that came out of the University of Alberta sort of started this. They tested it in 2022 and found they could reduce spread by 50%.

This is by steering a fire with a jet engine. They mount the engines on tank tracks and move them around.

Love it.

So, again, it needs to go to scale. These should be on the fire in L.A., for example, in Topanga Canyon, which has 1 entrance in and 1 entrance out. Guard the edge of the forest with these jet engines that blow the fire into a place that’s safe and not into a place where everybody lives. You’d think officials would be all over this technology, right?

Right.

An incredible member of the XPRIZE team, Peter Houlihan, runs our biodiversity track of prizes and runs this wildfire prize. He just finished running our XPRIZE in the Amazon, which involved 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.

He’s bringing incredible technology to this competition. I was just speaking to him this morning. This guy travels around the planet more than I do. He’s circumnavigating the globe; he’s somewhere in Southeast Asia at the moment. It’s insane.

One of the other things you really have to talk about is this: when I said earlier that fire has all these weird, entrenched stakeholders and everybody’s at odds, one of the reasons we’re having such problems in our forests is that even if you clear the fuel, what do you do with it once you get some of this stuff out of the forest?

There aren’t enough sawmills throughout the American West. They’ve been shut down. Now you’ve got these weird situations where wealthy people are saying, “No, no, not in my backyard. We can’t have a sawmill here.” Environmentalists hate sawmills because, for years, the lumber companies were just raping the Western forests. They’ve changed, and they’re better. All this stuff has gotten smarter and more environmentally friendly, but there’s residual anger.

A lot of the sawmills closed because people were moving to the American West and saying, “Not in my backyard.” Just to give you an example, the communities in and around Tahoe recently got a couple of sawmills open. One is on the Washoe Native American reservation, where they’re doing amazing work, and another is an old mill that we got to reopen.

Otherwise, they were having to take lumber 100 to 200 miles away. You’re trying to get the fuel out of the forest, but you’re putting carbon into the atmosphere to do it. You’re creating more of the problem.

How many sawmills do we need?

Well, that’s an interesting question based on throughput, right? Put it this way: the sawmill industry between 1985 and 2016 was a 40% decline. If you’re looking for a single number for what happened in the American West, 40% of the sawmills went away. So we have no place to take a lot of the wood now.

What you need are modular sawmills.

Mhm. For sure.

You don’t want to create a single sawmill; that doesn’t make any sense. What you want is modular sawmills. We were thinking about it when I talked about this in the white paper. You could build modular sawmills and franchise them.

They have to be as environmentally friendly as possible. They have to be carbon-neutral, water-wise, waste-free, with flexible design. All this stuff has been done. The innovation is already there; it’s just not at scale.

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.”

So, to the entrepreneurs out there, I love this one. If some entrepreneurs can build modular sawmills that can be on demand and repositioned as the forests are cleared, I think this is a great opportunity as well.

The better X Prize might be here. You want a market for woody biomass, right? The stuff that gets processed—there’s no really good market for it currently. There’s a way to take these softwoods and turn them into what’s known as cross-laminated timber. That works.

A really cool thing that we were looking at is biochar, because you can use a lot of these softwoods to make biochar. Biochar is amazing for forest health. If you pre-process biochar, the forest starts absorbing moisture and brings back forest health.

There’s a company—I want to say in Korea or Japan. We were talking to them 3 or 4 years ago. They had found a nontoxic, eco-friendly, maybe even molecular way to treat softwoods and get them to behave like hardwoods. So, again, all the technology is there.

What I wanted to do was sort of surround the problem with stakeholders. I was like, “Why don’t we have Home Depot and Lowe’s and all these kinds of companies—Target, right?—all these companies in the conversation?” Their stores are in the American West. They’re going to burn, too, and they should be in the conversation from the beginning. 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 a business: biodegradable fire retardants. Talk about that.

Yeah, those already exist. This was a really big issue. When you’re fighting fires all over the West, you can’t poison the ecosystem afterward. Well, you’re in L.A. right now, right? That’s the issue.

Perimeter Solutions has developed an eco-friendly fire retardant made from plant-based polymers. You can spray it from drones and aircraft, and it creates temporary firebreaks. In 2021, CAL FIRE used it to protect, I think, 20,000 acres of redwoods, and there was minimal long-term damage. We’ve tested this at scale already.

Again, there’s a lot of innovation that could be done here, because one of the things 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 retardant that’s actually good for the ecosystem?

If you’re going to have to spray this all over the place, why aren’t we using this as a way to restore forest health? If you want to solve the problem in the American West, restoring forest health has to be a huge part of it. You have to restore aquifers and forest health and all this stuff.

Entrepreneurship alone will solve this problem, but it won’t solve it fast enough. You need a lot of money, a lot of capital, and a lot of entrepreneurship, but you need multitool solutions—a single solution that will solve 6 or 7 problems at once.

If we know we have to restore forest health and we know we’re going to be putting out wildfires, let’s put it together. That’s where you get the most opportunity for innovation and money. And you know this from all your work with innovation: whenever these things come together into a new category, that’s where you get kind of the most opportunity for innovation and money, really.

Yeah. You made the request: Is there a venture fund that can be built around this technology? If there's ever a time—if people realize the American West is going to burn—it's now. It's not a matter of if; it's only a matter of when. Is it 5 years, 10 years, or, on the outside, 20 years? If you live there, are you prepared to use the existing lack of systems as your protection?

Somebody I worked on this original project with called me up recently, when the LA fire started. I said, “Do you want to reboot this project? Are you ready to do it again?” I was like, “Somebody else will build it. I'm happy to be the figurehead, but I spent 3 years and got nowhere. All I learned is that I'm not the guy for this.”

But that's not my point. The next question was, “Okay, if I rebooted this, who should be at the table?” And I was like, “Who should be at the table? Well, for starters, the governor of every single Western state, every major company in the American West—everybody.” It's going to burn. So it's either LA or we fix it. That's an either/or.

Honestly, if you're hearing this now, you can't ignore it. You have to say, “We've got to change the game here.” As an entrepreneur, you build tech. As an investor, you back tech. As a citizen, you vote in politicians who are going to support a change here.

The climate crisis is only going to make this worse and accelerate things. They've completely screwed up environmental regulations and building regulations that prevent you from doing what's intelligent and smart. It's just 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 wake up in your bed and go do your exercise routine and your normal everything. 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 do.

So let's talk about what's in the atmosphere. You've mentioned this before, right? Fire smoke contains particulate matter, PM2.5 and PM10. 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, the furans, and the heavy metals. There isn't a technology—I'm looking online to find machines that can detect that accurately—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 things at a high level. When we first started talking about this, what I started thinking is: Does disaster preparedness in the face of climate change mean that we have to start building things that can be flooded and burned, right?

Unless we're actively solving climate change at the rate that we need to be solving it, the other option seems to be creating stuff that can be waterlogged and burned without poisoning all species. I don't know what Los Angeles does, because everything that doesn't get cleaned up is going to leach into the groundwater, which is already—it's not like LA has an abundance of groundwater.

One of the things that you're going to see out of this—and at least the good news—is that 5 years ago, this didn't exist at scale, but we can now build solar-powered desalination. Can we do that fast, at scale, and modularly? That seems to be a challenge that LA is going to have to face very quickly because of the water supply.

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

Yeah, I've got good filtration indoors, and I wore a mask. But I have dogs, and I have to walk them. I had to walk the animals, and that definitely shortened the lives of my pets.

The other thing we need to say about LA is that the devastation for plants, animals, and ecosystems is just awful. 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 the fallout for the plants, animals, and ecosystems is just awful. And for the children who are going back to school—I'm sorry, the kids are just not going to be wearing masks in school.

Here's another stat: Burning materials—the materials that are in 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 the legal limit, which is insane. The long-term risks involve increased cancer rates, cardiovascular issues, and 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 local citizens were out trying to support.

This is a disaster after the disaster, just to be clear. I want people to realize that this is very real. As I drive around town here, 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 travel over 100 miles from a burn site. And guess what? Once we start doing the ash removal and cleanup in urban areas, this can scale up the pollutants in the atmosphere for up to 2 years. So what do you do? I'm like, I don't know what you do.

The other thing we haven't talked about is mental health. People lost their lives, their everything. Our friends lost absolutely everything. The mental cost of that is extraordinary. Their identity gets ripped away; a lot of really core human things get ripped away really fast.

Even the solutions—from a mental health perspective, before we even get into the long-term thinking on that side—seem insane in the face of the catastrophe. There are a lot of mental health solutions: flow, mindfulness, all the things. But it's the only way to sort of regain control of your life again, and I think that rebuilds alongside the rebuild of LA.

I just keep thinking about my wife, who's from California. She once said that the California in the songs hasn't really existed, which is an interesting idea. But what I thought was, essentially, what burned was the California that had existed. That's the California that I know, which is post-1979. I got to California for the first time in 1986.

Large swaths of that are gone. Whole memories are gone, and they won't be back in our lifetime, which is a really sad statistic that I'm reading here: There's a 23% increase in suicide rates observed in the 3 years following a disaster like that.

One thing I want to say, just so people know—not that this is very helpful—is that this is work that came out of the Flow Research Collective, and it's published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, if anybody wants to look at this. The evidence has been growing that flow is a very useful tool for overriding PTSD.

I'm not going to go into that, but the 2 times that we dealt with this, I had legit PTSD for a very long time. I was waking up in sweats every night with nightmares. I did not take the fires well when we were threatened with them, and flow was useful for me.

It sounds like a ridiculous thing, to prioritize trying to get into flow, but you have to prioritize your mental health after a fire. The reason I'm saying this, after everything you just said, is that I was like, “I don't want to wear a mask. I want to go walk outside with my dog in the sunshine tonight,” because I hadn't prioritized my mental health.

I was scrambling and making bad decisions, and I ended up very, very, very sick afterward for a while. I ended up with COVID, and what should have been a 2-week COVID battle stretched into 3 or 4 months before I was breathing normally again.

I want to summarize this for our listeners here. First of all, I think the most important thing that was said was that 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., but Canada, too—burn over the next 5, 10, 20 years. 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 as pissed off as I am that this was not addressed—the water supplies being empty, 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. Why aren't the resources going into addressing the technology that could solve this in the first place, before it becomes a wildfire?

If you're an investor, 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 were 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 everywhere: “The water is dangerous. Do not drink. Do not bathe in it, either.” So we've got water issues, but no one's out there saying, “Listen, don't breathe the air. Put on—not a KN95—put on an N95 mask.” I went out and bought filtration systems. These are both HEPA filters and ionization filtration systems that I put in the house, in the kids' bedrooms, to try and clean up the air.

But guess what? Every time you open the door, you track things in. There are lots of people out there saying you've got to wet-wash—no leaf blowers, no dry sweeping. We're going to have this gunk, this poisonous material, floating up into our lives for months, maybe years, to come.

I can't wait for Figure robots and Tesla robots. I really think—once again, I listen to you and I'm just thinking—this is a job for Elon. You want a place to test your robots at scale, baby.

Anyway, listen, thank you for the white paper you've written, for your brilliance, for your passion and commitment, Steven. I love you as a partner and as a friend. Please go into the show notes and get a copy of Steven's white paper. I'll put information in the show notes about the X Prize Wildfire, Anousheh 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 X Prize if you can, and please take care of your health. There's also a great 2-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 9/11 cleanup. Education is your best friend.

I don't want to cause fearmongering; that's not me. You guys know I'm the abundance guy, but longevity and health are the most important things you can focus on. Steven, any thoughts to close this out?

Just a thought for all those impacted by the LA fire: my heart goes out to you guys. Thinking of you.

Yeah, 150,000 displaced people. I met some incredibly strong individuals through this process—people who have lost their homes twice, people with kids, people who have said, “We're learning what's important in our lives, and it's our family.”

All right, brother. Be well. Love you, Peter.

Thank you. Thanks for doing this one.

Of course. Thank you.