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

0:00Most experts believe that almost all the forests in the American West are going to burn over the next 10 to 20 years. This is not the first fire. This is just the canary in the coal mine. The downstream health consequences are really, really severe. Here I am every day working out, being healthy, watching what I eat, my sleep, all of those things. and I'm like, I'm sitting here consuming all of these, these poisonous chemicals that you're gonna 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.

0:47Hey everybody, welcome to Moonshot, it's a special episode with my dear friend, my co -conspirator, Stephen Kotler. We're talking about the disaster after the disaster. While the world has almost forgotten about the Pacific Palisades fire here in LA, the disaster is just beginning. We're talking about how, first of all, you should be incredibly pissed off that all of this could have been prevented. Number two, that we're on the verge of the American Northwest burning. Not just LA, we're talking about the entire American Northwest as well as portions of Canada potentially being destroyed in the next five to 20 years.

1:26We'll talk about the data there. We'll talk about the incredible toxins released when hundreds of thousands of Tesla's 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 in the atmosphere or the metals, everything that is not being measured by today's systems. And we're going to talk about all that. Stephen, welcome, buddy. Hey, Peter. It's good to be with you.

2:13Terrible circumstances, but good to be with you. So I'm working at my desk the day the fire starts and it's about 11 o 'clock. I look out my window as he's black Plumes rising and like what the hell is going on? I'm on a zoom. I'm trying to Google I call Frankie Who's our domestic support at the house? Over a say can you find anything and nothing's being reported for like the first half hour right and ultimately this becomes the palisades fire and and the numbers are traumatic. The fact that it started in the first place is no surprise when you get into the details there. But I'm pissed, I'm pissed that we are not putting the tech in place to get this figured out.

3:01And while the world was watching, I was getting WhatsApp's and text messages and emails from abundance members, singularity members, ex -price members from around the world because this was front page news day on day on day as LA burns. And of course, it's out of the news now. It's we've moved on to the inauguration and Bitcoin and other things. But guess what? This is not the first fire. This is just the canary in the coal mine. Stephen, let's talk about this. I most people know you as my co -author and an incredible author of multitude of books, Brilliant Writer, and I'm grateful for you in my life.

3:45But you've been studying this field, you've written an incredible white paper, which we're gonna link to in the show notes. What's the potential future here? Let me put a little context around this. When I lived in New Mexico for two different summers, our house was, we lived in the country, our house was completely surrounded, we had fires. I'm sure he says it was raining ash down, and this is a really rural poor community. Structures for burning was it didn't, we ended up, we were saved but our neighbors were not as lucky and then in Nevada three, four years ago my wife was evacuated. I was actually out of town and she's evacuated.

4:27The fire got within a half mile of our house and then the next summer was the summer that most a Tahoe burned and after two years in a row of being evacuated of living under black spies for three months and just the friends who lost their everything. Like many friends in LA have at this point, it just spurred me into acting. I really took the, you know, I took a singularity university abundance, like, what can entrepreneurship and technology bring to this problem? And I brought, you know, 25 years of my journalism skills and I, you know, I don't think I'm an expert, but But I sat in the room with experts for three years and I tried really hard to move the needle on this.

5:10Let's just start with what, like, the simple things that I learned because 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 Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, up in to 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 America, like literally the entire American West is going to burn.

5:51And honestly, if you own a home in the American West, they sort of think your home is gonna burn too. And the only disagreement about the data I found, people net pick it and look at it, but was it 10 years or was it 20 years? But what all the studies show is that once cataclysmic fires start, they don't stop for over a decade until all the fuel is consumed. And the fires started, right? Over the past five years in California alone, forget the other states that have also been plagued. We saw 12 of the largest wildfires in history were recorded, right? In 2020, two fires crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains, which experts have believed for hundreds of years was impossible.

6:28They didn't think it could happen and it happened twice in a summer and Obviously by 2025 the problem had become 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 it is just I know it is it is it is absolutely just the beginning. It's worth like the the number you want to think about It's sort of like woody biomass, right? That's all the crap in the forest between the healthy trees. And what we know is if you can get woody biomass below 59 % content of a forest, the fires will put themselves out.

7:10They won't explode. They'll put themselves out. Unfortunately, like fuel loads are basically north of 60 % throughout the entire American was in Lake Tahoe, where I live. It's 248 million bone dry tons of wood that need to come out of the forest You got to start it you got a process that that's just that's just top right? Sounds like you're sitting on a on a powder keg of dynamite It's I will that was I mean so the first thing that I learned what I when I dove into this space is Oh my god the American West is a powder keg and it's it's very clear gonna explode and the experts have they all know what's going to explode?

7:51That was what was so astounding to me is we have technological solutions. Everybody says, like everybody had been saying for five years, I was going to happen in my experience. I spent three years with an amazing team of people, really talent people, trying to start efforts in LA, in Nevada, in Utah. We did meeting after meeting after meeting and couldn't get anywhere. I've never failed so good bleatly in an effort ever and it fires massively. It's hard. It's just a hard problem. There are a lot of stakeholders. Well here's what I want people to be hearing here. This isn't over. This is just the beginning and it is going to get worse.

8:40Number two, you know, first of all you can read the white paper or put in the show notes here that Steven has written, it's brilliant and provides all the data. Number two, there are things we can do to prevent it. And preventing it, we'll talk about this includes a number of businesses, a number of approaches and strategies, multimodal surrounding it that Steven outlines as a white paper. It also includes our $11 million X -Prize wildfire that we launched. You know, I had my equivalent moment to you five years ago when I live in Santa Monica right on the border of Santa Monica and Palisades. Again, you know, you can see the fires and the smoke in the house.

9:24And thank God our house was spared. And I'm living here in a friend's home, George Yos home here in Northern Beverly Hills. And I'm grateful for his lending it to the family. But so going back to five years ago, we're being evacuated and evacuated and I'm like WTF is going on here. Why aren't people catching these fires at the beginning? So my first reaction on things like this is let's solve a problem. This is always a solvable problem. And the technology we have in hand should be able to solve it. And that gave birth to the ex -price. We'll tell a little bit more later because it took five years to get that prize funded, which is pathetic and ridiculous.

10:15That more resources aren't going. I mean, I don't, you know, the estimates right now, what do you hear the estimates add for the losses in the market? Yeah, so I like, that numbers in the white paper, but I went, or the, what number was in the white paper, and I pulled it out. The number that I've seen the most consistently is $250 billion worth of damage. Now, that, and I put that, that's the number, that put it on the white paper. The numbers and the damage in the American West are hard to come by. Cal fire, who may have the, some of the best numbers, says it's 70 to $150 billion a year, up till now.

10:57But even those numbers, it's what's on the insured, what's insured, the downstream health, you've just pointed out, the downstream health consequences are really, really severe. I was from the fires in Nevada. I ended up with double pneumonia, and then I got COVID, and that was really complicated. Yeah, we're gonna get to this, if you can stick with us over this hour, and talk about the disaster after the disaster, which means we've dealt with getting the fires out and people losing their homes and there's a whole slew of mental health issues and stress that comes along with that. But the reality is here we burned, you know, how many total structures?

11:422012, the count, right? Right, and so, you know, an equal number of cars, 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 and the fumes go up and smoke, they are not detectable by normal air quality systems. You know, the systems that are measuring 2 .5 and 10 micron -sized particles and such are not measuring nickel lithium, you know, volatile chemicals that are are what can cause severe disease and damage. And so here I am every day working out, being healthy, watching what I eat, my sleep, all of those things.

12:38And I'm like, I'm sitting here consuming all of these poisonous chemicals. They're gonna take years off your life. So we'll talk about that, because I think people need to realize there's a real tragedy that comes there after, because there's this incentive to get back into your home, put the kids back in school. And honestly, I've been wearing an N95 mask. They're not easy to wear for long periods of time, and they're painful. Thank God my Tesla has got, you know, hepophilter mode so I can like, you know, 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 Palace AIDS fire, maybe it was arson, 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, and the fact that we've got these high tension power lines running through wooded areas seems insane to me.

13:48Your thoughts? Well, I have no more information than you about causes of the fire, but the winds, you know, the winds that started there came by the time they reached here, we had 200 mile an hour winds at the top of the mountains, which like, you know, that's unprecedented. Yeah. and it was unprecedented. I was with you in Los Angeles, right, right before the fire started, and when our plane took off, it was actually the most frightening thing I've been out of play at a while because the wings nearly hit the tarmac. The wind hit it so hard, the wings dipped, and on takeoff was really crazy, and that wind storm that morning was frightening.

14:34Those were, you know, some of the worst Santa Ana's I've seen. But you know, having fires at most of the time are down power lines and wins. No, 150 ,000 people have been displaced. I just this morning, my family and I went to San Maca College and we were volunteering, sorting, clothing for people who've lost everything. And by the way, if you live in LA this Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, Semmaka College has got incredible resources that they're distributing. So please consider going there if you need help. 12 ,000 structures destroyed entire neighborhoods reduced to ash. You know, I won't go into the fact that state farm, the largest insurer in LA, dropped 1 ,600 policies in July of 2024.

15:29Or, you know, do they know anything? I'm not a conspirist, but what they knew was, yeah, the winds were coming and LA wasn't prepared. They've been, you know, most of the big major insurance companies have been bailing on the American West more and more and more each year. And it's, if there was ever, you know, if there is 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.

16:24Life insurance pays your next akin after your dead. Health insurance pays you after you've gotten sick. There's a new approach, and we wrote about this in Futurist Fast and You Think, in which insurance prevents that from happening. Imagine if you bought fire insurance, and they were able to use technology and the best, And we'll talk about these things to prevent your house from ever burning down That's their first goal What if life insurance prevented you from dying and helping you? Yeah, so I mean like here's something mate. This is something like let me give you like just a really amazing Quadrate because this is I had to deal with this 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're either you're the your house's fireproof.

17:16We put in dust. We buried 20 ,000 dollar gallons worth of underground water storage and put an industrial sprinklers that face in and out to create to be able to create a fire break for it. We didn't want to do that. We wanted to put sprinklers on our roof because that's what the data shows is the very best thing to do. And if we were really smart about it, it'd be like a fountain where the water is recycled, right? And it would be a closed -lived system. But if you put sprinklers on your roof, it voids your homeowners insurance. Because it's an after -market addition. So it voids your roof insurance, and then it voids your homeowners insurance.

17:55So 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 homeowner's policy. So insane. You know, listen, I am so pissed off at the state government and LA government for their misappropriation and their lack of intelligence bluntly. It's funny. Let me say something. Because I am annoyed and I'm annoyed actually at like 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 your deal governments move slowly there are all kinds of entrenched stakeholders and entrepreneurship is faster yes into these things and you know can produce can produce a lot of change and the fire technologies have been developed for 10 years now.

19:04There's one fire fund. There's literally one venture fund for it. I think they're funded to the tune of like $35 million. So $250 billion worth of damages is the figure for LA. And there's one fucking fund trying to solve this problem and somebody gave him $35 million. I mean, to me, you know, like that's, I mean, the state government is behaving the way government seems to behave. and I wish it were different, but it does, I don't seem to have any power here. Where I've seen things change as through entrepreneurship, but I don't, there are so many climate funds, great, fantastic. What about why aren't we seeing the same potential play to disaster mitigation?

19:48Because we've been watching the disaster year after year, whether it's flooding in the American South versus fires in the wet. Like we're watching the extreme weather, mountain, mountain, mountain, and I look at this and I'm like, okay, this is entrepreneurship to the rescue and I'm not seeing the response. And so 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, which is, which are elegant. So five years ago, thereabouts, I'm, you know, I'm on my third evacuation.

20:32It was never this close, never this bad. And I'm like, there's got to be something we got to do here. And I said, obviously, the way you fight a wildfire is you put it out at inception, you know, when the fire begins. When's the best time to find a cancer? At the very beginning, at inception. Not when it's a stage 4, a metastasized cancer that you're fighting at all fronts. And that's what we're doing today with wildfires. We're not fighting at the beginning. We're fighting them when they're a conflagration and we're trying to fight them with everything we've got. And we've got incredible heroes out there just to be very clear, the men and women who are on the front line.

21:11Fire truck technology is amazing. All of the helicopters and aircraft. And I'm like, I snuck into my house in Santa Monica. I don't tell the cops to go and gather my kids' medicines and some clothes because we didn't take it seriously when I first heard about it. We went with minimal stuff. And I'm seeing the helicopters doing drops and I'm seeing the planes and it was like, go, yes, go, it was amazing. But why aren't we finding it inception? So I had the idea for an X -Prize that was monitor a thousand square acres of land. And if you detect a fire that's three meters, nine feet or larger, or if it's moving, put it out within 10 minutes.

21:59That's the rules. Super simple. I'm not able to fund this anyplace. And you know, people are saying it's a natural part of fire control that you know, 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 three meters or size or a fire moving, like in downtown Pacific Palisades. Just don't expect it there. So let fires burn where they should burn in natural, you know, natural cycles of nature. But let's protect other parts. And so one day I finally got a hold of Dick Merkin, an incredible physician, an entrepreneur, Michael Milken introduced me to him.

22:45And 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 Musk said, sure, instantly, to $100 million, carbon removal prize. And Dick Merkin gave us a half a million to design this prize. And the prize was very simple. There are two parts of it. One part is from space, can you monitor the earth for any sign of fires? That's one part, global monitoring. The second part is can you provide a system that monitors a given thousand square acres called 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 wienies on a grill.

23:36Something that's three meters or moving, put it out within 10 minutes. And that put it out within 10 minutes is probably the most important rule because in high winds, if you're waiting more than 10 minutes, you've lost it. So long story short, it took a while to get this prize funded. We ended up getting the Gordon and Betty more foundation as a co -title sponsor along with Pacific Gas and Electric. We got Minduru Foundation out of Australia, the Health and Foundation, Lockheed Martin Foundation, the American Family Mutual Insurance Company, Temis out of Greece, because Greece was being decimated by world requires.

24:18The Roddenberry Foundation, Fairfax Financial, a couple of individuals, Scott Painter, who who had lost his home committed a million dollars this prize and I just learned a couple of days ago that in the Palisades fire, he lost his home for a second time. You know, we've had a number of people Steve Brown, my chief AI officer, lost his home for a second time. And it's kind of insane. Long story short, we announced the prize. We have had 135 teams enter the competition and we're down to a final 29 teams that are in the semi -finals. And these teams are going to be using aerial drones, sound cannons, high lift UAVs.

25:10They'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. So, I mean, by the way, one of the things I, you know, it's interesting because when I wrote the white paper, I paid kind of the least amount of attention to fire extinguishing because I knew you were starting the X -Friars, I was like, OK, Peter might have this one.

25:53Like, he's got that element, you know, in it. Though some of the, you know, I know, and the satellite, I don't know, like the satellite stuff is kind of amazing. We're already like, I think, uh, um, like planet labs. It's two thousand. Yeah. I think Cal Fire said that like, it's an, And it's, or NASA fire detection is 95 % accurate. Like, we definitely, we definitely, the accuracy from the satellites is there. Planet, um, it's definitely well positioned. Will Marshall is well positioned. This is definitely a job for CubeSats. You said something before we started this podcast that I think was prophetic about this is a job for robots.

26:39Yeah, that's a, that maybe we'll 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 TVs and the pollutants and the level of toxicity The first thing I thought was if there was ever a job for Elon and they and the optimist robot It's this and the reason is for you to look at cleanup All right, maybe 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 Fukushima Fukushima, Fukushima, thank you.

27:20Right, the Fukushima in Elton really figured a whole new generation of disaster. Even wasn't, am I wrong, but didn't Boston Dynamics start out making disaster response robots? It was for the military, including disaster response. Yeah, the Fukushima nuclear disaster where they couldn't get anybody into the reactor to turn the damn thing off, spawned the DARPA challenges or robotic challenges. Right. That was it. Thank you. Exactly. So, yeah, we're obviously working on a new book and we've just finished a couple of chapters of the future of robots. and you and I know that you and I robots are really the next frontier.

28:05They're here, they're now, it's just about getting them to scale and here's a phenomenal opportunity. You know, we launched this wildfire prize. It's $11 million per purse. It should be $100 million per purse, by the way. If you don't, 10X the precise, just give me a call please. And we announced it at the Capitol and Palmer Lucky was there from Handeral, right? The founder of Oculus, but really has built a massive multi -billion dollar defense company and he got it and he said, listen, at the end of this competition, we're going to make Wildfires a thing of the past. And I've seen the technology that he plans to use.

28:54There are other companies that are using these aerial jets, which can literally fly to the point of fire in a couple of minutes and then land and then blow those fires out. That's the kind of technology we're seeing. I think we'll have ground UAVs. I think we'll have humanoid robots on the ready. I mean, honestly, there's no reason that these should exist. So just to provide a few more details on the timeline here, April of 25, semi -finals for the Track A, which is the orbital portion. August of 25 is the finals for the ground detection and extinction. Let me do a call out here to anybody from the FAA listening, anybody from state government, federal government listening.

29:53I 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 at 1000 square acres and you need to get from one location to the next at high speed and be able to put out a fire and when we run this competition it's going to be real fires being lit. There'll be decoy fires like you know a grill or a small campfire that the teams need to avoid and hit the fire that's nine feet three meters or moving and so we need permission to do this.

30:40So I remember, you know, Steven, you were there with me at the early days of the Ansari ex -price for spaceflight. I had to go to the head of the FAA to get permission for the teams to compete. We need that again. Otherwise, we're taking this wildfire prize outside the US to a permissive government. And we would much rather, since majority of the teams are in the United States. So we need support for the government to get out of the way of these entrepreneurs because they can solve this and they can make wildfires a thing of the past. I'm thinking it sounds like somebody needs to donate an Air Force Base.