Steve Wolf (Movie Pyrotechnics, Stunt Performers and Solving Wildfires with Science) - Episode 1080

This episode is sponsored by Transcend, a veteran -owned and operated performance optimization company that I introduced recently as a sponsor on this show. Well, since then I have actually been using my products and I have had incredible success. There was initial blood work that was extremely detailed and based on that they offered supplementation. So I began taking DHEA. BPC -157 for inflammation based on the fact that I've been a stuntman, a martial artist and a

firefighter my whole life. Lots of aches and pains. Dihexa to help cognition after multiple punches to the head and shift work and peptides. Four months later they did a detailed blood work again and I was actually able to taper off two of the peptides because my body had responded so well to just one of them that it was optimized

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Now, as I mentioned before, the other side of this company is an altruistic arm called the Transcend Foundation, which is putting veterans and first responders through some of their protocols free of charge. Now, Transcend are also offering you, the audience, 10 % off their protocols. And you can find that on jamesgearing .com under the Products tab. And if you want to hear more about Transcend and their story, listen to episode 808 with the founder, Ernie Colling. or go to

transcendcompany .com. This episode is sponsored by TeamBuildr, yet another company that's doing great things for the first responder community. As a strength and conditioning coach myself, who also trains tactical athletes, dissemination of wellness information is one of the biggest challenges. Now, TeamBuildr is the premier strength and conditioning software for tactical athletes. And there are several features that

really impress me. Firstly, there is a full exercise library, so you, the personal trainer, does not have to create that within your own department. Secondly, you can send out programming, but also individualize, which I love. So you blanket program for everyone. Now you can tweak based on someone's injury, someone's need to maybe drop some body composition, rather than having to write a program for every single person on their own. TeamBuilder also allows you to build custom questionnaires

to collate health and wellness data. It integrates with wearables. And I think one of the most important things is obviously it tracks. To me, it's imperative that we as a profession start tracking our people from day one and then over the full span of their career, therefore catching potential wellness issues and injuries before they happen. Now, if you want to try Team Builder, they are offering you, the audience of the Behind the Shield podcast, a free 14 -day trial to experience all of the

features. And if you want to take a deeper dive into TeamBuildr, listen to episode 1032 with Melissa Mercado or go to teambuilder .com. And I'll spell that to you because it's not as you think, T -E -A -M -B -U -I -L -D -R .com. Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing, and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show first responder, movie stunt performer, stunt scientist, and the man behind Team Wildfire, Steve Wolf.

Now, in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from his unique journey into the world of Hollywood, pyrotechnics, special effects, his work on the Discovery Channel. using science to help the wildland community, podcasting, and so much more. Now, before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback,

and leave a rating. Every single five -star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find. And this is a free library of well over 1 ,000 episodes now. So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women's stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them. So with that being said,

I introduce to you Steve Wolf. Enjoy. Well, Steve, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today. Hey, thanks so much for having me, James. And it was a pleasure having you on the fire break. Yeah, and I appreciate that, too. So where on planet Earth are we finding you this afternoon? This afternoon, you'll find me in Boulder, Colorado. But hopefully you won't find me because I'm really not looking to be

found today. All right. Well, let's start at the very beginning of your story. You've got a really interesting background. A lot of your story is similar to mine as well. Tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings. Sure. My port of entry to the U .S. was the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Actually, port of entry to the Earth, I suppose. So born in Manhattan. Lived in New York City until I

was six. Then we moved to Switzerland. My dad at the time was an international banker who turned TV food reporter. And my mom was an art and antiques appraiser. I'm the oldest of three boys. My middle brother was the lead videographer for CNN for

many years. and my youngest brother has developed innovative ways to use bamboo for housing furniture and bicycles so everyone's doing something interesting and my youngest brother and i work together fairly frequently when we're doing technology innovation and movie work so movie work to say that i've worked as a special effects coordinator on numerous feature films television shows music videos for the last 30 i'll just say 30 plus years that could be plus 15 who knows but um i worked for

tom cruise worked for james cameron working as a pyrotechnician blowing things up and simultaneously running a program called science in the movies where i teach stem concepts to school -aged children using movie stunts and special effects as the examples So, James, this was interesting that we had both worked as stunt performers in the special effects field and entertainment and both found ourselves moving across over into fire. Absolutely. Well, I want to go back firstly to

Switzerland. I think it's always. I want to go back to Switzerland too. It's so interesting when people have been in different parts of the world, especially if they live there, because you can then glean, okay, what about that culture did you like? Maybe other parts of the world could learn from. And then conversely, were there any things that were the opposite? So when you reflect back, what was it like being a young American growing up in Switzerland? It was really

great. A big change from New York City where it was all buildings. This was a lot of open space, a lot of sky, cows and green pastures, unpolluted lakes. So that would be the first thing that would strike you would be just simply the geography of the area being extremely beautiful. The air being clean and the Swiss being precise. So as a fledgling scientist, I was very impressed with how. accurately everything is handled in

Switzerland. When you go to pick up your shirts at the dry cleaner, they're all perfectly folded. They're all 62 .5 centimeters wide at the fold. They pride themselves on that precision. When I was in fourth grade, we took a trip to CERN, which was the nuclear accelerator facility that surrounds Geneva. That was the first time I saw you know, massive scale scientific technology at use for the purpose of discovering, I'm not

sure what, but I think they had an idea. And it was the first time I heard the word Google. And at the time it was simply referring to numerical quantity, not a search engine, because I don't think the internet was a thing then. When you reflect back, was there any discussion or any part of your education that told the story of how Switzerland was able to remain neutral when war was all around it in the 40s? Well, largely because not only was war all around it, but mountains

were all around it. And unless you planned some type of an aerial attack, Switzerland has the natural barriers of mountains all around it. The Romans were the first to find out how difficult it would be to take Switzerland as they tried moving from Italy across the Alps. Until the tunnel was put in, there really wasn't an easy land route into Switzerland. So that's one of

the things that helped maintain neutrality. The other one is that wealthy people from around the world have their money stored there and they don't want their money screwed with. So if you mess with Switzerland, you're going to be messing with a lot of very powerful, wealthy people that you can't even imagine. That's interesting and kind of sad in a way that you can, in theory, buy your way out of a war. Well, they simply don't take sides. I don't know that they buy

their way out. They just don't participate. They have amazing chocolate, great watches, clean mountain air, delicious food. So what's to go to war over? If other people have differences and they can't settle them amicably, that's their problem, as the Swiss would think. And we're going to go back and eat some chocolate and some cheese. When I think of precision, I lived in Japan for 15 months. And again, very precise

people. And when you look at a lot of the industry over there, it is their excellence when it comes to attention to detail and diligence, I think that creates a superior product in many areas. What was it about the Swiss upbringing that created the same ethos? For me, I attended the Lycée des Nations and then the École Internationale in Geneva. And the ethos there is a combination of forward -looking progress, attention to detail

and respect for the past. And I think that the sense of place that you have in Europe with regard to time is very different than in many other places. When you walk around Europe, you know, you could be living in a building from the 1600s as we did when we first moved to Geneva. We were in the Vieilleville and you look out over the rooftops and you realize that, you know, you're the 20th generation to live in that building or the 50th generation to walk down those streets

or the cobblestones. And so there's a sense of respect that you get for the area as a function of your little time in it, who you inherited it from, and who you're leaving it to. The farmhouse I grew up in dated back to the 1600s. It was crazy. And that was just my house. It didn't seem like anything out of the ordinary. So it's amazing when you go back home to Europe. I mean, there's so much history there. And it's interesting because when Americans say that, they'll be like,

oh, we don't have much history there, here. And then I'm sure the Native Americans are looking around going, wait a second, what was that you just said? Right. Well, unfortunately, our culture is very dismissive of other cultures, different cultures, foreign cultures, and Native cultures. So in the United States, we tend to simply look forward. Here's where we are and here's where we're going. And without a sense of where we've been, we lack a place, a sense of place and time.

Where do we fit in to the human story? And one of the consequences of looking backwards and seeing where you came from is it enhances an awareness. That there's a future going forward and that the decisions we make are going to impact our children and our grandchildren. And this was something actually that was the native cultures here in the U .S. were quite known for is the concept of the seventh generation, that every decision we make is done weighing the impacts

on seven generations forward. And I'm really not sure why they excluded the importance of the eighth and ninth generation, but. We don't even look forward to one generation. So that would be a huge improvement in our culture. Where do you think that comes from? It's interesting. Not only you in the science world, you had a childhood in Switzerland, but I've reflected

on this a lot recently. We are starting to see somewhat of a full circle where we're finally acknowledging ancient wisdom and whether it's stoicism being extremely popular in literature and podcasts now, whether it's realizing that

not. covering your foods with chemicals and feeding your animals hormones and antibiotics is actually much healthier for the human being but in in medicine especially which is obviously my world there's been a lot of arrogance like if you're not doing it the the 2020 way then you know you don't know what you're talking about and there's a disregard through some eyes of a millennia of human wisdom and all these things that we've learned so what is it about some of these kind

of entities that have created such a disdain from the very knowledge we should be learning from? I can't tell you what's created the disdain for it. I can tell you that I don't participate in it. Humans are about 200 ,000 years old in our relatively similar form. And we've been taking notes along the way. And that accumulated wisdom is... is held both within our bodies and our minds and in our cumulative knowledge bodies.

When we talk about science, people think that we have to have invented something new for it to be valid. When most science has already been proven, the laws of physics are the same in every part of the galaxy that we know of. And so much thought has been put into science by people who were a lot less busy than we are. People who had a lot more time to contemplate, to ponder, to really think about the universe, about science, about humans, about our place here, about health.

And much of that wisdom was discarded with a type of a not invented here mentality. You know, as we discover new things, we're finding that the source of them is often in antiquity. So when we go out to look for new cancer drugs, where do we go? We go to the Yumba Indians in the Amazon. We look at what their diets are. How do they treat things? How have they preserved this collective body of wisdom, experiential

knowledge? What gave us the idea that, you know, that if we ate the bark of a particular tree, it would cure a headache, right? That's where aspirin was right now. Bayer didn't come up with that. You know, that this was something that had been developed through hundreds and thousands of years of evolutionary knowledge. You know, you ate this thing, it killed you. You ate that other thing, it cured your stomach ache. You ate that other thing, it took away your headache.

You ate too much of that thing, you got too fat, right? So we've learned this, but we've largely discarded a lot of that knowledge. And that's unfortunate because, unfortunately, what we found now is there's no money to be made in keeping people healthy. We don't have a health care system. We have an illness treatment system. And so if you don't present with illnesses, you're not a financial opportunity to our health care system

as it exists in the U .S. where in many countries the focus is on health preservation, health enhancement, health maintenance. And here we largely lack a concept of what healthy is. Health is not simply the absence of illness. So there's a huge chasm there to be forged with regard to how we think about health. Absolutely. Well, I've always said this. I mean, this is at its origin. The country

I came from had national health care. And so back then, when you have a tax based health care system, purely tax based, that then creates a real desire to make your nation as healthy as possible because the healthier they are, the less they use the health care. And it's now for newborns and the elderly and traffic accidents and, God forbid, cancers. But then you look at the American model. And just like you said, I say this all the time, there's no profit in healthy

or dead people. But if you can keep people in between, you've got a drug addict for life. And this is not a conspiracy theory. It's just pure economics. We have a profit -based healthcare system. So the more sick people we have, and we've seen this because 70 % of our population is overweight or obese, the greater percentage of the pie that you can keep on these drugs or need these surgeries. the more money your company

makes. So until we have a national awakening on the very things that you just talked about, it's just going to get worse and worse and worse. And then alongside that, we have a national security crisis because now you've only got 30 % of the people that are actually even able to put on a uniform and defend this country now. So it's a massive, massive conversation that needs to

be had. Well, very much. If we were to prioritize enemies by the degree to which they threaten American lives, Domestic diet would probably be far higher than the threats posed by any foreign national entity. We kill 600 ,000 Americans through heart disease every year. Companies that are selling billions of dollars of statins every year have no interest in funding the messaging that if you were to eat less meat, you'd have less heart disease. So messaging costs money.

And money is paid for by things that are profitable and treating diseases profitable. The thing is that it's not sustainable because we can't continue to spend $40 billion a year on cardiac care, ignoring the fact that 99 % of that is completely avoidable as a function of diet and lifestyle changes. Now, I understand that doctors are largely dissuaded by their patients' behavior. from preaching nutrition because people simply don't listen. I knew a doctor who informed a diabetes patient

that she was going to lose her feet. And they asked, well, why didn't you tell her to change her diet? And he said, I've said that so many times, people stop listening, I just stop saying it. So people have accepted illness as a chronic state. And the healthcare industry's not done much to change that. With regard to wildfire,

the threat is largely airborne. That wildfire smoke is 15 times more dangerous to health than ordinary pollutants, than the smog that people breathe in large cities, because it contains heavy metals and it contains... large quantities of things that we just normally don't breathe. Like as a mobile species, when an area was threatened, we left. When there was no food, we left. When it was on fire, we left. Well, now we have permanent homes. So when there's a nearby fire, we don't

leave. We just close the windows and hope that we can get a decent HEPA filter to protect us. But while that may work for people who do have the luxury of staying at home, it doesn't work for the firefighters on the line. They're exposed to toxins at levels that really are impermissible. And that's with both wildfire and structural firefighting. You know better than anyone, James, what the death rates are from chemical exposure

to agents that people were told were safe. We're justified by saying, well, what do you want to do, lose the whole city? A few firefighter deaths is nothing compared to losing the whole city. Well, if you're a firefighter or that firefighter's family, it's the worst thing that could happen. Absolutely. Well, speaking of health, I just want to go back to your journey into the film

and the special effects world. When you were young, this could be the States and or Switzerland, what were you playing as far as sports and exercise back then? Well, that's a great question. I don't know if you've seen a movie called The Boys in Company C. It was the predecessor to Full Metal Jacket, even starring the same people, although it got far less credit because it was an independent

movie rather than a studio film. But in that movie, which is about a bunch of young kids from the States who are drafted and being sent to Vietnam, one of their drill instructors tells them that he believes that people are influenced by the games they play as children. He said that in the United States, they play baseball and you play from a fixed position and you have a fixed series of sequences that you perform in

order to score a home run. Whereas people in Europe and Asia play soccer, which was a fluid and dynamic game where wherever the ball is, that's where the game is. And you're constantly... In a new game every minute, the ball is here, it's one game, the ball is there, it's a new game. Right now you're not engaged, the next

minute you are engaged. And that type of fluid dynamic training that comes from playing games like soccer creates people who are much more adaptable to change because that's what they grew up with. Once you've had your at -bat in baseball, you know you're not up until the next whatever. nine plays or something. Whereas in soccer, you could be out in left field and there's nothing happening. And then all of a sudden,

boom, the actions come to you. So I think that that type of early experiences with fluid dynamic games are really important for people who are in tactical situations. Because this is one of the things that, you know, that kills firefighters is like, well, you know, the fire's inside, I'm outside. Yeah, that's fine until the facade collapses on you. And now it's a whole new ballgame. or the transitions that we're seeing between structure

fires or urban fires and wildland fires. Well, now with 40 % of the homes being in the wildland -urban interface, a structure fire can quickly become a wildfire, and a wildfire can quickly create a structure -to -structure conflagration, which we unfortunately call or mistakenly call wildfires. Downtown Los Angeles is not. a wildland environment. It's an urban environment. Even

worse, it's a suburban environment. And when a fire triggers through there, we categorize the type of fire based on what started it, which is really not helpful information. So if a nearby wildland fire started it, we say, well, a wildfire is driving through the city. If a trash fire started it, we don't characterize it. We just say it's a fire. But it really doesn't matter what the ignition source is when you have a structure to structure fire, that's what you're fighting.

So when you call it a wildfire, that makes people want to respond to it with wildfire tactics, personnel and equipment, which are completely unsuited to structure to structure complication. So this leaves people trying to fight a fire that they have misclassified. and therefore approach incorrectly with the results that you see. You know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of homes lost. Because the structure fire, people are

thinking, well, it's not a building fire. The wildland people are thinking, well, it's not really a wildland fire. So nature wins by lobbing the ball right between the two areas of responsibility and each thinking, oh, I thought you had that shot. So we really need a new approach to... It's a conflagration attack, which should largely be focused on prevention. However, I lived in the States long enough to know that the United

States is not a prevention culture. There's no money for prevention, whether it's health care, fire prevention, anything else. But there is unlimited money for response. So unfortunately, I think we're going to have a better chance of

dealing with these fires if we developed. better response capabilities simply because i think that prevention while it may be a better choice is just not a direction that americans are going to go in people won't go outside and pick up their leaves they won't clean the gutters they won't clear that zero to five foot space They won't participate in programs actively with their

neighbors to create safer communities. These are all things that community risk reduction people know are effective or would be effective, but such an uphill battle to get people to change their habits and be proactive and very little funding for that. So that's where we are, James. In your research, being worldly and again in the science, space, are there areas in the world where they are able to to story tell the importance

of that? And there is a lot more community involvement that results in less loss of homes and life during some of these wildfires. You know, Europe is certainly more advanced on that. If you've ever driven or flown across the United States, you'll see we have vast areas. of unused space. A fire in Phoenix is not going to impact a fire in Flagstaff because things are so spread out. So you might lose a city, but you're not going to lose a nation. In Europe, the villages are very close together.

They're stacked fairly contiguously. The buildings are close together. And so when a fire starts, if you don't stop it, you'll not only lose that city, you'll lose all the cities downwind of it. So they're very proactive in terms of what they can do to prevent fire from starting and spreading. And they're very proactive in how they respond to fires as well. So there are certainly

models out there for how that can be done. But necessity being the most important teacher, the lesson's gone to the people who need it, and it has been lost on the people who didn't need it. In the United States, we haven't needed that so much because of the space between areas. Well, we're going to get to the technology that you developed in a little bit. What was funny on this, going back to the ancient ways, I had Jason Ramos on the show and he's a smoke diver and

also developer as well. And one of the biggest innovations that he said that he's seen recently is the use of donkeys. I'm sorry, goats, to literally graze the areas that would have been in a high fuel load. And again, now here we are circling back to ancient times where I'm sure whether it was Native Americans or other places in the world that they, of course, would have, you know, if that was used as grazing, then they would know they would be relatively safe from a wildfire

risk back then. Right. And so if you were to look at the budget for, let's say, California. It continues to have the worst fires in the U .S. How much money was spent on one firehawk helicopter versus a goat grazing program? Goat grazing is still considered an experimental thing that's done by a fringe community and not at all funded. And yet, you know, there's $30 million when they want to buy a new helicopter. which is grounded, by the way, during wind -driven

fires, which is when you need the most. So they've invested the most money in the technology that's the most frail on game day. Absolutely. Well, let's dive into the movie world, and then we'll kind of circle around to the first responder professions. When you were in the school age, were you dreaming about going into special effects on the screen, or was there something else in your mind first? As into photography and first responder stuff, I worked as a medic at the New

York City Marathon. I was a photographer, worked at a camera store, very interested in how we document the world around us. Because photographs allow you to preserve an instant in time and then to study it. Whereas a continuous flow of

information allows for very little study. and therefore very little opportunity to learn from it so i was fascinated by that um and and of course i had never stopped nurturing the five -year -old boys infatuation with fire that that most boys could relate to so i had been given some early advice from my dad who he said if you want to be happy figure out what you like to do first and then figure out how to get paid for it well My favorite toys were my chemistry

set. And as far as I knew, its only purpose was for blowing things up. And then there were all the other chemicals that we threw out. But I got suspended from high school for a week once for doing the unauthorized experiment in the fume hood, where I was mixing sodium hydroxide with aluminum powder and then squirting it with water to set it on fire. And I thought that was fascinating, the idea that you could start a

fire with a squirt gun. It was worth five days of dismissal or whatever that was, suspension, in order to see that lesson. And the capability of fire always fascinated me and eventually led me to become a pyrotechnician in the film industry. So walk me through that path. I went to drama school. Very long story, very short. I went because I was... trying to be close to my girlfriend

at the time. So I got into drama school. I am hands down the worst actor on planet earth, but I found myself, I was good at the stage fight and I was a martial artist. So the stunt side started to kind of form. Um, but when I, I wasn't a stunt man yet, I was just a actor, a terrible actor with good sword skills. So then I got into the real world and then it's that double -edged sword of, you need an agent to get a job. You need a job to get an agent. So how, and then

it was, you know, it was maddening. It was a spinning wheel until I found the world of stunts. How did you find yourself getting into the entertainment industry with that specific set of skills? Well, I was in college. I went to Columbia University in New York where I studied Shakespeare and 18th century British literature and freelanced as an EMT working on movie sets. I had started a company called Cinematics, providing paramedics

and related medical services. two movie sets where dangerous stunts were being performed. So when they're doing a high fall airbag jump or they're doing a full body burn or a motorcycle stunt, production companies will, out of abundance of safety and legal requirement, have an ambulance standing by so that if people get hurt, they can be treated quickly. Treatment time is the difference between success or lack of success

in the outcomes of an accident. So I had bought a small ambulance, used it on sets in New York City. And many times I would look at the stunt that they were setting up. And it was obvious that some critical aspect of physics had been ignored. That if you plan to jump your motorcycle up this ramp because you want to land it inside this window and you fail to account for the parabolic nature of. trajectories as a function of gravity, you can't simply line it up with the window and

that's where you're going to go. So I would occasionally suggest to the stunt department, hey, if you move that ramp back a little bit, then you'll catch the downward arc and you'll end up in the window instead of near the window in the bricks. And that was frequently greeted with things like, hey, let's agree on a division of labor. We'll do the stunts. You drive the ambulance. So I said, all right, fine. I'll see you in the back of the ambulance in 10 minutes. When you hit

the wall. Yeah. And invariably, off they go, take off, boom, two knees slamming into the windowsill, two broken legs in the back of the ambulance. And eventually, I was able to convince producers that if they would let me apply a little bit more science and a little bit less cowboyism, we could make filmmaking less expensive by reducing the number of injuries. And so that... created an opportunity for me to begin work as a stunt

coordinator. And then I found out really that stunt people are really the human payload at the end of a physics experiment that's largely set up by the special effects department and that there was more science and less cowboyism in the effects department. So I transferred over and started to work my way up again from a special effects assistant to a special effects coordinator.

largely with the help of a mentor. When I realized I wanted to do special effects, I started reading the credits of movies to see, well, who are the people in this business? And there was one name that had popped up repeatedly, a gentleman named Gary Zeller. He invented something called Zell Gel. And Zell Gel is the aqueous liquid gel that stunt people put on their bodies when they light themselves on fire. to act as a heat sink to

catch heat so that you don't burn up. And he actually sold a lot of this to fire departments too, because in structural fires, people would burn their ears frequently. And they found that if they put a little bit of this Zell gel, fire stunt gel on, they could prevent that. So I called Gary out of the blue, you know, on a landline telephone. And after having him looked him up in the white pages, these are things that are no longer concepts. But I called Gary and I said,

hey, Gary, this is Steve Wolf. You don't know me, but I'm a big fan of your work. And starting next Monday, I would like to come be your apprentice, carry your bags, help you wire up whatever you're wiring up, get your coffee. Whatever you need done, I'm there to help and I'm not looking for a job. You don't have to pay me. I just want the experience of working with you. And he said, fine, I'll be in the city next week. We're going

to be setting up an episode of True Blue. We're going to launch the largest fireworks show ever launched inside an apartment building in New York City, all directed to the outside. It's supposed to be a fireworks warehouse explosion. So we're going to be wiring this up. If you have a hot melt glue gun, bring it. We're going to be going through a lot of stuff. So I showed up and kept showing up. And after a couple of

weeks, Gary put me on payroll. We eventually formed a company together, producing special effects intensive ads and sequences for movies. We worked for Bruce Willis. We had a lot of good things going on. Because I was able to explain to Gary that... 200 people who just learned how to shoot, you know, use a camera or a sound machine filming this thing that you've spent 30 years learning how to do. You should be paid more than any of them. They're there. You can find another

camera guy. You can find another sound guy. You can't find another pyro guy who knows how to make this effect happen. So I helped him raise his prices and we started working together. And then one day he got a phone call from Tom Cruise's production company. They were going to do a movie called The Firm shooting in Memphis. And he answered the phone and he just handed it to me. And he said, this one's for you. And that was my first job as the special effects coordinator. So that

was after three years of interning. He thought that I was ready to do that. And he was ready to get out of the business because. You can only spend so much of your life trying to create entertainment for people. If you have legitimate science chops, eventually you want to use them for something good, not just to watch people shoot each other

up in a movie for an hour and a half. So he moved off into working in environmental science, developing polymeric roof coatings for... you know, better UV rejection on structures, figuring out how to use the 250 ,000 tires that we generate every day in America for housing, you know, and a lot of things that were good that, you know, I had to get my career in first before I could turn around to doing something good. But he really created that opportunity for me. And that was

such an important lesson. that I think for other people who want to know, how do you get into the business? How do you get your break? You make it by showing up. If you keep showing up and you're not a pain in the neck and you provide some value to the people around you, they'll hire you. You're not going to get into the film industry by going to film school. You're not going to get into stunt work by going to stunt school. People hire people who they know, like,

and trust. If you don't take the time to get to know people and have them like you and trust you, it's going to be a hard shot at getting in. Absolutely. That's how I got my first stunt job. I was traveling with my girlfriend at the time and we were in Australia and Universal Studios Japan was looking for everyone. They were opening a theme park from scratch and it was about showing up. happened to have the skill set, but also look like Robert Patrick from T2. So between

those two, you know, that was it. I didn't have stunt school. I had martial arts. I had stunt training as far as the sword work, but that really wasn't needed for this particular role. You just needed to be, you know, a physical actor and have the right face basically. So yeah, if I'd never shown up for that interview, I probably would never have become a stunt man in the first

place. Right. Yeah. This is something that's really been hard for me to explain to people that Jobs are not awarded over the internet. Jobs aren't awarded to people who email their resume in. They're given to people to show up and put their face in front of the other face. You talked about, you know, you need an agent to get work and you can't get work if you don't

have an agent. The catch -22 there, you know, I got acting and stunt work in New York in my late 20s by putting my face in the agent's office every single day. print your headshots, print your resume, walk out there. And if you're standing in front of the person when their phone rings, hey, we need a guy to do X, Y, Z. Hey, Wolf, you want to try doing this? I just got a call,

right? That's how you get the work. They're not going to go through their Rolodex or their files and happen to say, oh, look, this guy would be really great for that. Like people are always doing the easiest thing and the easiest things to put the person to work who's standing right

in front of you. Talk to me about. the element of being unorthodox as well when i started the podcast you know there were even though it was pretty early days it was you know eight and a half years ago now but um yeah you could go on there and say this is how to start a podcast this is how to do this this is how to do that and i looked at it and go yeah i'm just going to do it my way and you know it's either going to work or it's not going to work but you know

i know that i want to do long form you know there was even then they were talking about if you just do short ones you can put all this sponsorship all over it and i'm like well i'm not trying to make money from it i'm trying to help people. So it's not about short, choppy, Insta -famous things. It's about a long, deep conversation.

But it ended up working. It became unique. And I think even with the books and then the show that I'm getting ready to make, and I'm being very, very optimistic with that sentence, but it will happen. It's going to be something that people haven't seen before because it's coming from a different perspective. It sounds like you've had that element in the way that you've viewed everything from the initial stunt world to the innovation that you've just come up with.

So what was it that made you stay your ground and be the quote unquote weirdo in that space? Well, I preface this by saying not to be dismissive of everything else in the world, but most things are done in a pretty crappy way. But people who don't put a lot of thought into them, this is simply true, right? And for almost any problem that you want to tackle, there's probably a better way to solve it than the way it's being solved now. So I remember in 1992, I saw a news story.

Tom Brokaw was talking about how the United States had come in 19th out of 20th in international science testing standards. And I was incredulous. You know, as a six -year -old, I stared at my television. I watched a man walk on the moon, plant that American flag. And I was like, how can the country that put a man on the moon be failing basic science and math? And that really irked me. And I decided that I wanted to change, you know, how education was conducted in science.

And so people would say, oh, well, you're going to have to go get a degree in education. Then you're going to have to get a master's in science education, early science teaching. And I thought, well, that's just being part of the system that doesn't work. Kids haven't gotten stupider. There's been no de -evolution. So if kids are failing science, it's because the schools are failing to teach it to them in a way that engages them.

So I started this program called Science in the Movies that I ran for upwards of 20 years, where I took six movie stunts and special effects, which included lighting myself on fire, hanging the principal from the ceiling, filling the gymnasium with smoke, burning down a house, and all these things that I knew. would engage kids. And I used that as the basis for teaching them the science, the physics and the chemistry that makes these types of stunts and special effects possible.

And, you know, within a decade, I had won the science teacher of the year award twice. Because this method, which had nothing to do with mainstream education, it was strictly an assembly that came in to schools was working. I was getting a lot of checks from schools in Texas where I was living at the time, which prompted the comptroller for the state of Texas to do an audit and say, why are all these companies writing checks to science

in the movies? What's going on with that? And so she called me up and she said, what are you doing? Why are you getting all these checks? And I said, well, I'm just doing a science assemblies. She didn't tell me about it and told her what the shows were about. She did her research and she found that. In any two side -by -side schools, the one at which I had spoken was scoring 30 % higher in their science exams. And it was simply

the impact of one hour of inspiration. So you don't have to have amazing science education every single day. What you have to do is inspire people to want to learn on their own. And the impact of that is far greater than the impact that you could have in a diluted, long campaign. When I thought back to my own high school years, I remember very little of it, but I remember some of the speakers who came and did assemblies.

And that really convinced me that the presence of someone who takes their time to come to your school because they're so excited about what they're doing and presents an assembly is really powerful. And so that was really the genesis of starting the Science in the Movies program, which brought me all around the world to Saudi Arabia, to Serbia, to keynote for the World Science Festival. And it was based on the idea that not

every kid has to invent the light bulb. You only need one Thomas Edison for everyone to have light. And so science is not going to be everyone's thing. But if you can reach a few people and inspire them. To pursue that journey of learning how the world works, that could have monumental impact for everyone. So working as a pyrotechnician, people say, what have you lit on fire? I believe that the most important thing that you could

ignite is a child's imagination. Because once that imagination takes off, especially with the resources kids have access to now on the Internet. Once they're curious about something, they will learn more about it than their teachers could ever teach. And they can become experts in fields that didn't exist. What do people make billions of dollars on now? Search. If you asked me in high school, what is search? You know, it's a game you play at a party, right? Hide and go

seek. So, but you know, but because of Sergey Brin and his... His friends had this fascination with this thing. They created something that became the most dominant economic and knowledge force on the planet. So as much as humanity has done, there's still vastly more to do. There are entire realms of knowledge yet to be explored, to be invented. And going at it as an outsider gives you a unique advantage because you're not coming up with the same answer that everyone

else came up with. I would never go to an engineering school to have them solve a problem because they all took the same classes, they all learned to solve a problem the same way, and they're all coming up with the same non -functional answers. So I think you're much better off working with people who are outside the system that have a unique perspective because it's that unique idea

that's going to be different. I read something yesterday on LinkedIn about a... put out by a marketing girl who does marketing for a company in Israel. And she said, different is better than better. And I thought that was really interesting that when you're asked, you know, why is your product better? The answer is that it's different, that there are many ways to solve problems. Some of them might be better. But the fact that you're doing something different is really as important.

Because as environmental conditions change, we don't know what's going to work. Is it better to be tall or short? I don't know. Depends what the food source is, how tall the grass is, and how much food is available. If you live in a place where food is scarce, it's better to be short. If you live in a place where you have to run from the animals, it's better to be tall. But we don't know what the environmental factors are going to be that decide what's the more survivable

trait. until the environmental pressure is exerted. And it's the same thing knowledge -wise. We don't know what the best answer to a problem is going to be because we don't know what form the question is going to take. So as we look forward to things like wildfire, we know that the way we used to approach that problem is not the way we're going to successfully approach it in the future. What will be the best answer? The best way is try a lot of things and see what works. Absolutely.

It's interesting, again, with that different perspective. This is what I've been trying to do in the fire service is getting to look at sleep deprivation and the work week. When it comes to cancer, it's all focused on carcinogens in our gear from the fires. And when it comes to mental health, it's, oh, it's what they saw. They had that call. And they're completely ignoring the fact that, you know, that. If you make the human resilient, they can actually deal with

a lot of stuff. But if you break them down through sleep deprivation, we have these 56, 80 -hour work weeks if we're forced to work another shift. And it's not my work. I'm not a sleep medicine guru. I didn't discover this. I just found it on someone else's podcast and realized this is what we need to be talking about. But just like you said, it's different. And because of that, my profession is so resistant to something being different, whether it's a helmet or whether it's

a shift. But that's our biggest enemy because, you know, as I said, ego is the enemy. We have to have the humility to go. Things have changed. Things are not the same as they used to be, you know, 80 years ago when we were just responding to maybe one fire a week. Now we're out there constantly. So taking a step back and going and considering that different way of looking at

it is how we move forward. Yeah. I mean, our body has recognized that a cancer cell doesn't belong there and does its best job to attack it. George Carlin had a very funny routine about the immense military -like capabilities of the immune system. But you lose all that benefit when you don't have the sleep that's necessary for the immune system to work properly. And that leaves you vulnerable to a host of illnesses.

Absolutely. Well, I want to get to the wildfire side, but just before we do, we kind of stopped at the movie. What was some of the most memorable stunts, special effects that you worked on in that space? Let's see. We burnt a house down for several. Burning houses down is fun, especially when you have the challenge that it's a historic house and you can't actually burn it down. Then you have to figure out how do you insulate the house from the inside, project flames out through

the windows. create the illusion that you're burning a house down. Fire stunts have always been very interesting. It led me to believe that a stunt person is a scientist who believes so strongly in their theory that they're willing to risk their own life to prove it. And this is the case whether you're jumping off a building into an airbag, understanding the physics of deceleration and the human limits of deceleration, the difference between and splat, exposure to

heat. It's one thing to invent a chemical that you think is going to act as an insulative barrier between you and the fuels. It's another thing to put the fuels on your body and light yourself on fire. As an astronomer, you could be vastly wrong about the speed at which the universe is expanding and still maintain your professorship. If you're a stunt person, you're wrong about the thermal dynamics of a given insulator or

fuel, you get burned to death. So the consequences of being wrong are pretty high, both for yourself and the people you work with. But that doesn't mean that you aren't eager to try them. One of the real challenges in the film industry has been sameness, right? We want bullet hits. We want the car to flip. We want this. They want the same thing over and over again. They want what's new, but they don't know what the new

thing is. So the challenge for me was to not get bored by doing the same thing the same way. And this led me to want to do the same stunt or special effect in a different manner every time. to make unavailable to me the answers I'd come up with before, but rather to use the knowledge I'd gained from those experiences to make it better every time. And I have a very short attention span for repetitive tasks. So when the task itself, when the outcome is repetitive, the method has

to be novel. And that's been great because it led me to discover a lot of new, technologies in science that could then be applied to movies. And just to clarify that, movie stunts and special effects is not magic and it's not machismo or anything like that. A special effects coordinator is basically a handyman who happens to work on a movie set and knows how to do stuff. A stunt person is a professional athlete who happens to use their athletic in the service of the entertainment

industry. So there's nothing miraculous about this. You know, you can't tell somebody, oh, could do a stunt for me. Like there's a lot of thought that goes, that'd be like telling an architect, oh, build a building for me. Okay, well, it's not that easy. There's a lot that goes into it. A lot of foresight and planning and materials and participation with a lot of

other people. But always wanting to do something a new way has been really useful, particularly now as it applies to the way I envision wildfire management. What about near misses? We've had some tragedies on movie sets over the last, you know, since the beginning of stunts, really. But when you reflect now, were there any near misses where, you know, you realize that someone narrowly escaped something horrendous? Yeah, I was one of those people. I was standing by

a car. The car got sideswiped. The transpo people hadn't put the car in park. They'd left it in neutral. And so when it got sideswiped, it came right for me. And I fell to the ground and curled up and let the car go over me, you know, hiding between the wheels. But everyone who saw that thought that I had been run over. Could not understand how I got up after. But, you know, I experienced

that. I forgot what it's called, but the distortion of time that happens in an emergency where everything seems to slow down and that buys you the time to figure out how you're going to get yourself out of this situation. So I've had those and you'll learn a lot from them. Mostly you learn. to slow down and think through what you're doing much more before you do it. You know, there's a, on your keyboard, you have a one and you have an asterisk. And I've seen patches that are composed

of the one and the asterisk. And it's just, it's a reminder. You only have one asterisk. So. It took me a moment. Yeah. Did you watch The Fall Guy, the new film? Loved it. Loved it. I watched the show when I was little and that absolutely had me wanting to be a stuntman, but I was on a farm in England at that time. It wasn't the natural path to become a stuntman, but then obviously I ended up getting into the industry. And it's kind of sad because as we progress through, you

see now CGI. being used for so much and you've got these stunt robots that you know fall hilariously and fail um but there's no substitute at times of course there's it's great if you can you know completely reduce the risk of someone if they're doing you know some of these descender falls and things that are replacing a traditional high fall but there's definitely a detriment too on screen and the moment a cgi is recognized it pulls you it snatches you from the story then

yes and i loved the fact that the fall guy paid tribute to the original stunts and you had, you know, this record -breaking car jump and this incredible high fall. So what is your perspective of that line between the danger of a real stunt and maybe the kind of the lag in technology to truly, truly replace it at the moment? Yeah, well, it's certainly not anywhere near ready

to replace it, except in a jarring way. uh that pulls you out of the story so i don't think we're in any danger of that but you know people said why why do you why are you blowing up cars in real life why aren't you just doing that with cgi say well because i could show up on set at eight o 'clock i could blow up that car 30 times before lunch and by noon the director can choose the best part of each explosion and piece it together and they're done it would take more

than three hours just Explain to the CGI people what you're trying to do, let alone set it up all on the computers, let alone two weeks on a render farm where it's rendering every frame and every pixel. So it's not only not an efficient way to do things, it's not a good way to do them. It takes a long time. And then if the director doesn't like it, three more weeks back on the render farm. Really, do we need to use computers for pixelating flame progression or blades of

grass moving? It's silliness. Point a fan at the grass and film it blowing. So the problem largely is really as a function, as you were speaking earlier about the games kids play when they grow up, that you and I grew up playing physical games, learning how the world... works from a physics standpoint and how we interrelate with it. But now people grow up and all their games are played with their thumbs. And so their bias is to think that software is the solution

to everything. But you couldn't figure out how to change an outlet or how to lift something with a pulley. There's so many basic science, physics concepts that are so... necessary every day that kids have no idea how they work. I am absolutely sure that if I brought a pulley into a classroom with kids right now, they'd have no idea what it was. Let alone that Archimedes invented it 2 ,500 years ago and what its function is. I said, well, you might need this if you

wanted to change the engine in a car. And they're like, well, why would I need to do that? Just bring it back to the Tesla shop. We needed to be a firefighter. You're going to rescue someone off the side of a building. Right, exactly. You need to understand what the tensile strength properties of the rope are, what the flammability properties of the rope are, what your own capabilities are. A lot, right? A lot of things that we think

about that really aren't largely taught. But I think that kids who do have the benefit of being taught this way of thinking and how the physical world works. are in a pinch at a great advantage over the rest. Well, speaking of that, one more area before we go to the wild land specifically. I know you did a show on the Discovery Channel as well. So you've done this kind of in -person on the school side. How did you find yourself in the kind of pseudo myth -busting world teaching

this on Discovery Channel? I've done several series for Discovery. I did a show called Houdini's Last Secret. where we recreated four of Houdini's most famous escapes, physically built them to the best of our knowledge, replicating what Houdini had created, and then had a magician escape from them. And that was interesting because if we don't really know how Houdini did these things, all we could do is our best guess and solve these

problems the way we would. How would we just figure out how to get immersed in a tank of water and escape? Catch a bullet with your teeth or these things that he did, which were illusions, but we had to figure out how to do them our way. That was fun science. I did a show called What Destroyed the Hindenburg, where the Discovery Channel gave us the budget to replicate three 10th scale Hindenburgs. And when normally we would say 10th scale, that's got to be tiny.

A 10th scale Hindenburg is 14 feet tall and 80 feet long. Oh, wow. I was thinking much more than that. Yeah, no, it was able to lift me. I could easily fly on our replicas. And they were filled with hydrogen, just like the original was. And then what we did is we destroyed each one by implementing one of the three most common theories of how the Hindenburg blew up. And then we compared our footage to the archival footage

of the actual disaster. And then we were able to conclude that the method of destroying it, the method of igniting it, that produced a result that looked closest to the real thing, was most likely the way it happened. What was that point in failure? Hubris. It was the Nazis who had taken over the construction of the dirigible.

Thinking that because they had a superior intellect, they would be able to master this incredibly flammable hydrogen gas while the rest of this inferior mortals would simply be consumed by it. But they knew better. And so they thought they could do it. They were told to use rubber or vinyl for containing the hydrogen. But the only source of that was the Goodyear plant in the United States. Knowing that they were about to go to war with the US, they decided not to

have the US as a vendor. And so they built the enclosure capsules for the hydrogen out of cotton, out of fine Egyptian cotton, which had to be kept wet in order to not leak. And yet they knew it still leaked a little bit anyway. So they had to carry way more hydrogen they would need so they could keep replacing it. And they carried water ballasts to counter the lift effect. So as they would lose lift by losing hydrogen, they would drop water. So it was this incredibly complex

balancing act. And the fact that they were able to get it around the world several times and make some big international trips was really a tribute to their scientific ability. But you could only play with things like that for so long before they bite you. So they had built these ventilation shafts in between each of the 14 donuts so that the excess hydrogen could escape. When the hydrogen entered those channels and would go up, it would create a vacuum at the

bottom where fresh air was drawn in. So at the bottom of these ventilation shafts, you had pure air. And at the top, you had almost straight hydrogen. And then along the column, you had everything in between. And at a certain percentage point, a mix between hydrogen and air, you don't get a flammable effect. You get a detonation effect. So as this hydrogen mix was leaking across the top, you had an arcing effect where static discharge from air running across the skin would

cause this coronal discharge from the tail. And when the stream of hydrogen gas reached that coronal discharge, it ignited it and created a fuel chain which chased down to the inside. When it hit that 37 % spot, it detonated and the whole thing was gone in less than a half

a minute. But the opportunity to explore science like that, to have the budget for that, and not only to learn about how things like that happen, but to learn about it in a public forum where you get to share that with other people is really fascinating. So I've done several shows like that. And I think that's fascinating because I really think that the key to the future is inspiring kids to be curious about science. Absolutely.

I mean, if you look, I've said this many times, you look at our news, you look at a lot of television, you look at even like the remaking of films that were already good from the 80s and 90s didn't need to be remade. It really is a dumbing down of creativity. You know, I think that where I'm seeing a beautiful kind of flourishing is in the world of documentaries and obviously podcasts too. But there is a hunger for learning and people are able to circumnavigate these kind of hurdles

and barriers and get to the source. So whether they listen to, you know, horrible history on the podcast or, you know, the Discovery Channel or some, even, you know, our science channels,

they started being about. crab fishermen and you know it became a soap opera rather than learning about science so i think that there is a hunger now and i think it's it's great to see this uh you know these things that you've done that have inspired kids but i think you're 100 right i think we have to remove that kind of idiocracy element that we really have been moving towards and get to who are the young innovators. And I worked on Idiocracy, okay? Lay off there. Oh,

did you? That was so funny. I was seeing one of those videos on social media a while ago, and it was talking about the costume designer. And I think it was a female, and she was looking for a shoe that no one would ever wear because this is Idiocracy. And that shoe was Crocs. You

look around now, everyone is in Crocs. So not only have we got, I would argue, the same kind of people in power, I mean, both sides of the aisle, and the dumbing down, you know, through tweets and texts and emojis of evil, simple, you know, communication, but even the damn shoes from that film are absolutely spot on. So it was supposed to be a comedy, ended up being a documentary, technically. Well, I think, unfortunately, social media in the way it's... consumed most

often is bad for society. Not particularly because of the content itself, although there's not much to be learned from watching your grandparents dance, but really more from what it does to our attention span. As we shorten our attention spans, we shorten our ability to wrestle with problems. And unfortunately, tough problems require serious attention over a long period of time. You don't, for the most part, solve problems in 30 -second

bytes. You solve them, for me, typically working in three -hour blocks over the course of years. And then you are able to make inroads on a serious problem. But if we deprive people of the ability to have an attention span, then we limit their ability to be effective. And I've seen this in myself. If you've got a busy mind, you can't critically think. And we saw it in COVID. I mean, no better example. You get everyone all scared

and stressed out. Then they become vehemently opposed to whatever the other side is rather than standing in the middle and going, maybe we should make America healthier while we're going through this thing. So I've seen that. The Instagram, the TVs in every bar and restaurant,

it's just this constant. stimulus. And when I've had my most, you know, inspiring moments is when I've been leaning into my meditation and I put my phone away and I'm walking my dog and, you know, trying to open that mind because there's, you know, all the great philosophers in the past were not having these aha moments between tweets. They were sitting, you know, pondering for a long, long time. You cannot ponder if your mind is busy. Right. You know, Einstein really popularized

the idea of the thought experiment. Well, You can't have the thought experiment without having thought. And you can't think while you're constantly distracted. So to the degree that you are able to divorce yourself from social media and actually take a moment to let your mind wander and ponder, that really is, I think, the limiting factor in your ability to solve problems. COVID was great for me, by the way. I had the good fortune to be in a very remote location, 6 ,500 feet

up. mountain overlooking Boulder with no neighbors, no distraction, no work to go to. And I took advantage of that quiet time to do some deeply reflective science work. And it was at that time that I took an idea that I had been carrying around for 10 years and translated into a patent for a product that I wanted to invent for fighting wildfire. So, and I know that in the normal busy pre -COVID or post -COVID world, I never would have had the time to have devoted to focus that

type of continuous effort on this project. Absolutely. I wrote my first book during COVID. I happened to have started it right before and then it happened. And I was like, okay, well, this is good timing, I guess. I mean, it's horrible for everyone that lost people. And I'm not saying that at all. But if you're going to make the most of this isolation, then, you know, let's do something good with it. You talked about the innovation then. So walk me through. What made you even

start pondering the wildland space? What was the problem that you were seeing? And then let's talk about the solution that you've created. Well, the problem is that the world is burning up because the physical conditions, regardless of how you attribute them, are hotter, drier, and windier. So lower moisture, more oxygen, and more heat. are three primary contributors to anything's flammability. Fire takes four things.

You have to have fuel, you have to have oxygen, you have to have heat, you have to have a chemical reaction. So when the environment provides more of those things, you get more fire. Preventatively, when I lived in Austin, where the government doesn't get in your business so much, I would burn off my land a few times a year. So that if a wildfire encroached, my land had already burned and I didn't have to worry about the fire

consuming it. And so I lit these wildfires, which are contained to my 22 acres, and I would manage the fire. And if the wind whipped up, the fire would become very hard to manage. And I didn't want to stop the burning process because I knew it was beneficial to the land and to safety. But I wanted to figure out how I could stay on top of the fire when the winds whipped up or conditions changed. So that started me thinking just from a personal use standpoint of what do

we need in order to contain fire? I had worked as a volunteer firefighter, and I couldn't believe that. When we have a fire that risks structures, neighborhoods, communities, potential billions of dollars of damage, the tools that are issued to the firefighter are what I would characterize are medieval gardening tools. A rake, a hoe, a pick. You look really smart. You can have a

chainsaw. But these tools are woefully inadequate compared to... the power of the fire and the dollar value of the destruction of the fire, not to mention the threat to life. So I couldn't believe that technology has advanced so far in so many other areas and not in fire suppression. So I asked the firefighters I was working with, if we actually wanted to stop this fire, what would we do? And they laughed and they said, well, it would take a hurricane. And so I took

that literally. Okay, well, what size hurricane? What wind speed would be required? What water volume would be required? Because when James Cameron says, make a hurricane for me, I don't laugh. I say, okay, well, what do you need? How far do the winds have to blow? Do you need 100 miles an hour? you know, 400 feet from the nozzle. Like, what is it exactly from a physics standpoint that you need to achieve this? And so I started to really pursue this with the firefighters.

So firefighters respond to wildfires, but for the most part, the control of the fire is up to the wind. The wind controls the fire. And so I was just simply thinking in terms of hierarchy, if you want to control a wildfire, you have to control the wind. So I thought there was a lot of wisdom what they said, that you would need a hurricane, but I didn't dismiss the idea that

we could bring the hurricane. And so this really led to the idea of creating a hurricane on wheels, where we could get massive, high -speed, high -volume airflow generated by jet engines, mount the jet engines on trucks, equip the jet engines with large tanks full of retardant. pump the retardant into the exhaust of the jet engine, and then use the jet engine to disperse the retardant with tremendous speed and force over large areas

very quickly. And that, in my mind, would be a tool that could actually fight a big wildfire. That if you need a coverage rate of, let's say, 50 gallons per acre of retardant, and you're pushing this thing out there with a 3 ,000 horsepower jet engine, You can cover 20 acres in a minute, which would mean that you could create a massive fire break using technology that has nothing to do with a rake, a hoe, a pick, or an ax, or

a shovel. That we throw people at this problem with the same success that we throw the TSA at airline security. Not very effectively. It was a physical problem that was beyond human scale that was going to require large, powerful technology to get ahead of. And so there were really six or seven things that I thought needed to be done

by this technology. We had to be able to create fuel breaks very quickly, not with vegetative removal, but with vegetation treatment, which is... to say we're leaving the fuel in place, we're just treating it chemically so that it's no longer available to interact with oxygen and create fire. We need to create evacuation routes or do what's called evacuation route hardening. Currently that's also done largely with vegetation

removal. Basically these high -speed gardening crews push through areas chopping down the trees and other things that people find to make their communities attractive. So there's a lot of resistance to vegetation removal. But they, on a good day, could do a mile a day with a crew of 40 people and a big chipping operation in this. That's fine if you're an urban planner and you're thinking about how you're going to do 50 years of evacuation

route hardening over the next four years. That's not an effective plan on the day when you see the ember starting to come across the hill. and you know people are going to need to get out, you don't want them to die in their cars the way they have in numerous fires, you have to figure out how are you going to make an evacuation route very quickly. By driving the jet engine at the vegetation on both sides and coating it with retardants, you can provide that gauntlet

of safety. The next thing we have to do is asset protection. How are we going to keep the things that we love and that are insured from burning? And that's by laying a perimeter, a protective chemical barrier around them of retardant. This is not firefighting at this point, right? This is simply turning fuels into non -combustibles. We need to create safety zones. So when most people are leaving the fire, firefighters are showing up, right? Like they said in 9 -11, right?

When everyone was running out, we were running in. So when fire teams aggregate at the site of a fire, They have to have an area where it's safe for them to be, and that's called a safety zone. If we can make that safety zone truly safe, it protects people. Those areas still typically can be overrun. So they look for blacktop or big parking lots or stuff where they stage all

the equipment. But if we could surround those areas with retardant very quickly using the jet dispersion method, we could create a safety zone on the fly wherever. It was needed, not wherever it happened to be. The next thing firefighters need is escape routes. We're fighting the fire. The winds change. Something has gone south for us. We need to be able to get out. So you have to be able to build a fuel -stripped, chemically -treated path from the area of danger to the

area of safety. A jet engine can do that. When you point the jet engine down, you can literally blow the fuels off the ground, the trees, the debris, the limbs, all the flammable vegetation. Hurricanes remove vegetation. We know that. If you've ever looked at footage from a hurricane, you'll see the trees are removed, the ground is removed, the buildings are removed. So jet engine could do that while simultaneously treating the area around it with retardant. And then direct

attack. There are times where we don't have time to get in front of the fire two miles ahead of it because the fire is right at the thing that we're trying to protect. In that case, we need to suppress the fire and push the fire back. Fire, despite its devastating capabilities, is a fragile chemical reaction. It requires just the right amount of fuel, the right amount of oxygen, the right wind speed. for providing the

oxygen. And if you disrupt that with too much wind, like blowing out a birthday candle or changing the humidity, spitting on the candle, raining on the fire, you can stop that reaction. And the jet engine offers you the horsepower to do that at scale. And the last thing that we need to do is be able to contain prescribed burns. The wildfire problem is a problem that we will

have to burn our way out of. We are going to have to pre -consume the fuels in a controlled way so that they're not consumed in a random chaotic and devastating way by wildfire, which means that we're going to have to do prescribed burns over much larger areas much more frequently. Not only a prescribed burn, but you could think

of this also as prescribed smoke. You can either have a wildfire where so much smoke comes through a community that no one can breathe, or you can release the smoke a little bit at a time through these prescribed events. People are hesitant, however, to do prescribed burns because of the risk that the fire could get out of control. And so they allow fuels to accumulate year after year, creating an extremely dangerous fuel load on the ground because they're afraid something

could happen. when they go to do a prescribed burn. This is just bad thinking. If you can define an area where you want to do a prescribed burn, and then you could lay out a 600 foot perimeter of retardant around that, then you could substantially reduce the risk of a wildfire prescribed burn escaping. So this was rummaging around in my

head for a dozen years. And it was, you know, when that COVID break came that i was able to congeal this into an engineering diagram and write a patent for it and then after covid i went through the techstars program so i could learn to combine some technical knowledge with some business knowledge and was then able to go out and raise four million dollars for the use of the design engineering and prototyping of the idea so we now sit with two Small -scale

prototypes that are UTVs that are equipped with jet engines. UTVs are really cool because they can get in between houses. They can treat the backyards. They can get places where you can't get with a Type 1 truck. And six weeks from now, we'll have the full -scale Hurricane with the massive jet engine and 2 ,500 -gallon tank on board. And I think this will be really a game -changer. in terms of our ability to repel and contain fire. So that's been my 24 -7 focus for

the last five years. My family has paid the price of my absence considerably while I have obsessed with this problem. And then I hope that... Acting like the solid rocket booster engines on the space shuttle, I could put all my energy into this for a short amount of time, and then it will launch, and then pilots can take over the project. But to turn any project from an idea into reality requires an intense level of constant energy that I like to bring to projects. It makes

so much sense. And so even when you were talking about prescribed burns, that's what I was thinking about before you even said it. You literally contain that burn, so you get to burn off everything in between, but it doesn't have the chance to jump the line then. And it's funny, Jason was talking about the firebots, and obviously we've got the goats. I mean, there's bringing, again, ancient knowledge and then modern technology

in. But you're right. I mean, putting these men and women... in dangerous way with hand tools, you know, even though, yes, in certain times it's effective, I would argue maybe on a, on a less acute fire. Right. If you listen about Jason talking about the fire shelter, he's like, the answer isn't the shelter. The answer is not putting these men and women there in the first place. So I've got another friend who talks about

checkering. Where I used to work, they had all this dense woodland and it was a theme park. So the fireworks would always go in there and they'd be fighting muck fires for weeks. And he's like, you just go in and you checker. That way you've got a small square that's on fire and everything else isn't. But again, it's a resistance from the facade. But, you know, it's such a false economy. And obviously with Paradise

Fire and some of these other ones. And I don't know if there was resistance on prescribed burns in that particular incidence, but if there is, the price when that fire comes to your doorstep far outweighs some discomfort from a prescribed burn. But being able to do it safely with the technology that's out there, including yours, I mean, that's an absolute game changer. You mentioned about the retardant. PFAS is now a big conversation. You're not only in us, and

there's some good news. I've had some scientists on that are developing a probiotic that will actually pull it from our body. I've never heard before, but it's something that we want to avoid. What is the retardant that you're using in this particular instance? There are a lot of retardant products on the market. I have my own preference, which is a product called Citrotec. There's many

things I like about Citrotec. One is that the active ingredient is potassium citrate, which I ingest on a regular basis when I eat my citrus fruits and vegetables. If I go to the doctor and I have a low potassium level, they would give me potassium citrate pills to take. So this is a food grade medical product that simply improves your potassium levels, which happen to counteract the effect of high sodium levels in your blood

pressure. So there's that. And then there's an enteric coating on it, which is just like what's on an aspirin to stop the pills from dissolving too soon in your stomach. So when potassium citrate solution is applied to vegetation, it soaks in, the water evaporates off, it leaves the potassium citrate in the vegetation, and then the enteric coating resists leaching from rain so that it can maintain that high potassium citrate level.

So I like that. I also like the fact that when you look at the MSDS on it, there's nothing hidden under the heading of trade secrets. All the ingredients are listed and you can tell right away, okay, this is what's in here. I feel comfortable with this or I don't feel comfortable with that. But you know what you're dealing with. And virtually every other retardant out there, they don't tell you what's in it. They just say, it's safe. Trust

me. Phrases like benign by design. Like, okay, that's cute and all, but I want to see the fish reports. I want to see. the 18 -month trials. I want to see the science behind it. And Steve Conboy at Citratech has been incredibly transparent with that process. So that makes me comfortable with that. Also, it's a product, just like if you have saltwater and you leave it there for 10 years, the salt doesn't come out. It's always saltwater. So Citratech doesn't ever fall out

of solution. It doesn't have to be agitated. And from a... From fluid dynamics perspective, it's just like water. So any tests that you could do about the broadcast distance, the particle size, the particle density, the effective range, the coverage area that you could test with the product, you could test just as effectively with water. So there's my two cents on the science side on the retardant. Brilliant. I mean, it's great to hear. I mean, there's an alternative.

You saw in the Palisades fire, I mean, all the AFFF being dropped, all these red clouds. It's terrible. Yeah, it's putting out some of the fire, but that's going to be in the ground now for millennia. And it's so sad. Yeah. And even as they scale back the PFAS and they just move to other elements like phosphorus. If you go into an area that typically has a low phosphorus soil and then you start dropping all this phosphorus on it, you're changing the nature of the soil.

And when you change the soil, you change what can grow in it. So now the only things that would grow in that area would be vegetation that has a high tolerance to phosphorus or performs well in phosphorus. Those plants are typically more flammable than the plants that would grow in the low phosphorus soil. So now you are... Putting out the fire, yes, while creating a problem for the next 20 years of growing only flammable vegetation

there. Not to mention that phosphorus feeds the organisms that are in water that cause algae, causes algae over bloom. So as if wildfires weren't bad enough for the hydrology system, now we're adding chemicals that make it even worse. When you lose a mountainside of trees and you lose that root system, what happens next? The next time it rains, that all slides down, plugs up the rivers, clogs the intakes for water systems. So there's a cascading effect from these wildfires.

It's not just what burns on the day. It's how the environment is impacted after the hydrology, how that is impacted. And not to mention... the lung health of all of the people downrange of that fire. So we have this country, Canada, just to our north. I refer to it as the country that can't keep its smoke to itself. Is that the one that we're supposed to take over along with Greenland and the Gulf of Mexico? I think all I could do is give you an enthusiastic no comment. Again,

idiocracy. Anyway, I digress. There you go. Yeah. I mean, I was bemoaning the fact this morning to my girlfriend that how hesitant people are now to say what's stupid and what's not because of fear of political reprisal. And I am sure that is not why my grandparents moved to this country. Very, very sad to say, to see. I don't think most people would ever dream that. Let's say the same way as most Russians never dreamed

of going into Ukraine either. You know, this is what's done by some of these people that call themselves leaders does not reflect the majority of the people in that country. No. In fact, when we when we build the future iterations of the hurricane, I wanted to have them built in Canada by a company called Tiger Cat. When I spoke with the CEO of Tiger Cat last week, I felt the need as an American to apologize. And he said, you're not the first. I just spent the weekend with

a few Canadians. This is last week, I mean, and it was the same thing. It was just a whole lot of face palming, basically. Yeah, right. Embarrassing. But, you know, we're resilient people. We've gotten through other things. Yes. You know, you had asked about. para -entertainment activities and injuries that happen on set. So one of the things I've done a great deal of is work as an expert witness in lawsuits involving cases of

people being injured on movie sets. Because it's almost always a matter of oversight or rushing or ignoring available safety information. I was an expert witness against Alec Baldwin in the killing of Helena Hutchins. And several other high -profile cases. And usually, you know, the knowledge is there. We just ignore it. Yeah. Yeah. So I go into... So the other thing, though, is, of course, as you're around something more, you have a very different sense of what's dangerous

and what's not. So if you've never been to a gun range, you might say, going to a gun range, that's got to be really dangerous. You're around all these guns. It's like, oh, well. I've been around gun rangers my whole life. I have no feeling that they're dangerous. Explosions, isn't that dangerous? I set off explosions where I'm standing

eight feet away on a regular basis. It's not dangerous because people who do that, they possess specialized knowledge where they're able to evaluate the risk with much more precision and an informed basis than people who don't do it for a living. So I'm sure you know from your stunt work that you've done a lot of things that people said, oh, my God, that's so dangerous. But because you have personal knowledge of how it's set up, you have no feeling that it's particularly dangerous

or reckless. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely calculated. It's dangerous, but it's calculated. And it's funny because firefighters are impressed by the stunt side. And it's like, well, we do stunts for a living, though. We throw on gear that, as you said, we trust implicitly and then run into burning buildings or hang off the side of a bridge on a rope to get rescue, you know, whatever. We'll go down a pipe or, you know, climb through a mangled car that's teetering and, you know,

trying to pull someone out. I mean, it is, those are stunts, but the thing is we don't get to set those up. We have to mitigate all the dangers as you're talking about soccer, you know, as the game progresses, it's an ongoing dynamic fluid situation. Yeah. Very interesting. So I cut you off because you were just about to talk about Canada. You said, you know, the smoke from

the north. So I'll carry on. I was just saying that, you know, if they get some fires that become unmanageable there, there they are with literally millions of hectares vulnerable to fire and on fire and a fire force of about 2000 people. So they have to make some very difficult decisions about where they apply their forces. I got a call during that summer where they said, there are 450 villages that we know won't be here next year. We don't have the resources to protect

any of them. We have to focus our resources on the large communities, so these towns will be gone. And we're just interested in what type of technology can you provide to assure them a safe way out. The response was limited to evacuation route hardening, not to the preservations of towns. They didn't have the ability to do it. But in the process of all that going on, 120 million Americans downstream of that are breathing

the smoke. The day that New York City became unlivable with these images of orange skies was a day that I really celebrated. Not because a lot of people are having to breathe toxic air, but because it brought the reality to the East Coast and to Wall Street that wildfire is not a regional issue. Wildfire is not a Canadian problem. It's not a West Coast problem. It's a world problem. Because while there may be 147 different countries, there's one atmosphere and

we all breathe it. And anything that happens in one part of the world impacts the atmosphere for all of us. We can't ever really take the idea that wildfire is someone else's problem just because it originates on their soil. Any more than we could say, you know, COVID was a Chinese problem because it started in China. It's the problem of everyone who's impacted by it. And we're all impacted by it. So I think

we all have a stake in wildfire control. And I would never say, you know, wildfire elimination, let's stop wildfires. That would be ridiculous. And that'd be like saying, let's stop lightning. Like wildfires are a fact of nature. They start thousands of times a day. They always have. They always will. So we're not trying to fight wildfires. We're trying to fight wildfire destruction and wildfire devastation. We're trying to minimize the impacts of wildfire on the built environment.

And that is... That is a scalable problem solution. We can do that. We just have to put a little bit more thought into where we build, how we build, how we mitigate, where we allow fuels to grow and where we contain them and where we treat them. So it's solvable. Like any other problem, it's simply a matter of collective will. It has to be an interesting question to ask you because you are coming from a very strong science

background. And going to the politicization of anything when it comes to global warming, you know, you've got one side that says it's killing everything, got the other side that dismisses it as gibberish. And then again, normal people standing in the middle like a tennis match looking left and right going, why are these crazy people

even talking? When you look at COVID and you see the reports of the Nile clearing up, of, you know, the smog in London and LA clearing, you know, the ozone layer starting to close again. And that's just an obvious benefit. So we know that there is an impact of all our pollution globally. And I know it's not just the States, not just UK. I mean, India and China and some of these other places, I know, are big contributors

to the pollution. But when it comes to global warming, that term, people kind of poo -poo it, even though they literally watched the air in their city get cleaner when the cars came off. What is your perspective? I know it's just one of the contributing factors, but what is your perspective of the impact of global warming on this wildfire issue? Because so many of the men and women on the boots on the ground, the actual blue -collar firefighters are all seeing this

getting worse and worse, hotter and hotter. Right. They describe it as hotter, drier, and windier. These are measurable phenomena. The thermometer has no political leaning. It simply tells you what the temperature is, which is the average velocity of the molecules. So there's really not any debate in the science community about attributing what we see to global warming. That's strictly political theater. And regardless as

to whether it was happening. by natural causes or man -made causes, we still have to deal with the consequence. And so while we could reduce our contribution to the phenomena, we nonetheless have to deal with the phenomena. The phenomena is hotter, windier, drier, more extreme fires with more frequency. I think it's just not that the United States is a response culture, but really every culture responds to fear because that's an innate human characteristic. Fire is

fear -inducing. News stories are merely anxiety -provoking. And therefore, we respond to the scary thing more than sometimes the more dangerous thing if it happens to be less visceral. So when you watch the news, you're watching an amalgamation of what the most visceral experiences that took place in the community were, not what the most

important ones were. An abandoned barn that burns down 50 miles from nowhere is the lead story, while cutting $50 million from the education budget doesn't even make the news that night. So there's a big difference between impact, importance, and... public awareness. But in this case, wildfire is both a subject of importance that's both visceral and important, which in my mind makes a great business. Absolutely. Well, I'm sure some people listening are probably wondering the same thing.

When I think of jets, I think of propulsion and planes. How are you able to Change the physics so these vehicles that these engines are mounted on aren't getting shot the opposite way of where you're trying to disperse this fire suppression foam. Well, friction is your friend. Friction is what allows your car to stop. When a jet is placed on an airplane. It's shooting gases back, and that creates that equal and opposite reaction

of pushing the plane forward. Because the plane is in the air, and to the degree possible in thin air at higher altitudes, it provides less resistance to that propulsive force. When you put that propulsive force on a 7 -ton truck, to which you've added 10 ,000 pounds of water, and you have six tires on the ground, all with aggressive tread, you simply have to set up a dynamic where the resistance provided by the weight and the friction on the ground is greater

than the propulsive force of the jet. So, you know, when I spit on something, right, I'm creating a pulsar force this way, but it doesn't knock me over because I weigh 170 pounds. So it's the same thing here. It's scaling the jet to the capabilities of the vehicle you put it on. Amazing. Legitimate question. And could you point the jet straight backwards and put the truck in neutral and get the heck out of there faster if you needed to? You absolutely could. That would be so cool.

Come on. Watching a frigging 10 -ton truck flying up the side of a mountain to get away from a fire. Right? Yeah. Although I envision pointing the jet forward more often so that we can clear territory like we would with a plow. You know, dozers. And dozer lines are a commonly used tool in fire containment. But when fires are creating ember cast two to 40 miles away that's starting new fires, what is really the benefit of creating

this eight -foot break? I don't see it. Maybe in fires of yesteryear, then yesterday's technology did something, but I don't think that's really effective right now. So I think being able to clear a 1 ,200 foot wide path by using distributed retardant is going to be a lot more effective, a lot faster, and have a less permanent negative impact on the area after the fire. for as much money as we spend to have dozers clear a line down to what they love to call mineral soil.

Then they have to come back after the fire and they have to put dirt back down or else they have these huge dozer scars across the land. So there's a new or better way. And while I'm not sure that my current iteration is the way, I think it's certainly in the right direction. And that as we apply it more often, we'll continue to perfect it. Absolutely. I mean, it sounds amazing. And this is the thing, you know, we're in 2025. You know, we all have microcomputers

that are in our pocket. You know, people are driving electric cars everywhere. And then there's areas of the fire service we're doing. I mean, like I always talk about even our helmets are almost 100 years old, you know, and there's a

resistance changing that. So, you know, when this... is available and it just makes more sense why would you not try it why would you not get a few out there and get it going and then compare resistance to change right so we're champions of them yeah the things that are going uh against that resistance right now are one the impact on the real estate and the insurance industry of these fires um if you can't get insurance you can't build if you can't get insurance you

can't sell you can't get insurance you can't buy So until we figure out how to make areas safe where insurance companies are willing to come in and underwrite that risk, we're going to see huge impacts on those industries. And when people can't sell their house because it's in a declared wildfire zone, what happens to the property values? They drop. When the property's values drop, what happens next? The tax base drops. When the tax base drops, the cities can't

offer the services that they can. previously and then neighborhoods go into decline so there's a much larger economic ripple impact from these fires than you would gather just from watching the fire on tv and so the ability to make dangerous areas livable through the use of retardants and vegetation removal and vegetation treatment is going to have a big impact on whether communities you know survive and thrive or decline and perish Absolutely. Well, where can people learn more

about Team Wildfire and the hurricane? Everywhere. You can go to teamwildfire .com, click on that media page. You'll see a six -minute story from the Today Show that we did in April, a recent story on CBS San Diego. There's a lot of coverage of it because, as I said, it's a visual story. It's a visual solution to a visual problem. So I wouldn't flaunt the fact that we have a lot of coverage as evidence to say that this is a great idea, but it certainly works well on TV.

It's a popular idea really because people are desperate for a new solution. And so far the solutions in that space have really been incremental when what we need is solutions that are exponential. Absolutely. All right. Well, I want to throw some quick closing questions at you before I let you go. All right. Is it the lightning round? Yeah, not quite. The first one, is there a book or other books that you love to recommend? It can be related to our discussion today or completely

unrelated. Man's Search for Meaning. I've got it right next to me. I love it. Viktor Frankl. I played him in a movie. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. The movie's called Bending Light. It's a 15 -minute short. And you can find it online. Brilliant. Well, that covers my next one, and we'll make that the film, seeing as you worked on so many. Oh, no, the film? The film is The Right Stuff. The Right Stuff, that's your favorite one? Absolutely.

I think every day in college. All right. Well, the next question, is there a person that you recommend to come on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military, and associated professions of the world? I would put Dave Winokur on the show and I would put Tom Guzman on the show. Dave probably has the most articulate vocabulary in describing fire -related phenomena, both proactively during and after of anyone I've spoken with. Brilliant.

All right. Thank you. And the very last question before we make sure everyone knows where to find you specifically, what do you do to decompress? I live in the mountains over Boulder. I have a hot tub and I get in the hot tub and just stare at the mountains and appreciate the natural beauty around me, both during the day and particularly at night. I think looking up at the stars and seeing what your place in the cosmos is helps put the problems that keep you up at night into

perspective. where you realize, yeah, not only will the neighborhood near me eventually burn down, the whole planet will be consumed by the sun one day and none of this will matter. So divide your time between focusing on the problems that will make the world better for you and your family and your next generation and taking care of the people who are in your life right now.

100%. All right. Well, then for people, if they want to learn more about you specifically or reach out to you, where are the best places, LinkedIn, that kind of place? LinkedIn is where I spend a fair amount of my time. So you could read about the project at teamwildfire .com or please reach out to me on LinkedIn. I think it's linked, what is it? LinkedIn .in .whatever slash Wolf Steve, something like that. I'll give you a link to it, but I'm not hard to find on there.

Beautiful. Well, Steve, I want to thank you so much. It's been such an amazing conversation. I mean, firstly, you know, your entrenchment in the science side, but yet thinking outside the box, but also this parallel stunt and, you know, EMS fire journey that you've had as well. It's been fascinating. So I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.

Well, James, thank you for being such a great interviewer and for your persistent curiosity. And for the way that you focus your curiosity on solving such an important problem. There's a reason we're designed to spend a third of our lives asleep. And when that's interrupted, nothing else escapes being a casualty of it. So thank you for that.