Two Marine Corps veterans and Hoover Fellows, Dave Winnacker and Donnie Hasseltine, break down California’s wildfire crisis—not from a sensational angle, but with sharp insight on what’s really at stake. They reveal how outdated fire strategies, rising insurance costs, and inaction are creating a perfect storm that could implode the state’s housing market. Drawing from their Hoover fellowship capstone, they explain why the solution isn’t more tech—it’s micro-level action and community-wide coordination. From defense-in-depth analogies to pricing risk through insurance markets, this conversation will change how you think about climate risk, public policy, and collective responsibility.
ABOUT THE PODCAST
Frontline Voices is part of the Veteran Fellowship Program at the Hoover Institution. Applications to join the 2025 Cohort of the Veteran Fellow Program is now available until July 31, 2025. Click here to apply.
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Dave Winnacker is a retired fire chief with over two decades of service across California, most recently leading the Moraga-Orinda Fire District. A former Marine Corps infantry officer and senior reserve commander, he also served in key wildfire leadership roles at the state level. As a Hoover Institution Veteran Fellow at Stanford, he focuses on the intersection of wildfire and property insurance. He co-founded XyloPlan Risk and helped launch ZoneHaven, an evacuation software used across California.
Donnie Hasseltine is a cybersecurity executive, Marine Corps combat veteran, and seasoned operator with over 20 years of leadership across military, tech, and security sectors. He has led high-performing teams in crisis environments and brings deep expertise in B2B SaaS, cybersecurity strategy, and enterprise risk. A Hoover Institution Veteran Fellow at Stanford, Donnie focuses on applying military and tech-driven insights to public sector challenges. He also co-founded ZoneHaven and XyloPlan Risk, pioneering tools for wildfire risk and community safety.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
[MUSIC]
>> Mike Steadman (00:10):
Welcome to Frontline Voices, a podcast brought to you
by Stanford University's HooverInstitution, where we explore leadership,
service, and real world solutions to someof our nation's most pressing issues.
I'm your host, Iron Mike Steadman,a Marine Corps veteran and
member of the inaugural classof Hoover Veteran Fellows.
In January of this year, wildfires onceagain devastated parts of California,
(00:32):
leaving entire communities in ruin.
Homes burnt to the ground,families were displaced, and
many of us were left wondering,how was this still happening?
Why weren't we better prepared,and is any of this preventable?
To help unpack these questions, I sat downwith two former Hoover veteran fellows,
Dave Winnacker and Donnie Hasseltine,who who are tackling wildfire risk from
(00:55):
a completely different angle throughthe lens of insurance market forces and
community resilience.
In addition to being a Brigadier Generalin the Marine Corps Reserve,
Dave is also a retired fire chief and
one of California's foremost experts onwildfire response and mitigation, bringing
more than two decades of experience fromthe front lines of the fire service.
(01:17):
He joined forces with Donnie, who's alsoa fellow Marine, for a joint capstone
project, where together they focustheir efforts on how we price and
manage wildfire risk, both throughpolicy and private sector innovation.
In this conversation, we dive intothe economics of risk, the collapse
of the insurance market, and why thesolutions to many of our biggest problems,
(01:40):
like fire prevention, may be simpler andcheaper than we think.
As always, I hope you enjoyed today's showand look forward to hearing your feedback.
Gentlemen, welcome to Frontline Voices.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (01:53):
Good to be here, Mike.
Good to see you again, man.
>> Mike Steadman (01:56):
It's always a privilege when I get to hang out with some fellow
Marines, particularly you two,
who are part of the inauguralVeteran Fellowship program.
And you know,like I was saying before we got started,
I consider both of you friends.
One of the powers of these type ofprograms is bringing people together from
all across the country.
And you know, I try to tell people whenyou're doing cohort based programs,
(02:17):
the programming is great, butyou really gotta take time to get to know
the people that you're, you know,that are part of your cohort.
And so it was cool.
You know, we traveled the world, got to goto Tbilisi, Georgia, got to spend a couple
months flying in to see each other,you know, at the, at the campus, and
then even getting our touch points everyyear, even though you all weren't able to
(02:39):
make it this year at the, you know,the kind of fly in or retreat, et cetera.
So one of the reasons I Want to invite youall to the podcast in the first place was
I would love you to just kind of introduceyourself and talk about your capstone.
Because when the California wildfireshappened this year, immediately I said,
(03:00):
we got to get these guys on the podcastto bring the human element to this.
And, you know,my first time kind of meeting you guys,
I know you had this big project, and yourcapstone was really focused around that,
but I really want to give you space tokind of, kind of introduce yourselves and
talk about that capstone.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (03:16):
Yeah, I can probably kick off.
You know, Dave and I actually go backa little ways in the Marine Corps,
so after active duty,I'll let him introduce himself.
He punched off in the reserves.
The reason why I say that is as we wenton, we kind of paralleled each other and
we found ourselves.
When I commanded 1st Recon Battalion,
Dave had command of 4thForce Reconnaissance Company.
So we're both lieutenantcolonel commanders, and
that allowed us to worktogether very closely.
(03:38):
I still remember, I think the firsttime you and I connected, you showed up,
my office, said, hey, I got a problem.
I need some help from the active duty.
Were you able to work that stuff out?
And then fast forward a little bit?
I ended up taking a job up in 23rdMarines as the inspector instructor,
which is the active duty rep or
regimental XO or second in command forthe 23rd Marine Regiment.
And Dave was the XO,which was the reserve component.
So essentially, Dave andI had the same position.
(04:00):
I was the active, he was the reserve.
So when he was doing his day job,I was kinda keeping things in track.
And he would come in on the drillweekends, I would hand off,
we'd high five each other,move from there.
But a lot of times we'd havesitting in the office and talking.
And as I got up here in Silicon Valley,I started immersing myself in the tech,
in the tech world, which eventuallyled to myself getting out and
going into cybersecurity.
(04:21):
But along that way, I started supportinganother program at Stanford called
the Hacking for Events program, where theytook military and intelligence programs
and problems and then had studentskind of go ahead and solve that.
And Dave and I were in the office one day,
as oftentimes they want to get thelieutenant colonels away from the Marines,
go drink coffee,leave us alone sort of thing.
And we'd sit there on a wet board andstart just talking, like,
(04:42):
how come we're still fightingfires like we did 100 years ago?
What kind of technology could we do?
So we sat down there over successiveWeekends sketching out ideas,
Dave would pitch in perspectivesfrom the fire department.
I would come at it from the tech angle and
we kind of craft out a number of differentsolutions and fast forward a little bit.
One of those ideas became a companythat was very successful.
Then I started getting ready to get out.
(05:03):
Dave started moving on andthis thing popped up at Hoover and
I kind of reached back out to him andsaid, hey Dave,
remember we had about10 ideas on that board.
What's the next one?
And maybe we should kind of take a run atthis veteran fellowship program together.
That's kind of how we got there.
So I'll toss to Dave to kindafill in the rest of the details.
>> Dave Winnacker (05:20):
Donnie's being a little revisionist with his history.
Truth be told, he called, said,I'm gonna apply for this thing.
Which one of your brightideas can I use to get in?
I mean, Donnie's a good friend,so I'm always down to help.
So we were spitballing and we'd probablyspend about a half hour working through
and I go, man, this sounds really cool.
You think they'd take both of us?
Donnie goes, I don't know.
When we find out you called them up andapparently they said, I don't know,
(05:43):
you should both apply.
Anyway, that's how we endedup in the VFD together.
So as Donnie mentioned, I served on activeduty Marine Corps infantry officer,
got out, joined the fire department androse up through the ranks and
found myself in late 2017 when Iwas the executive officer at 23rd
Marines as a lieutenantcolonel reserve officer.
(06:04):
I was also the fire chief of the MoragaOrinda Fire Protection District in
the San Francisco East Bay in the areathat quite famously burned in 1991 in
the Oakland hills.
This is the area justto the east of there.
And as a local government fire chief,I had a problem,
a wildfire that was going to outpace and
outnumber the weight of the firefightingresponse I could throw against it, right?
(06:27):
So a firefighting first or think,
an infantry first solutionwasn't going to work.
I started thinking about how we could,we could bend the curve of wildfire risk.
Like any good infant infantry officer,I fell back to the pubs and
I landed on defense in depth andreally started working through what
would be the steps it would take tocome up with a holistic community
(06:50):
wide approach that used durable pre firemeasures that were passive in nature.
So thinking obstacle belt thatcould then be used to augment and
increase the value ofthe firefighting response.
And Donnie and I spent a lot oftime swirling around with that.
As he mentioned,
we came up with an idea that turnedinto Zone Haven evacuation software.
(07:11):
Gotta be able to sanitize the workspaceto get all the residents out so
we have room to work.
And through that, we built out a numberof ideas that were our capstone.
And I think, really, to sum it up,the solution's pretty straightforward.
We have a very clear senseof what needs to be done.
The challenge is,how do we get people to do it?
And this is complicated by the factthat these are residents, and
(07:35):
we're talking about work doneon the private property.
The law and our codes are verydeferential to what people do on and
around their homes.
This is not a.
We're not invading somewhere,right, where we have to.
The stakeholdersare the ones who have a say.
We're the residents.
And so we began working through that,really aligning on how insurance,
(07:55):
both the access and affordability ofinsurance, could be used to drive.
Changed through price signaling and
the work that we did at Hoover that reallyset me on that journey that then resulted.
I was the California director forthe Western Fire Chiefs Association.
I ran the WUE task force forthe California Fire Chiefs Association,
(08:16):
I was on a couple of state boards andpanels and
right up through my fire serviceretirement at the end of the year,
I was really driving on this problem ofhow do we harness the market's ability to.
To tell people the price oftheir action or inaction?
Because otherwise this is abstract, right?
Wildfire.
For most Californians, wildfire isan abstract thing in any given year.
(08:37):
But insurance is annual and either now orin the very near future, wildfire caused
disruptions to the insurance marketare going to affect every California
in a way that the actual physicalmanifestations of wildfire will not.
So I really land on the criticalimportance of understanding price
signaling and understanding the barriersto accurate and timely price signaling
(08:58):
vis a vis risk that people have chosen toallow to remain on and around the parcel.
>> Mike Steadman (09:05):
So you and I, we all joined the VFP at the fall of 2021.
Right, and again, just starting out thisyear, all of a sudden the whole world is
paying attention to what'sgoing on in California.
I will love you all'sperspective of what happened and
just kind of bring our viewers up to speedon how we got to where we are today and
(09:27):
then how do we movepast it moving forward.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (09:31):
Let me highlight one thing as we kick off into that because
I think Dave's got the.
The best way to kind of talkthrough where we're at now.
But I want to.
One of the interesting things we noticed,as Dave said, the key thing is,
is is how do we use market forcesto drive good behavior, right.
How do we go ahead and take a lookat showing people the costs and
the risk associated with it?
Right.
We realized we needed somekind of lever to push that and
(09:53):
we felt insurance was probablythe right way to do it.
The other thing we noticed veryquickly is that in most cases, I mean,
I grew up in Louisiana where there'spretty smooth flooding hurricanes, and
if you go down there, you might getflood insurance, but it's very costly,
it's government run, andit's very ineffective.
And I think when we looked atwhat California was going.
California is a fair plan, right,if you're an insurance company,
you want to do business in California,you have to pay into this fair plan.
(10:15):
And what our concern was,we started seeing people advertise and
highlight additional further fair planadoption where and some people feel,
trying to say, hey, that's a goodnews story because more Californians
get insurance when they'regetting non renewed.
But from us, we said that's an indicatorof really bad things to come, right?
If everyone's going down that road,there's something government does well,
(10:35):
insurance probably isn'tthe right thing for that.
And as we go down that road, if there'sadditional fair plan adoption increases
the chances that a catastrophic eventcould collapse the whole system.
And so he pulled a lot of fair plandata from the state of California,
using our resources at Stanford, and didthat initial analysis and kind of showed,
hey look, we're going for
a pretty disastrous future if we don'tfind a way to kind of ameliorate this.
(10:58):
And I think that as Dave indicated earlyon, people kind of just held on and said,
it'll be okay, it'll be okay.
Fast forward turned out it wasn't okay.
So Dave.
>> Dave Winnacker (11:07):
Yeah. So how we got here, Mike,
is a couple of things.
One, we excluded wildfirefrom the landscape for
over a hundred yearsas a matter of policy.
So in the, in a fire dependent landscape,when you remove fire, you, you remove,
think of it as the vacuum cleaner,the whisk broom, the thing that's just
cleaning up the understory and keepingthe vegetative landscape in balance.
(11:28):
And when you exclude fire, butyou don't exclude photosynthesis,
you get accumulations of vegetation overtime that should have burned in a historic
fire regime every couple of years in a lowintensity, beneficial, no big deal fire.
But when you get rid of all those littlefires, you carry forward the fuel load,
the dead vegetation to a futuredate when on the hottest,
(11:50):
driest day with the worst winds,all of those actions that you delayed and
deferred, they come due in the form ofa balloon payment with interest on a,
on an extreme wildfire day, where youget fires that are simply unstoppable,
that's because ofthe accumulation of vegetation.
Because we excluded fire.
Climate change has increasedvapor deficit, meaning we
(12:11):
are getting more dry days late in the fallwith high winds due to vapor deficit and
compression of the rainy season.
And then lastly, we have builthundreds of thousands of homes in fire
dependent landscapewithout considering fire.
And to be very clear,it's not to say you can't build there,
that you can't buildwithout considering fire.
(12:32):
Same idea as Donnie's alluding to in a,if you're in a floodplain,
you need to build on stilts.
If you're in a fireplane ora fire hazard severity zone.
You need to build in a manner thatincorporates defensible space.
So vegetation management aroundthe home and home hardening,
meaning how the home is built.
We know how to do this,there's no secret about it.
Question is,how do we adopt those retrofits from or
(12:55):
the homes that are already there.
And then lastly we,we having set conditions for
unsustainable wildfire losses andwe're, we've achieved that.
Right?Between 1991 and 2017,
very few homes burn.
In the wildfire seasons of 2017 and2018, the insurance industry lost
two times the combined premiums they'dtaken in over the prior 26 years.
(13:20):
That is an unsustainablelevel of structure loss.
And then you start to see ripplesthrough the insurance market.
So all these other things, andas Donnie was alluding to attempts
to address the insurance marketresponding to unsustainable
losses with regulation,well this isn't a regulation problem.
This is a too many homesare burning problem.
(13:41):
And so from our perspective, wherethere's a need to address regulation and
some of the impacts that is having on,on preventing people from
understanding the price that'sassociated with the risk factors they're
maintaining around their homesis not to subsidize mitigations.
It's not to just pay to rebuild, it's touse price signaling to encourage people
(14:06):
to adopt the proven mitigations thatwill bend the curve on wildfire losses.
If a home is prepared to receive wildfireand all the homes around it are prepared
to receive wildfire, not only is thatthat cluster, that neighborhood,
unlikely to burn, as inextraordinarily unlikely to burn, but
it now forms a non burnable barrier thatprotects other homes that are downstream.
(14:30):
Right, so if you were, and there'sa network effect that gets achieved here
that if we three are neighbors, andI would love to be neighbors, that'd be a,
we have a lot of great barbecues andI have done my work because I'm a good,
virtuous, upstanding citizen.
And you two deadbeats have left a bunchof risk factors around your homes.
If the homes are less than 50ft apart,your asset becomes my peril.
(14:53):
Because if your home starts to burn,it will burn my house down with great
certainty, irregardless of the fact thatI prepared my home to receive wildfire.
And what we saw in LA this year andwhat we saw in Louisville,
Colorado in the Marshall fire,what we saw in Lahaina,
what we saw in the North Bay,in Coffee Park, right?
What we're seeing with increasing cadence,these are not wildland fires.
(15:18):
These are wildland initiated urban fires.
And once homes start to burn,they burn longer and they burn hotter, and
they will overwhelm wildfire.
Specific mitigations.
It's kind of if you put ona bike helmet and you know,
some stuff to go out bike riding and
you get in a car doing a hundred miles anhour, no one is going to be surprised that
(15:38):
your bike riding PPE was inadequate toprotect you from 100 mile an hour crash.
Wildfire is a bike ride.
Urban fire is a race car.
And so we have this challenge of that oncefires become established in the urban
environment, the all of ourother mitigations are moot.
And so the whole game here is aboutslowing the fire spread to the.
(15:59):
To the edge of the community.
That's your defense in depth, yourobstacle belt, about hardening the points
of entry so that the homes thatrepresent the opportunity for
transition from vegetativefire to structure fire,
those homes are prepared to receivefire and they are more resistive.
And then understanding the firefightingresponse, how long it will take
(16:20):
the appropriate number of firefightersto get to the right place,
think of that as your qrf, right?
You gotta keep the bad guys from gettingthrough the wall long enough for
the QRF to show up.
And when all of those are taken together,we have the ability,
we have the tools, we havethe modeling tools, we have the data,
we have everything we need tounderstand how to do this.
What we don't have is the will to act onthe part of the residents in our fire
(16:44):
prone areas.
And what those residents are looking foris certainty.
There's certainty thatif I do these things,
what certainty is there that I willget insurance and at what rate?
Now that doesn't exist because that wouldbe collusion and you can't have collusion
in regulated markets for a lot of reasons,all of which are very good.
But so the point I would just make hereis that we've been experienced sustained
(17:07):
unsustainable wildfire losses since 2017,and we are just now starting
to see the market collapse that Donnie andI studied as our capstone at vfp.
And so for a bunch of yearswhen bad things were happening,
people were buffered by the reflex time,the flash to bang, if you will,
from when large numbers of homes are lostuntil you see the implications of pricing.
(17:29):
Well, that same curve works the other way,from the moment you carry out
mitigations at scale, there willbe time until the market corrects.
But most importantly, as I said in thatexample before, if the three of us
are neighbors, all three of us need tocarry out the mitigations in order for
them to be effective.
And so you have this terrible problemwhere one person does the work and
(17:50):
doesn't see a positive outcome, andthen that discourages the other two,
whose unwillingness to do the work iswhat caused me to not be able to get
the outcome for my work.
And so it's, it's this really challengingproblem of a network effect where we need
everyone to do things.
And that doesn't happen just naturally.
That that requires concerted and focusedeffort and that does require regulation
(18:12):
and enforcement and price signaling sothat people can see the benefits of having
done this work because it's all otherwise,it's all just in the Abstract.
Until the catastrophe ensues.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (18:24):
The thing I'd also add to that.
Right, is when he talksabout the three of us.
Right, and doing our protections andour defensible space around our homes.
The other challenge is, let's justsay even if we all do that right,
the challenge is,do our three insurance companies all
agree that that's actuallygoing to defend the homes?
Right.And
those insurance companies don'talways share that information.
(18:45):
Because if I were, say,my insurance company looked at my home and
said, okay, check,you've done those events will space.
If they looked at yours andDave's, they could look at yours.
You use different insurers or they couldshare that information and say, okay,
I don't insure Mike,I don't insure Dave, but
I can validate through a common set of.
Of criteria that they have met thatcriteria to defend the home and
(19:06):
do the home hardening defensible space.
That I know that I can keepDonnie's rates low because Mike and
Dave's homes are also protected.
But if that communication doesn't happen,you get a case where like, like Dave said,
you ended up with this weird panic,we're not incentivized.
We don't see the positive effects thatneither do the insurance companies, so
then you have all three insurancecompanies saying, like,
(19:28):
I can't prove that they've all threedone the home hardening they need to do.
So we should all just step out of thismarket because it's too dangerous for
us for a business case becauseof just what Dave said.
I mean, you can, you know, be mad at theinsurance companies, but it's a business.
And when that business loses 30 yearsof profits in two years, like, who's.
Who's going to sign upto run that business?
>> Dave Winnacker (19:47):
You know, so for me, and I'm a grunt, y' all, so
I don't have all the deepindustry expertise like you do.
>> Mike Steadman (19:54):
But it sounds like, number one, the way we're
building homes these days, they'rebasically just fuel for these fires.
Essentially.
Right.If they're
not protected,>> Dave Winnacker: actually
requires>> Donnie Hasseltine: better.
>> Dave Winnacker (20:05):
Yeah, I'd say so.
At least in California andsome other areas as well.
Since 2008,we've had the appropriate building code.
It's technically chapter 7A ofthe building code that requires
the home be built to an ember resistancestandard that's highly effective.
In paradise in 2018,when the whole place burned out,
the majority of homes builtto the 7A standard did not.
(20:25):
Amidst one of the worst firelosses we've ever seen.
The problem of course is that veryfew homes have been built since 2007.
And so that the majority ofthe housing stock requires retrofits.
You have to make changes.
The second part is that the,
if the home is built to an emberresistant standard that's durable right.
That that will remain in place forever andever.
(20:45):
The vegetation that surroundsthe home also has to be maintained.
It's a, it's a belt andsuspenders approach.
You have these goblin minimum and thevegetation has to be checked every year
because things grow so exactly like Donniewas alluding to if, in if for some reason
we all did the work and we were all ableto share that with our insurance carriers.
So they had a comprehensive viewof our little neighborhood.
(21:07):
Said these guys are gold stara number one good to go.
It doesn't mean it will be next year orthe year after.
And so you, you have this constant problemof having to go out and check the work and
that that's really hard.
It's really hard as well when we're doingit in the midst of a, of a no kidding
collapse of the market and this dynamicenvironment where things are moving so
(21:27):
fast that a lot of people just sort of goto ground and say hey this is too much.
I can't track it all but to be clearthat the collapse of the insurance
markets are very likely with allof the ripple that come from that.
The property tax is based onhomes being able to sell.
Homes that can't get insured,can't be sold.
(21:48):
Mortgages require insurance.
If insurance is not available.
The mortgage market if can get very topsyturvy, municipal bonds that are used to
run any kind of capital projectsin municipal government.
All those are now have a wildfirecomponent because they're secured by ad
valorem property tax.
So the ripple from this stuffis potentially massive.
And this is the my case successfullypull your hair out stuff that
(22:12):
the solutions are low cost, high impact.
We know exactly what needs to be done andit's really minor.
We're talking about enhanced gardening andretrofitting of event screens on houses.
Really I mean very low cost, very highimpact that can prevent this potentially
contagion level financial crisis for
local government that would flow out ofthe really unwillingness to carry out
(22:33):
the actions that could bendthe curve of structure loss.
And that's you know micro work at scaleis hard but can have this massive impact.
And the alternative is truly scary.
And that's.
You know I don't think Donnie and
I take any pride in having called wherethis was going three, four years ago now,
because where it continues to headis potentially a really bad place.
(22:57):
And we need residents of these areas andat scale be galvanized to take action.
And I continue to believe price signalingis going to be the most effective way for
us to get there but that's complicated bythe fact that this is a fragmented market.
There are 38 admitted carriers, insurancecarriers in California, and very,
(23:18):
very large number of excess andsurplus line, non admitted carriers.
And so getting all of them to act in a waythat is sort of directionally the same.
So it's not collusion.
It still has competitive markets,that's really, really hard as well.
So we're left with a simple solution.
It's simple, it's not complex.
It's simple but it's hard.
(23:40):
And as a result of that, because it is so
hard, we see a lot of the energythat is being pointed
towards wildfire risk reduction nowis going to the complex but easy.
And somewhat ironically,it's easier to launch a satellite
with a complex instrument arraythan it is to get people to.
Clear out brush andgrass within five feet of their house,
(24:03):
that shouldn't be the way it is,but it is the way it is.
And so we, we end up withcontinuing use of, of tech for
sort of boutique solutions that don'taddress the underlying risk factors.
And as long as there are vulnerable homesand fire prone communities, they will burn
and anything we do other than addressthe vulnerabilities at the parcel level is
(24:23):
just kind of tinkering on, on the marginsof the bell curve, lower turn.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (24:28):
Yeah, I think it's also worth that,
Dave talked about the impacts, right?
You know, when paradise burns, that meansproperty taxes go away, which means that
makes it a very difficult to rebuild orbring back those government services.
But if you think about the housingcrisis kind of in California and
think more broadly about that,
the largest source of intergenerationalwealth is your home, right?
Is you put a lot of money in your home andthat's what you're gonna eventually sell
(24:51):
and bring out to be your nest eggin retirement or pass on your kids.
And, and that goes away ifyou can't insure your home.
And like Dave said, just to be superprecise about it, a lot of what
we're talking about here are pretty low,low tech, low budget things, right?
It's like,have you cleaned out your gutters?
Do you have gutter covers in your gutters?
Have you put mesh in your soffit vents soembers can't get in your attic?
(25:13):
Have you ensured that zero to five feetaround your home is non flammable,
no vegetation, like simple thingslike that radically change whether or
not that home is going to burn ornot, right?
And I think that one interesting thingthat Hoover did on day one is when we went
to that VFP, we had that chat from HRMcMaster where he talked about looking at
your beneficiaries and yourstakeholders and drawing a map of that.
(25:34):
And that was pretty profound forDave and I to draw out.
Look, we know we got government,we know we got homeowners,
we know we got firefighters.
And they all want the same thing.
They want things not to burn,
but they all have different waysof looking at that problem.
And how do you draw the lines acrossthere to see, okay, where they map,
where do they, where those points meet andwhere can we attack those points we meet?
(25:56):
Because if you understandthe stakeholders,
understand where the stakeholders meetnow, you can find a way to try to help,
help solve that problem andeventually what that had to do.
Another great thing that Uber did is wegot a lot of people like Dave said you
can't have collusion in the market.
So there's a lot of cases where insurers,California apartment insurance and
certain other groups can't be seenin the same room with each other.
(26:17):
Right.
So we're able to set up like a neutralground at Hoover on Stanford and
able hey look we're notgoing to televise this.
We're not going to quote anybody.
This is a Chatham Houserules bring all together.
Let's just acknowledge we all agreethat we want the same thing as
things not to burn.
How do we solve that?
And we just wipe away everything out andthat allowed us to come with a lot of
great ideas that quite franklyare carrying forward and
(26:38):
days been able to carry forward ingovernment and non-profit work but
it took us kind of getting together andgetting people who maybe wanted to talk
to each other but couldn't andidentifying the common thread and
pulling that common thread to getthem in the same room together.
>> Mike Steadman (26:53):
So you all have been working on this for a few years now for
a long time Dave,damn near your entire life.
Right.And
you also know we're in this 247kind of news cycle and it's just so
hard to keep up with particularlyyou know the tariffs and stuff now.
And I have not seen a lot ofinformation about the follow up,
you know post fires, people rebuilding.
It was there front and center you knowin the media for about three weeks and
(27:16):
then now I haven't really seen a lot whatis taking place what are the conversations
happening now?
>> Dave Winnacker (27:24):
So a couple of things specific to California.
The governor issued an executive orderthat's bringing forward zone zero which is
the requirement it was established bythe legislator in 2020 should have was
supposed to have gone into effect two anda half years ago but
that will be by regulationno later than 2029.
So things move a little slowly here.
(27:45):
There will be a state-wide regulation toremove anything that will burn inclusive
of wooden fences within 5ft of a structurethat that is an unlock on everything else
we're doing for structured risk reduction.
There's also a loosening of CEQArules that will allow fuel breaks and
some California Environmental Qualityact it will allow some projects to move
forward a little more quickly and it'stoo early to say how it unfolds but there
(28:09):
are some early talks about rebuildingin LA in a manner that accounts for
wildfire preparedness so that you can thenhave some really small model communities.
It's not rebuild them to burn again,so there's a lot more interest.
And one of the challenges there,you know, four or five years ago,
this was a pretty lonely space.
It's gotten very crowded.
(28:30):
But now, andbecause it's essentially a new field,
there's not a whole lot ofwell established expertise.
And we have this challenge that wildfire,the stuff the forest service is very
good at dealing with, is fundamentallydifferent than wildfire caused urban fire.
And so we have this problem.
We're blending disciplines, andthat can be a little rough early on.
(28:53):
And I'll send you for the show notes.
Mike, I just worked on a white paper.
We talked about the factoriesthat contribute to urban fire and
how the steps you have to have, and youhave to have all of them to initiate urban
fire because it doesn't happen that often,just when it happens is catastrophic.
But the Swiss cheese holes, it's aboutseven different steps that have to align.
(29:14):
And if you interrupt any one of those,
you bend the curve dramatically toinstead of 5,000 homes, it's five homes.
And you get down to the level of wherethese losses are sustainable and
buy us time to come up with the approacheswe need to get to a hundred percent
compliance, you know, which is reallycultural and social acceptance thing.
(29:38):
But there's a lot of energy in this space,and I think, unfortunately,
a lot of it is focusing onhow we further automate and
use technology to enhance ourability to rapidly extinguish fire.
And I would note that's how we got here,right?
Giving giving firefighters a biggerhammer is not gonna solve this problem.
It's just gonna kick the cana little bit farther down the road.
(30:00):
So really our focus has been on howwe create those passive pre fire
measures that look like communityadaptation to wildfire.
I mean, anyone who's watched eitherseen a wildfire in person or
watched any of the clips of Los Angeles,I think will hit the I believe button.
That that is not somethingyou can go toe to toe with.
That is not something we fight.
(30:20):
It's something we adapt to.
And I would.
The analogy would say, you know,bullfighter in the ring,
in the first 30 seconds of a bullfight,you don't put your head down and
charge the bull andhope you knock it down.
Right, sothis is the sort of thing we need to.
We need to figure out how wecan dance with this piece.
And we can do that through adaptation.
>> Mike Steadman (30:38):
I think a lot about how do you change human behavior?
You know, and when you talkabout the three areas, you know,
you mentioned the insurance companies,right.
The homeowners, right,the fire department sec, etc.
Even going back to that firstconversation we had with hr,
we talked about one framing the problem.
It's all about framing.
But then if you're actually goingto make meaningful progress,
(31:01):
it's probably hard to target allthree of those at the same time.
So where do you feel like you've beenable to move the needle the most?
>> Dave Winnacker (31:11):
I think on the, on the wildfire modeling.
So it's called catastrophe modeling.
It's used for the pricing of risk, theaverage yen, your loss calculation, and
I just as a fun.
I'd say for anyone who's listening, ifyou're talking to someone who's interested
or is has some knowledge about thewildfire space, a great thought experiment
(31:31):
is to ask them what is the unitof measure for wildfire risk?
Is it.
And wildfire risk reduction specifically?
Are we looking at the number ofdollars that have been spent?
Well, that's probably notthe best way of looking at it.
You can buy a very expensive car andstill be late for a meeting.
Are we looking at the number ofacres that have been treated?
You know, also not a great idea becauseI could grow out very long hair and
(31:53):
still be bald.
Right, it wouldn't, it wouldn't reallymatter that I had a lot of hair on
the back of my head because it's nothappening in the front of my head.
Or are we talking aboutthe dollars denominated in risk,
the risk denominated in dollars throughthe average annual loss, which I think is
a useful frame of reference because it'sthe one the insurance industry uses.
That's the first thing.
The second question to ask someone,if they do land upon a unit of measures,
(32:16):
what's the denominator?
Because if we say we treated a thousandacres of fire prone landscape,
that sounds really impressive.
Thousand acres is a lot.
Unless in the case of California,the denominator is 4.25 million,
4.25 million acres burned per yearwhen the landscape was imbalanced.
So thousand acres all of a suddendoesn't sound so impressive.
(32:39):
So I think that's really the key pieceis landing on the agreed upon unit
measure and being able to measure ourrisk reduction in dollars as shown at
the average annual loss calculation.
So if we know that our average annualloss calculation was $5,000 per million
total insured before we carried out thesemitigations and we did these things,
(33:01):
what was the outcome?
And so that if you, if you go back to yourMarine Corps EWS or command and staff,
are these measures of performance,are they measures of effectiveness really?
Or is it activity or is it outcomes?
And right now a lot of oureffort is focused on activity.
And so by working with the cap modelers,catastrophe modelers,
(33:21):
we've been able to make realprogress in understanding
what are the inputs they would use,how do those inputs impact the model.
So understanding which onesare going to be meaningful and
then laying the groundwork throughsome nascent work we're doing with
the WI Data Commons to create the pipethrough which we can feed parcel level and
(33:41):
neighborhood level mitigationdata to the catastrophe modelers.
Because that's the unlock, right?
I mean,of those 38 admitted insurance carriers,
significant number of them don't dotheir own wildfire risk modeling.
They just buy a score andunderwrite from there.
If we're communicating directlywith the scorekeepers,
that ripples down to everyone else.
(34:03):
And then we get all the other folks forfree because it's now baked in,
they're all using it.
So I think the cap model is where we'veseen the most interesting advances.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (34:14):
And I think there's also some things that Dave can go into
about one of the challenges whenyou're pricing risk, right?
It has to be backward looking,vice forward looking.
And that becomes very challengingto kind of do that, to look out and
see what it's going tolook like in the future.
But I think what's interesting to knowis when you talk to the cab modelers and
you look at the fire models, what I thinka lot of people don't realize when they
look at something like those LA fires, itjust looks like an Armageddon catastrophe.
(34:37):
Right?But fire, there's science behind it and
it's fairly predictable.
Right.You can look at things and
say a house with these characteristicsis going to burn, is not going to burn.
And you can look up the IBHS standards andtheir experiments where they literally put
two houses side by side andjust put a flamethrower on both.
And you see one burns down to ashes andthe other one doesn't burn.
And you can also lookat how fire would move.
(34:59):
Just like in the Marine Corps, we wouldlook at avenues of likely approach and we
do our modified combined opsis overlay andpredict how the enemy is going to move.
Fire can do that too.
You can look at valleys,you can look at fingers,
you can look at wind patterns in themorning to wind patterns the evening, and
you can see how thatfire is going to move.
So like Dave said, thousand acres maynot mean much, but more importantly,
(35:20):
it might be 500 acres on a specificdraw leading into a wooded village.
Could make a huge bit of difference.
Because if that splat has been had theunderbrush removed and a fire comes in and
moves down there,that fire is gonna move there.
It's going to start petering out.
Right.And if it reaches the village,
it's giving firefighters time to respond.
And if it hits the point there and allthose homes have that defensible space and
(35:41):
that home hardening done,fire is not gonna ignite.
It's not going to.
It's not going to carry.
And that's the real key thing is howare you preventing the fire from carrying
through those communities?
And then on the backside, showing thatmodeling to adjust the pricing of risk,
to show the insurance companies that theycan actually insure those facilities.
Like if you're just looking backwards,Right.
(36:02):
Can we insure in paradise?
You can insure it now because it's beenburned, it's not going to burn again for
another 10 years.
Right.
Once all that vegetation grows back,different ball game.
But you got to look at how does it looknow, how does it look in the future and
how do you bridge thatgap through the modeling?
>> Dave Winnacker (36:18):
Yeah, Mike, just to break that down, you know,
take yourself back to Afghanistan.
Do you ever see a FOB that didn'thave wire around the perimeter.
You didn't have Tescos,didn't have bunkers, right?
It was prepared to be attacked.
And so when they were attacked,generally went pretty well.
This is the same idea.
We prepare our communities for an attack.
(36:38):
We know it's coming, we know the avenuesapproach that fire pathways,
that's powerful.
Weather and fuel we can moderate,we can model those,
we know where the breach points are.
Our version of HESCO here is clearingout some defensible space and
our version of bunkers is replacingsome vents, putting in zone zero.
We can do this, we know how to do it.
And as I said,
defense in depth is a pretty good analogto what we're trying to carry out.
(37:02):
The problem is you can't just, you know,have the base commander stand up and say,
here's what we're going to do.
And then the gunnies go out andstart cracking heads and it gets done.
You know, here, this is, this is handholding one driveway at a time to convince
people of this is not onlyin their best interest,
but this is their civic duty,carry out this work.
>> Mike Steadman (37:22):
You're more familiar with the overall kind of history of these
fires in terms of like numbers,rough estimate, how devastating was what
happened in, you know, this yearcomparative to fires in previous years?
>> Dave Winnacker (37:36):
Yeah, so year over year is not a great example,
because as an example, 20,20, 2017, 2018, really bad.
2019, not so bad.
2020, really, really, really bad.
22, 23, not all that bad,24, early 25, really bad.
So there's a cyclical nature to it.
So part of it is,is what was the weather pattern that year?
(37:59):
Right.One of the things that made this year's
fires sobad was they were following a wet winter.
So the winter of 2324 inCalifornia was very wet.
That means you get more vegetative growth,thicker grass crop, more growth on brush.
Right.
And then, so that, and then that rainended about March, April of 2024.
(38:20):
And then you, you had a delayin the onset of seasonal rain so
that normally in LA Base in November,December, you start getting into rains.
Well, come January, when they had the windevent, they hadn't had any rains yet.
So now you have procured remnants of a,of a record crop of growth that have
gone eight months since they saw wettingrainfall and are, are cured out and dry.
(38:43):
And then you get a Santa Ana wind eventand, and an ignition and off it goes.
And, and so there are, you know, there's alot of factors that come together so it's,
it's better to take a macro view.
And we did a, a little study on this.
If you go back to 22 years,go back to 2003,
50% of the structures lost inthat time have been during urban
(39:06):
fires where it transitioned,but it was only five of them.
So a small number of fires can havean outsized impact because you know, in,
in Altadena and parts of the Palisades,when on eighth of an acre lots,
homes igniting, you know, eight homesper acre are burning as opposed
to some of these really monstrouswildland fires we've had.
(39:30):
The Dixie's a good example examplethat burned a million acres and
a couple of hundred homes.
And those couple hundred homes,it's tragedy they were lost.
That's very different thanthe thousands of homes that were lost.
So the density of urbanfire is really challenging.
But predicting that andtrying to make calls based on three, four,
five year trends, I think it'sa little bit of a fool's errand.
(39:52):
But the macro trends are really bad,I guess is the best way of saying it.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (39:55):
And just if you take a look at what Dave just said about those
years, right, 17, 18.
Really bad next couple years,but then next year really bad.
If you go back further right,
it was the 1991 Oakland Hills fire thatDave started the conversation about.
And then there was a dropof insurance profits.
But then it was like close to 20 years ofreally not any real significant fires in
(40:15):
fire losses, right?
Small ones here and there.
And now it's every two or three yearssomething catastrophic has happened.
So you can just look at that timeline.
When you extend the timeline out andyou see really bad fire,
20 years of kind of slowness andthen all of a sudden, bam, bam, bam, bam.
So again, that's the piece whereit's very hard to look year to year.
You look back collectively, you can seeit's, it's spiking really bad very,
(40:39):
very fast.
>> Mike Steadman (40:41):
Are you both optimistic now about the future with all these
lessons learned?
Are you still worried just as youwere when we first joined the vfp?
>> Dave Winnacker (40:50):
We're a lot better informed, got a lot more data,
know which trend lines to watch.
Just Donnie mentioned the beginning.
I'll give a brief.
In California,there's the admitted carriers.
This is true everywhere.
There are admitted carriersthat are regulated.
And then there isthe insurance of last resort.
It's called the Fair Plan.
In parts of the west,it's called Peoples in Florida.
(41:11):
And it's for people who throughno fault of their own can or
citizens, in Florida,residents who through no fault of
their own can't get insurance must beoffered coverage by the Fair Plan.
And the Fair Plan is a separate entity,but it is funded by the admitted carriers.
And if you are an admitted insurancecarrier, you have a proportional share of
(41:31):
policies in the Fair Plan based onhow much of the market you control.
So it's not government run.
Insurance is governmentmandated insurance.
And the Fair Plan, it's in the name,it's the insurance, the last resort.
If you see a significant and sustainedincrease in Fair Plan enrollment,
that's not good.
That's sign of a market distress.
(41:53):
And with the work we didat Hoover now a lot,
lot more savvy about knowing whatthat means and how to get the data.
And so I, I watched some zip codes that,you know,
my sort of my practitioner's eye saythat's, that's probably a pretty,
that's a place that probably isviewed as having high fire risk.
A couple of the zip codes I keep an eyeon, as of September 30th of last year,
(42:15):
fair plan enrollment was up 680% inthose in a year and that was September,
that, that predates la, right?
So a lot of things havegotten worse since then.
In a community that I was the firechief of, 25% of the community
was non renewed one day by State Farm,25% of the community.
(42:35):
And these are, you know, this is anaffluent place where getting coverage is
going to be a challenge because ofthe concentration of wealth and value.
So I am, I am optimistic.
We know it needs to be done.
I remain something less than optimisticabout the speed with which we're going to
see adaptation and the implementation ofmitigations at the appropriate scale.
(42:56):
And as a result of that, I think, andbecause it's a question of speed,
relative speed, is that willthe risk transfer industry and
really the global reinsurers whounderwrite the risk, will they stay while
they lose money in this market long enoughfor us to carry out mitigations at scale?
(43:16):
That's one question.
And the second question is if they stay,will we move with the appropriate speed?
Cuz if we remove the stressor,right, the impetus to take action,
then it's going to take us much longer.
So this is a question ofthis is gonna happen.
We're going to adapt, buthow long are we going to take the.
Rip the band aid off and that so long asthere is a functioning insurance market,
(43:39):
we will reduce the pressure on people tocarry out the mitigations that we need to
sustain the insurance market.
And so this, that's a hard one.
And that's why, as I mentioned atthe opening, that's why I'm so
interested in anything that bufferspeople from the cost of their actions.
And that if you, you know, if, if everytime you got in your car and you sped,
(44:03):
you know, you had to put fivebucks in the jar or whatever,
you wouldn't speed very often.
Right.But instead you feed until you
have an accident.
And this is the same thing that we're,we reduce the pressure on people to make
change when we protect them fromthe financial impact of their decisions.
>> Mike Steadman (44:21):
Love it.
This was.You know,
usually when I do these podcasts,I'm a lot more talkative.
But I have to honestly admit,like I grew up in Texas,
we didn't have to deal with wildfires.
Right?You are my.
Well, we had a little.
But nothing like you see in California,but this was only a first time.
>> Dave Winnacker (44:37):
Million acres burned last year, Mike, in Texas.
>> Mike Steadman (44:39):
Really?
>> Dave Winnacker (44:40):
Yeah.
Powerhouse fire one day, million acres.
>> Mike Steadman (44:44):
But I still had to say is like, you know,
you all are just like the SMEson this kind of subject.
So I was genuinely curious to just kind ofunderstand the situation from you all's
perspective, because there's just somuch I can't even use.
I don't know if we can use the wordmisinformation these days.
I think that word got canceled.
But there's just a lot of informationcoming at us and what's true, what's not.
Even before it went live, I mentionedsomething to you, and you were like,
(45:07):
[SOUND] kinda.
So I think, you know, the whole conceptof frontline voices is bringing people
from the front line who are dealingwith these hard challenges and
providing perspective for our viewers.
>> Dave Winnacker (45:19):
Yeah, I come back to one other thing that HR McMaster said when
he first talked to us, and he talkedabout the importance of agency and
people, community, cultures,countries, having agency.
I use that word a lot.
Based on how he presented it,it made so much sense to me.
The wildfire is a risk againstwhich we have agency, and
(45:40):
the question is whether ornot we choose to use it.
And I think to your point,Mike, about misinformation and
focus on how much water is inthe reservoir or whatever,
that distracts from the core issuethat we have control over, and
we have the ability to control our ownfate as communities and neighborhoods.
And that's really my hope,
is to get the message out thatwe can do things about this.
(46:01):
It's very clear.
Topography, weather, and fuel tells ushow the fire gets to the community.
Defensible space and
home hardening at the points of transitiontell us how many vulnerabilities we have.
And time until the firefighting responsecan arrive with the appropriate
weight of attack tells us what combinationof distant mitigations, near community
mitigations, and nonparcel mitigations ittakes to slow the fire to the point that
(46:25):
we will have more firefightersthan fire at the point of entry.
Because if we do, we win.
It's that simple.
And that, we know how to do all of that.
What we don't know how to do is getpeople how to execute it to scale.
>> Mike Steadman (46:38):
This brings me to my next point, and
I wanna shift our focus now, particularlyto the kinda Bellarn Fellowship program.
Again, being part ofthat inaugural cohort,
I kinda think of us aslike the advanced party.
You know, we got to be part of essentiallykind of creating history of what
this thing could be potential.
And so with that comes this obligation tokind of be good stewards for the program
(47:02):
as a whole, make sure we're attractingthe Right type of veterans to participate.
I would love to learnfrom both of you all.
What do you think makes a goodveteran fellow and who should apply?
>> Donnie Hasseltine (47:16):
Yeah, I'll jump in there, Mike.
I think one of the things that was really.
I think we talked about it,especially Dave, me, you, and
the rest of the group pretty early onour first meeting together is, you know,
Hoover was stepping on a limb to kindof create this program, and it was.
Dr. Rice put a lot of weightbehind it about trying this out.
And it was initially funded for fiveyears, and we made the point of, like,
look, we're getting a lot of great assets,a lot of great resources here,
(47:38):
a lot of great contacts, but we've got todeliver to show the value of this program.
And a lot of that, as you remember dayone, even the people who were setting up
the program with us, who are fantastic,were trying to do discovery.
I mean, like, you mentioned the Tbilisi,Georgia, trip.
That wasn't part of the curriculum.
Right.But we kinda said, hey,
we should think about, hey,
how are we leveraging some ofthe things that Hoover can do?
Can we do a foreign study?
(47:59):
Trip can we look at these differentways where we can enrich the fellows but
also tie what we're studying todifferent places around the world and
see where there's like connectivity there.
So when I look back on, I've talked to anumber of veterans, some that applied and
got in, some that didn't andsome that have thought about it.
What we try to drivehome is a couple things.
You got to think very hardabout your problem frame,
it doesn't have to haveto be near a solution.
(48:21):
You have to have framed whatyou think you can do about it.
You've got to match that up tothe resources Stanford has so
that within that year of the programwhere it's the really meat of
the year where you're really working hardon it, you can create tangible wins and
gains that you can pointto along that way.
And Dave and I kind of thought throughthat as we mapped our piece out about,
hey, let's get a webinar done.
(48:42):
Let's figure out where can we getpublished, where can we get pull
information to research and make surehypothesis is correct and then how do
we transmit that information out publiclyin smaller groups to larger groups,
how we get bigger megaphonesto drive that out so
we can point to how we use those resourcesto better dig into our problem that
we'd framed and then communicate outthe solutions we had identified.
(49:05):
So having kind of a good vision and
have done some thought onthe problem is really critical.
And then thinking deeply abouthow can you intelligently,
efficiently use the resources that Uberis going to bring to you to get some wins
towards your problem andthe time the program is going to give you.
>> Mike Steadman (49:22):
Anything to add, Dave.
>> Dave Winnacker (49:24):
I, you know, everything Donnie said, I think just having that
sense of others who have gone before havegiven the prestige and the legacy of
the service that we tried to live up toand trying to do our part within the VFP
so that opportunity to be available toothers, the resources of Stanford campus.
I mean, shoot,
(49:45):
just having a Stanford Edu email addressopened all kinds of doors for us.
And then the networkopportunities within the vfp.
I mean, I'm sure you all have,maybe not you, Mike, but
the rest of us have someserious imposter syndrome.
You look who you're in the room with.
Go, man.
This is a pretty outstanding group ofpeople from all different walks of life
(50:05):
that have done great things andare living up to what you would,
you would hope a group made up ofveterans would be capable of and
learned so much from the othermembers of the Group just.
We really wanted to make sure wewere doing our part to give back so
that the program was able to continue.
And I would encourage anyone who'sthinking about applying, as Donny said,
think global, act local.
(50:25):
How can you make somethingdeliverable within the timeframe?
And then what are you going todo through your actions and
your project to make the VFP better andto make your cohort better?
Because together we rise andthere's such an opportunity here.
If you just have a bright idea about yourthing and you're going to be off near
a rabbit hole, you're going to be missingout on an awful lot, program has to offer.
>> Mike Steadman (50:49):
Yeah, 100%.
You definitely want to lean in and
make sure you get to knowpeople in the program as well.
You know, I think one thing that makesveterans special and one reason that they
even started this program was because wedo have that kind of sense of service.
You know, just because we takeoff the uniform doesn't mean,
you know, we're no longer caring.
Right.We're no longer serving our communities.
And you got amazing veterans allacross the country doing great stuff.
(51:13):
You know, I was on with the policecommissioner or, sorry,
the police chief of Newport Newsyesterday, and one of the things him and
I were talking about, he realizedthat he's probably got a lot of
veterans that are little leaguecoaches and football coaches that he
really hasn't tapped into enough tokind of lower that community violence.
Right.So they're already out there kind of
doing the work.
But you got 500 officers.
(51:34):
Now, imagine you.
You add on top of that the amount ofveterans that we have across the country.
And so that's the kind of spirit I thinkof when I think of, like, the vfp.
And I just know it can be intimidating,particularly for veterans that, you know,
we all come from different backgrounds.
And just like you said, Dave,that kind of imposter syndrome.
We got veterans out hereat community colleges,
some that might have not goneto school and stuff, et cetera.
(51:57):
And they can look at a program likethis and be super intimidated.
But I really want toencourage them to apply.
And like you said, using the knowledgewe've gained over the last,
you know, five years, seeing allthe various different cohorts, you know,
we took a lot of Ls, soy' all don't have to.
But like they said, breaking this,having really good framing for
what you want to accom to accomplishduring your time in the program and
(52:20):
setting milestones asa way to drive momentum.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (52:24):
Absolutely.
>> Dave Winnacker (52:26):
Yeah. Remember that first week.
Like, hey, we're all Stanford.
Damn.
Yeah, we're excited.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (52:34):
Twice a week, guys.
What's the big deal?
>> Mike Steadman (52:36):
Yeah. And before I let y' all go,
I'm gonna say this.
Dave sent me a nutrition protocol.
Okay.
And I am training for the.
You're gonna be proud of me, Dave.
I'm training for the New York CityMarathon on behalf of Backpacks for
Life to raise money for homeless veterans.
And I'm going back into my.
Your sheet that you gave me,and I'm working it.
(52:57):
Did six miles this morning.
You know,I'm back at it in the morning, but
I got some time because the New YorkCity Marathon's not until November.
But, yeah, man, I appreciate you.
I appreciate our morning workouts.
Sometimes, Dave willcome knock on my door.
We're up at like, 5:30 getting the workoutin before we're doing the programming.
And again,these are the things that you remember,
(53:18):
you know,when you really lean in the program.
So appreciate you all.
Thank you for making time tobe a part of Frontline Voices.
And for all our listeners, do me a favor.
Make sure you subscribe to the podcast onyour favorite podcast hosting platform.
And if you're a military veteran that'sinterested in this veteran fellowship
program, I want to encourage youto head over to Hoover.org/VFP and
(53:43):
apply until next time.
Peace, love.
Have a great rest of your week.
[MUSIC]
>> Mike Steadman (00:10):
Welcome to Frontline Voices, a podcast brought to you
by Stanford University's HooverInstitution, where we explore leadership,
service, and real world solutions to someof our nation's most pressing issues.
I'm your host, Iron Mike Steadman,a Marine Corps veteran and
member of the inaugural classof Hoover Veteran Fellows.
In January of this year, wildfires onceagain devastated parts of California,
(00:32):
leaving entire communities in ruin.
Homes burnt to the ground,families were displaced, and
many of us were left wondering,how was this still happening?
Why weren't we better prepared,and is any of this preventable?
To help unpack these questions, I sat downwith two former Hoover veteran fellows,
Dave Winnacker and Donnie Hasseltine,who who are tackling wildfire risk from
(00:55):
a completely different angle throughthe lens of insurance market forces and
community resilience.
In addition to being a Brigadier Generalin the Marine Corps Reserve,
Dave is also a retired fire chief and
one of California's foremost experts onwildfire response and mitigation, bringing
more than two decades of experience fromthe front lines of the fire service.
(01:17):
He joined forces with Donnie, who's alsoa fellow Marine, for a joint capstone
project, where together they focustheir efforts on how we price and
manage wildfire risk, both throughpolicy and private sector innovation.
In this conversation, we dive intothe economics of risk, the collapse
of the insurance market, and why thesolutions to many of our biggest problems,
(01:40):
like fire prevention, may be simpler andcheaper than we think.
As always, I hope you enjoyed today's showand look forward to hearing your feedback.
Gentlemen, welcome to Frontline Voices.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (01:53):
Good to be here, Mike.
Good to see you again, man.
>> Mike Steadman (01:56):
It's always a privilege when I get to hang out with some fellow
Marines, particularly you two,
who are part of the inauguralVeteran Fellowship program.
And you know,like I was saying before we got started,
I consider both of you friends.
One of the powers of these type ofprograms is bringing people together from
all across the country.
And you know, I try to tell people whenyou're doing cohort based programs,
(02:17):
the programming is great, butyou really gotta take time to get to know
the people that you're, you know,that are part of your cohort.
And so it was cool.
You know, we traveled the world, got to goto Tbilisi, Georgia, got to spend a couple
months flying in to see each other,you know, at the, at the campus, and
then even getting our touch points everyyear, even though you all weren't able to
(02:39):
make it this year at the, you know,the kind of fly in or retreat, et cetera.
So one of the reasons I Want to invite youall to the podcast in the first place was
I would love you to just kind of introduceyourself and talk about your capstone.
Because when the California wildfireshappened this year, immediately I said,
(03:00):
we got to get these guys on the podcastto bring the human element to this.
And, you know,my first time kind of meeting you guys,
I know you had this big project, and yourcapstone was really focused around that,
but I really want to give you space tokind of, kind of introduce yourselves and
talk about that capstone.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (03:16):
Yeah, I can probably kick off.
You know, Dave and I actually go backa little ways in the Marine Corps,
so after active duty,I'll let him introduce himself.
He punched off in the reserves.
The reason why I say that is as we wenton, we kind of paralleled each other and
we found ourselves.
When I commanded 1st Recon Battalion,
Dave had command of 4thForce Reconnaissance Company.
So we're both lieutenantcolonel commanders, and
that allowed us to worktogether very closely.
(03:38):
I still remember, I think the firsttime you and I connected, you showed up,
my office, said, hey, I got a problem.
I need some help from the active duty.
Were you able to work that stuff out?
And then fast forward a little bit?
I ended up taking a job up in 23rdMarines as the inspector instructor,
which is the active duty rep or
regimental XO or second in command forthe 23rd Marine Regiment.
And Dave was the XO,which was the reserve component.
So essentially, Dave andI had the same position.
(04:00):
I was the active, he was the reserve.
So when he was doing his day job,I was kinda keeping things in track.
And he would come in on the drillweekends, I would hand off,
we'd high five each other,move from there.
But a lot of times we'd havesitting in the office and talking.
And as I got up here in Silicon Valley,I started immersing myself in the tech,
in the tech world, which eventuallyled to myself getting out and
going into cybersecurity.
(04:21):
But along that way, I started supportinganother program at Stanford called
the Hacking for Events program, where theytook military and intelligence programs
and problems and then had studentskind of go ahead and solve that.
And Dave and I were in the office one day,
as oftentimes they want to get thelieutenant colonels away from the Marines,
go drink coffee,leave us alone sort of thing.
And we'd sit there on a wet board andstart just talking, like,
(04:42):
how come we're still fightingfires like we did 100 years ago?
What kind of technology could we do?
So we sat down there over successiveWeekends sketching out ideas,
Dave would pitch in perspectivesfrom the fire department.
I would come at it from the tech angle and
we kind of craft out a number of differentsolutions and fast forward a little bit.
One of those ideas became a companythat was very successful.
Then I started getting ready to get out.
(05:03):
Dave started moving on andthis thing popped up at Hoover and
I kind of reached back out to him andsaid, hey Dave,
remember we had about10 ideas on that board.
What's the next one?
And maybe we should kind of take a run atthis veteran fellowship program together.
That's kind of how we got there.
So I'll toss to Dave to kindafill in the rest of the details.
>> Dave Winnacker (05:20):
Donnie's being a little revisionist with his history.
Truth be told, he called, said,I'm gonna apply for this thing.
Which one of your brightideas can I use to get in?
I mean, Donnie's a good friend,so I'm always down to help.
So we were spitballing and we'd probablyspend about a half hour working through
and I go, man, this sounds really cool.
You think they'd take both of us?
Donnie goes, I don't know.
When we find out you called them up andapparently they said, I don't know,
(05:43):
you should both apply.
Anyway, that's how we endedup in the VFD together.
So as Donnie mentioned, I served on activeduty Marine Corps infantry officer,
got out, joined the fire department androse up through the ranks and
found myself in late 2017 when Iwas the executive officer at 23rd
Marines as a lieutenantcolonel reserve officer.
(06:04):
I was also the fire chief of the MoragaOrinda Fire Protection District in
the San Francisco East Bay in the areathat quite famously burned in 1991 in
the Oakland hills.
This is the area justto the east of there.
And as a local government fire chief,I had a problem,
a wildfire that was going to outpace and
outnumber the weight of the firefightingresponse I could throw against it, right?
(06:27):
So a firefighting first or think,
an infantry first solutionwasn't going to work.
I started thinking about how we could,we could bend the curve of wildfire risk.
Like any good infant infantry officer,I fell back to the pubs and
I landed on defense in depth andreally started working through what
would be the steps it would take tocome up with a holistic community
(06:50):
wide approach that used durable pre firemeasures that were passive in nature.
So thinking obstacle belt thatcould then be used to augment and
increase the value ofthe firefighting response.
And Donnie and I spent a lot oftime swirling around with that.
As he mentioned,
we came up with an idea that turnedinto Zone Haven evacuation software.
(07:11):
Gotta be able to sanitize the workspaceto get all the residents out so
we have room to work.
And through that, we built out a numberof ideas that were our capstone.
And I think, really, to sum it up,the solution's pretty straightforward.
We have a very clear senseof what needs to be done.
The challenge is,how do we get people to do it?
And this is complicated by the factthat these are residents, and
(07:35):
we're talking about work doneon the private property.
The law and our codes are verydeferential to what people do on and
around their homes.
This is not a.
We're not invading somewhere,right, where we have to.
The stakeholdersare the ones who have a say.
We're the residents.
And so we began working through that,really aligning on how insurance,
(07:55):
both the access and affordability ofinsurance, could be used to drive.
Changed through price signaling and
the work that we did at Hoover that reallyset me on that journey that then resulted.
I was the California director forthe Western Fire Chiefs Association.
I ran the WUE task force forthe California Fire Chiefs Association,
(08:16):
I was on a couple of state boards andpanels and
right up through my fire serviceretirement at the end of the year,
I was really driving on this problem ofhow do we harness the market's ability to.
To tell people the price oftheir action or inaction?
Because otherwise this is abstract, right?
Wildfire.
For most Californians, wildfire isan abstract thing in any given year.
(08:37):
But insurance is annual and either now orin the very near future, wildfire caused
disruptions to the insurance marketare going to affect every California
in a way that the actual physicalmanifestations of wildfire will not.
So I really land on the criticalimportance of understanding price
signaling and understanding the barriersto accurate and timely price signaling
(08:58):
vis a vis risk that people have chosen toallow to remain on and around the parcel.
>> Mike Steadman (09:05):
So you and I, we all joined the VFP at the fall of 2021.
Right, and again, just starting out thisyear, all of a sudden the whole world is
paying attention to what'sgoing on in California.
I will love you all'sperspective of what happened and
just kind of bring our viewers up to speedon how we got to where we are today and
(09:27):
then how do we movepast it moving forward.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (09:31):
Let me highlight one thing as we kick off into that because
I think Dave's got the.
The best way to kind of talkthrough where we're at now.
But I want to.
One of the interesting things we noticed,as Dave said, the key thing is,
is is how do we use market forcesto drive good behavior, right.
How do we go ahead and take a lookat showing people the costs and
the risk associated with it?
Right.
We realized we needed somekind of lever to push that and
(09:53):
we felt insurance was probablythe right way to do it.
The other thing we noticed veryquickly is that in most cases, I mean,
I grew up in Louisiana where there'spretty smooth flooding hurricanes, and
if you go down there, you might getflood insurance, but it's very costly,
it's government run, andit's very ineffective.
And I think when we looked atwhat California was going.
California is a fair plan, right,if you're an insurance company,
you want to do business in California,you have to pay into this fair plan.
(10:15):
And what our concern was,we started seeing people advertise and
highlight additional further fair planadoption where and some people feel,
trying to say, hey, that's a goodnews story because more Californians
get insurance when they'regetting non renewed.
But from us, we said that's an indicatorof really bad things to come, right?
If everyone's going down that road,there's something government does well,
(10:35):
insurance probably isn'tthe right thing for that.
And as we go down that road, if there'sadditional fair plan adoption increases
the chances that a catastrophic eventcould collapse the whole system.
And so he pulled a lot of fair plandata from the state of California,
using our resources at Stanford, and didthat initial analysis and kind of showed,
hey look, we're going for
a pretty disastrous future if we don'tfind a way to kind of ameliorate this.
(10:58):
And I think that as Dave indicated earlyon, people kind of just held on and said,
it'll be okay, it'll be okay.
Fast forward turned out it wasn't okay.
So Dave.
>> Dave Winnacker (11:07):
Yeah. So how we got here, Mike,
is a couple of things.
One, we excluded wildfirefrom the landscape for
over a hundred yearsas a matter of policy.
So in the, in a fire dependent landscape,when you remove fire, you, you remove,
think of it as the vacuum cleaner,the whisk broom, the thing that's just
cleaning up the understory and keepingthe vegetative landscape in balance.
(11:28):
And when you exclude fire, butyou don't exclude photosynthesis,
you get accumulations of vegetation overtime that should have burned in a historic
fire regime every couple of years in a lowintensity, beneficial, no big deal fire.
But when you get rid of all those littlefires, you carry forward the fuel load,
the dead vegetation to a futuredate when on the hottest,
(11:50):
driest day with the worst winds,all of those actions that you delayed and
deferred, they come due in the form ofa balloon payment with interest on a,
on an extreme wildfire day, where youget fires that are simply unstoppable,
that's because ofthe accumulation of vegetation.
Because we excluded fire.
Climate change has increasedvapor deficit, meaning we
(12:11):
are getting more dry days late in the fallwith high winds due to vapor deficit and
compression of the rainy season.
And then lastly, we have builthundreds of thousands of homes in fire
dependent landscapewithout considering fire.
And to be very clear,it's not to say you can't build there,
that you can't buildwithout considering fire.
(12:32):
Same idea as Donnie's alluding to in a,if you're in a floodplain,
you need to build on stilts.
If you're in a fireplane ora fire hazard severity zone.
You need to build in a manner thatincorporates defensible space.
So vegetation management aroundthe home and home hardening,
meaning how the home is built.
We know how to do this,there's no secret about it.
Question is,how do we adopt those retrofits from or
(12:55):
the homes that are already there.
And then lastly we,we having set conditions for
unsustainable wildfire losses andwe're, we've achieved that.
Right?Between 1991 and 2017,
very few homes burn.
In the wildfire seasons of 2017 and2018, the insurance industry lost
two times the combined premiums they'dtaken in over the prior 26 years.
(13:20):
That is an unsustainablelevel of structure loss.
And then you start to see ripplesthrough the insurance market.
So all these other things, andas Donnie was alluding to attempts
to address the insurance marketresponding to unsustainable
losses with regulation,well this isn't a regulation problem.
This is a too many homesare burning problem.
(13:41):
And so from our perspective, wherethere's a need to address regulation and
some of the impacts that is having on,on preventing people from
understanding the price that'sassociated with the risk factors they're
maintaining around their homesis not to subsidize mitigations.
It's not to just pay to rebuild, it's touse price signaling to encourage people
(14:06):
to adopt the proven mitigations thatwill bend the curve on wildfire losses.
If a home is prepared to receive wildfireand all the homes around it are prepared
to receive wildfire, not only is thatthat cluster, that neighborhood,
unlikely to burn, as inextraordinarily unlikely to burn, but
it now forms a non burnable barrier thatprotects other homes that are downstream.
(14:30):
Right, so if you were, and there'sa network effect that gets achieved here
that if we three are neighbors, andI would love to be neighbors, that'd be a,
we have a lot of great barbecues andI have done my work because I'm a good,
virtuous, upstanding citizen.
And you two deadbeats have left a bunchof risk factors around your homes.
If the homes are less than 50ft apart,your asset becomes my peril.
(14:53):
Because if your home starts to burn,it will burn my house down with great
certainty, irregardless of the fact thatI prepared my home to receive wildfire.
And what we saw in LA this year andwhat we saw in Louisville,
Colorado in the Marshall fire,what we saw in Lahaina,
what we saw in the North Bay,in Coffee Park, right?
What we're seeing with increasing cadence,these are not wildland fires.
(15:18):
These are wildland initiated urban fires.
And once homes start to burn,they burn longer and they burn hotter, and
they will overwhelm wildfire.
Specific mitigations.
It's kind of if you put ona bike helmet and you know,
some stuff to go out bike riding and
you get in a car doing a hundred miles anhour, no one is going to be surprised that
(15:38):
your bike riding PPE was inadequate toprotect you from 100 mile an hour crash.
Wildfire is a bike ride.
Urban fire is a race car.
And so we have this challenge of that oncefires become established in the urban
environment, the all of ourother mitigations are moot.
And so the whole game here is aboutslowing the fire spread to the.
(15:59):
To the edge of the community.
That's your defense in depth, yourobstacle belt, about hardening the points
of entry so that the homes thatrepresent the opportunity for
transition from vegetativefire to structure fire,
those homes are prepared to receivefire and they are more resistive.
And then understanding the firefightingresponse, how long it will take
(16:20):
the appropriate number of firefightersto get to the right place,
think of that as your qrf, right?
You gotta keep the bad guys from gettingthrough the wall long enough for
the QRF to show up.
And when all of those are taken together,we have the ability,
we have the tools, we havethe modeling tools, we have the data,
we have everything we need tounderstand how to do this.
What we don't have is the will to act onthe part of the residents in our fire
(16:44):
prone areas.
And what those residents are looking foris certainty.
There's certainty thatif I do these things,
what certainty is there that I willget insurance and at what rate?
Now that doesn't exist because that wouldbe collusion and you can't have collusion
in regulated markets for a lot of reasons,all of which are very good.
But so the point I would just make hereis that we've been experienced sustained
(17:07):
unsustainable wildfire losses since 2017,and we are just now starting
to see the market collapse that Donnie andI studied as our capstone at vfp.
And so for a bunch of yearswhen bad things were happening,
people were buffered by the reflex time,the flash to bang, if you will,
from when large numbers of homes are lostuntil you see the implications of pricing.
(17:29):
Well, that same curve works the other way,from the moment you carry out
mitigations at scale, there willbe time until the market corrects.
But most importantly, as I said in thatexample before, if the three of us
are neighbors, all three of us need tocarry out the mitigations in order for
them to be effective.
And so you have this terrible problemwhere one person does the work and
(17:50):
doesn't see a positive outcome, andthen that discourages the other two,
whose unwillingness to do the work iswhat caused me to not be able to get
the outcome for my work.
And so it's, it's this really challengingproblem of a network effect where we need
everyone to do things.
And that doesn't happen just naturally.
That that requires concerted and focusedeffort and that does require regulation
(18:12):
and enforcement and price signaling sothat people can see the benefits of having
done this work because it's all otherwise,it's all just in the Abstract.
Until the catastrophe ensues.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (18:24):
The thing I'd also add to that.
Right, is when he talksabout the three of us.
Right, and doing our protections andour defensible space around our homes.
The other challenge is, let's justsay even if we all do that right,
the challenge is,do our three insurance companies all
agree that that's actuallygoing to defend the homes?
Right.And
those insurance companies don'talways share that information.
(18:45):
Because if I were, say,my insurance company looked at my home and
said, okay, check,you've done those events will space.
If they looked at yours andDave's, they could look at yours.
You use different insurers or they couldshare that information and say, okay,
I don't insure Mike,I don't insure Dave, but
I can validate through a common set of.
Of criteria that they have met thatcriteria to defend the home and
(19:06):
do the home hardening defensible space.
That I know that I can keepDonnie's rates low because Mike and
Dave's homes are also protected.
But if that communication doesn't happen,you get a case where like, like Dave said,
you ended up with this weird panic,we're not incentivized.
We don't see the positive effects thatneither do the insurance companies, so
then you have all three insurancecompanies saying, like,
(19:28):
I can't prove that they've all threedone the home hardening they need to do.
So we should all just step out of thismarket because it's too dangerous for
us for a business case becauseof just what Dave said.
I mean, you can, you know, be mad at theinsurance companies, but it's a business.
And when that business loses 30 yearsof profits in two years, like, who's.
Who's going to sign upto run that business?
>> Dave Winnacker (19:47):
You know, so for me, and I'm a grunt, y' all, so
I don't have all the deepindustry expertise like you do.
>> Mike Steadman (19:54):
But it sounds like, number one, the way we're
building homes these days, they'rebasically just fuel for these fires.
Essentially.
Right.If they're
not protected,>> Dave Winnacker: actually
requires>> Donnie Hasseltine: better.
>> Dave Winnacker (20:05):
Yeah, I'd say so.
At least in California andsome other areas as well.
Since 2008,we've had the appropriate building code.
It's technically chapter 7A ofthe building code that requires
the home be built to an ember resistancestandard that's highly effective.
In paradise in 2018,when the whole place burned out,
the majority of homes builtto the 7A standard did not.
(20:25):
Amidst one of the worst firelosses we've ever seen.
The problem of course is that veryfew homes have been built since 2007.
And so that the majority ofthe housing stock requires retrofits.
You have to make changes.
The second part is that the,
if the home is built to an emberresistant standard that's durable right.
That that will remain in place forever andever.
(20:45):
The vegetation that surroundsthe home also has to be maintained.
It's a, it's a belt andsuspenders approach.
You have these goblin minimum and thevegetation has to be checked every year
because things grow so exactly like Donniewas alluding to if, in if for some reason
we all did the work and we were all ableto share that with our insurance carriers.
So they had a comprehensive viewof our little neighborhood.
(21:07):
Said these guys are gold stara number one good to go.
It doesn't mean it will be next year orthe year after.
And so you, you have this constant problemof having to go out and check the work and
that that's really hard.
It's really hard as well when we're doingit in the midst of a, of a no kidding
collapse of the market and this dynamicenvironment where things are moving so
(21:27):
fast that a lot of people just sort of goto ground and say hey this is too much.
I can't track it all but to be clearthat the collapse of the insurance
markets are very likely with allof the ripple that come from that.
The property tax is based onhomes being able to sell.
Homes that can't get insured,can't be sold.
(21:48):
Mortgages require insurance.
If insurance is not available.
The mortgage market if can get very topsyturvy, municipal bonds that are used to
run any kind of capital projectsin municipal government.
All those are now have a wildfirecomponent because they're secured by ad
valorem property tax.
So the ripple from this stuffis potentially massive.
And this is the my case successfullypull your hair out stuff that
(22:12):
the solutions are low cost, high impact.
We know exactly what needs to be done andit's really minor.
We're talking about enhanced gardening andretrofitting of event screens on houses.
Really I mean very low cost, very highimpact that can prevent this potentially
contagion level financial crisis for
local government that would flow out ofthe really unwillingness to carry out
(22:33):
the actions that could bendthe curve of structure loss.
And that's you know micro work at scaleis hard but can have this massive impact.
And the alternative is truly scary.
And that's.
You know I don't think Donnie and
I take any pride in having called wherethis was going three, four years ago now,
because where it continues to headis potentially a really bad place.
(22:57):
And we need residents of these areas andat scale be galvanized to take action.
And I continue to believe price signalingis going to be the most effective way for
us to get there but that's complicated bythe fact that this is a fragmented market.
There are 38 admitted carriers, insurancecarriers in California, and very,
(23:18):
very large number of excess andsurplus line, non admitted carriers.
And so getting all of them to act in a waythat is sort of directionally the same.
So it's not collusion.
It still has competitive markets,that's really, really hard as well.
So we're left with a simple solution.
It's simple, it's not complex.
It's simple but it's hard.
(23:40):
And as a result of that, because it is so
hard, we see a lot of the energythat is being pointed
towards wildfire risk reduction nowis going to the complex but easy.
And somewhat ironically,it's easier to launch a satellite
with a complex instrument arraythan it is to get people to.
Clear out brush andgrass within five feet of their house,
(24:03):
that shouldn't be the way it is,but it is the way it is.
And so we, we end up withcontinuing use of, of tech for
sort of boutique solutions that don'taddress the underlying risk factors.
And as long as there are vulnerable homesand fire prone communities, they will burn
and anything we do other than addressthe vulnerabilities at the parcel level is
(24:23):
just kind of tinkering on, on the marginsof the bell curve, lower turn.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (24:28):
Yeah, I think it's also worth that,
Dave talked about the impacts, right?
You know, when paradise burns, that meansproperty taxes go away, which means that
makes it a very difficult to rebuild orbring back those government services.
But if you think about the housingcrisis kind of in California and
think more broadly about that,
the largest source of intergenerationalwealth is your home, right?
Is you put a lot of money in your home andthat's what you're gonna eventually sell
(24:51):
and bring out to be your nest eggin retirement or pass on your kids.
And, and that goes away ifyou can't insure your home.
And like Dave said, just to be superprecise about it, a lot of what
we're talking about here are pretty low,low tech, low budget things, right?
It's like,have you cleaned out your gutters?
Do you have gutter covers in your gutters?
Have you put mesh in your soffit vents soembers can't get in your attic?
(25:13):
Have you ensured that zero to five feetaround your home is non flammable,
no vegetation, like simple thingslike that radically change whether or
not that home is going to burn ornot, right?
And I think that one interesting thingthat Hoover did on day one is when we went
to that VFP, we had that chat from HRMcMaster where he talked about looking at
your beneficiaries and yourstakeholders and drawing a map of that.
(25:34):
And that was pretty profound forDave and I to draw out.
Look, we know we got government,we know we got homeowners,
we know we got firefighters.
And they all want the same thing.
They want things not to burn,
but they all have different waysof looking at that problem.
And how do you draw the lines acrossthere to see, okay, where they map,
where do they, where those points meet andwhere can we attack those points we meet?
(25:56):
Because if you understandthe stakeholders,
understand where the stakeholders meetnow, you can find a way to try to help,
help solve that problem andeventually what that had to do.
Another great thing that Uber did is wegot a lot of people like Dave said you
can't have collusion in the market.
So there's a lot of cases where insurers,California apartment insurance and
certain other groups can't be seenin the same room with each other.
(26:17):
Right.
So we're able to set up like a neutralground at Hoover on Stanford and
able hey look we're notgoing to televise this.
We're not going to quote anybody.
This is a Chatham Houserules bring all together.
Let's just acknowledge we all agreethat we want the same thing as
things not to burn.
How do we solve that?
And we just wipe away everything out andthat allowed us to come with a lot of
great ideas that quite franklyare carrying forward and
(26:38):
days been able to carry forward ingovernment and non-profit work but
it took us kind of getting together andgetting people who maybe wanted to talk
to each other but couldn't andidentifying the common thread and
pulling that common thread to getthem in the same room together.
>> Mike Steadman (26:53):
So you all have been working on this for a few years now for
a long time Dave,damn near your entire life.
Right.And
you also know we're in this 247kind of news cycle and it's just so
hard to keep up with particularlyyou know the tariffs and stuff now.
And I have not seen a lot ofinformation about the follow up,
you know post fires, people rebuilding.
It was there front and center you knowin the media for about three weeks and
(27:16):
then now I haven't really seen a lot whatis taking place what are the conversations
happening now?
>> Dave Winnacker (27:24):
So a couple of things specific to California.
The governor issued an executive orderthat's bringing forward zone zero which is
the requirement it was established bythe legislator in 2020 should have was
supposed to have gone into effect two anda half years ago but
that will be by regulationno later than 2029.
So things move a little slowly here.
(27:45):
There will be a state-wide regulation toremove anything that will burn inclusive
of wooden fences within 5ft of a structurethat that is an unlock on everything else
we're doing for structured risk reduction.
There's also a loosening of CEQArules that will allow fuel breaks and
some California Environmental Qualityact it will allow some projects to move
forward a little more quickly and it'stoo early to say how it unfolds but there
(28:09):
are some early talks about rebuildingin LA in a manner that accounts for
wildfire preparedness so that you can thenhave some really small model communities.
It's not rebuild them to burn again,so there's a lot more interest.
And one of the challenges there,you know, four or five years ago,
this was a pretty lonely space.
It's gotten very crowded.
(28:30):
But now, andbecause it's essentially a new field,
there's not a whole lot ofwell established expertise.
And we have this challenge that wildfire,the stuff the forest service is very
good at dealing with, is fundamentallydifferent than wildfire caused urban fire.
And so we have this problem.
We're blending disciplines, andthat can be a little rough early on.
(28:53):
And I'll send you for the show notes.
Mike, I just worked on a white paper.
We talked about the factoriesthat contribute to urban fire and
how the steps you have to have, and youhave to have all of them to initiate urban
fire because it doesn't happen that often,just when it happens is catastrophic.
But the Swiss cheese holes, it's aboutseven different steps that have to align.
(29:14):
And if you interrupt any one of those,
you bend the curve dramatically toinstead of 5,000 homes, it's five homes.
And you get down to the level of wherethese losses are sustainable and
buy us time to come up with the approacheswe need to get to a hundred percent
compliance, you know, which is reallycultural and social acceptance thing.
(29:38):
But there's a lot of energy in this space,and I think, unfortunately,
a lot of it is focusing onhow we further automate and
use technology to enhance ourability to rapidly extinguish fire.
And I would note that's how we got here,right?
Giving giving firefighters a biggerhammer is not gonna solve this problem.
It's just gonna kick the cana little bit farther down the road.
(30:00):
So really our focus has been on howwe create those passive pre fire
measures that look like communityadaptation to wildfire.
I mean, anyone who's watched eitherseen a wildfire in person or
watched any of the clips of Los Angeles,I think will hit the I believe button.
That that is not somethingyou can go toe to toe with.
That is not something we fight.
(30:20):
It's something we adapt to.
And I would.
The analogy would say, you know,bullfighter in the ring,
in the first 30 seconds of a bullfight,you don't put your head down and
charge the bull andhope you knock it down.
Right, sothis is the sort of thing we need to.
We need to figure out how wecan dance with this piece.
And we can do that through adaptation.
>> Mike Steadman (30:38):
I think a lot about how do you change human behavior?
You know, and when you talkabout the three areas, you know,
you mentioned the insurance companies,right.
The homeowners, right,the fire department sec, etc.
Even going back to that firstconversation we had with hr,
we talked about one framing the problem.
It's all about framing.
But then if you're actually goingto make meaningful progress,
(31:01):
it's probably hard to target allthree of those at the same time.
So where do you feel like you've beenable to move the needle the most?
>> Dave Winnacker (31:11):
I think on the, on the wildfire modeling.
So it's called catastrophe modeling.
It's used for the pricing of risk, theaverage yen, your loss calculation, and
I just as a fun.
I'd say for anyone who's listening, ifyou're talking to someone who's interested
or is has some knowledge about thewildfire space, a great thought experiment
(31:31):
is to ask them what is the unitof measure for wildfire risk?
Is it.
And wildfire risk reduction specifically?
Are we looking at the number ofdollars that have been spent?
Well, that's probably notthe best way of looking at it.
You can buy a very expensive car andstill be late for a meeting.
Are we looking at the number ofacres that have been treated?
You know, also not a great idea becauseI could grow out very long hair and
(31:53):
still be bald.
Right, it wouldn't, it wouldn't reallymatter that I had a lot of hair on
the back of my head because it's nothappening in the front of my head.
Or are we talking aboutthe dollars denominated in risk,
the risk denominated in dollars throughthe average annual loss, which I think is
a useful frame of reference because it'sthe one the insurance industry uses.
That's the first thing.
The second question to ask someone,if they do land upon a unit of measures,
(32:16):
what's the denominator?
Because if we say we treated a thousandacres of fire prone landscape,
that sounds really impressive.
Thousand acres is a lot.
Unless in the case of California,the denominator is 4.25 million,
4.25 million acres burned per yearwhen the landscape was imbalanced.
So thousand acres all of a suddendoesn't sound so impressive.
(32:39):
So I think that's really the key pieceis landing on the agreed upon unit
measure and being able to measure ourrisk reduction in dollars as shown at
the average annual loss calculation.
So if we know that our average annualloss calculation was $5,000 per million
total insured before we carried out thesemitigations and we did these things,
(33:01):
what was the outcome?
And so that if you, if you go back to yourMarine Corps EWS or command and staff,
are these measures of performance,are they measures of effectiveness really?
Or is it activity or is it outcomes?
And right now a lot of oureffort is focused on activity.
And so by working with the cap modelers,catastrophe modelers,
(33:21):
we've been able to make realprogress in understanding
what are the inputs they would use,how do those inputs impact the model.
So understanding which onesare going to be meaningful and
then laying the groundwork throughsome nascent work we're doing with
the WI Data Commons to create the pipethrough which we can feed parcel level and
(33:41):
neighborhood level mitigationdata to the catastrophe modelers.
Because that's the unlock, right?
I mean,of those 38 admitted insurance carriers,
significant number of them don't dotheir own wildfire risk modeling.
They just buy a score andunderwrite from there.
If we're communicating directlywith the scorekeepers,
that ripples down to everyone else.
(34:03):
And then we get all the other folks forfree because it's now baked in,
they're all using it.
So I think the cap model is where we'veseen the most interesting advances.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (34:14):
And I think there's also some things that Dave can go into
about one of the challenges whenyou're pricing risk, right?
It has to be backward looking,vice forward looking.
And that becomes very challengingto kind of do that, to look out and
see what it's going tolook like in the future.
But I think what's interesting to knowis when you talk to the cab modelers and
you look at the fire models, what I thinka lot of people don't realize when they
look at something like those LA fires, itjust looks like an Armageddon catastrophe.
(34:37):
Right?But fire, there's science behind it and
it's fairly predictable.
Right.You can look at things and
say a house with these characteristicsis going to burn, is not going to burn.
And you can look up the IBHS standards andtheir experiments where they literally put
two houses side by side andjust put a flamethrower on both.
And you see one burns down to ashes andthe other one doesn't burn.
And you can also lookat how fire would move.
(34:59):
Just like in the Marine Corps, we wouldlook at avenues of likely approach and we
do our modified combined opsis overlay andpredict how the enemy is going to move.
Fire can do that too.
You can look at valleys,you can look at fingers,
you can look at wind patterns in themorning to wind patterns the evening, and
you can see how thatfire is going to move.
So like Dave said, thousand acres maynot mean much, but more importantly,
(35:20):
it might be 500 acres on a specificdraw leading into a wooded village.
Could make a huge bit of difference.
Because if that splat has been had theunderbrush removed and a fire comes in and
moves down there,that fire is gonna move there.
It's going to start petering out.
Right.And if it reaches the village,
it's giving firefighters time to respond.
And if it hits the point there and allthose homes have that defensible space and
(35:41):
that home hardening done,fire is not gonna ignite.
It's not going to.
It's not going to carry.
And that's the real key thing is howare you preventing the fire from carrying
through those communities?
And then on the backside, showing thatmodeling to adjust the pricing of risk,
to show the insurance companies that theycan actually insure those facilities.
Like if you're just looking backwards,Right.
(36:02):
Can we insure in paradise?
You can insure it now because it's beenburned, it's not going to burn again for
another 10 years.
Right.
Once all that vegetation grows back,different ball game.
But you got to look at how does it looknow, how does it look in the future and
how do you bridge thatgap through the modeling?
>> Dave Winnacker (36:18):
Yeah, Mike, just to break that down, you know,
take yourself back to Afghanistan.
Do you ever see a FOB that didn'thave wire around the perimeter.
You didn't have Tescos,didn't have bunkers, right?
It was prepared to be attacked.
And so when they were attacked,generally went pretty well.
This is the same idea.
We prepare our communities for an attack.
(36:38):
We know it's coming, we know the avenuesapproach that fire pathways,
that's powerful.
Weather and fuel we can moderate,we can model those,
we know where the breach points are.
Our version of HESCO here is clearingout some defensible space and
our version of bunkers is replacingsome vents, putting in zone zero.
We can do this, we know how to do it.
And as I said,
defense in depth is a pretty good analogto what we're trying to carry out.
(37:02):
The problem is you can't just, you know,have the base commander stand up and say,
here's what we're going to do.
And then the gunnies go out andstart cracking heads and it gets done.
You know, here, this is, this is handholding one driveway at a time to convince
people of this is not onlyin their best interest,
but this is their civic duty,carry out this work.
>> Mike Steadman (37:22):
You're more familiar with the overall kind of history of these
fires in terms of like numbers,rough estimate, how devastating was what
happened in, you know, this yearcomparative to fires in previous years?
>> Dave Winnacker (37:36):
Yeah, so year over year is not a great example,
because as an example, 20,20, 2017, 2018, really bad.
2019, not so bad.
2020, really, really, really bad.
22, 23, not all that bad,24, early 25, really bad.
So there's a cyclical nature to it.
So part of it is,is what was the weather pattern that year?
(37:59):
Right.One of the things that made this year's
fires sobad was they were following a wet winter.
So the winter of 2324 inCalifornia was very wet.
That means you get more vegetative growth,thicker grass crop, more growth on brush.
Right.
And then, so that, and then that rainended about March, April of 2024.
(38:20):
And then you, you had a delayin the onset of seasonal rain so
that normally in LA Base in November,December, you start getting into rains.
Well, come January, when they had the windevent, they hadn't had any rains yet.
So now you have procured remnants of a,of a record crop of growth that have
gone eight months since they saw wettingrainfall and are, are cured out and dry.
(38:43):
And then you get a Santa Ana wind eventand, and an ignition and off it goes.
And, and so there are, you know, there's alot of factors that come together so it's,
it's better to take a macro view.
And we did a, a little study on this.
If you go back to 22 years,go back to 2003,
50% of the structures lost inthat time have been during urban
(39:06):
fires where it transitioned,but it was only five of them.
So a small number of fires can havean outsized impact because you know, in,
in Altadena and parts of the Palisades,when on eighth of an acre lots,
homes igniting, you know, eight homesper acre are burning as opposed
to some of these really monstrouswildland fires we've had.
(39:30):
The Dixie's a good example examplethat burned a million acres and
a couple of hundred homes.
And those couple hundred homes,it's tragedy they were lost.
That's very different thanthe thousands of homes that were lost.
So the density of urbanfire is really challenging.
But predicting that andtrying to make calls based on three, four,
five year trends, I think it'sa little bit of a fool's errand.
(39:52):
But the macro trends are really bad,I guess is the best way of saying it.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (39:55):
And just if you take a look at what Dave just said about those
years, right, 17, 18.
Really bad next couple years,but then next year really bad.
If you go back further right,
it was the 1991 Oakland Hills fire thatDave started the conversation about.
And then there was a dropof insurance profits.
But then it was like close to 20 years ofreally not any real significant fires in
(40:15):
fire losses, right?
Small ones here and there.
And now it's every two or three yearssomething catastrophic has happened.
So you can just look at that timeline.
When you extend the timeline out andyou see really bad fire,
20 years of kind of slowness andthen all of a sudden, bam, bam, bam, bam.
So again, that's the piece whereit's very hard to look year to year.
You look back collectively, you can seeit's, it's spiking really bad very,
(40:39):
very fast.
>> Mike Steadman (40:41):
Are you both optimistic now about the future with all these
lessons learned?
Are you still worried just as youwere when we first joined the vfp?
>> Dave Winnacker (40:50):
We're a lot better informed, got a lot more data,
know which trend lines to watch.
Just Donnie mentioned the beginning.
I'll give a brief.
In California,there's the admitted carriers.
This is true everywhere.
There are admitted carriersthat are regulated.
And then there isthe insurance of last resort.
It's called the Fair Plan.
In parts of the west,it's called Peoples in Florida.
(41:11):
And it's for people who throughno fault of their own can or
citizens, in Florida,residents who through no fault of
their own can't get insurance must beoffered coverage by the Fair Plan.
And the Fair Plan is a separate entity,but it is funded by the admitted carriers.
And if you are an admitted insurancecarrier, you have a proportional share of
(41:31):
policies in the Fair Plan based onhow much of the market you control.
So it's not government run.
Insurance is governmentmandated insurance.
And the Fair Plan, it's in the name,it's the insurance, the last resort.
If you see a significant and sustainedincrease in Fair Plan enrollment,
that's not good.
That's sign of a market distress.
(41:53):
And with the work we didat Hoover now a lot,
lot more savvy about knowing whatthat means and how to get the data.
And so I, I watched some zip codes that,you know,
my sort of my practitioner's eye saythat's, that's probably a pretty,
that's a place that probably isviewed as having high fire risk.
A couple of the zip codes I keep an eyeon, as of September 30th of last year,
(42:15):
fair plan enrollment was up 680% inthose in a year and that was September,
that, that predates la, right?
So a lot of things havegotten worse since then.
In a community that I was the firechief of, 25% of the community
was non renewed one day by State Farm,25% of the community.
(42:35):
And these are, you know, this is anaffluent place where getting coverage is
going to be a challenge because ofthe concentration of wealth and value.
So I am, I am optimistic.
We know it needs to be done.
I remain something less than optimisticabout the speed with which we're going to
see adaptation and the implementation ofmitigations at the appropriate scale.
(42:56):
And as a result of that, I think, andbecause it's a question of speed,
relative speed, is that willthe risk transfer industry and
really the global reinsurers whounderwrite the risk, will they stay while
they lose money in this market long enoughfor us to carry out mitigations at scale?
(43:16):
That's one question.
And the second question is if they stay,will we move with the appropriate speed?
Cuz if we remove the stressor,right, the impetus to take action,
then it's going to take us much longer.
So this is a question ofthis is gonna happen.
We're going to adapt, buthow long are we going to take the.
Rip the band aid off and that so long asthere is a functioning insurance market,
(43:39):
we will reduce the pressure on people tocarry out the mitigations that we need to
sustain the insurance market.
And so this, that's a hard one.
And that's why, as I mentioned atthe opening, that's why I'm so
interested in anything that bufferspeople from the cost of their actions.
And that if you, you know, if, if everytime you got in your car and you sped,
(44:03):
you know, you had to put fivebucks in the jar or whatever,
you wouldn't speed very often.
Right.But instead you feed until you
have an accident.
And this is the same thing that we're,we reduce the pressure on people to make
change when we protect them fromthe financial impact of their decisions.
>> Mike Steadman (44:21):
Love it.
This was.You know,
usually when I do these podcasts,I'm a lot more talkative.
But I have to honestly admit,like I grew up in Texas,
we didn't have to deal with wildfires.
Right?You are my.
Well, we had a little.
But nothing like you see in California,but this was only a first time.
>> Dave Winnacker (44:37):
Million acres burned last year, Mike, in Texas.
>> Mike Steadman (44:39):
Really?
>> Dave Winnacker (44:40):
Yeah.
Powerhouse fire one day, million acres.
>> Mike Steadman (44:44):
But I still had to say is like, you know,
you all are just like the SMEson this kind of subject.
So I was genuinely curious to just kind ofunderstand the situation from you all's
perspective, because there's just somuch I can't even use.
I don't know if we can use the wordmisinformation these days.
I think that word got canceled.
But there's just a lot of informationcoming at us and what's true, what's not.
Even before it went live, I mentionedsomething to you, and you were like,
(45:07):
[SOUND] kinda.
So I think, you know, the whole conceptof frontline voices is bringing people
from the front line who are dealingwith these hard challenges and
providing perspective for our viewers.
>> Dave Winnacker (45:19):
Yeah, I come back to one other thing that HR McMaster said when
he first talked to us, and he talkedabout the importance of agency and
people, community, cultures,countries, having agency.
I use that word a lot.
Based on how he presented it,it made so much sense to me.
The wildfire is a risk againstwhich we have agency, and
(45:40):
the question is whether ornot we choose to use it.
And I think to your point,Mike, about misinformation and
focus on how much water is inthe reservoir or whatever,
that distracts from the core issuethat we have control over, and
we have the ability to control our ownfate as communities and neighborhoods.
And that's really my hope,
is to get the message out thatwe can do things about this.
(46:01):
It's very clear.
Topography, weather, and fuel tells ushow the fire gets to the community.
Defensible space and
home hardening at the points of transitiontell us how many vulnerabilities we have.
And time until the firefighting responsecan arrive with the appropriate
weight of attack tells us what combinationof distant mitigations, near community
mitigations, and nonparcel mitigations ittakes to slow the fire to the point that
(46:25):
we will have more firefightersthan fire at the point of entry.
Because if we do, we win.
It's that simple.
And that, we know how to do all of that.
What we don't know how to do is getpeople how to execute it to scale.
>> Mike Steadman (46:38):
This brings me to my next point, and
I wanna shift our focus now, particularlyto the kinda Bellarn Fellowship program.
Again, being part ofthat inaugural cohort,
I kinda think of us aslike the advanced party.
You know, we got to be part of essentiallykind of creating history of what
this thing could be potential.
And so with that comes this obligation tokind of be good stewards for the program
(47:02):
as a whole, make sure we're attractingthe Right type of veterans to participate.
I would love to learnfrom both of you all.
What do you think makes a goodveteran fellow and who should apply?
>> Donnie Hasseltine (47:16):
Yeah, I'll jump in there, Mike.
I think one of the things that was really.
I think we talked about it,especially Dave, me, you, and
the rest of the group pretty early onour first meeting together is, you know,
Hoover was stepping on a limb to kindof create this program, and it was.
Dr. Rice put a lot of weightbehind it about trying this out.
And it was initially funded for fiveyears, and we made the point of, like,
look, we're getting a lot of great assets,a lot of great resources here,
(47:38):
a lot of great contacts, but we've got todeliver to show the value of this program.
And a lot of that, as you remember dayone, even the people who were setting up
the program with us, who are fantastic,were trying to do discovery.
I mean, like, you mentioned the Tbilisi,Georgia, trip.
That wasn't part of the curriculum.
Right.But we kinda said, hey,
we should think about, hey,
how are we leveraging some ofthe things that Hoover can do?
Can we do a foreign study?
(47:59):
Trip can we look at these differentways where we can enrich the fellows but
also tie what we're studying todifferent places around the world and
see where there's like connectivity there.
So when I look back on, I've talked to anumber of veterans, some that applied and
got in, some that didn't andsome that have thought about it.
What we try to drivehome is a couple things.
You got to think very hardabout your problem frame,
it doesn't have to haveto be near a solution.
(48:21):
You have to have framed whatyou think you can do about it.
You've got to match that up tothe resources Stanford has so
that within that year of the programwhere it's the really meat of
the year where you're really working hardon it, you can create tangible wins and
gains that you can pointto along that way.
And Dave and I kind of thought throughthat as we mapped our piece out about,
hey, let's get a webinar done.
(48:42):
Let's figure out where can we getpublished, where can we get pull
information to research and make surehypothesis is correct and then how do
we transmit that information out publiclyin smaller groups to larger groups,
how we get bigger megaphonesto drive that out so
we can point to how we use those resourcesto better dig into our problem that
we'd framed and then communicate outthe solutions we had identified.
(49:05):
So having kind of a good vision and
have done some thought onthe problem is really critical.
And then thinking deeply abouthow can you intelligently,
efficiently use the resources that Uberis going to bring to you to get some wins
towards your problem andthe time the program is going to give you.
>> Mike Steadman (49:22):
Anything to add, Dave.
>> Dave Winnacker (49:24):
I, you know, everything Donnie said, I think just having that
sense of others who have gone before havegiven the prestige and the legacy of
the service that we tried to live up toand trying to do our part within the VFP
so that opportunity to be available toothers, the resources of Stanford campus.
I mean, shoot,
(49:45):
just having a Stanford Edu email addressopened all kinds of doors for us.
And then the networkopportunities within the vfp.
I mean, I'm sure you all have,maybe not you, Mike, but
the rest of us have someserious imposter syndrome.
You look who you're in the room with.
Go, man.
This is a pretty outstanding group ofpeople from all different walks of life
(50:05):
that have done great things andare living up to what you would,
you would hope a group made up ofveterans would be capable of and
learned so much from the othermembers of the Group just.
We really wanted to make sure wewere doing our part to give back so
that the program was able to continue.
And I would encourage anyone who'sthinking about applying, as Donny said,
think global, act local.
(50:25):
How can you make somethingdeliverable within the timeframe?
And then what are you going todo through your actions and
your project to make the VFP better andto make your cohort better?
Because together we rise andthere's such an opportunity here.
If you just have a bright idea about yourthing and you're going to be off near
a rabbit hole, you're going to be missingout on an awful lot, program has to offer.
>> Mike Steadman (50:49):
Yeah, 100%.
You definitely want to lean in and
make sure you get to knowpeople in the program as well.
You know, I think one thing that makesveterans special and one reason that they
even started this program was because wedo have that kind of sense of service.
You know, just because we takeoff the uniform doesn't mean,
you know, we're no longer caring.
Right.We're no longer serving our communities.
And you got amazing veterans allacross the country doing great stuff.
(51:13):
You know, I was on with the policecommissioner or, sorry,
the police chief of Newport Newsyesterday, and one of the things him and
I were talking about, he realizedthat he's probably got a lot of
veterans that are little leaguecoaches and football coaches that he
really hasn't tapped into enough tokind of lower that community violence.
Right.So they're already out there kind of
doing the work.
But you got 500 officers.
(51:34):
Now, imagine you.
You add on top of that the amount ofveterans that we have across the country.
And so that's the kind of spirit I thinkof when I think of, like, the vfp.
And I just know it can be intimidating,particularly for veterans that, you know,
we all come from different backgrounds.
And just like you said, Dave,that kind of imposter syndrome.
We got veterans out hereat community colleges,
some that might have not goneto school and stuff, et cetera.
(51:57):
And they can look at a program likethis and be super intimidated.
But I really want toencourage them to apply.
And like you said, using the knowledgewe've gained over the last,
you know, five years, seeing allthe various different cohorts, you know,
we took a lot of Ls, soy' all don't have to.
But like they said, breaking this,having really good framing for
what you want to accom to accomplishduring your time in the program and
(52:20):
setting milestones asa way to drive momentum.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (52:24):
Absolutely.
>> Dave Winnacker (52:26):
Yeah. Remember that first week.
Like, hey, we're all Stanford.
Damn.
Yeah, we're excited.
>> Donnie Hasseltine (52:34):
Twice a week, guys.
What's the big deal?
>> Mike Steadman (52:36):
Yeah. And before I let y' all go,
I'm gonna say this.
Dave sent me a nutrition protocol.
Okay.
And I am training for the.
You're gonna be proud of me, Dave.
I'm training for the New York CityMarathon on behalf of Backpacks for
Life to raise money for homeless veterans.
And I'm going back into my.
Your sheet that you gave me,and I'm working it.
(52:57):
Did six miles this morning.
You know,I'm back at it in the morning, but
I got some time because the New YorkCity Marathon's not until November.
But, yeah, man, I appreciate you.
I appreciate our morning workouts.
Sometimes, Dave willcome knock on my door.
We're up at like, 5:30 getting the workoutin before we're doing the programming.
And again,these are the things that you remember,
(53:18):
you know,when you really lean in the program.
So appreciate you all.
Thank you for making time tobe a part of Frontline Voices.
And for all our listeners, do me a favor.
Make sure you subscribe to the podcast onyour favorite podcast hosting platform.
And if you're a military veteran that'sinterested in this veteran fellowship
program, I want to encourage youto head over to Hoover.org/VFP and
(53:43):
apply until next time.
Peace, love.
Have a great rest of your week.
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