Rain: Using Autonomous Aircraft to Stop Wildfires Before They Start

Speaker A: You're listening to Climate Rising, an official podcast of Harvard Business School's Business and Environment Initiative.

Speaker B: There's a very brief period of time, typically the first five, eight minutes after a fire starts, where it's possible to prevent those losses. We envision a future network of these aircraft distributed throughout high wildfire risk areas that are able to very rapidly intervene and stop fires before they grow out of control.

Speaker A: This is Climate Rising, a podcast from Harvard Business School, and I'm your host, Mike Toffel, a, uh, professor here at hbs, joined by my colleague John Mullikind, senior lecturer. Thanks for joining me, John.

Speaker C: It's great to be here, Mike.

Speaker A: Today's episode is part of our AI for Climate series, where we explore how artificial intelligence is being applied to real world climate challenges.

Speaker C: Our guest today is Maxwell Brody, co founder and CEO of Rain Industries, a company focused on wildfire prevention and response. I first met Max at Azolla Ventures, where I'm an operating partner. Azzola is an investor in Rain.

Speaker A: We'll ask Max to discuss how AI and predictive systems can be used to detect and suppress wildfires and what it takes to deploy these technologies in practice.

Speaker B: I've been hearing for decades that the markets can solve climate change. Today, we have more incentives for market solutions than ever. And emissions are rising on, um, this season of Drilled Carbon Cowboys, the story of three market solutions colliding in one multinational boondoggle.

Speaker A: Gotta give Bruce of the guys credit. They're Republicans. They don't give a about any of this stuff. Listen anywhere you get podcasts. If you're looking for another podcast that explores how climate change is impacting our lives and even our meals, then you should check out the Real Organic Podcast, the award winning best sustainability, environment and climate podcast produced by the Real Organic Project. Recently named one of the best climate podcasts by earth.org, the Real Organic Podcast uncovers the forces shaping organic food, from regenerative agriculture to hydroponics and beyond. They feature deep conversations with farmers, scientists, chefs and journalists to shed light on, um, what's really happening in our food system and on your dinner table. Follow the Real Organic Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's our conversation with Maxwell Brody, co founder and CEO of Rain Industries. Max, thank you so much for joining John and me on Climate Rising.

Speaker B: Welcome, Max, Mike, John, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.

Speaker A: Why don't we begin by asking you to tell us a bit about your company, Rane and how you got into this space.

Speaker B: Sure. So at Rane, we build an AI firefighting pilot that upgrades existing helicopters with the ability to autonomously fight wildfires. Now, the reason one might want to do this is so that the aircraft can be pre positioned in remote areas close to where fires start to very rapidly intervene before fires grow out of control. Because in the United States, wildfires cost over $300 billion in costs, losses, damages every single year. And there's a very brief period of time, typically the first five, eight minutes after a fire starts, where it's possible to prevent those losses. So we envision a future network of these aircraft distributed throughout high wildfire risk areas that are able to very rapidly intervene and stop fires before they grow out of control. And the reason that I'm building this company is because that was my experience growing up in 2003 in British Columbia, where I lived through the Okanagan Mountain park firestorm, which at the time caused the largest mass evacuations in Canada since the Second World War. Over 30,000 people displaced from their homes. Army was called in, and that fire started with a lightning strike on a single tree in the middle of the night that no one was able to get to until it was too late. The winds picked up in the morning and before long, the town was never the same. I've carried that with me my whole life. And when the 2018 Camp Fire happened here in Paradise, California, it was like reliving this childhood trauma all over again, only so, so much worse. 84 people died and it felt that just nothing had changed, nothing had improved. But the problem was getting so much worse. And indeed, in every subsequent year, the 2020 fires that burned through the Bay Area, 2023 fires that have still to this day in Canada, not gone, uh, out, they just have gone underground into the peat. And when the snow comes, they survive the winter. The challenge has just become so, so massive that we cannot do the same thing that we have always done before. So we're very excited to be bringing autonomous rapid wildfire response to the wildfire space and have been working on it every day since then.

Speaker A: Um, now you bring with you a background in, if I remember correctly, Ed Tech, Right, you're programming, trying to create solutions in the education space.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah, my story is startups, basically. This is my third startup and what I want to spend my life on is at the intersection of scalable systems and ultimately things that are good for society. That's been true in my previous startup and education. It is, uh, true with rain and it'll be true for whatever I work on for the rest of my life. But I think you guys over at hbs, uh, might call it shared value or alternately, double or triple. Bottom line. That's been my life direction since I got into building tech companies.

Speaker C: Max, we've been fighting wildfires for a long time, probably since the dawn of history. Who are you competing with? You're not just trying to solve a major problem for society, but you're a business we've all seen mov about smokejumpers. Who are you competing with? What's the alternative to this vision you have for a future of autonomous wildfire fighting?

Speaker B: We're not doing anything radically new. From the perspective of the fire community, faster response has always been a better outcome or a better ambition. And if, indeed, if you look at the history of what's referred to as initial attack, the first period of response after a wildfire ignition, that period has just been shrinking in terms of the goal over the past several decades. In the latter half of the 20th century, initial attack meant the first couple of days. And in the 90s, it started to become okay for several hours. It was really only in the late 2000s and, um, 2010s that California in particular set a new standard for okay. Initial attack means 20 minutes. But even from the data and from the modeling that we've done now in terms of what is required in order to, uh, actually intervene before many of these ignitions hit their inflection point, we're much more talking like closer to five, eight minutes these days. And particularly in the wind driven fires. I don't think of it so much as like a new competing idea in terms of what the fire community is doing today. It's more of an extension of what the goal has been for a good long time. And I do want to note for the astute, uh, listeners among us that a large reason that we are in this wildfire crisis today is due to a suppression only policy over the past 100, which increases forests and increases the density of the forest, increases the available fuels that contributes to catastrophic, uh, wildfires. That is fact. And at rain, we do not seek to employ this technology to perpetuate that all or nothing policy. What we seek to do is deploy this technology in order to very rapidly intervene in the fires with catastrophic potential that would otherwise destroy communities. And then we have been working with fire thought leaders in the space to implement a more nuanced approach to fire suppression for ignitions that can be managed for ecological benefit. And what that means is there are Some ignitions that you do want to allow to continue to burn, uh, in order to clean the fuels in forests. The same technology that we're developing will be able to apply selective cooling to regions within ignitions to keep them within safe thresholds, which is a concept called fire intensity management. That's a bit of a tangent, but I, I do want to clarify that up front that the technology that we're designing is designed to, number one, very rapidly respond to ignitions with catastrophic potential. And help managers and incident commanders, uh, identify the difference between ignitions with catastrophic potential and those that can be safely managed for ecological benefit.

Speaker C: Really interesting, you're describing this world in which the difference between 5 to 8 minutes and 20 minutes can be pretty phenomenal in terms of the potential that it has to get completely out of control. And I think intuitively that that makes sense. What's really interesting is you're using a lot of autonomy. You're using pretty deeply embedded autonomy. Tell us just a bit about actually what this looks like in practice, what happens and how you're leveraging autonomy to enable you to make that leap to shorter and shorter timelines of initial attack.

Speaker B: So ultimately what enables the shorter timelines to initial attack is, is the aircraft being pre positioned in remote areas and then able to be remotely commanded to respond. That's what fundamentally saves time. Now on the roadmap to getting to that major milestone, we're going to be introducing autonomy into existing fire operations, mature fires as part of a buildup program. And so that build up program will see aircraft operating on what are referred to as branches, which are essentially segments of the fire that otherwise may not have in service or have resources assigned to them. And then that is what ultimately builds the trust and confidence within FHIR community to then progress the system towards pre positioned remote deployments. So let's talk about what does autonomy do? As you noted, ultimately it's sense plan act. You have this flying robot that needs to be able to perceive its environment, make plans to optimize an outcome and then act on those plans. And that is really the core of our technology. We work very closely with Sikorsky and Lockheed Martin on the Blackhawk platform aircraft utilizing their existing flight operating system matrix, which uh, takes care of the essential basic flight, takeoff, landing, don't run into things. And we layer on top of that the firefighting decision making strategy, which the industry term of art for that is mission autonomy. We build the Wildfire mission autonomy layer of the autonomy stack, which is pulling in data from thermal sensors and visual sensors onboard the aircraft, uh, it's running that into our world model, localizing objects, fire, personnel, equipment, constructing that understanding of the world, and then recommending strategies based on the operator's intent, which is really important. We enable the operator to issue intent level command of the aircraft. And so you, as the individual on the ground in command of the system, are not saying go left, go right, go up, go down. You're basically calling plays. They say, I want you to prioritize the left flank, or I want you to completely extinguish this spot fire, or I want you to be doing asset protection, flank protection. And then with that objective in mind, the system will recommend suppression plans which then the operator approves, denies or edits. And that is the key interaction mode. And that is ultimately what will enable a single operator to oversee a vast fleet of these aircraft. Because the system is only demanding the attention of the operator at, ah, key moments rather than continuous operation of the remote aircraft.

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Speaker C: It's really interesting when you're talking about these early stage fires, these ones that are five to eight minutes in signation. I got to imagine the environment is pretty much similar to the way it is when there isn't a fire. But when you've got a fire that's begun to burn out of control, I have to imagine that the environment is incredibly challenging with rising heat and tremendous winds. Talk us through the live fire tests that you have today. What can the system do and what can't it do?

Speaker B: So we've been working with live fire for a few years, progressing from very small spot fire ignitions to more recently a, uh, field deployment in San Bernardino county last year in California. It started with precision. We wanted to be able to distinguish heat sources and signatures against other common heat sources and signatures to ensure that we had good data flowing into the system. And so that's what we showed in October of 2024 when we conducted, not our first, but our kind of first publicly accessible demonstration over, uh, in Connecticut, where we flew multiple drops in red flag wind conditions targeting a very small heat source, essentially a propane powered, uh, heat source no larger than the table that we're probably all sitting at. And uh, just with a whole group of people, including the US Fire Administrator in attendance, we just hit every single time, drop after drop, that very small heat source. Despite the fact that the winds were 15 plus knots gusting higher. Uh, it was Connecticut's third red flag warning in its history and just so happened to be on that day. Can't plan these things. And then we progressed from there. And so that was in 2024. And then we've enhanced our wind deviation models since then, which is projecting where the water is going to actually hit the ground after it is being impacted by wind mid trajectory. So water is released, it is impacted by wind, where is it going to end up on the ground? Very, uh, hard problem and also very common. Very rarely do you, as you noted John, ever get perfect calm conditions, particularly when fires are starting to grow out of control and get near that inflection or tipping point. Then in 2025 we brought the autonomous aircraft running our software out to San Bernardino county in partnership with the fire chief there, Chief Dan Munsey, as well as Pacific Gas and Electric, to show the system working in real world conditions. This is real terrain. Hills. We picked up water in 30 knot wind conditions, we dropped water in 20 knot wind conditions. A very challenging environment, especially for our first field deployment. And so we were very happy with the outcome of that. We learned a ton. We incorporated all of that data back into the system and are now heading into a new period or a new operational cadence where we'll be implementing all of those lessons and again getting it out in the field for real fire operations. That's been the trajectory over the past few years and some of the hard challenges we've solved and are solving.

Speaker A: So we should put a little bit of a picture on this because we've been talking about helicopters, but helicopters themselves don't have much capacity for water in the cockpit, for example. So we should spell out the fact that these have this, I don't know, net, more like a sheet underneath that's become a portable tank, right. That it fills by a pump or just by gravity. How does it take us through what it actually looks like?

Speaker B: Sure, I'LL uh, set the scene. So these are Black Hawk helicopters, which weigh about 20,000 pounds and can carry about 9,000 pounds worth of payload capacity. These aircraft are broadly deployed by the Department of Defense, by the army, and also by nations around the world. And they're also broadly deployed in aerial firefighting with fire agencies. Today. The Blackhawk is an excellent platform for wildfire suppression, both because it is already in use, because it has this advanced flight autonomy operating system that Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky have been building over the past decade plus, and also because it is available as excess property from the Department of Defense in large quantities, which makes it accessible to fire agencies. Now, you might be thinking, Black Hawk helicopter, that's a big aircraft. What about drones? What about small aircraft? And it really just comes down to the physics of fire. Fire requires a enormous amount of water and payload capacity in order to have any sort of meaningful impact, especially for those ignitions with catastrophic potential. Only 2.7% of ignitions cause 89% of structural loss and consume 61% of suppression budget. So it's really the small number of fast moving, typically wind driven fires that cause all the damage. And for those, you need thousands and thousands of gallons of water typically within the first five to eight minutes. Blackhawk helicopter carries a lot of payload. Mike, you were talking about the suppression system on board that aircraft. And there's a few different types of suppression systems that can be outfitted onto aircraft in general, but including the Blackhawk, you can mount a tank, a hard tank directly below the aircraft. There is a tank that will fit inside the rear of the aircraft. Or you can attach a Bambi bucket, which is what we've done today, which is slung on a long line underneath the aircraft. And each of them have their pros and cons. For the Bambi bucket, it's typically very quick to attach. The aircraft can be used for other things, and it's very fast to fill because you're just dipping it in the water and pulling water out versus the other tank systems. You need to be sitting there hovering for about a minute to pump up the water into the tank. To date, we have worked with the Bambi bucket. It's versatile, it's quick to attach to the aircraft. We're looking forward to working with tanked systems soon. And because they do have some particular benefits that align well with our vision, which is namely that the tank can be pre filled with water before the aircraft takes off to reduce your response time. With a Bambi bucket, you gotta go stop and pick up water. Before you head to the fire, when you have a tank on board, that tank can be filled with water, you're ready to go, you go straight to the fire.

Speaker A: Got it. And you mentioned that these are in use, these Black Hawk helicopters in use widely. My perhaps outdated vision of firefighting from the air was always this vision of these large tankers that scoop water up in a lake and then drop it behind it. I had never been aware that helicopters are being used as well and widely used as you're describing. So is it still the case that these fixed wing aircraft are also being used in firefighting?

Speaker B: Absolutely. There is variety of aircraft types in the fleet. In the national fleet, you've got fixed wing aircraft that do scoop water and then return and do laps. You've got very large air tankers or VLADs, which return to the airport in order to be filled with retardant on the ground and then go back up. You've got other forms of fixed wing that also do repeat laps from aircraft or from airports that are not quite as large as the very large air tankers. The you've. And then of course there's an array of helicopters and it really comes down to the tool that's best fit for purpose. Helicopters are very often used for initial attack. They can be pre positioned or located closer to where fires start. Because of the vertical takeoff and landing capability versus fixed wings, you're typically restrained to airports.

Speaker A: Got it. And then how did you decide what to make versus what to buy? So it seems like it would be a long road if you were going to build your own helicopters where you have an expert set of helicopters, including produced at ah, massive scale and including some that are, as you mentioned, being decommissioned for its original, perhaps military purpose. So that seems like a fairly straightforward decision. But then even for the software stacks that you're deploying, you mentioned that the manufacturer itself, Sikorsky, has created some of this Autonomy software, but you're adding to that some of the more sophisticated like in a sense targeting and maybe censoring systems. And some of that, I don't know, might be off the shelf and some of that might be homegrown. So take us through a little bit about kind of the make buy decision.

Speaker B: Sure. So for us it's pretty clear like our North Star is stopping wildfires before they grow out of control as fast as possible. We want to see this technology field and deployed yesterday. You know, for some folks, the thing that really gets them excited might be building everything themselves. And that's kind of why they want to do something in the world for us. We want to see communities be safe from wildfire and we want to see the carbon effects of wildfire be uh, massively reduced. To do that, we take a very pragmatic, realistic approach, which is what's the fastest path. And when we looked at the market and said, and it was actually a big part of why we decided that now is the right time to build this business, is because we can leverage Department of Defense taxpayer funded technology, uh, in order to massively accelerate deployment of autonomous rapid wildfire response. And we don't need to reinvent the wheel. And so I think that for us was a pretty obvious kind of yes, let's leverage what exists and move fast. And I think that that, uh, same philosophy applies across the broader scope of what we make versus build. It's what gets us to our objective faster. But in general, because mission autonomy is still quite new, even within the broader Department of Defense world, we built ourselves the entire mission autonomy stack, really on top of the matrix flight operating system.

Speaker A: It sounds to me from your earlier description about the way that an operator, that there is an operator involved, but there's not telling it to go up and down, left and right, but rather one might think of as semi autonomous, at least in the EV world, where you need to still be paying attention, although it can change lanes on its own, for example, or make recommendations, is that kind of the space we're in with maybe an eventual vision of full autonomy. But at the moment, since there's an operator in the loop, it sounds semi autonomous, is that right?

Speaker B: Yeah. So I uh, love the EV analogy because it is so apt for some things, but at the same time it really breaks down for other things. The interaction model of the vehicle or the system asking for approval to do something is not what we readily see in the autonomous ground vehicle space. And in that sense the analogy breaks down a little bit. But to your earlier comment of does the roadmap involve the autonomy functionality aiding human piloted welfare suppression missions on the roadmap to a fully uncrewed remote deployment? The answer is yes, of course. We to date have had safety pilots on board the aircraft and the technology will support enhanced targeting and support ensuring that people and equipment are not in the drop zone. And it will support assessment of efficacy in order to support continuous improvement and training of the human pilot.

Speaker A: So let's talk a little bit about who the beneficiaries are of this service and therefore who might be your target clients. And from prior conversations I've had about wildfires, I've learned there's actually many different entities that have incentives to not to have suppression for wildfires, whether that be communities, as you began your story with, uh, that don't want to have a wildfire coming into the town. There's landowners, whether they be private or public, who value trees for either the ecosystem services they provide or for timber. There's pipelines, there's utilities, or there's rail folks who have their assets that go through the forests and would prefer their assets not to be burned down. So there's all these different folks who value forests not being on fire. Some of this has resulted in government function, as John was talking about earlier. I think most people's mentality of firefighters, whether they be in your town or at forests, the sense is that these are government employees from a government function. But also there's a history in America which people may forget that, uh, some of the original firefighters in communities were in fact private and you had to subscribe to the service. And so it's interesting, is it public, is it private? Different types of assets that are trying to be protected. So in this whole mil, you tell us a bit about where you're playing.

Speaker B: It's a fascinating topic, Mike. I think the tragedy of the commons comes to mind is an underlying concept where who is responsible for the air, who is responsible for the forests, who are responsible for these resources that we all benefit from. In the US the government in its varying forms, local, state and federal, is ultimately responsible for firefighting and particularly is responsible for that on lands that they own. And so that is our core customer segment is fire agencies at the state, federal and local level. But there are these other vested interests that you noted, whether those are electric utilities, landowners, asset owners, solar farm owners, mines, that all have a shared invested interest in their non being catastrophic wildfires. And the largest of all of those vested interests actually is the insurance industry, which stands to both gain and lose a massive amount of money and does every year from these catastrophic fires to the point where in California in particular, there is an insurance crisis because of the wildfire crisis. And when you have an insurance crisis, you have a housing crisis and an illiquid market and you have issues with getting mortgages, which underpins the entire economy, which starts to become a, uh, ripple effect. We are starting with the fire agencies because they are ultimately the ones that have the authority to field and to make decisions about what is deployed and what is not deployed over fires. But even today there is a pattern of the private sector working together with the fire agencies to expand capacity. Pacific Gas and Electric has multiple Blackhawk UH helicopters that they loan to local county governments for the purpose of firefighting. San Diego Gas and Electric has their own firefighting helicopter fleet. Southern California Edison, together with the local Southern California counties, LA County, Ventura County, Orange county, established the Quick Reaction Force, which is another helicopter fleet that is tasked with immediate M and 24 hour, 365 day response to fires in the broader LA region. And so there is this pattern already of private sector partnering with fire agencies to expand capacity. And we certainly believe that is a trend that will continue to expand in the future, especially as new tools like autonomous aircraft help shift the efficacy and cost profiles to enable a greater number of parties to become involved and add an ability to measure quantitative outcomes that will bring in entirely new parties like the insurance industry, where the actuarial effect of rapid wildfire intervention can actually be incorporated into insurance models to then justify preventative dollars flowing in to expand that rapid response capacity. So it's a multi stage process. Today we are engaged with fire agencies and electric utilities and we will continue to expand the private sector stakeholders to include landowners, asset owners and insurance.

Speaker C: You started off, Max talking about earlier on this idea that we had suppressed fire so successfully for so long that we just built up this enormous load of fuel, right? That forests were just stacked with undergrow and there just hadn't been fires in too long, effectively. And so that in turn made the fires that did happen these really terrible outcomes, or at least it contributed to the severity of the fires that occurred. You're talking a bit about who has which incentives and who's going to pay for it. But this question of if you can kill almost any ignition in your vision within 10 minutes, who gets to decide who decides whether a specific fire should be let burn or not?

Speaker B: It's an excellent question, John. Uh, it is a challenge for fire agencies today. And because it is so hard, the pendulum has swung back and forth a couple of times. There were some devastating fires in New Mexico a few years ago that were started as federal prescribed fires that became massive uncontrolled incidents that ultimately cost the Federal Government over $5 billion in liabilities and untold suffering within the community. And today, if you look at federal policy, the pendulum has swung back to, okay, we can't have that. We're back to a place of suppressing all fires that are all unplanned ignitions. I fundamentally believe that providing new tools to the fire agencies that not only allow them to make decisions in a supportive capacity around what fires have Catastrophic potential, and what fires have potential for ecological benefit, but also tools that are able to shape the outcome after you've made that initial decision. Because right now, Jeff Bezos likes to talk about doors that you can walk through and when making decisions, and doors that you can walk back through. Right. And so when a fire manager is making a decision right now to let this fire continue to burn, okay, you make that decision, and there's very little walking back through that door if the conditions change. You, uh, have very little agency to take an ignition that you thought was going to not be catastrophic, that turned into becoming in condition with catastrophic potential. And we seek to change that. We seek to provide fire managers with the ability to manage fire intensity in real time and with, uh, the confidence of being able to shut, uh, down the fire at any time if it becomes beyond a safe threshold. And, and the way that works is you have teaming autonomous systems, essentially swarming autonomous Black Hawk helicopters with our software that are, uh, continuously, not just monitoring, but actively intervening within the interior of the fire, not just the edge, finding the regions that are becoming too hot, and then intervening by applying water, not for the purpose of extinguishing, but for cooling, which comes down to the amount of water that you're deploying in relation to the intensity, uh, of the fire that's being radiated. This is certainly not anything that's today being implemented. This is what we are building towards and what we're working with fire leaders to conceptualize and to implement. But it is where I believe that we need to go in order to avoid this quagmire of, okay, we need to get more fire on the ground, but when we have an unplanned ignition, it's too risky to just let it continue to burn because then conditions can change, and then, then you end up with leveled communities and billions of dollars in damages.

Speaker C: This fire management story is really interesting. You started from your own personal experience. This is really becoming a climate story. You mentioned, uh, right at the beginning that you're interested also in the carbon effect. This is certainly climate change is responsible in part for the worsening frequency and severity of fires for a variety of reasons. But this is also becoming something that actually is a cyclical participant in climate. The worst fire years cause emissions that are more than some country's annual emissions. How do you think about this sort of moving from what might be described as an adaptation play to a business that is also focused on mitigation?

Speaker B: In some sense, we definitely view ourselves as working at the intersection of mitigation and Adaptation. A lot of people at first glance say, oh yeah, rain is an adaptation company. But I think those folks are missing the headlines, which quite frankly the New York Times and everyone else is missing the headline too, that these fires are just emitting massive amounts of carbon that, uh, are not really being incorporated into global carbon accounting today. And just to give you a few vignettes that, the 2020 wildfire season in California undid all greenhouse gas emissions progress over the preceding two decades. That's every solar panel, every electricity, electric car, all netted out by a single wildfire season. The global 2021 wildfire season. If you were to aggregate emissions from all wildfires globally and consider that to be a country, the country of wildfire would rank second only to China in terms of global emissions. As I mentioned earlier, the 2023 Canadian wildfire season, it emitted over six times the total emissions of the state of California. And those fires have actually never gone out. They've just continued to burn in the peat that survives even the winter. 18%, uh, as best we can determine, of Global Fossil fuel CO2 emissions are actually attributable to wildfire. This historically has been considered natural land use, and I think a few years ago still would have been. I think there is a shift within the community to recognize that, no, actually this is human caused climate change and needs to be accounted for differently.

Speaker A: Is there a carbon market that might evolve to pay for the suppression of fires due to the avoided carbon emissions?

Speaker B: There will be, is my short answer. It is a topic that is in active discussion, I would say at the research level. Currently we're still a few years, I think, away from implementation, but the using the avoided losses or using avoided emissions as a means to pay for the prevention is a topic that many people in the research community are looking at.

Speaker A: Great. And the other part I was going to ask about all the way back to insurance, are insurance companies there yet? In figuring that compensating for suppression can result in lower risk and therefore lower premiums? And so it sets up this incentives for landowners or others to, uh, purchase more fire suppression services because it's coming out of the savings from insurance.

Speaker B: The short version is insurers are not there yet. Insurers are warming up to proactive measures. I think you're starting to see insurers get a lot more engaged around topics like Zone 0, which is the space immediately adjacent to your structure, to your house or structure, getting involved in preventative work there. But in terms of getting involved in early fire intervention, we haven't yet seen the insurance community step up and actively participate.

Speaker C: So when you're thinking about this, there's a lot of different elements that you're working on. Obviously, you've got the physical system, the hardware, you've got the software stack, this autonomy stack, you've got a number of different players, this complex web of jurisdictions and different types of entities that care very much about these outcomes. But it really ties back to the origin story where you had this experience of being in the pathway of a wildfire and your desire that, that fewer people are put in that position. What keeps you up at night? You've got a lot of things that you're trying to navigate, every entrepreneur does. But what is it that is on your mind these days when you think about what needs to go right for this to work?

Speaker B: I think the thing that keeps me up at night the most is just there's no reason why this can't go faster, right? There's no single reason why we can't have the future faster. And today is the SpaceX IPO. And I often point to the unbelievable feats of engineering and human achievement that SpaceX has typified over these past few years that they would not have occurred except for the vision and drive and ambition of that company. We are pretty singular in terms of where we sit in the market, in terms of advancing this technology. And every month, quarter year faster that we can field and deploy the tech is fewer carbon emissions and lives than communities saved. So, uh, I think it's really sharpening.

Speaker A: So where would you recommend folks looking for ideas, whether it be podcasts or conferences or magazines, where would they get a sense of what the table of contents looks like?

Speaker B: Science fiction is a great place to start. It is important to intersect science fiction with the moment in history which we are at right now, and extend what is possible given the current domain, but for specific resources and materials. I love the book Where Is My Flying Car? Which does look at the past latter half of the 20th century and attempt to answer that question from various angles. But otherwise I would just recommend take a look, ah, at what science fiction promised us and figure out where's the edge that we can extend to now. And oh my gosh, there's never been a better time, AI aside, in terms of building AI apps, the potential of AI to actually help us build these things that we never dreamed we could have, I think is we're just at the very beginning of that.

Speaker A: Yeah, very interesting, Max. Thank you so much. It's been a really interesting conversation. Best of luck. To you in your future adventures with Rain. And again, thanks for joining Jon and me.

Speaker C: Thanks, Max.

Speaker B: Thank you, John. Thanks, Mike.

Speaker A: That was our conversation with Maxwell Brody, co founder and CEO of Rain Industries. And thanks to my HBS colleague, John Mulligan for co hosting today's episode. You've been listening to Climate Rising. I'm your host, Mike Toffel. Sophie Wong produced Today's episode. Craig McDonald is our audio engineer. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Climate Rising. See you then.