Oct 31, 2025 · 42m · more-or-less
Stuart Landesberg's Plan to Save the American West from Wildfires · More or Less Podcast
Stuart Landesberg · 27m spoken Brit Morin · 6m spoken Dave Morin · 5m spoken Intro Singer · 14s spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Seneca founder and CEO Stuart Landesberg joins 'More or Less' hosts Dave and Britt Morin to unveil his company's autonomous drone strike teams, engineered to extinguish wildfires within the first twenty minutes of ignition. The discussion explores the trillion-dollar wildfire crisis, the failure of current firefighting infrastructure, and how mission-driven robotics can preserve the American West.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 15.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 3.7 Guest teaching 4.3 Guest disagreement 0.7 The hosts pushing back 1.3
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 35:03 Partner Meeting Resistance
Stuart pushes back against Dave's aggressive production roadmap projections, rejecting the premise that scaling rapidly into thousands of drones early is desirable before iterative hardware improvements are proven.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 34:45 Deployment Roadmap InterrogationDave refuses to let Stuart stay high-level on deployment timelines, pressing him repeatedly on specific strike team targets for 2026, 2027, and beyond.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 12:18 The Forest Fuel Load RealityStuart explains the forestry dilemma to the hosts, detailing how a century of total fire suppression has built up an unnatural fuel load that guarantees extreme, uncontrollable fires.
The host holds their own ▶ 6:32 Generational Smokejumping ExpertiseDave demonstrates deep domain familiarity by detailing his family's multi-generational service as Montana smokejumpers and fire chiefs, establishing personal authority on wildland firefighting history.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| More or Less Title Sequence | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | Dave and Britt introduce Stuart Landesberg while disclosing their investment in his drone startup Seneca. Dave jokingly asks whether to label the sector defense tech or offense tech, which Stuart collegially reframes as pro-America re-industrialization tech. | |
| From Grove Collaborative to Mission-Driven Hardware | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Stuart describes his transition from finance to building Grove Collaborative into a multi-billion dollar public company before taking time off to found Seneca. Britt asks about his founder psychology, and Stuart emphasizes his refusal to operate companies where he cannot define the core mission. | |
| Family Legacies and Smokejumping History | 6 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Dave shares his deep personal connection to wildland firefighting through his grandfather, a post-WWII airborne paradoctor smokejumper, and his stepbrothers who served as hotshots. Stuart validates this legacy, elaborating on the harrowing selflessness of smokejumpers and helicopter pilots. | |
| The Trillion-Dollar Crisis and Fuel Load Dilemma | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Stuart details the trillion-dollar annual economic toll of wildfires and explains how decades of aggressive over-suppression have created extreme fuel loads across Western forests. Dave adds a sharp entrepreneurial quip noting the structural lack of ARR in fire prevention. | |
| Subterranean Bunkers vs. Rapid Suppression | 3 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Britt and Dave recount an outlandish startup pitch for hydraulic houses that retract underground during fires. Stuart dismisses retroactive bunker defenses as economically unviable compared to suppressing fires in the initial fifteen minutes before exponential spread. | |
| Seneca's Autonomous Drone Strike Teams | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Dave deconstructs mainstream media narratives that condition the public to think only of massive megafires rather than early containment. Stuart explains Seneca's autonomous five-drone strike teams, which cover thirty square miles with sub-ten-minute response times and reload directly from fire engines. | |
| Night Flight Firefighting and Institutional Hurdles | 6 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Dave and Stuart exchange technical insights on why human aerial firefighting completely halts at night due to zero-visibility mountainous terrain. Stuart explains that sensors like LIDAR bypass human visual limits, and contrasts the fire service's decentralized tech adoption with federally backed defense research. | |
| Regulatory Headwinds, Market Drivers, and Capital | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Stuart explains that regulatory reception from the FAA and fire chiefs has been unusually receptive because five trillion dollars in residential assets face uninsurability. He draws a firm line between frivolous consumer AI applications and essential physical resilience infrastructure. | |
| Deployment Roadmap and Rapid Municipal Demand | 4 | 5 | 2 | 5 | Dave presses Stuart on deployment cadence and scaling projections, playfully likening the interrogation to a formal venture partner meeting. Stuart pushes back against premature manufacturing expansion, arguing that early cohorts must iterate on live customer feedback before mass rollout. | |
| Hiring, Community Advocacy, and Stoic Philosophy | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Stuart issues a recruitment call and encourages listeners to lobby HOAs and municipal fire districts to adopt modern technologies. Dave asks about company culture, prompting Stuart to share Seneca's stoic philosophy of amor fati and how a catastrophic early flight test accelerated their engineering rigor. |
Statements from this episode (22)
Landesberg: Defense and hardware innovation is 'pro-America tech'
“I just call it, you know, it's pro-America tech, right? I'm here for the re-industrialization.”
Landesberg: Non-founder CEOs cannot set mission or determine impact
“Fundamentally every time it came down to that if you don't start the company, you don't get to create the mission. And if you don't create the mission, you don't get to set the change. You don't get to set the impact that the company has on the world.”
Landesberg: 2025 will be most expensive wildfire year, topping $1 trillion
“There's a joint Senate committee that a couple of years ago said the cost was about just shy of a trillion dollars, and we already know that because of Palisades, 25 will be the most expensive year on record, so almost certainly over a trillion dollars of econ…”
Landesberg: U.S. spends hundreds of billions on fire suppression over prevention
“There's hundreds of billions of dollars already in fire suppression spend in the U.S. Fire prevention spend is really, is much less popular.”
Landesberg: Fire helicopters cost $12,000 to $15,000 per hour to operate
“The typical fire helicopter is somewhere between 12 and 15,000 dollars an hour to operate.”
Landesberg: Some decade-defining wildfires were escaped prescribed burns
“It is true that some of the biggest fires over the last decade have been prescribed burns that got out of control”
Landesberg: Fire Chiefs Agree Early Suppression Beats Structure-by-Structure Defense
“When you talk to most of the chiefs and fire scientists, it doesn't matter, federal, local, et cetera, level, they all will say that better than going structure by structure, is the idea of stopping the fire when it's small.”
Landesberg: Suppressing Wildfires Within 20 Minutes Drastically Cuts Needed Equipment
“Fire grows exponentially, and so if you can get to a fire in the first 1015, 20 minutes, and so the cost to put it out, the amount of apparatus, the amount of suppression payload, you can actually take out a fire that's a couple hundred square feet with much l…”
Landesberg: Seneca drones cover 30 square miles in sub-10 minutes
“Our aircraft covered 30 square miles. So you could cover a 30 square mile area in sub 10 minute response time with effectively a full engine's worth of suppression payload.”
Landesberg: Five Seneca drones carry enough payload for top-5% risk fires
“Exactly five drones. They always stay together and they fly either in series or like in a team, depending on what the, Use cases. They'll fly out, get to the fire, hopefully within five minutes or so of detection. And so that should be more than enough payload…”
Landesberg: Seneca drones can reload and refill from any fire engine
“They're built to load and return from the fire engine. So they go to the fire, deploy the sort of the full payload, and then they can come back to any fire engine, any water tender, get refilled and fly back out again.”
Landesberg: There is very little night firefighting apparatus today
“Today there's very little night firefighting apparatus.”
Landesberg: Night-vision-trained helicopter pilots are aviation's hardest hire
“The hardest hire in aviation is a night vision trained helicopter pilot.”
Landesberg: Napa wildfire tripled in size overnight as operations halted
“There was a fire in Napa a couple of months ago now that was about 5000 acres, and the firefighting operations basically stopped, At 7:30 or eight PM. Maybe they didn't stop entirely, but most of them stopped. And the fire grew from like a thousand acres to a …”
Landesberg: Fire service lacks the DARPA-style federal tech infrastructure of defense
“Every town had its own fire department. And the legacy of that means that there's a ton of independent fire departments who sort of grew up and built their technology roadmaps independently. And you contrast that to what's happened in national defense, where y…”
Landesberg: $5T in Western Home Assets Face High Fire Risk
“Insurance companies are basically saying, Hey, if we can't insure a whole big portion of the American West, and that's a very strong economic motivator for something like five trillion of home assets that's at high fire risk right now, it's an insane number.”
Landesberg: Without Wildfire Tech, Living in the American West Is Unsustainable
“If we don't do this, we have no chance of living in the American West. And keeping our mortgages for like, 25, 30 years, right? It has to happen.”
Landesberg: US Must Revive Manufacturing or Surrender Sovereignty
“It is totally fait accompli that either America gives up its sovereignty or we get good at manufacturing again.”
Landesberg: Targeting Seneca's Peak Valuation Multiple in Year 20
“I want to build a company where our enterprise value, like our multiple, right? That's used to determine our enterprise value is highest in year 20, right? Because that last, like, five years of compounding is actually the most valuable.”
Landesberg: US capital markets will beat foreign manufacturing capacity over ten years
“What allows the U S to beat some of the more industrialized, like better manufacturing nations over the next 10 years, our capital markets are the best in the world, right? Does our industrial capacity match engine? No chance, but our capital markets are incre…”