Chuck Yates Needs A Job

0:20 Hey everybody, welcome to Chuck Yates needs a job, the podcast. My guest today is Brian Gett. Brian, welcome in. Thanks for having me Chuck. Excited to be here. All right. Let's just jump

0:31 right into it. Are you Nixon going to China or are you Ben Solo? Wow. Deep questions to start. Exactly. Give me your story because this is fascinating. You're a unicorn I didn't know this person

0:49 existed. Yeah. Well, my evolution has taken place over many years. You know, I started really all this goes back for me. The genesis was falling in love with the outdoors. Actually, I used to

0:60 lead wilderness trips for teenagers in Alaska throughout the Southwest, going backpacking, mountaineering, ice climbing, all that kind of stuff. We would go in Alaska for 40 days with a group of

1:10 teenagers, like 15 and 16 year olds and be 10 days from a road and just that kind of raw wilderness. I just fell in love with the outdoors. And from that point on, I just wanted to do something to

1:22 help protect, protect that environment, protect nature. And so that's what drew me in initially to be my interest in energy and green building and kind of that whole background and renewable energy

1:33 and power. And so I just, like most things I do, I just went 100 head over heels for it all in. I mean, I did crazy. I like worked at a permaculture farm, milk and goats and growing our own

1:44 food. You know, like the true hippie commune up in Humboldt County, California - A goat's a nasty animal, but it really underrated the nastiness of goats, not funded tangle with - Yeah,

1:58 especially when you're waking up at like five in the morning to milk them and they're really, you know, annoyed with you. But yeah, so I mean, I really went all in on this. I went to work for a

2:08 general contractor 'cause I really wanted to understand how billions went together so I could make them more energy efficient and green. you know, working in all the building trades from electrical,

2:18 plumbing, general contracting, all of that. I had a brief diversion in this kind of interesting chapter where I built a company that was designing contained composting systems. So we were

2:29 composting various types of organic waste, like food waste, yard waste, all that kind of stuff. But we were doing it at the institutional and commercial level or even a municipal level. So we

2:40 would develop these systems and use earthworms, a specific species of worms. I have some horror stories I didn't, I don't want to bore you with, but - Okay, Brian, just real quick, when I woke

2:51 up this morning, I looked at my calendar, oh, I'm recording with Brian. I did not have on the bingo card that within the first 45 seconds of the podcast, we'd be talking goats and earthworms -

3:00 Yeah, see, keep going, keep going - Keep it interesting, man. So yeah, that was a whole saga where basically our mission was to process organic waste closest to the source of generation So we

3:11 were working with municipal entities like at landfills. at food waste processing facilities that make like the frozen dinners, can find animal feeding operations, you know, schools. And I won't

3:23 bore you with the details, but I spent three years working on that project and lots of growing pains from that. And then I would just immerse in this world, the sustainability green world. And

3:35 that really led me to focus on energy and buildings. And so at that point, I went, I became executive director of this Green Building Trade Association in California that represented all of the key

3:46 stakeholders promoting renewable energy, green building, energy efficiency, all of these best practices. And so one day I'd be working with pulty homes on commercial, you know, production built

3:58 new homes. The next day I'd be talking with a local government designing green building policy the next day with a lender or real estate agent. And so it helped me understand and cheap my viewpoint

4:08 of all these different stakeholders on kind of that bolt invasion in California. From there. I went and worked and led a consulting company that we grew from like a 15 person little boutique shop to

4:21 about 50 people. And we really took off during the Obama administration because they were flooding us with cash. So we were one of the pigs at the trough. We were eating our way all the way through

4:32 it, man. It was.

4:34 So on trial quickly, we forget. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was billions of dollars flooding into energy to put people back to work shovel ready jobs. And because of my previous role at this trade

4:46 association, I had a lot of relationships with local government and all these stakeholders, utilities. And so we were, we pulled together this proposal and basically won a bunch of money, a big

4:57 contract, my firm won a 60 million contract to implement, which became energy upgrade California, which was a statewide green building slash energy efficiency program to upgrade homes and buildings

5:09 and make them more efficient So from there, I went on to. start a software company focused on basically how do you quantify the savings potential of solar energy in homes and energy efficiency

5:22 improvements like heating, air conditioning, that kind of stuff. All the way in my most recent thing, I worked on wireless power technology. So basically sending electricity through the air using

5:33 radio waves. So just like on your mobile phone, you can get data. We could send power through the air 30 feet away to power cameras, electronic devices and factories and all these kind of cool

5:44 applications. So I'll stop there, but that's just a quick snapshot of my evolution. So that stuff's fascinating and we could talk that stuff

5:56 all day long. But kind of the question I got is what happened? Because that doesn't sound like your Twitter feed today. No, it definitely doesn't. And you know, my evolution happened over over

6:06 many years. It wasn't one landmark event But what happened was because I was in the belly of the beast. I was working in California. on the most progressive energy programs in the country. And

6:17 what I saw is that they just don't work, right? I thought the problem was, well, if we just had enough money, we could scale these things and really make the impact that we were aspiring to. The

6:28 reality is they were fundamentally flawed in the design and the core principles that we held were not true, right? And so, you know, there's two things you can do when you're wrong about something.

6:40 You can just continue to plow forward and, you know, make the same mistakes or you can have some self-reflection and kind of suck up your ego a little bit and say, man, this was just not the right

6:51 investment of time and energy. And unfortunately, I wasted over 20 years of my life working on the wrong problem. I had the right instincts to work in energy and that that's kind of the foundation

7:03 of all of human flourishing in progress is derived from energy use and consumption, but I was working at it on the wrong angle And so seeing these programs year after year. fail fail fail, you know,

7:16 not be cost to fail. Define fail. Define fail. Oh, you were, you were getting there, but yeah, you know, a lot of the hype around a lot of the solar and energy efficiency programs is that they

7:27 save money and that they deliver all this value. Well, what we found is no, the reason you have to provide so much subsidy and so much incentive is because they actually don't deliver enough value

7:38 in most situations. Now, again, in California, if you're putting solar on a large home that has a big load and you have no shade issues, sure, it makes sense. It pencils, but still it requires

7:51 tremendous rebates, tax credits and all of these subsidies to make that happen. Same thing with energy efficiency improvements. The average improvement that we were helping to facilitate with low

8:03 cost financing and rebates and subsidies would cost, you know, 15, 20, 000 to upgrade the heating and air conditioning system in your home and insulation and all these improvement. So that would

8:14 never pencil just from an economic standpoint. There's good reasons to do it. I mean, I'm pro insulation and pro efficiency, right? I mean, you have better sound acoustics. You don't hear your

8:24 neighbors or the street noise. You have better thermal comfort. You have a lot of these benefits, but you're not doing it strictly for economic reasons. You do in it because you need to replace

8:34 your air conditioner anyway. And you can take advantage of this 5, 000 rebate from the government or the utility that's helping you pay for it. So I just saw all the cracks starting to show and how

8:45 these programs operate and that they were never going to scale and never hit the goals, these very aspirational and vicious goals that the various regulators and in politicians had set forth. Wow,

8:58 that might be been solo. I hate to answer the question for you, but

9:04 because it does feel like the discussion and I've been an oil and gas guy, kind of my whole So I understand the economics there. I can walk through, I can look at somebody's numbers and I'd say,

9:17 okay, you didn't count this, you didn't count that. When I look through solar wind, that's what you always hear is that they're cheaper, they're more cost effective, all that. It's just big bad

9:31 oil won't allow you to do it. My response has always been big bad oil is all about money. If it were cheaper, they would do it So,

9:42 how do we break down? Can you get into maybe some examples, some examples and examples with some specific numbers to figure out why this is more, well, why it's not as efficient as kind of claimed?

10:00 Sure. Yeah. I mean, their core, large scale wind and solar farms are expensive wasteful add-ons to the existing power grid Let's walk through why I'm making this claim. what is the basis for that?

10:13 So the first thing to realize is there, these sources of energy have very low power density, which means they take up a lot of surface area, a lot of land. So to cite these things, no one wants a

10:25 big solar farmer or wind turbine in their backyard, obviously in the suburb of Houston. So you're gonna cite them - Or off Kenny,

10:33 or off Kenny Bunkport, Maine, or off Martha's, then you're didn't take Kennedy - Yeah, I'm just saying, yeah - Or most desired coastlines, no one wants to look at this stuff for a whole variety

10:42 of reasons we can get into, but the bottom line is you need to cite them far away from the businesses and homes that use the energy. And because you need a huge area of land, for example, a 200

10:55 megawatt wind farm would require about 13 square miles of land. So miles versus a natural gas plant, is you could fit on a single city block, right? So you're talking about huge differences space.

11:10 A solar farm is going to use a tremendous amount more land. For example, on the wind side, it's about

11:21 360 acres are the amount of area that uses compared to a nuclear power plant to generate the same amount of electricity. And solar is better than that, because wind has basically a power density of

11:35 kind of one versus solar at 10. So solar is basically 10x more energy dense than wind, but it still uses a tremendous amount of land. And you have to go where the sun and wind is, right? You

11:46 can't just put these things anywhere. So because of that, these large installations have to be cited far from these urban areas. Now, you have to buy all that land, first of all. Now, that's

11:57 going to vary depending on the cost of real estate, depending if you're in Maine or Texas or Florida, etc, California. But then then now you gotta get that power back to the urban area. that

12:09 transmission cost is huge. So let's walk through an example. So in Southern California, there's this area and it's called the Inland Empire. It's just east of Los Angeles area where there's a lot

12:21 of sun and a lot of wind. And so they built a bunch of solar and wind resources out there and they built this transmission line called the Tehachapi transmission line. And they thought it was gonna

12:32 cost 17 billion. It's a

12:35 173 mile line So 173 miles to send electrons from the wind turbine to the business or to the home. When it actually costs with 3 billion when they finished it. And this is just one transmission line.

12:50 So when we're talking about this cost and scale of locating these very large facilities, we're talking about big dollars. So let's scale that up a little bit more. California has this big, bold

13:02 plan. They wanna be 100 renewable by 2045 Well, to do that, they're counting on building investing 30 billion in new high voltage transmission capacity. So not all the local distribution, not

13:17 anything about the solar panels of the wind turbines, just the high voltage transmission 30 billion. Well, that sounds like a lot, but it's even worse than that because the real cost to the

13:27 consumer or the rate payer for every dollar that's invested in that transmission asset, 350 has to be paid over the life of the asset by the business owner or the homeowner over the life of that

13:41 transmission line. So you're talking about 100 billion in costs that someone's going to have to pay for, someone's going to have to eat, and that's going to get forced on to the rate payer, the

13:50 consumer. So let me cut you off and walk me again because I may have just missed it. 30 billion is the cost of those lines. How did you get to 100 billion again? Make sure I understand that Sure.

14:01 So there's the

14:05 actual initial cost, but then there's the They have to maintain and operate those over the course of the life. So let's say it's 35 years over the life of the asset. So there's additional costs

14:16 involved. So they actually charge when they calculate the form when they create the formula to how they're going to actually recoup that investment. It's about 350 for every dollar invested. Gotcha.

14:29 That makes sense? Yeah, that makes perfect sense So we got 100 billion into the high-speed transmission line. Gotcha. Yeah, and that's before we've, again, we've not actually put up a single

14:42 wind turbine or a solar panel yet. That's just on the transmission lines. And then all of that takes a lot of land, right? You've got to have all these easements, you've got to buy land and all

14:52 of those things. Well, then you've got to pay property tax on all that land So this isn't, utilities aren't charities, this isn't just free, right? There's costs to buy the land, there's costs

15:04 to own and maintain the land in terms of property And then after all of that, you have to store, you have to have the ability to store some of this energy because as we all know, the sun does only

15:15 shine, the wind doesn't always blow. So what happens in California wind, it's cloudy out or the wind stops, et cetera. And this happens obviously a lot more than, depending on the latitude and

15:27 the climate, than you would want. So the amount of storage you need in terms of battery storage is just huge And right now battery storage is rated about one to four hours. It's mainly just used to

15:41 extend kind of solar during the day for a couple hours into the early evening. It's not meant to store over the whole night or multiple days if there's bad inclement weather. And when you start

15:54 talking about other areas, here's a great example of this 'cause the number one leader in the world on solar and wind is Germany, right? They've invested about, they'll, we'll have invested 550,

16:07 dollars equivalent by 2025 in all of this solar and wind infrastructure. So to do that, um, and to go a hundred percent renewable, that doesn't even get them close to 100, but that's what they're

16:21 already allocated and spending. They're going to have, if they were going to overcome all the wind droughts and gloomy days in Germany, they would have to overcome a 61 day deficit of wind and sun.

16:35 So that just when, you know, the sun's obviously gloomy out, you're not going to get the full amount of radiation hitting the panels, et cetera. And they did this analysis. They went back over

16:46 35 years of data. So these aren't projections. This isn't estimates. They looked at hourly interval data over 35 years of history to find that you would need to overcome the 61 day period of kind

16:58 of scarce wind and sun. So when they calculated the numbers of what they would mean in terms of energy storage, they would need 24 days. of energy storage. So not a few hours, not 24 hours, 24

17:12 days to basically go to this 100 renewable scenario. That's 36 terawatt hours of energy. That's just the cost of that is so astronomical. It's a non-starter, right? It's just you can't do

17:26 that. So that's just an example of the magnitude of the costs we're talking about when we start talking about storage costs, transmission costs, property tax, land investment, all of these things

17:38 add up - Gotcha. So, and I'll take us off the road real quick and we'll come back, but in the response back to that, oh, but batteries get cheaper every day. Look at Moore's Law. The

17:53 improvements are so great. Technology will solve this in the next decade - Moore's Law doesn't apply to battery technology or to solar and wind technology It's a category error. thinking to apply

18:08 that. Most of the costs are, sure, we're always gonna incrementally get better, and batteries are getting better, and solar is incrementally getting better, but it's not Moore's Law, it's not

18:18 doubling every 18 months. You're looking at small incremental gains of a few percentages, percentage points a year of greater efficiency, and most of the cost reductions are now gone. We're

18:30 actually seeing prices go up because of commodity inflation, because of increasing energy costs I mean, solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are made with a lot of energy, a lot of

18:41 commodities to make these things. So there's this fallacy that these costs are gonna keep dropping. We're actually, now you're starting to see them go back up as commodity inflation prevails, and

18:52 we're likely to see for at least the near future, foreseeable future, we're gonna be in a state of commodity inflation. So these costs are not gonna continue to drop, they're actually gonna go up

19:04 I have often and I was a little bit leading to witness there. I think the reason more of law doesn't apply is God came down and said the amount of energy stored in oil in a barrel of oil weighs 300

19:20 pounds. The same amount of energy stored in lithium weighs 20, 000 pounds. And that's just theoretical limits based on physics, as I like to say, that's what God declared when the earth was

19:36 formed, and that's your limiting factor. I mean, it just, it has to be. So it costs a lot of money. Let's talk a little bit about this, because I don't think people appreciate this, and I'll

19:49 get these numbers wrong. So correct me.

19:53 70 of all solar is made in China, 60 of wind turbines, I think, are made in China At the end of the day, China, 23 of their energy is from. hole, I believe. So in effect, creating these

20:12 renewable,

20:16 the solar and the wind is really China exporting coal, isn't it? Or am I looking at that wrong? No, you're looking at it with clear eyes. You know, the reality is right now, obviously what's

20:28 happening with Russia and energy security and national security is becoming a top agenda item for good reason, because you can see how vulnerable countries are. I mean, Russia could not have

20:40 initiated this attack without this long plan of kind of making Europe and especially Germany and these other countries more dependent on their oil and gas resources. Right. And so all we would be

20:53 doing by going to this 100 renewable fantasy is shifting to China, because the numbers are actually deceiving and they're much worse than you just stated So about 80 of the solar panels. are made in

21:07 China, but when you actually start breaking down that the integral components to make it, like the solar ingots and solar wafers, the very energy intensive process to make polysilicon, it's almost

21:20 99 of those core components are made in China because they have very weak environmental regulations and labor regulations. 45 of all the solar grade polysilicon in the world is made with slave labor

21:34 in Jingjiang province So there are people call it forced labor, you can call it what you want. It's slavery when you don't have a choice whether you go to work and what factory you work and how long

21:44 you work and you're not getting paid a fair wage. And that's basically there's people and about over a million people in detention camps working in these factories that are making the solar grade

21:55 polysilicon. So 45 of that, but that gets blended with all of the other polysilicon. So you don't even know there's no real traceability for a solar panel to know is my

22:07 solar grade polysilicon coming from Xinjiang, or is it coming from another part of China or somewhere else? You don't really know because it's blended in. So you have slave labor, that helps

22:17 decrease the cost quite a bit. And then you have basically the Chinese government that has very consciously and strategically subsidized their industry to break the back of Europe and the US

22:31 manufacturing of solar panels. So in Europe, it's almost, I think it's completely gone I'm not aware of any significant solar manufacturing in Europe anymore. The United States has dropped off a

22:42 cliff. It's down to a trickle. We have a few, but almost all of the major capacity is now coming out of China. And to get around some of these tariffs and kind of forced labor issues, et cetera,

22:55 what China does is has agreements with operations in Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand to assemble the panels and ship them out from there to get around. tariffs and to get around some of these labor

23:09 issues. So the core components, the energy-intensive components that are made using cheap coal and slave labor in China are then getting assembled in Malaysian Vietnam and then shipped over to

23:20 Europe and the United States. So when we talk about energy security, this is incredibly dangerous. I mean, China is our number one strategic adversary in the world. They're much more powerful

23:31 than Russia And to put our entire energy system in the hands of China, they could overnight decide to flip a switch and stop supplying parts, materials, panels, and all the critical infrastructure

23:46 that's required would be put us in this terrible position, obviously. So I'm very concerned about that So you just gave some qualitative commentary around the economics and you alluded to the actual

24:03 dollars and cents. Let me get you to a pine on when you look at solar and wind and you look at the cost. If you're using construction costs from five years ago, coal prices have gone through the

24:20 roof. So you cannot project that going forward.

24:24 You alluded to this too, the components. I mean, just the precious metals, et cetera. If we're really gonna do this on a big scale, we're gonna have to go find more of that stuff And I don't

24:35 think that's gonna get cheaper over time. So those metals are gonna be more expensive. And I do believe that ultimately in the human experience, you have to be better to your people or else you get

24:51 into trouble. So as much as I agree that the slave labor in China, I do think over time that has to go away, either the people revolt or China does better the human rights front. to more integrate

25:06 them into the rest of society. So thinking the cost structure from past is gonna be the cost structure going forward. Now, look, I also believe technology improves over time and costs generally go

25:21 down. But I have a real struggle seeing that happen. Am I right about that or - You are. I mean, the 50 to 70 of the cost of a wind turbine solar panel send these commodities and energy embodied

25:35 cost. So that's, you know, what we're obviously in this inflationary environment with commodities, it's gonna get more expensive, not less. So we're already seeing some of the largest wind

25:46 manufacturers in the world. They're losing money on every wind turbine they sell. They're losing money. They have a negative profit margin. And so they're in real big trouble. The only reason

25:56 this industry exists is it's propped up by overly generous subsidies in tax credits Otherwise, it wouldn't exist. I mean, period, both on the Chinese side, 'cause they've subsidized to lower the

26:09 cost with not only the slave labor and cheap coal, but also the government just flooding their companies with money to drive down the cost. But also then all of the tax incentives and subsidies of

26:19 the Western governments, Europe and the United States as an example. Without that, this technology doesn't have lakes, it doesn't stand on its own. And if you then add in to overcome these

26:31 reliability and resilience issue by really providing durable, long-term battery storage, as we talked about earlier, it's just the physics and economics of this to way smart a not It's. sense no

26:41 make design an energy system. And

26:48 there's a huge opportunity cost to wasting all this money. Over the last decade or so, we've spent globally about 27 trillion on solar and wind installations and all of that money and all of that

27:02 time. We've moved the needle from 87 fossil fuels that is supplying the world to 84. So we've basically decreased 3. We've moved the needle over 10 years and this massive investment. And it's

27:19 barely even a dent. And it's creating all of these additional problems and not even delivering on the result. So that's, it's a huge problem - So Brian, when we look, I see this on Twitter, I

27:32 see this on LinkedIn, I see various places. You always see the chart. And on the left, you have the high energy costs and it's always oil, gas and coal. And then it always has on the right, the

27:45 low cost of solar and wind. And I don't need, I don't have the capability of getting in there and figuring out what they're including, what they're not included. But I hear things like, well,

27:57 the wind and solar guys don't

28:00 calculate decommissioning costs. And do you have any color on why we see these charts given what we've just been talking about? It's really comparing apples and oranges and it's an unfair comparison

28:15 to begin with. So people on Twitter are talking about different things and I don't want to group them all in one. Some people when they talk about they're talking about the cost of the panels,

28:26 they'll say, Oh look, the cost of the solar panels has gone down 80 over the last decade. Well, that's true It has for a lot of the reasons we talked about earlier. But that's not necessarily the

28:37 full cost of energy. And then there's other people on Twitter or other people citing reports they're talking about the levelized cost of energy, which does include land costs and does include

28:47 financing costs, etc. So you need to parse that first of all. What are they talking about the wind turbine in the panel? Are they talking about the actual cost of energy itself? But the reason

28:57 why it's apples and oranges is because you're comparing completely different products. Like if I was going to sell you a car. And I said, okay, car number one over here, you can drive it six to

29:08 eight hours a day, but no more. And you can only drive it during this time. So you can drive it from, you know, 9 am. to let's say 4 or 5 pm. Period. You can't drive at night, you can't pick

29:18 up, you know, go to dinner in it or on, you know, other times. And then the car two, you can drive whenever you want. It's 247, et cetera. Are those cars valued the same? Of course not. I

29:30 mean, they're providing different value And so it's this intermittency issue that is not being truly factored in when you look at those numbers. And the reality is anytime you see a solar and wind

29:40 farm, it's additional, it's not replacement. Germany is the best example of this because they've spent, as I alluded to earlier, more money, you know, this 550 billion investment. They went

29:54 from 11 solar and wind on the grid to 40, right? Since the year 2000 So they've done more than anyone in the planet on this, but. when you look at their fossil-fired generation, they still have

30:07 90 of the fossil-fired generation that they had 20 years ago. So you're not actually, even though they increased, they spent massive amount of money, increased all this capacity, they're not

30:18 actually shutting off various natural gas and coal power plants to be replaced by that. So that's the fundamental misconception that most people have is they think this is just, it's an apples are

30:32 orange, that they're comparing two similar things when they're not, they're completely different. And no matter how much wind and solar you put on the grid, you're still gonna have to have

30:42 consistent, reliable, base load power. Otherwise, you're gonna have outages and that's what we're starting to see. And in parts in Texas and California, where you're having large amounts of

30:52 intermittent renewables added, 'cause it's not just that you have all these additional costs, it's actually parasitic. They're like parasites on the grid because they're eroding the economics of

31:02 running a natural gas power plant or a whole power plant. So instead of running the coal plant or the natural gas plant, let's say at 65 of the time, now you're running it, let's say 30 of the

31:12 time or 40 of the time. So obviously, the economics of running that plant degrade, right? All these policies give this preferential treatment to these solar and wind resources and cannibalize the

31:25 economics of the durable base load power. So it has this unfortunate effect of making our stable resources less cost effective and adding more cost to the grid as it is. So do you see how they're

31:40 really not apples and apples as a comparison? So have you seen a good resource that tries to summarize and put it on an apples to apples basis? Because I don't think I've seen one. Well, the one

31:55 Twitter thread I put out that was all about the levelized cost of energy I. did a threat on this. This is even the criticism of that thread is well, you're comparing existing power plants to new

32:06 solar and wind farms, right? But that is the reality most times that we're looking at. We're not looking at kind of building from scratch in a greenfield development. Do we build a new coal plant

32:19 or do we build a new solar farm, right? We're talking about either extending the life or upgrading existing infrastructure or augmenting it and adding these additional solar and wind resources So

32:30 it's really not even a reasonable comparison because if you build that solar farm, you still need to operate a natural gas plant, the pipelines, all the maintenance, all the infrastructure that's

32:42 needed to operate that natural gas plant still has to be there. So you don't get rid of it. So it's really, you can't just do this very clean, easy comparison of, well, if I build a new natural

32:53 gas plant and I build a new solar farm because when you build the solar farm, you need both. You need the natural gas plant and the solar farm. you don't get rid of

33:04 that - Yeah, so if I were gonna oversimplify the Apple Stapples comparison, and I haven't done it, but I do need to go do that, I think it would be helpful, is solar renewables don't include

33:19 decommissioning costs and they don't include battery backup to deal with your reliability issue. I don't know how I would handle this on the oil and gas side, but I do think it's fair, CO2 does

33:33 have a cost and it's probably not being captured somehow. So there probably is something fair to do on that side in terms of at least quantifying it, 'cause that's really what we're talking about,

33:45 I think, to get it to Apple Stapples - You mentioned the decommissioning and this is actually a huge looming problem for the solar industry and wind industry because it's basically in danger of

33:56 sinking under its own waste. So solar panels, most of the estimates that a lot of the academic papers and this analysis that has been done are estimated that solar panels last about 30 years. But

34:10 that's not often the case. I mean, maybe in certain situations and ideal conditions, that's the case. But we see all the time where solar panels get replaced after 10 years, 15 years. And as the

34:21 economics have changed, any smart consumer would upgrade their panels anyway well before the end of their useful life It makes sense like in California, if you bought a solar system on your house in,

34:33 let's say 2011, by, you know, right about now, it makes sense to actually upgrade the panels in the system based upon the unit economics of the upgrade. So what's going to happen when you start

34:45 prematurely retiring all of these panels that they thought were going to last for 30 years, but are only last 10 years or 15 years are really at the most about 20 years is what we're looking at. But

34:55 it's somewhere in that range, right? very few of these systems are really going to be operational and functioning it high productivity for 30 years. So you have just this massive amount of waste

35:07 that has to be dealt with in recycling people so what are we going to recycle them? Well, recycling is incredibly expensive. These are huge big bulky things to dispose of and they have a lot of

35:17 toxic hazardous waste in them. Oftentimes local governments classify solar panels as hazardous waste, which means they have to be handled and shipped in a very specific way and they break easily so

35:30 the heavy metals could leach into groundwater and the landfills, all this kind of stuff. And so it's a huge problem. They're estimating that there'll be 78 million tons of solar panel waste by 2050,

35:42 which is to kind of make that clear. It's about 60 million Honda cars. So imagine a Honda car, like 60 million of those worth of solar panels are going to be thrown away So these things don't last

35:54 that long. Let's just be generous and say about 20 years or so plus or minus. There's all kinds of other issues that happen for underperformance of these panels. I was talking with a friend of mine

36:05 that used to work for SunPower, probably the highest quality foldable tag dealer out there that makes these panels. And they have huge amount of inverter failures, all kinds of workmanship issues,

36:17 the modeling on the shading. So a lot of these systems are underperforming, especially in the residential level And so they're not delivering the CO2 reduction and the savings that is promised

36:29 anyway due to a lot of these underperforming systems. And the fact that they're not going to last for 30 years, many of these systems are going to be trashed and aren't going to be recycled because

36:40 it costs like 20 to 30 to recycle one panel versus shipping it to a landfill is like 1 or 2. So what are you going to do unless you're required to? And if you're required to, that's going to be

36:51 passed on to the homeowner or to the business, And that's just going to escalate the cost and it's going to break the whole economics of doing it in the first place - Because when we do that apples

37:00 and apples comparison, if I'm taking the solar and wind side of it, it's yeah, you pay a lot upfront for these things, but then they quote unquote run for free, even though they don't run for

37:12 free. But the operating costs is relatively low. The flip side of that is 30 years is one thing, 15 years is totally different I mean, that's the amortization - So, you know, a great side story

37:26 on that, on this issue of solar panels not needing maintenance. So Greenpeace decided to create a solar village in India in 2014. And so they came in there and they subsidized and funded this solar

37:38 array in this village that didn't have electricity at the time, which is great, right? I mean, solar is a wonderful technology for rural applications where you don't have existing power lines

37:48 After three years, the system stopped working, and they weren't able to maintain it. In today, it's like a cow shed. So it's basically not being utilized in that village is hooked up now,

38:00 finally, after this since 2014, is hooked up to the electricity grid and they're using coal power. So that program and that installation lasted just a few years. I mean, these things, it's not

38:13 like you set it and forget it. There are maintenance issues required. In Verters Fail, workmanship issues, the panels need to be cleaned. There's all kinds of things that degrade performance that

38:23 need to be looked after. So if we think through this

38:30 CO2 parts per million have gone from 300 parts per million to call it 425 parts per million today, let's call that over the last 125 years. Temperature has risen 1 and 12 degrees in that time.

38:51 Correlation does not mean causation, but my position on this is we ignore that at our own peril. I mean,

39:01 I don't think it's proven science that you can pound the table and say we're causing this, but the eyeball test says we probably are. What's the solution to this? And you're in a great position

39:14 'cause you've kind of seen it all, if you will. What's our solution? I'm gonna make, I did this on a podcast about three weeks ago, the energy policy draft where the premise was you're the energy

39:27 czar of the world. What do you do? So Brian, you're in charge. We all do what you say. What's the solution to this - So the short quick answer from a technology standpoint is nuclear natural gas.

39:40 Natural gas has 50 of the CO2 emissions and 10 of the air pollutants of a coal plant. The world still is dominated by coal Toby Rice of UQTT did this great presentation showing how American-made

39:52 liquefied natural gas can reduce global emissions by helping facilitate this transition. So I think that's going to be absolutely necessary in terms of the natural evolution. And then nuclear power

40:05 is inevitable. It's had its setbacks. There's so much misunderstanding and fear about nuclear, totally unfounded. But those are the technologies that are going to get us there. And I believe,

40:19 barring the edge cases and exceptions, obviously in rural areas and in a village or something like that, where solar can be perfectly appropriate, every solar panel we're putting for an industrial

40:30 application in these large facilities and every wind turbine, it's a step backwards to meeting these goals.

40:37 Zooming out though, before we just talk just about CO2 and carbon, I think we've lost the threat a little bit about what are we trying to do. What is our goal? Like, the goal is to protect and

40:48 improve human lives. and to protect and improve our environment. That should be the goal. Somehow this whole discussion has been essentially focused on this one attribute that leads to that outcome.

40:60 So I think we have to zoom out, we have to look at, okay, given this is the goal, what are the metrics that we should be looking at? I think most of us would agree that that is a valuable goal -

41:12 Right - You know, overall. So if that's the goal, to have a goal, you need to know if you're making it or not, you need to have a metric, right? So I think we need to look at, well, what are

41:21 the core metrics around human flourishing? These are things like life span, economic productivity, health impacts, sanitation, water quality, habitat protection, you know, all of the, we can

41:34 quantify these things in very tangible metrics. Then we have to think about, well, what is gonna be most effective for us to hit these metrics and do the most good for the least amount of resources?

41:47 'Cause the other thing most of us can agree on is It's not like we have an unlimited amount of resources, right? The world has lots of problems. We have tremendous poverty. We have horrible

41:56 pollution in some places. We have all kinds of disease problems. You need, you can't just have this endless supply of money. So we have to be thoughtful and practical about how we deploy solutions

42:07 and how we use these resources. So if that's the case, I personally believe that this massive, this multi-trillion dollar investment in solar and wind is taking us away from meeting our CO2

42:19 reduction goals, right? Because it's an opportunity cost. I think there's, if we could do three things, we could solve this problem. One is have people understand how the energy system works,

42:31 at least at a high level. So there's this great book called How the World Works. It's a new book by Valkov Smill, who's a very science kind of detailed technical guy, but this book is a much more

42:43 lay person's book. And he just walks you through how energy works, how agriculture works, how steel, all these things. We need to educate people about the basic fundamentals of how these systems

42:53 work. The second is people need to understand opportunity costs, because all of these dollars flooding into solar and wind are dollars not going into nuclear power and not going into new efficient

43:04 natural gas plants. They're taking us away from the goal of reducing CO2. And then the third is understanding second order effects, because all of these systems that we're installing have massive

43:16 second order effects that most people aren't even thinking about. Like most people think when they buy a solar panel, they're not supporting slavery, right? They're not thinking they're buying a

43:24 solar, when they're supporting a solar farm, that they're cutting down a forest or taking over a pristine desert that had endangered turtles on it. I mean, there's all of these - The blunt nose

43:34 leopard lizard. It's a long story, I'll tell you over a beer sometime, but I'll just say this. The reason the blunt nose leopard lizard is almost extinct. is because it is the single dumbest

43:48 creature God has ever put on the face of this earth. But in need I digress - So all of this comes down to one issue, I think, and that is storytelling. That is what we need is more, we have the

44:01 technologies, these exist. We've had them for years. I mean, they're getting better all the time, but we have a narrative that's circulating and to the general public and has been adopted and is

44:11 kind of bored into the minds of so many people that fossil fuels are bad, that nuclear is dangerous, then natural gas is leading us in the wrong direction and that solar wind and electric vehicles

44:23 are the panacea. These are going to get us to the promised land. And anything else is a diversion from some meeting our goals and we've lost the narrative. I understand, I used to believe that

44:36 narrative. I invested 20 years of my life on that narrative. So I understand it. I'm not trying to vilify any person or I don't attack people, We have to actually reframe the conversation and tell

44:48 better stories. And my critique of the oil and gas industry would be, you have incredibly smart, talented scientists, geologists and technical engineers. And they've had their head down doing

44:58 amazing work, providing this energy that all of us benefit from and helping us flourish. But they've done a terrible job of telling the story about it. And so they've seeded the ground to the

45:09 competition and the competition is just walloping them I mean, go ask your average person on the street today. Our fossil fuels good or bad. Most people, I think, maybe with the exception of

45:21 certain areas in Houston are gonna say, yeah, fossil fuels are bad and they pollute too much and et cetera, et cetera - My three kids would say that. They have the greatest life on the planet

45:31 because of fossil fuels - They're ignoring all the benefits. It's not looking at the trade-offs. It's not looking at an honest kind of cost benefit analysis. 'Cause if you do, you would see very

45:42 quickly. that fossil fuels have been the greatest gift to human flourishing that more than anything, you know, three billion people. Fire and wheel. I mean, we're fossil fuels, fire wheel.

45:55 That's one, two, three in some way, shape or form, maybe throw in antibiotics. Yeah. And so we just have, we have to change that story. You know, people think, even like a simple example, I

46:06 was reading this morning about the embodied energy in chicken versus tomatoes Like you have all these vegetarian and vegans saying, oh, save the climate, go vegan, you know, eat vegetarian. But

46:18 the embodied diesel fuel in a tomato is more than a chicken. So you know, you're going to talk about CO2 emissions. Now obviously some cow and red meat, et cetera has higher emission, but they're

46:31 not always using that kind of nuance thinking to really weigh these costs and benefits And so we have to reframe the narrative, we have to tell a better story.

46:43 not always be on the defensive. Here's a couple examples on the positive side what the industry has done. I think in 2020,

46:53 when Inivex, Donhol Solutions, wanted to make a co-branded jacket to give his Christmas gifts to their staff with North Face, I'm sure you're aware of this, they basically said no and it became

47:02 this whole thing. And the industry got together, they put this great campaign with the billboards, thank you North Face for the puffer jackets and that all their products are made from oil and gas

47:12 And then Chris Wright of Liberty made this fantastic video that went semi-viral and educating people about the essential role of fossil fuels play and sustaining almost everything in your life from

47:22 your phone and computer to your lights to everything. And we need more of that. Toby Rice did it just recently with his unleashing LNG to help the transition from coal to natural gas and turning the

47:37 villain into a hero, right? We need to flip that, he's basically presenting USLNG is the hero in the story in helping us achieve these goals more effectively. So we need more storytelling like

47:48 that, but we can't just always be reactive. We can't wait for North Face or for everyone to basically try to make the industry go extinct or push them overseas before you come up with a compelling

48:01 narrative. We have to come up proactively to tell this story in a much more effective way So my soapbox is exactly what you're talking about. One, I think we've historically been, as you said,

48:18 run by a bunch of engineers and engineers can't tell stories, no offense to the engineers in the audience. Two, an interesting, I think, underappreciated dynamic is if you produced oil and gas,

48:32 you're a price taker, right? The world sets oil prices, the market sets it You are not Adidas saying, hey, here's why we're better than. Nike. So there's never been a culture of sales marketing,

48:47 my products better. I need to make the case. I need to make the narrative. I need to educate it. I've got a barrel. What's the price? 70. Great. I'll take it. So I think those are two big

48:58 issues I think another big issue that I've come to learn over time because folks will reach out through Twitter, link them, whatever and just say, Hey Chuck, can we talk? They're from the other

49:11 side, if you will. And they'll say, Hey, we can't even tell people that we're talking to you, but we just want to pick your brain. And what I have found is the other side, the environmental

49:23 side, a lot of the reason they act the way they act towards us is not because burning a hydrocarbons a problem. I have one who's become a pretty good friend.

49:36 She says, Man, I could not live without my suburban, to cart my six kids around. It's that they don't trust us as actors. And quite frankly, I agree with them. The oil and gas business, we've

49:50 hit things. We haven't been the best in terms of corporate citizens. We've gotten a lot better. But I do think it's that trust element 'cause this comes into my last point on the soapbox and you're

50:04 sitting there cringing, why did I bring this up? But the last thing on the soapbox is if you go look at psychological studies of how you change someone's mind, not an open mind, have a, but

50:19 discussion someone has a held belief. And we are, as you say, at the held belief, hydrocarbons are bad today by the vast population. There are only really three ways you can change somebody's

50:31 mind. One, you can ask them questions. That's why the Socratic method is actually a good method of teaching very hard to do in a broad-based marketing-type campaign. just asking questions. Two,

50:45 you can make them laugh. I have a held belief that young kids today are more liberal than normal young kids because of John Stewart. I mean, I watched The Daily Show every night. I thought he was

50:59 hysterical, even though I didn't agree with a lot of his politics, but he would, I'd go, okay, if John actually cares that much about it, I ought to think about it. And then the third thing is,

51:09 and this is what the environmentalists have done because they don't trust us as actors. Third thing you can do is scare people. And they've definitely used the scare tactics. The world's gonna end

51:19 in 10 years. We're all gonna die. That, you know, I know I'm somewhat unfairly categorizing the message, but that's been the underlying tone. And so I think as we try to sit here and tell these

51:34 stories, and I've killed a lot of brain cells on this, and I don't have the perfect answer to this, but definitely need to educate. just so people understand the trade-offs they're making. But

51:45 we've also got to do it outside the echo chamber 'cause we sit around in energy and anything that we think of as advocacy is great. We high five each other, but you get out into the real world and

51:57 it's like, Wow, it doesn't land a blow. It didn't change anyone's mind. What we use humor on is we're making fun of people 'cause their lights went off Well, that's not changing their hearts and

52:12 minds. And so I appreciate you saying all the stuff you've done as well as all your advocacy on Twitter 'cause you're right. If we don't recapture the narrative, people dying today because they

52:24 don't have cheap energy, I don't know why those deaths are somehow less important than 75 years from now, people dying because of climate change - Yeah, I agree with everything you said there. I

52:35 think we need to tap into people's desire to have a sense of purpose and meaning. 'Cause a lot of the people on the left side of the spectrum and environmentalists mindset, me used to be one of them.

52:46 So I really understand this and I have a lot of friends and colleagues that think this way. So I understand the mindset is that for the most part, obviously there's some bad actors out there, but

52:57 for the most part, it's coming from a desire to do good in the world, to make things better. They were wanting a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose. And so they're grabbing onto it, especially

53:07 as religion has kind of waned in the culture and a lot of people don't have a foundational set of values. A lot of people have gravitated, myself included to, environmentalism almost as religious

53:17 replacement. And the reason why is 'cause people are wanting a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning. And so they're deriving that from these beliefs and through these activities and actions. So

53:29 when you confront someone with facts that goes against their identity, that's a hard thing to do because they can't just admit I was wrong about that. fact, they have to potentially evaluate their

53:41 entire identity and how they never been able to do it. So it's very challenging. I went through this myself because I had a lot of invested 20 years of my life or more as having these beliefs and

53:55 seeing myself in a certain way. It's very painful. You also become, you lose friends, you lose respect from certain people that you used to know because they view you differently It's a much

54:07 bigger problem than just, Oh, well, here's the fact, you know, later. I mean, we know this in basic marketing, right? When Nike wants to advertise their apparel gear or tennis racket or

54:18 whatever, they don't bombard you with facts and say, Look how many athletes use Nike shirts and how many tennis players use Nike rackets and hats. They tell you a story. They talk about Serena

54:30 Williams or

54:33 these famous players that basically came from nothing of against all odds in

54:43 this hero story, right? And they sell it on emotion. That's how they're effectively sell. That's how Apple computers are. You don't buy Apple computer 'cause technically it's the best computer.

54:48 Oh, I'm sure some of your listeners will argue about that. You buy Apple because you're buying into the brand. It's an emotional buy - Steve Jobs was cool. I mean, let's just cut to the chase -

55:01 Yeah - But it's an emotional decision. It's about an identity I'm the kind of person that owns, has an iPhone or has a Mac. And it's more than just a business financial decision to buy that laptop

55:14 versus this one. So that's what we need to tap into because natural gas, oil, nuclear, there's a great story here 'cause these people, they wanna do good in the world. They wanna make it better.

55:26 So we can channel that energy and show them how they can have a much more effective outcome and impact by using these technologies properly And you're right, the industry also has to clean up its You

55:37 know, things are methane emissions, et cetera. It has to be vigilant. It can't take things for granted. But if the industry steps up and implements best practices, I think there's a strong case

55:47 that can be made to these people that say, Hey, we have this common goal again. Zooming out, what do we want? In proving people's lives, improving the environment. Here's a path to get there

55:58 most effectively. And here's the data that supports it. But here's the emotional story that helps you make that leap and make that transition. And right now it's all vitriol and it's this hero

56:08 villain contrast. We need to swap it because in my mind, oil and gas are the heroes of this story. But there's been painted as the villain. So it's time to switch that around. And it can be done

56:20 through effective story talk - I like it. So Brian, just so you know, the energy policy draft. Natural gas went number one and nuclear went number two in the draft. So great minds think alike One

56:36 funny story from that. podcast, you know David Ramsey would by any chance. Yeah, I was on his podcast section. Okay. So you know, DRW DRW drafted, I think second to last, he was drafting

56:48 number six. And he drafted Cole and he said, there's limited resources in the world. And I'm going to be the only one that's warm at the end of the day. So I'm taking goal. And the other, the

57:00 other point he made was, um, if I were running Canada right now, I'd put a coal plant on every block because I want global warming because with five degrees increase in temperature, Canada would

57:13 be bearable. So not necessarily an effective, uh, storytelling on the emotion, to create meaning, but, uh, he did have some real points in terms of what you said is just the human condition and

57:28 the power that energy has, uh, to deliver that. So in,

57:35 in coal, I mean, as much as it's often vilified, has a good story as well. I mean, look at India, look at in China. It's an amazing story of poverty reduction, right? We've gone from in 1980,

57:45 we had globally 42 people living in extreme poverty, to in a very short period of time to about 2020, that number is less than 10. And that was mostly due to coal and other fossil fuels helping to

57:58 elevate that prosperity and solve a lot of these critical issues I mean, about 10 million people die every year due to energy poverty, right? Of all the various types, whether it's breathing in

58:11 the wood smoke and that's a few million people and all the health impacts and water sanitation. When you add it all up, it's about 10 million people a year, right? That's a lot of people every

58:21 year. And coal actually is helping in that transition. So there's a good, you know, India is like 75 coal. We're not gonna get rid of coal tomorrow I mean, Western developed wealthier countries

58:32 should transition to cleaner being fuels like. nuclear and natural gas. But it's unrealistic and actually immoral, I would say, to be forcing the developing world, like in parts of India and

58:46 China and other developing countries to move, you know, basically you're subjecting them to energy poverty. And we're seeing this, the World Bank, the European Investment Bank is divesting from

58:57 thermal fossil fuel-fired financing for power plants in Africa and other places And to me, that is completely immoral, right? You are subjecting these people to energy poverty in a much less

59:12 quality of life and all the health and other implications that come across that so that you can virtue signal and feel good. You know, we can transition, but this is gonna take, you know, many

59:22 decades, not a single decade and certainly, you know, it's gonna be way beyond 2050 overall. But we have to have a sober, thoughtful, nuanced approach Otherwise, we're going to cause a terrible

59:34 amount of suffering. on the poorest among us and we can't do that - And I know China, China is our enemy. It is a fair point for China to say, you got your standard of living off the back of coal.

59:48 Why don't we get our shot at it? And my Marshall plan of energy has always been, if we really wanted to be serious about this, the United States will drag our younger brother Europe into the

1:00:01 conversation just 'cause they don't feel left out Needs to sit down with China and India and say, okay guys, no more coal plants going forward. We will finance natural gas infrastructure for you

1:00:13 guys. And you know, 'cause it is, I think it is a fair point for China and India to say that - Yeah, however though, China will never do that because they would be putting their energy security

1:00:26 and their national security in peril. They would be then beholden, just like, you know, you're looking in Germany is to Russia right now. China would never, they have massive coal resources.

1:00:35 They don't have a lot of natural gas resources. And they're not going to put their future and their energy security in the hands of the United States. So that's not going to be a viable solution for

1:00:45 getting them off coal. The viable solution is as fast as you can ramp their economic prosperity, they're going to start being cleaner using more mission control technologies, controlling their air

1:00:55 pollution. We've seen it in every country that's gone through this. And so to give you an idea of the scale of this, in the last 12 months, the amount of additional coal that the world is burnt

1:01:06 due to a lot of conflicting and converging things with the war in Ukraine, the supply shocks and spiking of natural gas, et cetera. We've burned 500 million additional tons of coal in the last 12

1:01:19 months. That wipes out 100 of all the wind and solar installed for the last 15 years in the United States from a missions profile perspective. So what we've just done in one year with Just this bump

1:01:31 is wiped out. all that investment. So that's what we're talking about. We're not going to be able to build wind and solar to get out of this quandary. India and China are the main players in this.

1:01:43 If you're gonna do anything about CO2 emissions and global warming, and there's no way they're gonna go to natural gas when they have all these coal resources for the reasons we just said. So the

1:01:52 best thing we can do is how they can accelerate their economic growth, because they'll naturally evolve, just like we did, just like Europe did, to cleaner burning fuels over time And anyone that

1:02:03 claimed, that's why China's not agreeing to these commitments until like 2060 or 2070. You know, these politicians are gonna be dead, but this happens - Jesus, I come much longer now. I have

1:02:13 given you five extra years. A little lead to that - That's my real criticism. All these climate pledges, and this goes for most politicians, maybe not all, but most. It's just a bunch of crap,

1:02:24 right? I mean, they're putting out these 2050 pledges. They're not gonna, there's no accountability for this. They're not gonna be around.

1:02:32 well before that. So it's great because it sounds great, you get votes and makes people excited. And they're just wanting to keep control and stay in office. And so these climate, you're already

1:02:43 seen, right after the COP26 conference, Japan, they're committed at the conference, then it's backing out. And they're actually, their fossil fuel consumption is not gonna plans to go up. So I

1:02:53 give zero weight to these climate pledges. And honestly, most of the countries don't matter anyway, 'cause it's really just about these really core, growing economies in Asia, specifically China

1:03:04 and India that make any difference. The rest of us are in the noise going to not It's. move the needle at all. If we stopped 100 of the CO2 emissions in the US and Europe is going to be so minor an

1:03:18 impact on the temperature that it might not even be measurable, right? It's gonna be totally inconsequential based upon the ramp that's happening - Yeah, unfortunately there's not a peeing in a

1:03:30 non-paying section of the swimming pool. Yeah, when the five-year-olds jump in, we just get it. So yeah - Exactly - Well, Brian, you were really cool to come on. This has been a lot of fun -

1:03:41 Yeah, thanks. I appreciate the invitation and the opportunity to chat - Absolutely, nice to meet you. And anytime you want to leave California, Texas will have you - Well, I'm looking forward to

1:03:52 visiting soon, hopefully. So I'll let you know when I'm coming in town -

1:03:58 Cool. We cover everything you think you want to cover - Yeah, I'm going to talk about a lot of stuff. And I found myself, I was rambling a little bit, a few sections there. Hopefully I wasn't

1:04:08 going on too, too long. I caught myself a couple of times like, oh, I should pause here - No, it's all good. The more and more I've done this, I've kind of figured out the better content is

1:04:23 where the guest is saying the unique stuff they know that nobody else knows. Like if you and I were sitting here talking about the Dallas Cowboy draft, Nobody would really give a shit. 'cause I

1:04:33 don't know you, but I don't have any unique insight into the Dallas Cowboy Draft. That being said, all this stuff you were talking about, you uniquely know that. And so listeners will find that

1:04:46 interesting - Well, I hope so - I hope so - So one question, when have you dropped podcasts? 'Cause one of the things I've kind of seen over time is if you're on a bunch of podcasts and a short

1:04:60 period, a lot of times they get fewer downloads. When was the last time you did one - You know, there's been a little gap, so I don't think that's gonna be an issue. I did DRW, but that was like

1:05:12 for your, that would be a crossover audience, but that was well over, I don't know, six, eight weeks ago even. So that's not gonna conflict. I did a nuclear podcast that was probably about

1:05:25 three to four weeks ago, but again, I think the audience is different So I don't think there's gonna be any. direct conflict with your audience - And I was saying that more for your benefit to make

1:05:38 sure it got heard, that you got heard as opposed to mine.

1:05:45 The last thing I'll tell you, and I didn't work this in just because it didn't fit, but have you heard what Joe Rogan said about nuclear power? If you heard this whole bit. So his whole shtick is,

1:05:58 and you know, 'cause Colin and I have said on the podcast multiple times, if we invented nuclear power yesterday, we would have the solution. Everybody would just be, Oh, great, we've solved it.

1:06:08 Let's move forward. Joe Rogan's take on that is, hey, three mile island, Chernobyl, the place in Japan, when were all these things built? Early 70s, right? Because did you ever drive a car

1:06:22 from the 70s? They sucked. We just couldn't manufacture anything back then. It's not nuclear that's the problem. It's the 70s We sucked in the 70s. Don't hold that against nuclear - Yeah, and

1:06:35 even those, I mean, obviously Chernobyl was all those accidents were significant, but Chernobyl being the most in the technology they were used. They didn't have any of the containment practices

1:06:45 in dome that they have today. And the other ones, I mean, it's often glossed over. Like no one died in Three Mile Island - Right - No one - Yeah - Right, there was one person that died from

1:06:56 radiation exposure in Fukushima, one, right - Right - There were deaths, but it was about the evacuation from basically the earthquake, the typhoon, et cetera. Chernobyl was about 200 people

1:07:11 that they're estimating, including not just the first responders and the firefighters, but in the thyroid cancer, but thyroid cancer is not, I mean, it's terrible. You never want anyone to have

1:07:21 thyroid cancer, but it's a very small percentage of those people are gonna have any lasting consequences. So it's really unfortunate narrative Yeah, no, it's a. So part of a winter storm, Yuri,

1:07:35 that almost shut down the grid and Texas, a nuclear plant went down. That was one of the dominoes that was falling. And it went down because a sensor broke that monitored the water temperature.

1:07:49 And I don't know if this story is true, but I really do hope it's true. They were saying, okay, we can't monitor the water temperature. We need to shut down. That's the regulation And there was

1:08:01 an engineer sitting there with his hand in the tank going, it's pretty freaking cold guys. I'll tell you what, he's up. Why are we shutting down during the biggest demand for power we've ever seen?

1:08:13 It's fine. I'll just sit here. I'll change hands periodically. And whenever warms up, I'll let you know. Yeah, sometimes we just overlook common sense. We really do. Well, nice to meet you

1:08:25 and love to get you to use some point. Come hang out with us. That would be great I certainly will let you know next time I head that way.