Podcasts about Northern Europe

Keith explores how investors can build legacy wealth by owning productive teak timber and the land beneath it in Panama.  Mike Cobb, an international real estate developer with over 30 years of experience, explains why Panama's legal framework, economic stability, and U.S. dollar economy make it a compelling destination for first-time offshore investors.  They discuss the long-term return profile of teak, its resilience as a hard asset, and common mistakes to avoid when investing internationally, along with how a sawmill and vertical integration can enhance returns.  This discussion highlights how the strategy can diversify both geography and asset type while also opening doors to potential residency options abroad. Episode Page: GetRichEducation.com/615 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments.  For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text  FAMILY to 66866  Unlock truly passive real estate income—visit flockhomes.com/GRE today to see if your properties qualify for a 721 exchange with Flock Homes. To get in the best physical, mental, and professional shape of your life, go to DanielThomasHind.com and apply for Daniel's intensive 1-on-1 coaching for burnt-out entrepreneurs and executives. Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review"  For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— GREletter.com  Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript:   Keith Weinhold  0:01   Welcome to GRE. I'm your host Keith Weinhold, talking about a legacy investment. You can profit from this real asset long term, and so can your heirs. It's real estate, but not housing. It's a diverse and more primitive use type. Today on Get Rich Education, you know. Mid South Homebuyers, that top Memphis turnkey provider. I learned that a secret weapon behind their explosive growth is more than just you buying their properties. It's an executive coach. For nine years now, their CEO Terry Kerr and his COO Pat Mix have worked privately with a coach who I've now learned from too, and he doesn't market himself online anywhere. After 12 years behind the scenes, that coach is now making himself available exclusively for GRE listeners. His name is Daniel Thomas Hind. If you're a hard-charging business owner or investor who wants to get in the best shape of your life, physically, mentally, and professionally, you can fill out an application for a free consult. This is private one-on-one coaching for those willing to go to uncommon lengths to achieve uncommon results. Thanks to Daniel, we've all become better leaders, better operators, and better men. It started by showing up for ourselves. Now it's your turn. Go to DanielThomashind.com. H-I-N-D. That's DanielThomashind.com, and sign up before spots fill.   Keith Weinhold  1:35   What if you got your mortgage loans the same place I get mine? You sure can at Ridge Lending Group NMLS 42056. They provided GRE listeners with more loans than anyone because Ridge specializes in investment property. They'll help you build a long-term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequal and even chat directly with President Caeli Ridge while it's on your mind. Start at ridgelendinggroup.com. That's ridgelendinggroup.com.   Speaker 1  2:08   You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education.   Keith Weinhold  2:24   Welcome to GRE from Cherokee, North Carolina, to Cherokee, Panama, and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Welcome back to another Wealth Building Week. You are inside Get Rich Education, where financially free beats debt free. Today we're talking about a specific investment that is not residential real estate. In fact, it's a more primordial real estate type that predates housing. So therefore, it is lucid and intelligible. It's easy to understand. Sort of the opposite of more arcane investment like AI data centers or crypto mining. At a basic level, this makes it easy to understand, and there aren't any tenants to manage. It also does not pay you as often as monthly, though as you'll learn, there is income and appreciation is expected too. Now, if you invest outside your home country, you're probably going to want to be diligent and select a politically stable nation that also has an operator based in that region with a fantastic track record. It helps if they're close to the U.S. This small nation is close to the U.S. in both geographic proximity and economically. Their currency is even the U.S. dollar. They even share an electrical system with the U.S. with the same outlets and voltages. As you might be guessing, where I'm talking about, this nation also has a consumer culture somewhat similar to the U.S. with American restaurants and retailers and brands in our real estate world. What we find more important is how, like the U.S. this nation is a constitutional presidential republic, and both nations have these separate executive, legislative, and judicial branches, the three branches and elected presidents, in these competitive multi-party elections, and both America and this place have market-oriented economies that emphasize private property and private enterprise, banking and financial services, international commerce, logistics, ports, and aviation.   Keith Weinhold  4:49   Today, we're talking about the opportunity for you to own productive timber and the land beneath it, teak hardwood trees in Panama, a quarter-acre parcel. At a time with your name on the deed, that direct ownership is known as fee simple ownership. I have directly invested in Panama for about 11 years myself. Now, though teak might be able to survive in a climate like Hawaii, mere survival is not enough in the U.S. It is difficult to impossible to find anywhere that grows productive plantation teak. Here in the late 2020s decade, we've had bouts of El Nino or La Nina a lot of places in the world, and that has severely weakened some crop types. Other providers of different agricultural investments are failing, but not this teak. They're resilient, and we'll get into the physical properties of the teak. I'm going to ask today's distinguished guest about that. He and his business partners planted some select timber 27 years ago, and they've been offering teak hardware parcels to investors for that long, 27 years, and for about the last 10 years to GRE investors. Hundreds of you are participating now, but I'm going to wait to ask more about the physical teak product itself until later, because what's more important are the investment environment and the strength of the operator. So learn more about this and what the projected investment returns are, and just how much exactly does a quarter-acre parcel of teak cost? If you so choose, owning teak parcels also gives you the option of residency status in Panama, and you only need to spend two days there every two years in part of maintaining that status, they offer investor in-person tours of the teak plantations too because they're proud of what they do there. I expect a fascinating discussion with Mike, the teak company co-founder and CEO. This week's guest has become a friend since I met him about 10 years ago. He co-founded and is CEO of an international real estate development company. He's got active projects throughout Central America. He's been doing it for more than 30 years, so he's not a tinkerer and not trying out project concepts.   Keith Weinhold  7:26   And at this point, he's helped thousands of North Americans diversify their portfolios through international real estate ownership and residency planning, and even lifestyle investing. And if you've ever attended an investment conference on something like global diversification. You might have seen him speak there because he's such a frequent, recognized speaker and voice, and he's authored multiple books on real estate, financial freedom, expat living, and just unlocking a better lifestyle. Hey, welcome back onto the show, Mike Cobb.   Mike Cobb  7:59   Oh Keith, nice to be with you. And you're right. 10 years, we've enjoyed one another's company at many conferences. It's always great to be back with you virtually. I look forward to seeing you again personally one of these days as well. And yeah, thank you for the very kind words on the intro.   Keith Weinhold  8:14   Yeah, if I'm teetering on whether or not to attend a conference, I ask myself, is Mike going to be there? That's right.   Mike Cobb  8:20   We'll hang out,   Keith Weinhold  8:22   100% And you know, Mike, he's also an avid reader of GRE's "Don't Quit Your Daydream" newsletter. So then, clearly, he's even smarter than you've ever thought. You heard him on the show before, so you knew he was smart, but now he's even smarter than you ever knew since he's a reader. Tell us what you like about the newsletter.   Mike Cobb  8:40   You know, Keith. I gotta say, every issue that comes in, I read it. By the way, today's issue said read before Thursday, so you give me a couple days tomorrow at least to read it. Anyway, no, you know what? You are so powerfully succinct. The charts that you put in are wonderful. You were a geographer major, and and so spatial things are important. I also recognize. I love the charts. I love the graphs, and I hate to even say I love sort of the I hate to call it the trivial information, but you know enough data points that seem trivial when you put a theory around them actually become meaningful. And what you are able to do is you're able to connect dots that most people don't connect. That's the hallmark of genius, and I think you are a genius, by the way. And I think your newsletter shows that. And so, thanks for putting it out. Your readers are very, very fortunate to have you there, giving them the kinds of information that are super relevant in the marketplace at one level and on a specific level. But even more important, creating the theoretical constructs that allow them to understand the why of something's happening because you know if you understand the why of something you know it makes a lot more sense first of all but it also allows us to maybe forecast the next what coming down the pike and if we can be on the front edge of something or you know being able to look over the hill or around the bend that's. Powerful in the marketplace, and and you bring that power to your readers. Well done, man.   Keith Weinhold  10:04   Thanks. Yeah, it's not just what; it's why this matters. And that was an incredibly kind thing to say. I write every word of the letter myself, and you, the listener, you can get the letter free now@greletter.com I send it about weekly, and Mike, I know that U.S. investors, including some Get Rich Education followers, they've been increasingly looking offshore for one thing many perceive the political risk has palpably higher than it was a few years ago. So, just broadly, tell us more about what North American investors seem to be looking for.   Mike Cobb  10:42   Sure, I summed it up earlier today. I was talking with a conference organizer, and he was really giving me the hard sell on why I should come to his conference. And it's probably not a good fit. But I heard myself say it for the first time. What we really help folks do in certain spheres, but maybe in this sphere, is help people get a good night's sleep, you know, peace of mind, right? And when you've got the political turmoil, you wrote an article or a newsletter a couple weeks ago, and it was about inflation, the kinds of things that were happening, and it was so spot on. And I think your readers, and not just your readers, but people who are tuned into what's really happening from a political standpoint, a financial standpoint. There is no way you can print this much money. There's no way you can have these kinds of things going on all the time that create a huge run-up of debt, right? And it's not even the debt; it's the implications of the debt. What's going to happen next? How's this thing going to unwind, right? And so when you have all of this stuff going on. You have people who are really, really worried about their future. It's a financial future. I say there are two train wrecks. There's a train wreck of debt, which is what I just talked about, and there's a train wreck of freedom. And that train wreck of freedom is really, in some ways, a result of the train wreck of debt. But when you've got a train wreck or two train wrecks happening, we really have three choices. We can ride it out, right? Take the ride and go for the crash, right? We can do something about it, but we really have to do something about it before. I'm going to mix a metaphor here, but if you know a hurricane's coming in three or four days, you don't wait till the wind's blowing 150 miles an hour to put up the plywood, right? You get out there while the sun's still shining. You put up the plywood, and then when the hurricane hits, like you got plywood over the windows, and you can ride out the storm. And this is where I think so many people are today. They're recognizing this hurricane is coming. The problem is, is that I don't think people always know where to go get plywood, right? What do I do? How do I protect myself and my assets, right?   Mike Cobb  12:38   And what this conversation right here is about is here's one kind of plywood you can put up on your window and the diversification overseas the diversification internationally into a hard asset that is not really inflation proof because I'm not sure there is such a thing but largely inflation proof or a big a great hedge against inflation real stuff hard assets real estate timber commodity right this is. what so many people are now looking at, and then the other piece of it is you can layer in a residency, which starts to give you that political plan B. You've got an economic plan B, kind of the hedge against inflation, but you've got this residency component that gives you sort of a hedge against the political uncertainty, and 1000s of folks have moved in this direction. Several 100, I think it's about 600 folks now, have picked up the residency as part of their timber investment as well. So a lot of different things going on, but I think they do circle all the way back to this train wreck of debt and a train wreck of freedom, the political divisiveness kind of what's happening.   Keith Weinhold  13:40   Now, what if someone hasn't invested in a hard asset overseas before, Mike? I'm thinking some people might come ask you. You know, why would I do this? For example, I live in the United States, where we have a rule of law and stable, mature markets and high property ownership rights. So, why should I look to diversify internationally with hard assets,   Mike Cobb  14:01   yeah, I think there's a general answer, and then maybe a couple specific answers. Generally, you know, I would never bet against the U.S. the U.S. economy. We're the largest economy in the world. I would never bet against it, right? But I think that for prudence, we would all want to have at least another basket for a few of our eggs: 5% 10% 20% Pick. Pick a number that's comfortable, but have some of your investable net worth outside your home country. Like that's just prudent, right? Why would you have everything all in one basket? And so we see that as a general answer. Specifically, a country like Panama, where we do have artique plantations, they have public title escritora publica. It's fee simple title, but in the civil law, so it's called escritora publica. The rule of law is strong in Panama. And then the other thing about Panama that I absolutely love is you have the canal, and the canal provides both economic stability and political stability. On the economic side, it generates just. Under $5 billion a year of cash flow, year in year out, right? So just it's like an ATM machine for a country with a population of about 4 million people. Do the math on that; like that's a huge amount of money on a per capita basis, right?   Keith Weinhold  15:13   Narrow water passages have really been newsworthy for a long time now, too.   Mike Cobb  15:16   Well, they have, and just like the Strait of Hormuz, right? You know, people sometimes go. I hear it said, "Oh, the canal is a vital strategic U.S. interest. That is absolutely 100% correct. But if you're a country that produces any goods that ship, or you're a country that receives any goods by ship, that canal is a strategic interest to you, and by definition, that's every country in the world. Every country in the world wants that canal open and transiting, right? Because everybody either produces or receives or both, right? And so you've got the political stability element as well as the economic stability element. You've got the rule of law. Panama is a great, great place for that person who you mentioned who's never done an overseas investment, never gone offshore, right? What's an easy place to start? What's one of the safest places to start is Panama, and it's in this hemisphere too, so it's close. I mean, you can get there for three hours from Miami, three and a half hours from Houston. Flights all over to U.S. Canada. It's easy. So I think a lot of folks see Panama as a very, very easy way to make that first step overseas.   Keith Weinhold  16:25   I happen to know that you just flew in from Panama. You're in the United States today, but you're constantly going to Central America. You span time zones more often than almost anyone I know. You mentioned fee simple ownership in there. For those that don't know, I think of that as direct ownership, where you don't have some weird administrative government layer in there that can dilute your hard asset.   Mike Cobb  16:47   Right, you can own it in your own name, you can own it in a corporation, so it's easy to own it. But yeah, no layering, right? By the way, the Constitution treats owners who are Panamanian the same exact ways it treats all foreign owners, and actually, we do business all over Central America. The one thing that we look for is a a legal regime that protects foreigners and foreign investors the same as it does domestic. Panama does that.   Keith Weinhold  17:12   Yeah, so investing in hard asset in Panama is a bit like investing internationally with training wheels on, due to its close relationship with the United States bolstered by the Panama Canal, but yet if someone hasn't invested internationally first, there are still a few mistakes to avoid. Maybe things that one isn't aware of. Can you tell us more about that?    Mike Cobb  17:33   The biggest danger people have when they make their first foreign investment is what I call margarita madness, right? And a lot of times it happens. You're on vacation in Cancun. You're having the time of your life. You're you just went parasailing, whatever. You're walking down the beach, and some developer says, "Hey, come on up here and take a look at my condo project. You know, and we'll buy you dinner at Senior Frogs tonight. We'll give you a coupon or whatever, right?   Keith Weinhold  17:55   Right.   Mike Cobb  17:55   And a lot of people do that, and then later that night, that's Senior Frogs. They're celebrating the condo they just bought, right? I mean, it's not how we transact real estate in the U.S. and Canada. There's a due diligence process. There's a due diligence period. It takes weeks or months to transact on a property, not hours, right? And so the single biggest mistake is that, and the way that we really can resolve it. I mean, my book is all about this. In fact, you have a copy, and I think you've helped some of your your readers and listeners get copies as well. It's called "How to Buy Your Home Overseas and Get It Right the First Time, and it really boils down to three simple principles: buy what you see. Is it there? Right. Own community. Right. Make sure it's in a place where you have people around. Right? Because there are a lot of ghost towns out there, and then know the developer. Do your due diligence on the developer himself, right? So you've got these three principles, and if you follow those three principles, you could do a lot better. But I actually think there's even a better way, and it has to do with character. It has to do with us, and you know when we move to the developing world, anywhere outside of you know North America, Northern Europe, maybe Australia, New Zealand, right? We're moving from the land of seller beware, right? Think lemon laws, think Ralph Nader, think advocacy groups, you know, lots of laws and regulations that control the seller, to the world of buyer beware, where none of those laws exist, and so now you're on your own. And because we've been living and transacting our whole lives in a seller beware environment, in a bubble of protection, we're protected by the government, right? We think we are. We'll just say that anyway. But we're protected. We're in a bubble, and we move to the land of buyer beware.   Mike Cobb  19:38   The problem is we don't really know how to transact. We don't know the right questions to ask, and our single biggest advantage, our single biggest attribute or asset that we have, is actually humility, because we don't know what we don't know, and we have to forget what we think we know. Assumptions, right? We can't bring assumptions with us that hold true. Some do some. Don't right. If we approach a transaction overseas with humility, there are no dumb questions. I'm going to ask every question I can think of. I'm going to do as much research as I can within a limited period of time. I'm not going to not analysis to paralysis forever. I'm going to say, look, I'm going to spend the next 30 days. I'm going to do a ton of due diligence, and at the end of 30 days, if I like what I say, I'm going to transact, right? So you're you're not getting the deer in the headlights never to do something, right? But you know, several weeks, maybe a month or two, depending on what it is you're doing, is enough time to do really, really good due diligence. Ask all the questions you can think of, but approach it with humility. And when we do those things, we transact so much, so much better than if we just rush into it with Margarita Madness.   Keith Weinhold  20:44   Right? People get caught up in those emotions with Margarita Madness and end up with a timeshare that they can't get rid of, or something like that. You said something so interesting there, Mike. When you move from the developed world to the developing world, you move from a seller beware world, like with some of the things you have to be aware of, and like you need to give disclosures and such into a buyer beware world. I hadn't thought of it that way before.   Mike Cobb  21:08   Yeah, and really, a lot of my book and a lot of the presentations that I've given, you've seen me give over the years, really deal with what I call a change in thought process. Because mostly in presentations, right? My goal in a presentation is to help somebody change how they think, to take away the bubble and understand that they're on their own, right? It's not really their own. They have you, they have me, they have other resources, right? But they don't have this bubble of government or regulations or laws out there protecting them anymore. Now it's the individual, and as an individual, I don't want to be rugged individual. I want to find other people that can help me, right? But I have to do that as opposed to it's just there for me, right? So if I can help people change how they think, they will transact so much better. They'll make better investments. They'll make investments that work for them in ways that they want them to work for them, right? They'll achieve the goal or the dream in a much, much, much higher percentage of the cases,   Keith Weinhold  22:04   we're talking about investing antique tree hardwood plantations, principally in Panama, like you mentioned, and we're talking about one mindset about crossing borders with our investing, and another is oftentimes, at least for GRE listeners, we're crossing asset use type because we're so used to residential rental housing. So when you cross into agriculture or forestry, I guess as it is with teak, what are some of the bridges to cross there as we change use type?    Mike Cobb  22:35   The reason I love timber generally and teak specifically in Panama in this case is that most people, most people, and I hope that many of your readers aren't most people. Most investors look at 20-five years and they simply say themselves, "No way, no way. And I love that because right now teak timber is being cut down 10 to 12 times faster than anyone is replanting it. And the reason people don't replant it is because most average investors come along and say, "Oh, it's 25 years. I can't wait 25 years. Well, you know what? Good, because the folks who do decide to move ahead and plant the teak, what that means is the price of teak is very highly likely to continue to increase in value far beyond inflation. Teak wholesale teak prices have gone up five and a half percent a year on average for the last 50-three years. I think that number is going to increase largely because there's this huge psychological barrier. People think, "Oh, 20-five years, but back in 1990-eight I bought 100-acre cattle pasture in Panama, and we had a professional forestry company plant it and maintain it for the last now 27 years, and two two and a half years ago, we started building a sawmill. Our sawmill is up and running. In fact, was just down there and brought back one of our first retail products. We're producing lumber. Our first container of lumber is headed out to a distributor in Colorado next week.   Keith Weinhold  23:56   Mike's holding up a nice cutting board for those in the audience.   Mike Cobb  24:00   Nice cutting board. We're setting up an e-commerce site. We're going business to consumer with cutting board, bath mat, shelving, tables, chairs. We have our whole production facility ramping up with new retail products. So the bottom line is, is yeah, man, it does take 25 years. You know.   Keith Weinhold  24:15   The lantation to harvest cycle. That's the 25 year span you're talking about here. The patience it takes for an investor.   Mike Cobb  24:21   Thank you. Yes, absolutely. And then, as we cut down this mature plantation that we we are now harvesting right now, it gets replanted, and the next 25 year harvest. I'm 61 Maybe I'll make 86 I don't know. Maybe not. Right. But my kids probably will, and they'll get the big harvest in 25 years, and then it'll replant, and maybe they'll get a next one, or maybe it'll be the grandkids, right? And so what we found savvy investors, people who are really not your average bear, right? And they think to themselves, how can I create generational wealth stewardship? I have enough money coming in. I mean, Keith, that the I mean, you can own teak for 10 grand. You can. Own a quarter acre of teak. You own the land. You own the trees. 10 grand, like it's 9000 something or other, but 10 grand, right? I mean, the bottom line is it's such an affordable, easy investment, right? And it turns into well over $100,000 in today's numbers. Who knows what inflation? But in today's numbers, buying power, you know, 10,000 turns into 100,000 right? Over 20-five years, and so most people who do this recognize the fact that they might get the first harvest, but it's their kids, their grandkids, their great grandkids who are going to get this harvest every 20-five years thereafter. And so the 20-five year thing becomes a wonderful thing, not a bad thing. Right, it keeps many people out, which keeps the price of teak high and growing, which we like. But it also creates this cash flow period. People go, "Oh, it doesn't cash flow. I'm like, "Absolutely, it does. It cash flows phenomenally four times a century. Like you have an internal rate of return of almost 11% 10 point something, right? You have an internal rate of return of 11% and it cash flows four times a century. This is a phenomenal cash flow investment. You might get to see the first one or the second one, but you're probably not seeing three or four. But somebody else in your lineage, your family, your heirs will see it, and they will all be so happy you made that decision to own teak.   Keith Weinhold  26:22   We're talking about the ability for you to own teak parcels and the land beneath it, title in your own name, one quarter of an acre at a time. We're going to talk more about that with Mike when we come back. You're listening to Get Rich Education. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Flock Homes helps you retire from real estate and landlording, whether it's one problem property or your whole portfolio, through a 721 exchange, deferring your capital gains tax and depreciation recapture. It's a strategy long used by the ultra wealthy. Now mom and pop landlords can 721 their residential real estate. Request your initial valuation. See if your properties qualify at flockhomes.com/gre. That's flockehomes.com/gre.   Keith Weinhold  27:09   Let me ask you something: If you've worked hard to build wealth, is your money positioned to actually support your goals? A lot of accredited investors leave capital sitting in cash because it feels safe, but inflation and missed income opportunities can quietly erode its value. Freedom Family Investments offers freedom notes for investors seeking structured income backed by real estate. It's a straightforward approach built on real assets, not speculation. And full disclosure, I'm an investor myself. What I like is that their team walks you through how it all works, so you can decide if it aligns with your portfolio and income goals. Every investment carries risk, and nothing is guaranteed. But with a track record of consistent, on-time investor payouts, they built real credibility. Go to freedomfamilyinvestments.com to book a clarity call or text family to 66866 That's family to 66866.   Ken McElroy  28:12   This is Rich Dad advisor Ken McElroy. Listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold and don't quit your daydream.   Keith Weinhold  28:29   Welcome back to Get Rich Education. We're talking about international investing with teak tree plantations. This isn't something experimental. We're not talking about a tinkerer here. You have to be more careful when you go overseas, and we're talking about with the owner of an international company that's been doing this for 30 years, providing international investments. But the teak tree plantation, I think, began in 1998 or 1999 Is that right?   Mike Cobb  28:56   Yeah, 98 was the purchase of the property, and in the rainy season of 99 we planted the first 100 acres. Yep.   Keith Weinhold  29:03   Yeah. Well, talk to us more about that because you talked to us about how historically teak appreciates at about 5% per year. Tell us about how we get to that 11% internal rate of return.   Mike Cobb  29:15   Yeah. Sure. I mean, so two things. One, you've got the five and a half percent a year kind of calculated out over a very long period of time, 50-three years. So that's a pretty good statistical baseline. And then the fact that your trees actually physically grow, right? I mean, back in 2008 my joke is from 2008 to 2012 While the rest of us in real estate were hating life, my trees just simply kept growing, right? They just kept growing. And so what you start off with is about 100 maybe 110, I think, trees on a quarter acre, and in the end, after all the thinnings, you end up with somewhere between 22 and 25 trees per quarter acre, and each of those trees produces about 1.2 to 1.6 cubic meters of timber. For lumber, by the way, one of the things that we are working on, and you know, look at the end of the day, you had a walk, jog, run, right? And we're in the walk stage right now, but we're harvesting out all of the other elements of the teak tree. Your lumber piece, that just you know, sell it as boards, you know, one by fours, one by sixes, one by eights, whatever it is. Ship that stuff off. That's your 1.2 to 1.6 cubic meters, but you've got other pieces of the tree. You've got stuff that's too thin, the root stock that can be turned into other things, including cellucrete with cellulose, the ground up, the sawdust itself. We're saving all the sawdust. We're going to use that for cellulite. This is the math on this. Our investors get 80% of the net proceeds after processing costs, which is 15% my company gets 20% and so we, my company, has the highest incentive to drive the highest possible return to the investor possible because I get 20% of whatever I make for the investor, and so all the numbers we use are always the net investor number, right? And we have a business plan. All the numbers are laid out. It's all there, and it's pretty easy to see how the IRR gets up. About I think it's 10.6, 10.7% I can't remember. Just under 11% but it's all in the business plan, Keith. And again, this is part of that due diligence process, right? Get a copy of the business plan. Get on the phone with one of our property consultants maybe take a trip to Panama. I just got back. We just took a group of people. Yeah, we got tours. Yeah, we have tours, and so like as part of the due diligence process, come visit, come see the trees, come see the sawmill. Right? If it's something that makes sense from a an investment standpoint, yeah, the material, the facts, and the due diligence is all there for people to be able to pick up and do over a you know several week period, you know 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, whatever it is.   Keith Weinhold  31:47   Well, let's back up because seemingly you have had really good prescience. Because when we look at world agriculture today, we see some problems. Whether some people want to call it erratic weather, other want to call it climate change, and how that's really ravaged some crops and created disruptions in certain produce. Or with coffee, you know, we've also got a cattle production problem, for example. But you've chosen something that's been really resilient. Tell us more about that resilience and just why teak of all crops and forestry.   Mike Cobb  32:22   Let me start by saying, who was it? Yogi Berra says, you know, predicting is hard to do, especially when it's about the future or something. Exactly. Yeah. Right. But I mean, look, we're talking about the future. I mean, who the heck knows, right? I mean, that's what makes it investing rather than you know something else. But teak has been grown in plantations for almost 400 years. It was started by the British in India, what was then Burman throughout Southeast Asia. And one of the things the Brits did so so well is they documented everything. They had statisticians keeping track of altitude, rainfall, soil types, different stock. I mean, just anything and everything that you could imagine, and so by the early 1900s, some of the best books about teak and teak plantation farming was written. I actually read those books in order to interview the forestry management companies in Panama that we would hire them to manage our plantation, because I don't know anything about it, right? But I wanted to be prepared to do the interviews, so I was. What amazed and fascinated me was this incredible track record of production for almost 400 years of teak as a commodity in the marketplace, and then for the last 50 years, 53 years, you know, seeing what's happened to the price of teak in that time period. Look, nobody can predict the future. Weather patterns change. Teak as a species, is very very resilient. You know, the highest quality teak is grown in very specific conditions, and the Darien province of Panama has exactly the conditions to produce the highest quality teak. If those conditions change, maybe the quality of the teak goes down. Maybe the quality of the teak goes up a little bit. Who knows, right? I mean, at the end of the day, we don't control weather. We don't control weather patterns. We don't control the future. But that thing goes back to the idea of diversification. Like, how can we mitigate against the future? I think we do that by just simply broad diversification. And if we have all of our assets and stocks, bonds, and rental real estate, we're pretty concentrated, especially if it's all in the United States, right? Our home country, for example, and so some diversification into other sectors probably makes sense. I know it makes sense for me because I think that's my way of hedging against the uncertainties of the future.   Keith Weinhold  34:37   Let's talk about the tree quality and then the sawmill, because some people don't understand that teak really has pretty special properties that maple or black cherry or oak doesn't have.   Mike Cobb  34:47   It does. It has a very very high oil content and it has a hardness that makes it extremely resistant to rot fungus, which is why it's used in the marine environment. If you look at Chris Craft. Boats or yachts. You always hear about teak, teak, teak. Teak is used in maritime environments because it holds up to the salt water-not just salt water-holds up to water, but even more so, salt water and the environment, which makes it unique. And so, even if you don't treat teak, right, you just leave it out. It turns gray, but it doesn't rot. And then you can come back. You can you know sand it and varnish it and turn it into that beautiful, rich color. It's a beautiful, beautiful wood. It's funny because it has furniture uses, outdoor furniture, patio furniture, things like that, decking. But now they're starting to use it in hardwood floors. They're using it in gates and fences and soffit materials. Again, outdoor uses, but it can be used indoors as well for very very fine furniture, which at the end of the day teak has a panache that a lot of these other woods don't have. Mahogany is certainly one mahogany. The thing about mahogany is it's softer, right? It's a softer wood. It carries some qualities in terms of the grains and the colors that make it a a very favorable product for cabinetry and other things. We actually looked at mahogany as a species to possibly grow, and it's about a 30-five to 40-year harvest cycle. And so, when we looked at that, we said, you know, we can get our heads around 20-five, and and maybe someday we will do some mahogany plantations as well. But for now, we we started with teak. Actually, when we did the analysis, I don't know if this is still true, but 27, 28 years ago, when I did the initial research and analysis, it had the best time value of money ROI.   Keith Weinhold  36:29   Ah, that's the first time I learned that. And some of these durability properties that you've been talking about really go back to my earlier question about how some more sensitive crops have been ravaged lately.   Mike Cobb  36:39   Yeah, it holds up very very well to the environment. By the way, it'll do well in pretty much everything but desert, right? If it rains too much, the teak will grow faster. Actually, it produces a less quality. The quality of the teak is less. If so, if panama's rain system changed and it started raining every day of the year, where we have it growing, teak trees would grow wonderfully. The quality of the teak would be lower, right? Still, be teak. It'd still be valuable, but not as valuable in the marketplace. So.   Keith Weinhold  37:08   Now you've been here to talk about teak before, but something that you added a few years ago was a sawmill to really bring some vertical integration there. And now you're not at the mercy, perhaps, of the price that you would need to sell to a lumberyard. Can you tell us more about how it's going with that?   Mike Cobb  37:22   Yeah, absolutely. Well, the bottom line is, is because we earn 20% of what we earn for the investor on their wood, our goal is to sell it for as high a possible price. And lumber does pretty well. I mean, you can sell logs. Let's just start there. You can cut the trees and sell the logs for X. You can turn the logs into lumber and sell it for you know whatever 578 x. You can turn it into things like cutting board, chairs, tables, a finished product, and there you're talking about you know not just five to 7x You're talking about another 10x on top of that. So that's like 30x right? I mean it's an incredible difference. So from log to finished product, it's about a 30 times differential in what you ultimately achieve out of the marketplace for return. Right now it takes longer to do it. There's more work involved, but at the end of the day, because you make more of the investor, we make more. Some of the teak is going to go out as finished product, and so we get a blended return of lumber. We don't do logs, but we're going to have a blended return of lumber and finished product that will push that yield up maybe higher than we've anticipated, which would be just fine with everybody.    Keith Weinhold  38:30   ll right, all right. Diversifying your exit, then. Well, before we learn about how we can get a hold of more information, is there any last thing that we should know about investing across international lines into teak, maybe something that I didn't think about asking you, Mike.   Mike Cobb  38:45   The only thing there is two of the teak farm parcels can be bundled together for a half acre with about a I don't know it's a seven $8,000 legal piece government fees to achieve a residency. So you can actually become a resident of Panama with the teak investment, and again coming in on about 600 folks have done the residency as well as the investment and ownership of the teak farms. So I would say that's a piece. Again, if people aren't sleeping well at night, they're worried about inflation, they're worried about social disruption, polarization, where things are headed, right? And they like the idea of the teak investment, then you know it may make sense to just do the extra government legal piece and get the residency card. I mean, I just did that. By the way, I think you know I'm a I'm a Nicaraguan resident because I lived in Nicaragua for 14 years.   Keith Weinhold  39:34   Mike is holding up his Nicaraguan ID.   Mike Cobb  39:37   but last summer I also got my Panama residency card, so now I have, y'all. I'm a U.S. resident, U.S. citizen, and I'm also a Nicaraguan. I think I held up my West Virginia driver's license. Hold on, let me go. Here's my Nicaraguan residency. Sorry, I was like, yeah. Wait a minute. Anyway, so right. So I'm a U.S. citizen, and I'm a resident of both Nicaragua and Panama. And so, this is something that a lot of folks choose to do because of the uncertainty, the political and social uncertainty in their lives. The teak itself will help with the economic uncertainty, but the residency then helps with the other two elements.   Keith Weinhold  40:15   Next time you fly in and you're doing customs in Panama City or Managua, show them your West Virginia driver's license and see how they like it. See what happens.   Mike Cobb  40:22   It wouldn't work. Hahaha.   Keith Weinhold  40:25   Well, the prices are low. You do not need to be an accredited investor in order to do this. So there's really no qualification bar to clear. There's really no limit in the number of parcels that you can buy. Some people like to purchase 10 parcels, but you can buy as little as one, and tell us more about that price.   Mike Cobb  40:42   Yeah, in fact, we've introduced Keith since the last time we talked a financing program. Oh,   Keith Weinhold  40:48   I didn't know that yet.   Mike Cobb  40:49   We did. That's a fairly new. It's a this year thing, right? So the teak parcels, I think 9890 or something, whatever. Call it 10 grand. The parcels just under $10,000.   Keith Weinhold  40:59   Okay.   Mike Cobb  40:59   Yeah, and they have a down payment and a credit card thing. I think it stretches maybe over a year or two, so it's a fairly short period. Let's people who don't have the entire 10,000 upfront who want the teak investment to be able to acquire it. And if they're doing the residency piece, the residency piece can only begin after the teak farm piece is acquired, right? But it can also lead to the residency piece over time. So yeah, and then there are some discounts on three of them and 10 of them. So we have a lot of people that actually end up getting them for. And and here's a really cool thing because it's titled in your own name, it can also be titled in a child's name or a grandchild's name. And so we have a lot of people that actually acquire them and they don't take ownership. They put it in their kid's name or their grand name. Yeah, so it's a wonderful way to move that asset already right out of the gates into the next generation or the next generation.   Keith Weinhold  41:52   So we're talking about diversifying at least twice, both internationally and then in a different asset type as well. This has been fascinating to learn about, Mike. It's just fascinating alone, I think, to learn about the geography and the teak itself. And like we touched on earlier, they do organize tours. Any reputable provider should do that. They're proud of what they offer there. Tours in the Darien province of Panama, in this case, to see your teak tree parcels. It's a really approachable price. If you want to learn more and get a report and perhaps purchase some parcels, Mike's one of our GRE marketplace providers. You can visit gremarketplace.com/teak or talk to your GRE investment coach. Mike has been fascinating as always. It's been great having you back on the show.   Mike Cobb  42:40   Nice to be here. Thank you, Keith.   Keith Weinhold  42:48   Teak is one of the more durable crops that there is. The demand for teak hardwood is substantial, and it's really growing. They have also had the same tree manager for all 27 years since the teak was planted, some real continuity there. The name of the manager is Heyo Forestall. There's a little to manage with the teak hardwood trees, like performing thinnings, and those thinnings do give investors like you intermittent income. So you're not waiting for absolutely everything for 25 years, but the income from the thinning is really small. Most of the return takes place in that 25 years, and it's interesting to me to see the profile of the GRE investor in teak because it attracts young investors, and maybe that's because the cost of entry is so low. It also attracts older investors because they more often have an eye toward passing along something productive to their heirs that is going to outlive them. A lot of them don't want to give their heirs money because money can be spent on fleeting trivialities. Also, the older a person is, they just have an easier time visualizing the fact of 25 years and knowing that it really will pass by. And yes, in-person tours are offered there in the Darien province of Panama, and there were 13 to 14 attendees on a recent tour. They do need to limit the group size, and the tours are for you, whether you're an existing investor or not. If you're just checking it out, that's for you too. If you believe that you want to attend a tour and you don't want to buy, I understand that you can get your money back from the tour.   Keith Weinhold  44:35   The next tour is in September. Each quarter-acre newborn teak parcel costs $9,680 $9,680 and over 20-five years, it's projected to produce about 110k in today's dollars. And yes, now with financing, we've talked about this investment on GRE before, but it's the first time where they now have financing in place, so you don't even need. 9680 to get started. Also, retirement funds might be eligible for use here. And really, when you think about the long-term horizon of this investment, retirement funds make sense. If this is potentially interesting to you, get a hold of the report that goes into the details and shows you some projections and more. You can do so by either contacting your GRE investment coach or visit gremarketplace.com/teek. Money may not grow on trees, but sometimes trees grow into money. Until next time, keep growing your means and maybe a few trees. You could visit gremarketplace.com/teak. Until next week, I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.   Speaker 1  45:53   Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal, or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively.    Keith Weinhold  46:21   The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building. getricheduceducation.com  

Today's brief looks ahead to three future-planning cruise stories. Semester at Sea opened applications for its 104-day 2027 voyage aboard the World Odyssey, sailing September 9, 2027 from Ijmuiden, Netherlands and ending in Thailand in late December, with calls in Portugal, Morocco, Brazil, St. Helena, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong. Uniworld Boutique River Cruises added a complimentary pre- or post-cruise hotel stay to select 2027 Europe river itineraries on the Danube and Douro, bookable through August 31, 2026. And Ponant Explorations opened bookings for more than 150 Europe cruises running October 2027 through November 2028 across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Islands and Northern Europe.

– World News Briefing– Persecution in China– United States Independence Day Celebrations Sweep the Nation– Chinese Foreign Minister Visit Meets with Peaceful Protests in Northern Europe– Triumphant Conclusion of Shen Yun World Tour in Canada To provide feedback on this podcast, please email us at feedback@minghuiradio.org

In this episode of The International Risk Podcast, Dominic Bowen speaks with Dr Duncan Depledge about climate change and its growing impact on the world's militaries.This conversation looks at the geopolitics of the Arctic, the role of energy and logistics in warfare, and the growing competition across the High North, exploring how environmental change has become a central concern in defence planning. Duncan explains why it is a problem for militaries today rather than in the future, and why armed forces now treat a warming world as a practical operational challenge instead of a distant environmental one. The discussion examines whether militaries can decarbonise without compromising readiness and combat effectiveness, and why energy is both a necessity and a vulnerability in war. We also explore NATO's growing engagement with climate security, the rising competition for the critical minerals that green technologies depend on, and why the Arctic, the Baltic, and Northern Europe are now closely connected. The conversation explores:Whether the Arctic is the new central theatre of military strategyHow energy transitions create both resilience and vulnerabilityThe role of critical minerals and resource competition in future conflictWhy climate change is a present-day defence issue, not a future one Dr Duncan Depledge is Senior Lecturer in Geopolitics and Security at Loughborough University, specialising in climate security, defence policy, and Arctic geopolitics. He has advised the Ministry of Defence, NATO, and the European Commission, and previously served as Special Adviser to the House of Commons Defence Committee for its inquiry into UK defence policy in the Arctic.  The International Risk Podcast brings together global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers to explore the forces transforming our world — from geopolitical instability and organised crime to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare.  Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and one of Europe's leading experts on international risk and crisis management. He advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across Europe on how to prepare for uncertainty, navigate crises, and build strategic resilience in an increasingly volatile world. #Geopolitics #ClimateChange #Arctic #NATO #Defence #Military #HighNorth #Baltic #CriticalMinerals#EnergySecurity #China #ClimateSecurity #PoliticalRisk #InternationalRisk #StrategyTell us what you liked!

Today's Cruise News covers three stories shaping cruise choices for the seasons ahead. Margaritaville at Sea welcomed its one millionth guest on June 25 and is preparing to add a third ship, the Margaritaville at Sea Beachcomber, which will homeport at PortMiami beginning January 2027. MSC Cruises launched a July 4 sale offering 40 percent off, free sailings for children, and 250 dollars off U.S. homeport departures, with five sailings crossing the holiday out of Galveston, Seattle, Port Canaveral, and Miami. And MSC confirmed that MSC Meraviglia will homeport in Southampton for 21 cruises in 2028, expanding the line's UK presence with British Isles, Northern Europe, and Norwegian fjords itineraries.

Japan and the UK sign a $12 billion floating wind deal for 5.9 GW, Muehlhan buys Coverwind Solutions in Spain, and US grid reform stalls as MISO, PJM, and SPP fast-track fossil resources over wind. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, just back from Japan, in Matthew’s stead. Yolanda Padron is on special assignment. Well, Rosemary, what happened in Japan? You, you spent a, a week touring the country and looking at, uh, some energy projects. What did you learn?  Rosemary Barnes: I was there for just five, five nights. I went over for an, um, an, a systems engineering conference by INCOSE. I was doing a keynote presentation there, and also spoke to some of their… They’ve got this program, an international programming for, like, upcoming leaders. Um, and yeah, it was funny, the topic that I chose for [00:01:00] that was how you can combine an online presence with a serious professional career. Uh, ’cause, you know, like, a lot of the advice that you see about building an online presence is, like, totally compat- incompatible with being taken seriously in a, uh, you know, in a, a job like engineering. So that was pretty fun. And then on the last day, I was able to arrange a tour of a community. Like, we went to this village near Fukushima, and they, a- after the Fukushima, uh, or the earthquake that led to the Fukushima, uh, shutdown, that town, some power lines came down, and that, that village was without power for three months. So in response to that, they’re like, “Community power for the win.” At this place, like, there was literally steam coming out of the ground just, you know, randomly. It’s an onsen town, so you know, like, it’s, um, it’s built around tourism for these hot baths. And so they put in a couple of geothermal power plants, small ones, and, um, also some hydropower. But the reason why I wanted to go there was ’cause, you know, ge- [00:02:00]geothermal is such an obvious solution for Japan, for the energy, but they only have… .3% of their electricity is generated by geothermal currently. And, um, the main reason is that the onsen community in Japan is really opposed to it. They’ve lobbied against it because they’re worried that, um, you know, the onsen community needs heat to come out, hot water to come out of the ground, and geothermal takes hot water out of the ground, so they’re just worried that they’re incompatible. Um, now I think the science says that that’s not really true, that the, there isn’t, they’re not the same resource and that one doesn’t affect the other. The wastewater from the geothermal is not really wastewater. It’s just water that is not as hot as it was when it came up. Um, that goes down then into the onsen because it’s a good temperature. And then some of the even cooler water, about 21, 23 degrees, they’re using that to raise shrimp.  Allen Hall: Well, just speaking of Japan, uh, the Japanese Prime Minister was just in the UK and a [00:03:00] big deal was signed between Japan and United Kingdom, £9 billion worth, which is about 12 billion US dollars, uh, to work together on 5.9 gigawatts of floating wind capacity in the UK, uh, across three different projects. W- And the goal is to get some Japanese partners working with, uh, the UK companies involved with it to suss out how to do offshore wind. And as we all know, Japan is gonna, is headed there right now and is going to need a little bit of a primer on how to do it. And, and, well, they should because, uh, there’s been some really successful efforts in the UK and up north, Northern Europe. Uh, so the, the goal of this is to, to get these projects underway and, and Japan’s committing all this money, which, uh, sure, it’s a nice boost to the UK at the moment. It gets a little turbulent over there if you’ve been watching the news. Rosemary [00:04:00] Tying back to your experience in Japan recently, is there a big push internally? Do you see that internally in Japan for offshore wind and even offshore floating wind in Japan, or are they really prepping for it in country?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I’d say I went over there thinking that Japan was, like, oddly not bothered about wind energy of any flavor. Um, ’cause, you know, like onshore wind, they’ve got problems because the good ri- wind resource is right on the ridges, and they’re getting just hammered by lightning, and they’ve got some, like, really interesting responses to how they think that they should manage that, that in my opinion are just gonna kill… Like, you would never bother to have an onshore wind farm if these, um, regulations go ahead. So offshore they have got, um, a bit of a, an, a fixed bottom resource, and they’ve had several auction rounds geared towards that, but they’re, um, they haven’t gone well. I think that, like, people have promised… It, it’s a similar story to elsewhere in the world. Uh, people have, like, bid, like, [00:05:00] bid down to quite low prices and then not been able to deliver and pulled out. Mitsubishi just recently paid some, uh, some huge penalty for not going ahead with a, a project. There isn’t actually that much fixed bottom potential, um, for Japan. So, um, if they wanna have a significant amount of wind energy in their grid, which they should, because they’re, like, honestly it is probably the best or one of the couple of best options to provide big chunks of their electricity supply, then it needs to be floating. Um, and the government is actually pushing on that. I thought they weren’t doing too much, but I did talk to someone from this group, Flora. It is a group that is, um, that, that is trying to form partnerships with other countries, but also with manufacturers to try and set the framework up so that it can, like, l- lay the groundwork for commercialization to happen without being prescriptive. Flora is in there [00:06:00] to try and, you know, get the pieces in place to be able to allow, um, you know, uh, innovation and competition to happen much, much faster.  Allen Hall: What’s the most complicated piece technically that needs to be solved before Japan can really move forward? Is it the money piece? I mean, um, um, I said technically, but I feel like there’s always this money aspect to it, which is important, but on the technology side, i- is it, is there any technology that remains to be solved or is it just the will to do it? Rosemary Barnes: Basically in any engineering question, the answer is money, like, when you come down to it. So, like, it’s almost boring to say, yeah, it’s, it’s money. Floating offshore wind- Too hard, too niche for most people to consider it a mainstream thing, but it’s the legitimate, like, good contender for Japan. And you know what? That presents opportunity. It can actually be good to have to do something hard. Um, and Japan has the opportunity to be the [00:07:00] country where, you know, it’s the country where floating wind makes the most sense, so they can be the ones, if they’re smart about it, they can be the ones where the smart technologies evolve. There will at least be little niche things that they develop that will go on to succeed, and Japan really needs some new big manufacturing industry to… Like, their car industry is obviously, um, has been so important, the automotive manufacturing, and it’s declining now relative to China. Um, so I am also hopeful that they can, you know, build that up a bit more, but I don’t think that they’re going to, you know, topple China, so they are looking for new industries that will be the new… Yeah, do for them what the auto industry did from, yeah, from the ’70s onwards. Actually, you know, like, you can tie it back in a nice loop back to the oil crisis in the ’70s because that’s when the world was like, “Oh, actually small, efficient cars are, are quite a smart idea.” And Japan had those because it was so [00:08:00] constrained in terms of, you know, the oil that it could bring in was expensive. Not having their own fossil resources, they learned to conserve it, and then that turned out to be, you know, a big advantage for them.  Allen Hall: Using the 1970s gas price crisis and the movement towards Japanese cars in the United States, I mean, timing is everything. And Japan was in, uh, Honda in particular, was in the United States. I think Toyota was too, if I remember correctly. And when gas prices went through the roof, uh, yeah, they were very efficient cars, and not the most reliable at the moment, but obviously they’ve changed quite a bit and s- they are, particularly Honda and Toyota, are probably two of the more reliable blan- brands you can buy in the States today. So things change, right? You’re just getting your foot in the door. But that, that break point is, is coming pretty soon, I would say, in, in terms of timing. I- is it the right time for Japan to move into floating offshore? It’s gonna be within the next couple of years, don’t you think, Rosie?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, yeah, def- [00:09:00] definitely. Um, and yeah, I mean, I, it, it, it does frustrate me that any money is being spent on, um, hydrogen and ammonia imports. I, I would just rather that they just, just, just do the LNG until you figure out alternatives.  Allen Hall: That makes more sense.  Rosemary Barnes: Gas is better than… You know, like ammonia, for example, they’re locking in these coal power plants for additional years, making investments, um, you know, thinking that this is gonna be part of their future. They’re gonna end up burning coal, y- you know? At least gas is flexible enough to support renewables, and so it can, you know, like speed the rollout of, of wind. And they do have a fair bit of solar too in Japan. Floating solar, actually. They invented that there, and have actually got quite, quite a lot of it. Allen Hall: Gas is gonna be the answer short term. I think in the relationship between the United States and Japan has always been pretty solid since after World War II, that the United States would be willing partners to help Japan stand up any [00:10:00] technology, probably except for wind, which is just bizarre.  Rosemary Barnes: One of your maybe, um, unexpected legacies in Japan was, I say you, I mean the USA, they’ve got, um, not just the, like, silly American power plug design where you’ve got, like, the parallel pins that just fall out, so they’ve got that. But they also have 110 volts. Like, where else in the world is, is, thinks that’s a good idea? I had, um, my little travel steamer I’d taken over there, hairdryer, useless. Absolutely useless.  Allen Hall: That’s all you  Matthew Stead: need.  Rosemary Barnes: I blame you personally, Allen. I hold you personally responsible for my wrinkled clothing. Allen Hall: Delamination and bondline failures in blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. CIC NDT are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their nondestructive [00:11:00] test technology penetrates deep into blade materials to find voids and cracks traditional inspections completely miss. CIC NDT maps every critical defect, delivers actionable reports, and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cicndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions Well, the wind service sector is consolidating as we’ve all watched over the last year or two, and Mjolner Wind Service is one of the most aggressive buyers in the field. Uh, the Danish company has signed to acquire Cover Wind Solutions of Spain, including Cover Sun Solutions and Cover Renewable, with the deal expected to close by the end of June. This is Mjolner’s 11th acquisition since 2023. Now, Cover Wind fills a geographic gap for Mjolner. Uh, they are [00:12:00] involved in Spain and France and, uh, already involved in covering the Nordics a little bit and Central Europe. So there’s a, a big play here, and, and decommissioning is really the, the story underneath of th- all this is on the decommissioning side. Uh, Mjolner views turbine end-of-life services as an important future growth area, and obviously it is. Particularly in Spain, there’s been a lot of turbines that will be, uh, brought down and new turbines put up in the next 10 years, and Cover Wind gives Mjolner that ability. And as we all know, Mjolner just recently acquired our Canadian friends, AC883. So yeah, they have been on quite the spin recently, and that’s not even Yeah, sl- a sliver of what’s happening on the consolidation effort, uh, we didn’t talk about last week, but we, we should have, which was Fairwind acquiring Rope Partner in the States. And Rope Partner is a [00:13:00] longtime blade repair company and has been seen for years, as long as I can remember honestly, as the go-to blade experts on complex repairs. The, the, the most trained up, most, uh, technicians. On the technician side, they’re, they, they, they always had the highest trained people to what I remember, and also they would ta- tackle some of the most complex blade problems, and now they’re part of Fairwind. So there is movement, Matthew. A, a lot more than I thought there would be, because after COVID, a lot of companies just disappeared, but now it does seem like they’re being acquired, which is a, a good result, I guess. Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think there’s a strong opportunity, and, uh, and maybe the first point is that actually doing an M&A successfully is actually really hard. Um, I, I’ve personally been through two, uh, two M&As, um, and it is, it is really hard to get an M&A right. And so I think, you know, [00:14:00] these companies are showing that, um, you learn, you can do better, and, you know, it, it, it is hard. So congratulations for them for achieving that. Um, but the second part I think is also, you know, the industry maturing, uh, gaining scale is also, you know, necessary and, you know, driving, you know, but– and these people should be able to drive their, you know, better margins and so forth through, through scale. So, you know, I, I think, um, I think we had a bit of quick chat about it previously, but, um, this is, you know, a really good thing.  Allen Hall: Does it change the way we think about, uh, independent service providers?  Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think it’s gonna continue. I mean, this is not the end of it. Um, you know, in– even in what we do, there’s been various, you know, mergers and acquisitions in, in our space or, and investments, you know, cross-investments. So I, I just see this continuing. You know, like SkySpecs, um, you know, growing their, their CMS, um, business and their financial arm. Um, this is just gonna continue.  Allen Hall: [00:15:00] Is it more activity, uh, related to the availability of AI? It’s– It does seem like that’s playing into some of the decisions that are being made on the mergers and acquisition in renewables, is you start to see more discussion of, hey, we’re going to, uh, apply new techniques, machine learning. A lot of times you’ll see that, particularly in Europe, and then here in the States it’s almost all AI, where they’re- In order to have a, a very successful AI venture, you need to bring in the brainpower to feed that AI. And it does seem like there’s a lot of, of senior companies getting grabbed that could be part of a larger artificial intelligence play. Matthew Stead: You remind me of the, um, the dotcom boom and bust. I don’t know. I’m, I’m a little bit more skeptical, um, on the value actions on the, on the AI side of things.  Allen Hall: Really?  Matthew Stead: It certainly… It’s a massive, um, massive, um, transformation for the industry, and you know, I mean, what I, what, what we can all do is, is massive. [00:16:00] But, um, my former employer, a consulting business, bought a AI company for a billion dollars, and I, I, I just can’t see the value. So, um, anyway, I’m, I’m a bit skeptical about valuations and AI, and, um, I’m not as bullish as many people are.  Allen Hall: Really? Uh, because it does seem like more recently, the shift has been from the number of engineers you have in your company times a million dollars a head, that’s the way it was, uh, not that long ago. And now it does turn into how many senior people you have, that’s the multiplier. Because they’re trying to take that knowledge and all that data resource that you have, like at a, a rope partner where they’ve prepared really complex problems for years. That data set is amazing if you could get your fingers on it. Matthew Stead: Uh, yeah, yeah. And I, you know, I completely agree with you, but I just think it’s being oversold and overcooked and overbaked.  Allen Hall: I see it as growing instead of it declining. I don’t think it’s cooling off. I think we’re just at the precipice of [00:17:00] it. As we get better at using some of these AI tools, if we’re gonna build data centers in space, ’cause that’s gonna be the, the linchpin to all this, is if it gets to data centers in space, then we can leverage massive data sets and learn something from them and get better. Matthew Stead: I love change, but, um, I, I think that’s ri- ridiculous, to be honest. Um, I know we’ve spoken about it a number of times, but data centers in space just seems stupid to me. But, but yeah, going back to your original point, Alan, um, yeah, we, we can definitely do better with you know, more insights around our data and getting more out of our data. I mean, data is the new oil. You know, we’ve been saying that for the last 10 years. Um, yeah, I’m, I’m full, I’m fully on board with that, but I’m just a little bit of a, a little bit of a negative Nancy on, um, some of these overhype  Allen Hall: The line to connect a new wind project to the U.S. grid has been one of the industry’s most stubborn bottlenecks. And a new report from Advanced Energy [00:18:00] United drafted by Grid Strategies and the Brattle Group finds that seven major U.S. grid operators have made progress, at least some, on generator interconnection reform since FERC Order 2023 took effect. So that was the order that said we need to fix this interconnect queue problem. There are just too many people in line and we need to give some ranking to them. But progress on paper has not yet translated into projects moving through the queue faster. And a newer problem is emerging. Fast track interconnection policies at MISO, PJM, and SPP are directing limited system headroom towards, drum roll, utility-affiliated and fossil-heavy resources at the expense of independent clean energy developers. So the game is being rigged a little bit at the moment where they want to push forward [00:19:00] gas and other fossil fuel type generation in front of solar and wind, which are less costly and quicker to get up and running. This can’t last long, right? E- eventually the people living in, uh, MISO, PJM, and SPP are gonna have a little bit of a revolt on how power prices are gonna bump up accordingly. Matthew Stead: There’s been numerous other attempts to stifle wind, um, and those numerous other attempts, uh, tend to be overwritten and, uh, ruled out and thrown out in courts. And, um, it, it just seems like this is, well, if that didn’t work, we’ll, we’ll try something else.  Allen Hall: It’s a delay tactic.  Matthew Stead: Yeah, exactly. Then becomes another one. Well, you know, just wait for that one to be thrown out.  Allen Hall: I don’t know who said the famous saying, time is money, but time is money, and if you can [00:20:00] delay a project from happening, it costs money to sit on the sidelines and you’re, you’re paying interest on a loan or your investors are getting upset because they’re not seeing the returns. So the easy game in most situations like this is just to drive the schedule to the right, even if it’s by a couple of months. It’s expensive.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. If there’s two things I wish I didn’t know about, the first one is telecommunications and how rubbish it is. I just wish I didn’t, wish I didn’t know about telecommunications and the need for cellular and satellite and blah, blah, blah. I wish I didn’t know about that. The other one I wish I didn’t know about, because I wish it wasn’t a problem, was just grid connections and grid and networks.  Allen Hall: How bad it is.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. Rosie, if you can jump in, but you know, the New South Wales-South Australian Interconnector Grid, um, is just being energized now. I don’t know if it’s one or two years late. Um- And they’re trying to recover a billion dollars from the general [00:21:00] public  Rosemary Barnes: Is it only a billion? I thought it, when I looked at the stats, um, it was like near tripling of the, of the project cost  Matthew Stead: My understanding is the government screwed it up or the, uh, the, the operator screwed it up in terms of the transmission lines, and then want, wants to claim it back from the general public ’cause they, they screwed up. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It’s a weird thing ’cause you, you know, it’s like, I think it’s like this everywhere in the world that the, yeah, transmission companies or network companies, they get a regulated rate of return on their, on their project, so they invest. But then it’s like what’s that rate of return for? It’s not money for nothing, right? It’s for them, you know, like taking on some risk and y- you know, some sorts of things are, are built into that. Um, but it’s kind of like if you, you get that amount approved and then you stuff up your project management so it drags out and takes a lot of money, then you’re also gonna be compensated additionally for having done a bad job with your project [00:22:00] management. The kinds of delays are not unforeseeable. You know, like I’ve been a project manager in my past. You don’t just make your best case scenario and then kind of just assume that that’s, um, how much it will cost and not, y- you know, not come up with, um, contingency plans for if, uh, if predictable things happen. It’s not, there’s no like black swan events in here. It’s just, um, you know, things that happen every now and then. And it is one of those like key principles of like delivering on big projects, um, that Ben Slibbert, you know, in that, that book, um, How Big Things Get Done, he goes over and over and over again that you need to keep your project as short as possible ’cause the longer it is, the more like surprises you’ll have along the way and it will cost more. And I just don’t think that they, like they need to go read that book and then do a better job with their project planning and scenarios.  Allen Hall: You know who’s read that book clearly is, I, I’ll bring up the name, I know it’s gonna cause controversy, [00:23:00] Elon.  Rosemary Barnes: I knew you were gonna say that.  Allen Hall: Well, you know why I say that? Because there was an interview with him and I was skimming through some nonsense and then this little interview popped up, and he was talking about how quickly they need to get things rolling. And it’s like one year you’re getting s- first year you’re getting started, second year you’re just growing like crazy, and third year is infinity. And the only way that makes sense is that you’re just pouring every resource on this problem to shorten the schedule That’s it  Rosemary Barnes: You, you do. You have, you have to do the, the, you know, the parts of your project where surprises are gonna happen. Like you can… There are surprises and you know, don’t know what they, they are gonna be. However, you can guarantee that there will be surprises. Like you, you know going into a years-long project that several things are gonna happen that are, you know, gonna surprise you. And so you can plan for that. And the best planning that you can do is to make sure that once you start actually, you, you know, you’re gonna spend time in planning to, um, get it right, but once you actually start [00:24:00] the phase of your project where delays cost money, then you, you just plan as, do everything you can to keep that as short as possible, and it will be, it’ll be cheaper. Even if it sounds more expensive, oh, we’ve gotta, you know, pay crews overtime to, you know, do a night shift or something like that, um, you know, you need to consider, consider that because the, there will be delays and they cost. And it’s just, like at this point, maybe 100 years ago you could get away with being surprised by that, but y- you know, like project management has come far enough now that we know, we know this. It’s just basics.  Allen Hall: But infrastructure projects are tough because they don’t see the revenue on the backside that much sooner. It’s sort of a very flat 3% growth industry Unlike a lot of other things  Rosemary Barnes: But that’s it, like just to contain costs, you have to have a small project.  Allen Hall: They will, but they’ve always historically gotten paid for those overruns and continue to make their 3%. If there was some sort… Back to Matthew’s point, if there was some sort of, uh, [00:25:00] disincentive to be late, they would hurry, maybe even spend a little bit of their own money, but there would have to be some massive upside, which is the problem, right? They can’t have a massive upside.  Rosemary Barnes: But that’s why I’m s- I’m saying that the situation where costs blow out and they still get… Like, they get… They make more money by having done a bad job because it costs more. You know, like that is not, it’s not okay.  Allen Hall: Is it more money or just paying the bills that they had when they were building the thing?  Rosemary Barnes: It depends how much we let them get away with, but their preference is to make, just be, “Oh, we could never have known that there would be a flood.” It’s like, okay, yeah, like, was it like a 1 in 50 years flood or something? So yeah, on average, that particular event wasn’t gonna happen, but there’s probably, you know, like 20 different categories of 1 in 50 year things that could have happened, and if your project lasts for five years, you’re gonna have a few of those. You just are. You know? It’s not, it’s not bad luck. It’s just like, just normal statistical variation [00:26:00] that y- Yeah, so I, I, I really think it’s important to, um, to not just say, “Oh. Oh, poor you,” ’cause it’s, it always sounds like a sob story. “Oh, a flood. Who could have known?”  Allen Hall: Who could have known it rains?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I mean, I, I don’t know. Like, I often talk about how people don’t know what, um, engineers do, and we don’t get enough res- respect for, for what we do, and people don’t get it. But I think project managers is, if anything, worse. People don’t respect project management as a, um, a, I don’t know, is it a profession? But, you know, as an ex- ex- field of expertise and don’t, don’t know how much of a difference it makes to have a good one, and also that it is not that hard to be a good project manager. You just have to actually do it.  Matthew Stead: Can I make a suggestion that actually is the reverse of Darwin theory? We’ve got to come up with a name, but you know, the dumber you are, the more money you make. Also, for the record, um, Elon does have a lot of, um, philosophies and approaches which I do support. The efficiency, automating things after you’ve done them manually, only [00:27:00] doing the bare minimum, you know, all those sorts of things, doing things fast. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, there’s a lot, a lot of good product development and engineering that you can learn from Elon, and you do not have to take the, like, weird personal stuff along with it. You are able to pick and choose which aspects you, you learn from.  Allen Hall: But it does take a specific kind of person to weather that storm. If you wanna play in that sandbox, y- you better be ready because it’ll be hard and fast and not very forgiving. So you just have to know that going in, which can be great, and it can be a great experience, uh, for a lot of engineers, but it isn’t for everyone. As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an [00:28:00]industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit peswind.com today. In this quarter’s PES Wind magazine, which you can download at peswind.com, there’s an article from TGS 4C about vessel traffic around offshore wind farms. And this is kind of interesting bec- because they looked at some major wind farms off the coast of the UK, Dogger Bank B, Dogger Bank C, and Sofia. Uh, and obviously there’s a lot of marine traffic around those, but you don’t really realize the scale and how, uh, it affects the, the traffic on the water. The– When they had looked at these three wind farms, they realized, uh, they had about 860, uh, transits in 2021 around that area, and that went to more than 20,000 by [00:29:00] 2025. So the amount of economic and commercial activity that was happening around those wind farms exploded. And when you have that many ships in the water, it does change the nature of that area and also how other ships transit through the area, around that area. Uh, it’s an interesting piece because if you look at where those wind farms are, Matthew, th- that’s kind of a narrow stretch in there where there is a lot of ship traffic already. So y- you create this, uh, artificial barrier for some of the ship traffic, and you’re trying to understand how that is affecting the flow in and out. But I think the, the bigger piece is you can tell how well a development is progressing on offshore wind by looking at the ships and who’s where and when. Matthew Stead: I think this is interesting topic. Um, I, I– To be honest, I don’t completely get it. Can you explain it to me?  Allen Hall: If I’m an investor in these projects, if I’m the government, if [00:30:00] I’m the, uh, the power company that’s gonna handle the power coming off these sites, I really need to know how it’s going. And the way that I look at it in the States when I look at offshore projects here, ’cause we could do something very similar, who’s out on, on the ocean? Where are they? What tower are they at? How many towers are running? You can kinda tell that. Are they, are they just doing surveys or are they laying cable? Or is there something more active happening? And where are the ships from? Are they installation vessels? Are they driving monopiles? What’s going on out in the water? It does give you a really good sense where they are in the project. Kind of back to Rosemary’s point on, on managing big projects, you– schedule is everything You can tell. You can really tell.  Matthew Stead: Thinking about it a different way. So it’s a bit more like shadow monitoring. So it’s just a way of, it’s a way of independently monitoring and checking progress, making sure that there’s transparency as to what’s going on. Allen Hall: I think there’s a lot of [00:31:00] value in that data set. And as, uh, more operators start to use that data set and more companies start to use that data set globally, uh, they’re gonna be doing offshore projects, I think, differently in, in terms of efficiency. They- they’re learning as they go.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. Isn’t that one of the classical, um, sort of mathematical problems about how to optimize, uh, courier deliveries? We’ve gotta talk about quantum computing at some point too, so.  Allen Hall: We probably should. But for right now, I need everybody to go to peswind.com and download this quarter’s magazine. A lot of good articles in there, and it’s a great free download. Tons to learn. Go to peswind.com. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover this [00:32:00] show. For Matthew and Rosemary, I am Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Two episodes in one week?! Woohoo! Well, it’s mostly because I failed to put an episode out last week and I did, legit, feel bad about that. ICYMI – my Pop and I were at #HomebrewCon last week and discussed our thoughts on that trip here: https://youtu.be/s4ZyLDoHjdc Thank you so much for tuning into the Homebrew Happy Hour podcast!… THE home brew #podcast where we answer all of your home brewing questions and discuss anything related to craft beer! A NOT SO SUBTLE REMINDER: If you appreciate the things we do here at Homebrew Happy Hour, consider joining our Trub Club! — https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=21132635 On Today’s Show: Hop Extracts for Dry Hopping, Lager Yeast Kölsch, & Solving Low OG Problems Links for this episode:CellarScience Instant Water: https://morebeer.com/collections/cellarscience%C2%AE-instant-water%E2%84%A2?a_aid=HomebrewHappyHourCellarScience Premium Dry Yeast: https://morebeer.com/collections/cellarscience/index?a_aid=HomebrewHappyHourFLOTit 2.0: https://amzn.to/3NhMRnC We want to hear from you! If you have a question that you'd like us to discuss on a future episode, please click on the “Submit a Question” link at the top of our website or you can now call in your questions via our questions hotline @ 325-305-6107 and leave your message after the beep. Let us know what you think and enjoy the show! cheers, joshua ———————– Thank you to our show's sponsor, Hops Direct! Family owned and operated, Hops Direct provides a wide variety of hop selection and ships directly to your door. Learn more by visiting https://hopsdirect.com/?utm_source=HHH&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=HHH+link ————————– CellarScience offers premium dry yeast that delivers higher cell counts than typical liquid pitches, meaning you get a stronger, healthier fermentation without the hassle. The best part? You can Direct Pitch right into your wort—no starters, no waiting, just brewing. Whether you need their new ‘WEST COAST’ strain for a classic American IPA, or ‘JUNGLE’ for massive fruity esters, they've got your next batch covered. Join a recipe receiving tier of our Trub Club today because every kit that ships out now includes premium CellarScience Yeast, join at https://www.patreon.com/HomebrewHappyHour ————————– Real innovation in base malt doesn’t come around often. But as the world's largest producer of specialty malt, Viking is changing the game. Sourced strictly from local farmers in Northern Europe—where harsh winters naturally reduce the need for chemical pesticides—Viking delivers pristine, non-GMO barley that consistently wins gold medals at major pro and homebrew competitions. Because of direct importing, you get access to this exact same pro-level quality at a price that easily competes with standard, cheaper domestic malts.Join a recipe receiving tier of our Trub Club today because every kit that ships out now includes premium Viking Malt, join at https://www.patreon.com/HomebrewHappyHour————————– This episode is brought to you by Brewer’s Friend! Brewing beer at home isn't just about the ingredients, it's about precision. And that's where BrewersFriend.com comes in. Whether you're dialing in your very first recipe or perfecting your hundredth, Brewers Friend gives you the tools to brew with confidence. Their recipe builder, mash calculators, and water profile database helps take the guesswork out of the process so you can focus on what matters: making great beer! Plus, Brewers Friend isn't just software, it's a community of passionate homebrewers, sharing recipes, tips, and feedback. It's like having a brew club in your pocket! Head over to BrewersFriend.com today and take your homebrewing to the next level. Use promo code HAPPYHOUR to save 25% OFF premium memberships! That's BrewersFriend.com…because better brewing starts with better tools! Click here to use our link: https://bit.ly/3N7uQbm ————————– Become a Patron! Reminder that these episodes are ultimately made possible because of YOUR support. Consider becoming a member of our TRUB CLUB via our Patreon page and receive perks such as merch, exclusive group access and content, recipes, and some tiers even get monthly recipe kits mailed to you! https://www.patreon.com/HomebrewHappyHour #homebrewing #homebrewers #craftbeer #beer #brewing #craftbrew #kolsch #webcast #show

My Pop and I had the best trip ever this past week as we left Austin, Texas, flew into Nashville, and road tripped it out to Asheville via the beautiful Smokey Mountains so we could attend #HomebrewCon 2026. In today’s episode, we recap the entire trip. If you’re only interested in our thoughts on the conference, use the timestamp below! Otherwise… Thank you so much for tuning into the Homebrew Happy Hour podcast!… THE home brew #podcast where we answer all of your home brewing questions and discuss anything related to craft beer! A NOT SO SUBTLE REMINDER: If you appreciate the things we do here at Homebrew Happy Hour, consider joining our Trub Club! — https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=21132635 On Today’s Show: Our Trip to #HomebrewCon 2026 in Asheville, NCSkip to us actually talking about HomebrewCon00:21:29 minute mark Links for this episode:DIY SITY Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DIYSITYThe BruSho YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBruShoGolden Hive Mead YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@goldenhivemeadCityscape Brewing YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CityscapeBrewingAHA’s Website: https://homebrewersassociation.org/ We want to hear from you! If you have a question that you'd like us to discuss on a future episode, please click on the “Submit a Question” link at the top of our website or you can now call in your questions via our questions hotline @ 325-305-6107 and leave your message after the beep. Let us know what you think and enjoy the show! cheers, joshua ———————– Thank you to our show's sponsor, Hops Direct! Family owned and operated, Hops Direct provides a wide variety of hop selection and ships directly to your door. Learn more by visiting https://hopsdirect.com/?utm_source=HHH&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=HHH+link ————————– CellarScience offers premium dry yeast that delivers higher cell counts than typical liquid pitches, meaning you get a stronger, healthier fermentation without the hassle. The best part? You can Direct Pitch right into your wort—no starters, no waiting, just brewing. Whether you need their new ‘WEST COAST’ strain for a classic American IPA, or ‘JUNGLE’ for massive fruity esters, they've got your next batch covered. Join a recipe receiving tier of our Trub Club today because every kit that ships out now includes premium CellarScience Yeast, join at https://www.patreon.com/HomebrewHappyHour ————————– Real innovation in base malt doesn’t come around often. But as the world's largest producer of specialty malt, Viking is changing the game. Sourced strictly from local farmers in Northern Europe—where harsh winters naturally reduce the need for chemical pesticides—Viking delivers pristine, non-GMO barley that consistently wins gold medals at major pro and homebrew competitions. Because of direct importing, you get access to this exact same pro-level quality at a price that easily competes with standard, cheaper domestic malts.Join a recipe receiving tier of our Trub Club today because every kit that ships out now includes premium Viking Malt, join at https://www.patreon.com/HomebrewHappyHour————————– This episode is brought to you by Brewer’s Friend! Brewing beer at home isn't just about the ingredients, it's about precision. And that's where BrewersFriend.com comes in. Whether you're dialing in your very first recipe or perfecting your hundredth, Brewers Friend gives you the tools to brew with confidence. Their recipe builder, mash calculators, and water profile database helps take the guesswork out of the process so you can focus on what matters: making great beer! Plus, Brewers Friend isn't just software, it's a community of passionate homebrewers, sharing recipes, tips, and feedback. It's like having a brew club in your pocket! Head over to BrewersFriend.com today and take your homebrewing to the next level. Use promo code HAPPYHOUR to save 25% OFF premium memberships! That's BrewersFriend.com…because better brewing starts with better tools! Click here to use our link: https://bit.ly/3N7uQbm ————————– Become a Patron! Reminder that these episodes are ultimately made possible because of YOUR support. Consider becoming a member of our TRUB CLUB via our Patreon page and receive perks such as merch, exclusive group access and content, recipes, and some tiers even get monthly recipe kits mailed to you! https://www.patreon.com/HomebrewHappyHour #homebrewing #homebrewers #craftbeer #beer #brewing #craftbrew #kolsch #webcast #show

Episode Overview With Dr. Drew Lansdown away (and reportedly playing golf in Scotland), Brian and Nirav dive deep into the sports medicine landscape of the FIFA World Cup 2026. The episode covers the unique injury patterns in soccer, what surgeons and physicians need to understand about treating elite soccer players, and the injury prevention strategies that have strong data behind them. Key Topics Covered Why Soccer Produces High Rates of Non-Contact Injuries • ACL tears are the defining non-contact injury in soccer ◦ Soccer is the #1 sport played by female athletes — a population with well-established higher ACL tear rates ◦ Quick acceleration, deceleration, and multi-directional cutting movements are intrinsic to the sport ◦ Cognitive load during play (split-second decision-making while in the air) increases landing mechanics risk ◦ Classic example: the Wayne Rooney-type ACL — trying to split a defender while thinking two steps ahead leads to a mis-step • Game structure contributes to higher injury numbers ◦ 11 players per side means more total athletes on the field ◦ Longer games (90 minutes vs. basketball or football quarters) ◦ Combined effect: more player-hours of exposure per match Load Management & the World Cup Context • The World Cup paradox: fewer games per week than top club players are used to ◦ Example: Erling Haaland at Manchester City — club season + qualifiers + Champions League stacks up to more games/week than the World Cup ◦ The bigger concern is cumulative seasonal load, not the World Cup schedule itself • The World Cup is essentially an off-season add-on for elite players ◦ Comparable to asking NBA athletes to play the NBA season and then immediately compete in the Olympics • Travel is likely less of a factor than commonly assumed ◦ Elite clubs already manage heavy international travel; accommodations are often top-tier • Early specialization a compounding factor ◦ Many World Cup players have been playing since age 10–13 with little cross-sport participation, contributing to long-term cumulative load ◦ Notable exception: Norway — athletes there tend to play multiple sports ACL Surgery Considerations for Soccer Players • Graft selection overview ◦ Bone-Patellar Tendon-Bone (BPTB): traditional gold standard — caveat is patella fracture risk with early falls onto the knee ◦ Quad Tendon: recent JBJS meta-analysis showed marginal superiority, but difference not clinically significant; less commonly used in soccer given importance of quad strength ◦ Hamstring ± Lateral Extra-Articular Tenodesis (LAT): widely used in the Premier League, largely driven by the influence of Andy Williams' work with top clubs • Return-to-play timeline ◦ Uniformly 9–12 months regardless of graft choice ◦ Phased rehab: gait & coordination → strength → agility → sport-specific • Key structural differences in elite soccer player care ◦ Academy pipeline provides high-quality early medical access — similar to minor league baseball feeder systems ◦ Bracing: elite soccer players use far fewer post-op braces and return-to-sport braces vs. American football or basketball athletes ◦ Less post-op bracing is not associated with worse outcomes in this population Hamstring Injuries in Soccer • Most common injury type in soccer globally • High-speed sprinting is the primary mechanism ◦ The hamstring functions eccentrically during the late swing phase of sprinting — peak load occurs just before foot strike ◦ The injury moment is often at the point of maximal lengthening under force • Grading and prognosis ◦ Grade 1 (mild strain): return in 1–2 weeks ◦ Grade 2 (partial tear): 3–6 weeks depending on location and extent ◦ Grade 3 (complete rupture or proximal avulsion): potentially surgical; weeks to months • Proximal hamstring avulsions deserve specific attention ◦ Complete proximal avulsions (from the ischial tuberosity) are increasingly managed operatively in athletes ◦ Strong evidence for surgical repair in high-demand athletes who want to return to competitive sport • Nordic hamstring curls: effective prevention tool (discussed later in injury prevention section) Ankle Injuries • Lateral ankle sprains are extremely common in soccer ◦ The ATF (anterior talofibular ligament) is most commonly injured ◦ Mechanism: plantar flexion + inversion, often from landing on another player's foot • The challenge of ankle turf toe and high ankle sprains ◦ Syndesmotic (high ankle) injuries are less common but significantly longer recovery — 6–10+ weeks • World Cup-specific context: artificial turf used in some venues ◦ Turf surfaces change force transmission through the ankle and may increase injury risk compared to natural grass Muscle Cramps: A World Cup Staple • Muscle cramping is ubiquitous in World Cup play — especially in heat/humidity ◦ Not a sign of poor conditioning — even elite players cramp ◦ Players accustomed to cooler climates (Northern Europe) are particularly susceptible • Mechanism: combination of dehydration, electrolyte depletion, and neuromuscular fatigue • Cramping is functionally debilitating even though it is not a structural injury • Treatment/prevention: aggressive electrolyte repletion ◦ Pickle juice: Brian and Nirav discuss — strong evidence in ultra-endurance contexts; electrolyte content is the likely mechanism ◦ Bananas, electrolyte drinks, gels — all have their place ◦ "Anything that repletes electrolytes" will help — athlete preference matters The Theatrics — Diving, Flopping & the Mystery Spray • Why do elite athletes go down so dramatically? ◦ Getting kicked in an unprotected lower extremity genuinely hurts — shin guards are getting smaller (Nirav jokes about a quarter-sized guard his daughter uses) ◦ Foul strategy: falling can draw calls or stop play — gamesmanship is real • The spray — what is it? ◦ Best evidence: a topical cooling spray similar to Icy Hot or ethyl chloride ◦ Temporarily numbs the skin and superficial nerve endings at the contusion site ◦ Not a structural fix — purely symptomatic/neurological effect on acute pain ◦ The shock of impact often wears off naturally — the spray may assist with that transition Injury Prevention — What the Data Actually Shows • FIFA 11+ Program ◦ Developed by FIFA and extensively validated in peer-reviewed literature ◦ Components: core strengthening, glute/hamstring activation, agility drills ◦ Consistent reduction in injury rates by approximately 50% ◦ How to find it: search "FIFA 11+ injury prevention" (not just "FIFA 11" — that returns the video game) ◦ Widely implemented at elite levels; underutilized in youth soccer where practice time is dominated by skill drills and scrimmaging • Nordic Hamstring Curls ◦ Strong and growing evidence for both hamstring injury prevention AND ACL injury risk reduction ◦ Works by strengthening the hamstring eccentrically — addressing the exact mechanism of hamstring strains ◦ Compliance challenge: extraordinarily difficult to perform correctly, especially in older athletes ◦ Brian and Nirav agree: nearly impossible to complete a full set, especially with added weight • Implementation gap: what gets done vs. what works ◦ Youth coaches prioritize the "fun stuff" — drills, scrimmage — over warm-up protocols ◦ 15 minutes of evidence-based warm-up is a hard sell when kids are paying for club-level coaching and want to play Clinical Pearls for Practitioners • Graft selection for soccer players is multifactorial — consider quad strength demands and fall-on-knee risk before defaulting to BPTB • Post-op bracing: the European/Premier League model of minimal bracing in elite soccer players is worth considering — less may be more in highly compliant athletes • Proximal hamstring avulsions in competitive athletes warrant surgical consultation — non-operative outcomes in this population are often unsatisfactory • Cramping ≠ poor conditioning — counseling athletes and families on this distinction is important • FIFA 11+ should be part of any soccer athlete's injury prevention conversation, especially in youth programs • Nordic curls: prescribe them, warn patients they are difficult, and set realistic expectations Quotable Moments "The World Cup paradoxically is actually fewer games per week than a lot of these players are used to." — Dr. Feeley "It's like asking NBA athletes to come in, play the NBA season, and then play in the Olympics." — Dr. Feeley on cumulative load "Our youngest now uses something the size of a quarter... that's her shin guard." — Dr. Pandya on evolving shin guard trends "Nordic curls are almost impossible. That's why you see people doing them." — Dr. Feeley "Anything that repletes electrolytes is going to be beneficial." — Dr. Feeley on cramping management Please subscribe to our podcast at Apple PodcastsCheck out our website on Simplecast

Today's brief covers three stories shaping the cruise calendar. Fincantieri has delivered the LNG-ready Mein Schiff Flow, the ninth ship for TUI Cruises, from its Monfalcone yard, a roughly 160,000-gross-ton vessel carrying 3,984 guests, with a christening set for Trieste and a Mediterranean program based out of Palma de Mallorca. Norwegian Sun opens its 2026 Northern Europe season on seven-to-ten-night sailings between Copenhagen and Helsinki, one of its last seasons with Norwegian Cruise Line before the ship transfers to India-based Cordelia Cruises in 2027 to become Cordelia Sun. And Aroya, the only ship operated by Cruise Saudi, will screen 2026 FIFA World Cup matches across its seven-night Eastern Mediterranean cruises from Istanbul, with fan zones and themed activities on board through mid-September.

What happens when some of the world's leading spa and wellness executives gather to discuss the future of the industry? Recorded live at the W3Spa EMEA event in Portugal, Lisa Starr sits down with hospitality and wellness leaders Sharon Barcock, Louise Moore, Egle Ruksenaite, and Kerry Turpin to explore the trends, challenges, and opportunities shaping spa, wellness, longevity, and hospitality across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. From the rise of longevity-focused guest experiences and wellness-driven hotel design to the growing importance of natural resources, accessibility, and inclusive wellness, this conversation offers a fascinating look at where the industry is headed next. What You'll Learn • Why longevity has become one of the most important conversations in hospitality and wellness • How leading hotel brands are integrating sleep, movement, nutrition, and mindfulness into the guest journey • The role technology should play in spa and wellness experiences • Why education and staff training remain critical to successful wellness innovation • How natural resources such as thermal waters, climate therapy, and local healing traditions are shaping future     wellness destinations • Why the future of wellness may depend on making experiences more accessible to broader populations Episode Highlights  03:35 – Why longevity is becoming a defining trend in hospitality wellness 05:15 – Hilton's approach to meeting guests where they are on their wellness journey 07:30 – Wellness technology: What's worth investing in and what may be a passing trend? 10:25 – The ongoing challenge of training and educating wellness teams 15:45 – How geopolitical events are impacting tourism and hospitality across the Middle East 20:00 – Why today's travelers are seeking wellness, culture, and meaningful experiences 24:00 – Egle Ruksenaite's vision for wellness development beyond luxury 29:00 – Designing wellness destinations that serve people of all abilities 31:00 – Building one of Northern Europe's largest thermal wellness destinations 38:45 – Why the future of wellness is about creating healthier ways of living Meet the Guests Sharon Barcock is Director of Spa Operations for Hilton across the Middle East and Africa, overseeing a rapidly growing portfolio of luxury wellness destinations throughout the region. Louise Moore is Director of Spa Development and Operations for Hilton across Europe and brings extensive expertise in hospitality wellness, guest experience, and spa strategy. Egle Ruksenaite is Founder of E77 and one of Europe's most respected wellness consultants, known for developing innovative spa, medical wellness, thermal, and hospitality projects throughout Europe and beyond. Kerry Turpin is Global Head of Spa and Wellness for Corinthia Hotels, where she leads wellness strategy across a growing luxury hotel portfolio. In this conversation, she shares how Corinthia is integrating movement, mindfulness, recovery, and nourishment into the guest experience.  Tools, Frameworks, or Strategies Mentioned • Longevity and healthy aging • Wellness hospitality trends • Spa development and operations • Wellness tourism • Guest experience design • Natural healing traditions • Thermal wellness destinations • Accessibility and inclusive wellness • Hospitality leadership • Future wellness concepts Closing Insight "The future of wellness isn't just about building more luxury spaces. It's about creating healthier ways of living that are accessible, meaningful, and connected to the needs of real people." If you enjoyed this episode of StarrCast, subscribe and follow for more conversations with the leaders shaping the future of spa, wellness, hospitality, and longevity. Subscribe to StarrCast for more conversations with the innovators, operators, and thought leaders shaping the future of spa, wellness, hospitality, and longevity. Looking for expert advice in Spa Consulting, with live training and online learning? Spa Consulting: https://wynnebusiness.com/spa-management-consulting  Live Training: https://wynnebusiness.com/spa-management-courses/  Online Learning: https://wynnebusiness.com/spa-management-courses  Other Links: Connect with We Work Well: https://weworkwellevents.com/ Connect with Sharon Barcock: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharon-barcock-7379704/ Connect with Louise Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-moore-205ab46/ Connect with Egle Ruksenaite: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruksenaite-egle-00593174/ Connect with Kerry Turpin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-turpin-35572a180/ Follow Lisa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisastarrwynnebusiness  Listen or Watch StarrCast Podcast on Your Preferred Platform or YouTube: https://wynnebusiness.com/starrcast-podcast/  Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wynnebusiness/?ref=bookmarks  Join us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wynnebusiness/   

At Infosecurity Europe 2026, Matt Middleton-Leal, Regional Vice President for Qualys across Northern Europe, joins Sean Martin inside the Risk Operations Center built into the Qualys booth. The premise is blunt: cybersecurity has spent years getting good at measuring risk and almost no time getting good at fixing it. The Risk Operations Center, or ROC, is the Qualys answer to that imbalance. So what is a ROC? It is not a product. Middleton-Leal describes it as an operating model that pulls scattered risk signals together, ranks them by business context and financial impact, and drives them toward remediation. If a SOC looks in the rearview mirror at what already happened, the ROC looks through the windshield at the risk ahead. Why now? Because risk moves at machine speed. In an AI-driven world of frontier models and autonomous agents, Middleton-Leal argues that remediation tied to service desk tickets is already too slow. He shares what happens when a client prepares to deploy tens of thousands of new agents before anyone knows what those agents touch or where their data goes. The example that lands hardest is a number: 62 million risk findings across one client's combined tooling. Middleton-Leal walks through how threat intelligence, business context, and safe exploitability testing collapse that figure to under one percent of fixes that genuinely reduce loss. It is a concrete look at how to prioritize remediation instead of drowning in dashboards. There is a quieter shift underneath it all: financial risk quantification, long reserved for the largest banks, reaching companies that never had the analysts to build it. Working with Richard Seiersen, Chief Risk Technology Officer at Qualys, the company is building ways to answer questions like what a ransomware event would likely cost a business in your sector and region. Middleton-Leal closes with the one place every organization should start, whether they use Qualys or not. This is a Brand Spotlight. A Brand Spotlight is a ~15 minute conversation designed to explore the guest, their company, and what makes their approach unique. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/creation#spotlight GUESTMatt Middleton-Leal, Regional Vice President, Northern Europe, Qualys LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-middleton-leal-a56557/ RESOURCES Qualys: https://www.qualys.com ITSPmagazine Infosecurity Europe 2026 coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/infosecurity-europe-2026-infosec-london-cybersecurity-event-coverage Richard Seiersen, Chief Risk Technology Officer at Qualys, co-author of "How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk" Connect with Matt Middleton-Leal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-middleton-leal-a56557/ Are you interested in telling your story? ▶︎ Full Length Brand Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#full ▶︎ Brand Spotlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#spotlight ▶︎ Brand Highlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#highlight ▶︎ Get your own Brand Briefing at an upcoming event: https://www.studioc60.com/buy-brand-briefings KEYWORDS Matt Middleton-Leal, Qualys, Sean Martin, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, brand spotlight, Risk Operations Center, ROC, risk remediation, cyber risk quantification, exposure management, vulnerability management, Richard Seiersen, AI security risk, Infosecurity Europe 2026, machine speed remediation, security operations Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

First up on the podcast, producer Kevin McLean talks with Staff Writer Paul Voosen about the latest on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Researchers have long been concerned that global warming could cause a collapse in the AMOC, which would trigger dramatic cooling in Northern Europe. But recent data and models suggest the AMOC may be more resilient than previously thought. Next on the show, Scott Marek, assistant professor in the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine, talks with host Sarah Crespi about brainwide association studies (BWAS) for childhood brain development. BWAS measure structure and function across many brains and look for correlations between these measures and behavior, disease, and environment. In this work, Marek and colleagues focus on how socioeconomic factors—captured by zip code—are strongly correlated with certain brain differences in more than 4000 children ages 9.5 to 11. The work also suggests lack of sleep and excess screen time could mediate the influence of socioeconomic conditions on differences in brain structure and function. This week's episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Photo: P. Voosen/Science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s great to have Julia Herz from the American Homebrewers Association (https://homebrewersassociation.org/) back on the show this week to discuss the upcoming #HomebrewCon (NEXT WEEK, FYI, SO GO BUY YOUR TICKETS NOW). Personally, I have high expectations for this year’s show because, well, my Pop and I are going to be there! If you’re attending this year’s event, please hit me up. We’d love to meet you in person and grab a beer (or two, or three). With all of that being said, thanks for coming back for another episode of our Homebrew Happy Hour podcast!… THE home brew #podcast where we answer all of your home brewing questions and discuss anything related to craft beer! A NOT SO SUBTLE REMINDER: If you appreciate the things we do here at Homebrew Happy Hour, consider joining our Trub Club! — https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=21132635 On Today’s Show: The Road to HomebrewCon 2026 in Asheville w/ Julia Herz Links for this episode:CellarScience Instant Water: https://morebeer.com/collections/cellarscience%C2%AE-instant-water%E2%84%A2?a_aid=HomebrewHappyHourCellarScience Premium Dry Yeast: https://morebeer.com/collections/cellarscience/index?a_aid=HomebrewHappyHourVIKING MALT: https://morebeer.com/search?q=viking+maltFLOTit 2.0: https://amzn.to/3NhMRnC We want to hear from you! If you have a question that you'd like us to discuss on a future episode, please click on the “Submit a Question” link at the top of our website or you can now call in your questions via our questions hotline @ 325-305-6107 and leave your message after the beep. Let us know what you think and enjoy the show! cheers, joshua ———————– Thank you to our show's sponsor, Hops Direct! Family owned and operated, Hops Direct provides a wide variety of hop selection and ships directly to your door. Learn more by visiting https://hopsdirect.com/?utm_source=HHH&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=HHH+link ————————– CellarScience offers premium dry yeast that delivers higher cell counts than typical liquid pitches, meaning you get a stronger, healthier fermentation without the hassle. The best part? You can Direct Pitch right into your wort—no starters, no waiting, just brewing. Whether you need their new ‘WEST COAST’ strain for a classic American IPA, or ‘JUNGLE’ for massive fruity esters, they've got your next batch covered. Join a recipe receiving tier of our Trub Club today because every kit that ships out now includes premium CellarScience Yeast, join at https://www.patreon.com/HomebrewHappyHour ————————– Real innovation in base malt doesn’t come around often. But as the world's largest producer of specialty malt, Viking is changing the game. Sourced strictly from local farmers in Northern Europe—where harsh winters naturally reduce the need for chemical pesticides—Viking delivers pristine, non-GMO barley that consistently wins gold medals at major pro and homebrew competitions. Because of direct importing, you get access to this exact same pro-level quality at a price that easily competes with standard, cheaper domestic malts.Join a recipe receiving tier of our Trub Club today because every kit that ships out now includes premium Viking Malt, join at https://www.patreon.com/HomebrewHappyHour————————– This episode is brought to you by Brewer’s Friend! Brewing beer at home isn't just about the ingredients, it's about precision. And that's where BrewersFriend.com comes in. Whether you're dialing in your very first recipe or perfecting your hundredth, Brewers Friend gives you the tools to brew with confidence. Their recipe builder, mash calculators, and water profile database helps take the guesswork out of the process so you can focus on what matters: making great beer! Plus, Brewers Friend isn't just software, it's a community of passionate homebrewers, sharing recipes, tips, and feedback. It's like having a brew club in your pocket! Head over to BrewersFriend.com today and take your homebrewing to the next level. Use promo code HAPPYHOUR to save 25% OFF premium memberships! That's BrewersFriend.com…because better brewing starts with better tools! Click here to use our link: https://bit.ly/3N7uQbm ————————– Become a Patron! Reminder that these episodes are ultimately made possible because of YOUR support. Consider becoming a member of our TRUB CLUB via our Patreon page and receive perks such as merch, exclusive group access and content, recipes, and some tiers even get monthly recipe kits mailed to you! https://www.patreon.com/HomebrewHappyHour #homebrewing #homebrewers #craftbeer #beer #brewing #craftbrew #kolsch #webcast #show

First up on the podcast, producer Kevin McLean talks with Staff Writer Paul Voosen about the latest on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Researchers have long been concerned that global warming could cause a collapse in the AMOC, which would trigger dramatic cooling in Northern Europe. But recent data and models suggest the AMOC may be more resilient than previously thought. Next on the show, Scott Marek, assistant professor in the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine, talks with host Sarah Crespi about brainwide association studies (BWAS) for childhood brain development. BWAS measure structure and function across many brains and look for correlations between these measures and behavior, disease, and environment. In this work, Marek and colleagues focus on how socioeconomic factors—captured by zip code—are strongly correlated with certain brain differences in more than 4000 children ages 9.5 to 11. The work also suggests lack of sleep and excess screen time could mediate the influence of socioeconomic conditions on differences in brain structure and function. This week's episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Photo: P. Voosen/Science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After Oleksandr Usyk defeated Tyson Fury in late 2024 for the heavyweight championship, the Ukrainian boxer held up a sabre that once belonged to the 17th Century Ukrainian Cossack Hetman,  Ivan Mapeza, who this episode is dedicated to.    Usyk's fortitude spoke to Ukraine's resilience against a larger foe who initiated the type of vainglorious War Tolstoy condemns, with all of his soul, in W&P.Showcasing the weapon was a transcendent moment of Usyk bringing history to Life.  This ability is something Tolstoy shares given who often he reaches into the past to make literary points. In W&P, for example, Tolstoy cites the Classical world and more recent influences. He skillfully adapts the famous quote from Voltaire: "If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." The Frenchman also had a well-known correspondence with Catherine II, who some of W&P's characters look to as illustrative of an idealized past. Yet part of her reputation involves keeping so many under serfdom. Voltaire urged her to release her serfs.Quite forgotten is how Voltaire contributed to Mazepa becoming an icon of the Romantic age. Victor Hugo, Lord Byron & Franz List, also elevated Mazepa to a status Tolstoy himself briefly references in his 1857 work “Youth.” Tolstoy wrote that if he reaches the age of 70, he envisions that a lovely young woman could love him as easily as she could love….a Mazeppa.Mazepa was born to a noble Cossack family near Kyiv. His father was a town otaman (leader) and his mother instilled in her son a deep devotion to God and Cossack culture. Mazepa received a European education and served at the Polish royal court.  While quite young, he is said to have fallen in love with the wife of a Polish nobleman and to have been punished through being tied to a wild horse and carried back to the Land of the Cossacks, where he was adopted by one of their communities and rose to leader.  He was Hetman from 1687 – 1709.    Mazepa remains a key figure in Ukrainian-Russian relations given he decided to turn his allegiance to Sweden over the Czar during  the Great Northern War. This conflict was fought between Sweden and an anti-Swedish coalition led by Moscow. This intermittent affair lasted about 20 years and involved control over Northern Europe and the Baltics.  Sweden initially did well causing Peter to move his troops inward and draw Charles to invade.The conflict made its way to Mazepa's Cossacks,  whose status and allegiance greatly changed over the previous generation. Since 1654, many were uneasy allies with the Czar after withdrawing support for Poland.  They now felt subject to excessive demands for troops to be used in projects like building canals and fortresses, where they could be worked to sickness and death and used as proverbial “cannon fodder”Thus, in 1708, Mazepa aligned with Charles, giving him 5,000 Cossacks.  Mazepa felt he was choosing the lesser of two evils. Later that year, there was a race of belligerents to Mazepa's home city of Baturyn.  20,000 Russian soldiers commanded by Alexander Menshikov overwhelmed this military arsenal and food store. When the city fell, there was this infamous slaughter of the civilian population.   A number were tied to makeshift crosses or boards and floated down the local river.The next summer, on June  27, 1709, the armies faced off near Poltava, where Peter & Charles were on-hand directing troops. The Czar prevailed and this turn in history explains why Sweden never became a great power. This battle also had a major role in propelling Russia to their status. Yet that fire in the hearts of Ukrainians for independence was not extinguished over the next few centuries. Today, a Ukrainian state exists which exacts quite the toll on Russian aggression.  Ukrainians revere Mazepa for making the best choice he could.Mazepa was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church and Czar Peter also ordered all portraits of the man destroyed. Similarly, Tolstoy,  was separated from the Orthodox Church in 1901 through a Church Proclamation.  Tolstoy's writing on religion led to the church to declare him as a “false teacher” imbued with “intellectual pride.”   This leads me to the second reference to I have found from Tolstoy on Mazppa, which is the  book “Life of Tolstoy” by Tolstoy's long-time English friend and translator,  Alymer Maude.  Maude describes how Tolstoy studied the life of Mazepa upon a friendly wager as a law student.

Better late than never, amirite? Apologies for the delay in publishing this but I’m thrilled to have my favorite homebrewer on the planet, Ms Lorena Evans, back on the show (via last minute request ) to help take your questions and, mostly, to participate in a variety of shenanigans with me. I always have the best time when she’s around! Thank you so much for tuning into the Homebrew Happy Hour podcast!… THE home brew #podcast where we answer all of your home brewing questions and discuss anything related to craft beer! A NOT SO SUBTLE REMINDER: If you appreciate the things we do here at Homebrew Happy Hour, consider joining our Trub Club! — https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=21132635 On Today’s Show: Do You REALLY Need Rice Hulls? | SRM, Growler Fills, & Draft Sparkling Water  Links for this episode:CellarScience Instant Water: https://morebeer.com/collections/cellarscience%C2%AE-instant-water%E2%84%A2?a_aid=HomebrewHappyHourCellarScience Premium Dry Yeast: https://morebeer.com/collections/cellarscience/index?a_aid=HomebrewHappyHourFLOTit 2.0: https://amzn.to/3NhMRnC We want to hear from you! If you have a question that you'd like us to discuss on a future episode, please click on the “Submit a Question” link at the top of our website or you can now call in your questions via our questions hotline @ 325-305-6107 and leave your message after the beep. Let us know what you think and enjoy the show! cheers, joshua ———————– Thank you to our show's sponsor, Hops Direct! Family owned and operated, Hops Direct provides a wide variety of hop selection and ships directly to your door. Learn more by visiting https://hopsdirect.com/?utm_source=HHH&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=HHH+link ————————– CellarScience offers premium dry yeast that delivers higher cell counts than typical liquid pitches, meaning you get a stronger, healthier fermentation without the hassle. The best part? You can Direct Pitch right into your wort—no starters, no waiting, just brewing. Whether you need their new ‘WEST COAST’ strain for a classic American IPA, or ‘JUNGLE’ for massive fruity esters, they've got your next batch covered. Join a recipe receiving tier of our Trub Club today because every kit that ships out now includes premium CellarScience Yeast, join at https://www.patreon.com/HomebrewHappyHour ————————– Real innovation in base malt doesn’t come around often. But as the world's largest producer of specialty malt, Viking is changing the game. Sourced strictly from local farmers in Northern Europe—where harsh winters naturally reduce the need for chemical pesticides—Viking delivers pristine, non-GMO barley that consistently wins gold medals at major pro and homebrew competitions. Because of direct importing, you get access to this exact same pro-level quality at a price that easily competes with standard, cheaper domestic malts.Join a recipe receiving tier of our Trub Club today because every kit that ships out now includes premium Viking Malt, join at https://www.patreon.com/HomebrewHappyHour————————– This episode is brought to you by Brewer’s Friend! Brewing beer at home isn't just about the ingredients, it's about precision. And that's where BrewersFriend.com comes in. Whether you're dialing in your very first recipe or perfecting your hundredth, Brewers Friend gives you the tools to brew with confidence. Their recipe builder, mash calculators, and water profile database helps take the guesswork out of the process so you can focus on what matters: making great beer! Plus, Brewers Friend isn't just software, it's a community of passionate homebrewers, sharing recipes, tips, and feedback. It's like having a brew club in your pocket! Head over to BrewersFriend.com today and take your homebrewing to the next level. Use promo code HAPPYHOUR to save 25% OFF premium memberships! That's BrewersFriend.com…because better brewing starts with better tools! Click here to use our link: https://bit.ly/3N7uQbm ————————– Become a Patron! Reminder that these episodes are ultimately made possible because of YOUR support. Consider becoming a member of our TRUB CLUB via our Patreon page and receive perks such as merch, exclusive group access and content, recipes, and some tiers even get monthly recipe kits mailed to you! https://www.patreon.com/HomebrewHappyHour #homebrewing #homebrewers #craftbeer #beer #brewing #craftbrew #kolsch #webcast #show

At a workshop owned by Jiangsu Zhufeng Electromechanical Technology Co in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, a buyer evaluated an electric three-wheeler model destined for Indonesia, discussing modifications with engineers, who took detailed notes on the customer‘s requirements.在江苏省徐州市的江苏珠峰机电科技有限公司车间里，一位买家正在评估一款即将发往印度尼西亚的电动三轮车，并与工程师商讨改装方案，工程师们则认真记录着客户的每一项需求。As concerns over fuel costs and energy security grow globally, China's electric three-wheelers, widely used to transport people and goods, have seen a surge in demand in overseas markets in recent months.随着全球对燃料成本和能源安全的担忧日益加剧，近几个月来，中国用于客货运输的电动三轮车在海外市场需求激增。Jiangsu Zhufeng Electromechanical Technology Co produced nearly 30,000 units in 2025, with exports mainly destined for the United States, Turkiye, Cambodia and Indonesia. With its products having entered Brunei, Vietnam and Laos this year, the company expects its annual production to surpass 50,000 units.江苏珠峰机电科技有限公司2025年产量近3万辆，产品主要出口至美国、土耳其、柬埔寨和印度尼西亚。随着其产品今年进入文莱、越南和老挝市场，该公司预计年产量将突破5万辆。From January to April this year, exports of electric three-wheelers from Xuzhou reached 168 million yuan ($24.8 million), up 87.1 percent year-on-year, while exports of related parts and components totaled 115 million yuan, an increase of 29.6 percent from a year earlier, according to data from Xuzhou Customs.徐州海关数据显示，今年1至4月，徐州电动三轮车出口额达1.68亿元人民币，同比增长87.1%；相关零配件出口额达1.15亿元，同比增长29.6%。Dai Hui, deputy head of Xuzhou Customs, said that three-wheelers made in Xuzhou have reached more than 130 countries and regions.徐州海关副关长戴辉表示，徐州制造的电动三轮车已出口至130多个国家和地区。"In addition to emerging markets, the next frontier is North America, Western Europe and Northern Europe, where exporters are stepping up efforts to expand their presence," Dai said.戴辉说：“除了新兴市场，下一个前沿阵地是北美、西欧和北欧，出口商正在加大力度拓展这些地区的业务。”Ni Xiaofeng, president of Jiangsu Guowei Motorcycle Co, another three-wheeler manufacturer based in Wuxi, Jiangsu, said the growing appeal of low-cost, energy-efficient transportation solutions, coupled with stricter environmental regulations and efforts to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, have further boosted demand for Chinese three-wheelers in overseas markets.江苏国威摩托车有限公司总裁倪晓峰表示，低成本、高能效的交通解决方案吸引力不断提升，加之环保法规日益严格，以及各国努力减少对化石燃料的依赖，进一步提振了中国三轮车在海外市场的需求。"A standard electric three-wheeler and similar models typically sell for $3,000 to $6,000 in European and North American markets," he said.他说：“在欧洲和北美市场，一辆标准款电动三轮车及同类车型的售价通常在3000至6000美元之间。”Li Chengyun, head of the technical unit of Xuzhou Zhibo Locomotive Co in Xuzhou, said most electric three-wheelers on the market offer a driving range of 80 to 100 kilometers with standard lithium batteries. For an additional cost, customers can choose larger battery packs, which increase the range to as much as 180 to 220 kilometers.徐州智博机车有限公司技术部负责人李承运（音译）表示，市场上大多数电动三轮车标配锂电池的续航里程为80至100公里。客户可选择额外付费升级更大容量的电池包，将续航里程提升至180至220公里。"More overseas customers are demanding higher power output, prompting us to equip vehicles with larger motors," Li said. "Buyers are also requesting larger and wider tires and wheel rims, leading the company to adopt aluminum alloy wheels to better meet customers' specifications."李承运说：“越来越多的海外客户要求更高的动力输出，这促使我们为车辆配备更大功率的电机。买家还对更宽大的轮胎和轮辋提出了要求，这使得公司采用铝合金轮毂，以更好地满足客户的规格要求。”Zhang Hui, president of Xuzhou Zhibo Locomotive Co, said that in the long run, concerns over fuel supply disruptions and the search for affordable transportation alternatives will continue to drive the global adoption of electric three-wheelers.徐州智博机车有限公司总裁张辉表示，从长远来看，对燃油供应中断的担忧以及对经济型交通替代方案的探索，将持续推动电动三轮车在全球的普及。Beyond traditional cargo and passenger-carrying three-wheelers, manufacturers are increasingly branching into specialty and recreational vehicles to diversify their product offerings.除了传统的客货两用三轮车，制造商正越来越多地涉足特种车辆和休闲车辆领域，以实现产品线的多元化。He Shan, sales director at Jiangsu Shanming Shuixiu Environmental Protection Technology Co in Xuzhou, said the company's business originally focused on manufacturing cargo three-wheelers, but shifted toward developing and exporting specialty vehicles such as road sweepers after spotting growing demand in niche markets.江苏山明水秀环保科技有限公司销售总监贺珊表示，该公司原本以生产货运三轮车为主，但在发现利基市场需求不断增长后，转而开发和出口道路清扫车等特种车辆。"We are rolling out upgraded models that can sweep streets, wash surfaces, spray water mist and suppress dust. A single sweeper can do the work of more than a dozen people," He said.贺珊说：“我们正在推出能够清扫街道、清洗路面、喷雾降尘的升级版车型。一台清扫车能完成十几个人的工作量。”Household-use three-wheelers, passenger shuttles and leisure vehicles designed for tourist attractions and golf courses have become key growth segments for many traditional electric three-wheeler manufacturers, said Chen Bin, deputy director of the expert committee of the Beijing-based China Machinery Industry Federation.中国机械工业联合会专家委员会副主任陈斌表示，家用三轮车、景区摆渡车以及专为旅游景点和高尔夫球场设计的休闲车辆，已成为众多传统电动三轮车制造商的关键增长领域。Chen said the growing popularity of electric three-wheelers reflects a broader shift toward affordable, energy-efficient mobility solutions, creating new opportunities for Chinese manufacturers in global markets.陈斌指出，电动三轮车的日益普及，反映出全球交通出行正朝着经济型、高能效方向转变，这为中国制造商在全球市场创造了新的机遇。traction /ˈtrækʃən/吸引力，受欢迎程度environmental regulations /ɪnˌvaɪrənˈmentəl ˌreɡjʊˈleɪʃənz/环保法规lithium battery /ˈlɪθiəm ˈbætəri/锂电池driving range /ˈdraɪvɪŋ reɪndʒ/续航里程road sweeper /rəʊd ˈswiːpə/道路清扫车niche market /niːʃ ˈmɑːkɪt/利基市场，细分市场

Global late May harsh heat waves pop up: UK and Northern Europe, India, even Moscow. First science: Dr. Ben Poulter of Spark – methane emissions from wetlands passes human emissions and getting stronger. Another climate emergency. You need to hear this.

India's relations with Europe are often viewed through the lens of Brussels, Paris, Berlin, or London. But in recent years, India has also been deepening its ties with another important set of partners: the Nordic countries. Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Oslo for the third India-Nordic Summit, bringing together India and the five Nordic countries—Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark.  The agenda for the six countries was wide-ranging, covering trade, investment, green technology, maritime cooperation, the Arctic, and the Indo-Pacific.  The visit also marked the first official trip by an Indian prime minister to Norway in more than four decades. As a result of the summit, Norway and India have elevated their bilateral relationship with new agreements on climate, technology, science, and the blue economy. To discuss what all of this means for India, Norway, and the changing global order, Milan is joined this week by May-Elin Stener, who serves as Ambassador of Norway to India, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives. Prior to taking up this position, Ambassador Stener was the Deputy Director General of the Regional department in the foreign ministry. She has served as Norway's Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York as well as Deputy Head of the Norwegian Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa. She has been a member of the Norwegian Foreign Service since 1995. Milan and Ambassador Stener discuss the outcomes of the India-Nordic summit, the Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement (TEPA), and the green technology partnership Norway envisions with India. Plus, the two discussed linkages between the Arctic and the Indo-Pacific and the controversy over a Norwegian journalist's questioning of Indian officials in Oslo.  Episode notes: Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, “India-Norway Joint Statement,” May 18, 2026. Government of Sweden, “Joint Statement: 3rd India-Nordic Summit, Oslo, 19 May 2026,” May 19, 2026. Priyanka Shankar, “India-Nordic summit: Why is Modi wooing Northern Europe?” Al Jazeera, May 19, 2026. “The India-Nordic Summit: What It Is and What Has Now Been Set in Motion,” India's World, May 20, 2026. Suhasini Haidar, “Commitment to democracy makes India, Nordic nations natural partners: Modi,” Hindu, May 20, 2026.

Pope Leo meets his hometown mayor and discusses global issues and Chicago sports. Meanwhile, Madrid's “holy” metro train honors Pope Leo ahead of his upcoming visit. And, EWTN opens a new office in Sweden to expand Catholic reach across Northern Europe.

Pete Andrews from EchoBolt joins to discuss ultrasonic bolt inspection, the Bolt Wave device, and blade stud defect detection. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Pete Andrews: Pete, welcome to the program. Good to be back. Yeah. See you face to face. Yeah. Yes. This is wonderful. It’s a really great event to catch it with loads of the. UK innovation that are happening in the supply chain. So it’s, yeah, really nice to be here.  Allen Hall: This is really good to meet in person because we have seen a lot of bolt issues in the us, Canada, Australia, yeah. Uh, all around the world and every time bolt problems come up, I say, have you called Pete Andrews and Echo Bolt and gotten the kit to detect bolt issues? And then who’s Pete? Give me Pete’s phone number. Okay, sure. Uh, but now that we’re here in person, a lot has changed since we first talked to you probably two years ago.[00:01:00] You’re a bootstrap company based in the UK that has global presence, and I, I think it’s a good start to explain what the technology is and why Echo Bolt matters so much in today’s world.  Pete Andrews: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, as you said, we’re a uk, um, SME, there’s a team of 13 of us based here in the uk. Yeah. But we do deliver our services internationally, but really focused on Northern Europe. Yeah. But increasingly we’ve done more in the US and North America, a little bit in Canada. Um, but our big offering really is to help wind turbine operators and owners reduce the need to routinely retire in bulks. So we have a quick and simple inspection technology that people can deploy, find out the status of their bolt connections, and then. Reti them if necessary, but the vast majority of the time we find that they’re static and absolutely fine and can be left [00:02:00] alone. So it’s a real big efficiency boost for wind operators.  Joel Saxum: Well, you’re doing things by prescription now, right? Instead of just blanket cover, we’re gonna do all of this. It’s like, let’s work on the ones that actually need to be worked on. Let’s do the, the work that we actually need to, and instead of lugging, like we’re looking at the kit right here, and I can, you can hold the case in one hand, let alone the tools in a couple of fingers. As opposed to torque tensioning tools that are this big, they weigh a hundred kilos, and those come with all of their own problems. So I know that you guys said you’re, you’re focused here. You do a lot of work, um, in the offshore wind world as well. Yeah. I mean, offshore wind is where you add a zero right? To zeros. Yeah. Everything else is that much more complicated. It costs that much more. It’s you’re transitioning people offshore to the transition pieces. Like there’s so much more HSE risk, dollar risk, all of these different spend things. So. The Echo Bolt systems, these different tools that you have being developed and utilized here first make absolute sense, but now you guys are starting to go to onshore as well.  Pete Andrews: Yeah, that’s right. So I mean, as as you said, that there’s really [00:03:00] three main benefit areas we focus on. The first one is the health and safety of technicians, right? As you said, some of the fasteners used offshore now are up to MA hundred. So a hundred millimeter diameter bolts,  Joel Saxum: four inches for our American friends. Yeah, absolutely.  Pete Andrews: And they probably weigh. 30 kilos plus per bolt. Yeah. Um, so just the physical manual handling of that sort of equipment and the tightening equipment for those bolts is a huge risk for people. If you think 150 bolts lifting or maneuvering, the tooling around on on its own can cause all the problems. So as well as the inherent risk of the hydraulic kit failing. So occasionally we see catastrophic tool failure. Is, which have really high potential severity, you know, sort of tensioner heads ejecting or crush injuries from Tor. So that is really a key focus for our customers, just to [00:04:00] keep their teams safe, but also you have to be the cost effective and the the major cost benefit we allow is that we don’t have to revisit every bolt and every turbine like you’d have to do if you were retyping. So we believe there’s something of the order of a million pounds per installed gigawatt saving. By moving from a routine REIT uh, maintenance strategy to a focused condition based inspection, you significantly reduce the amount of intervention you make and keep your turbines running more and reduce the boots on the ground on the turbine. So three real kind of, um, key. Benefits for people adopting our technology  Allen Hall: because we routinely see tower bolts being reworked or retention depending on who the manufacturer is. And I’m watching this go on. I’m like, why are [00:05:00] we doing this? It seems, or the 10% rule, we’re tighten 10% this year, and they’ll come back and see how it’s going. That’s a little insane, right, because you’re just kind of. Tensioning bolts up to see if one of them has a problem and then you just do more of them and we’re wasting so much time because echo bolts figured this out years ago. You don’t need to do that. You can tell what the tension is in a bolt ultrasonically, which was the original technology, the first gen I’ll call it, uh, that you could tell the length of the bolt. If the length of the bolt is correct within certain parameters, you know that it is tension properly. If it’s shrunk, that probably means it’s not tensioned properly. That’s a huge advantage because you can’t physically see it. And I know I’ve seen technicians go, oh, I could take a hammer and I can tell you which ones are not tensioned properly wrong. Wrong. And I think that’s where equitable comes in because you’re actually applying a a lot of science simply [00:06:00] to a complex problem because the numbers are so big. Pete Andrews: Yeah, I mean that, that, that’s been the real. Driving force between our offering is to simplify it. So ultimately we’re based on a non-destructive testing technique. It’s an ultrasonic thickness checking technique, but when from the non-destructive testing background, it’s crack detection, people have time, they can be, it’s a very precision measurement. People have to be trained in the wind industry. We’re trying to inspect. A thousand, 2000 bolts a day at scale. It’s a completely different, um, ask of the technology and the way the technology has been developed historically has required too much technician expertise, too much configuration and set up time, and hasn’t delivered on the, on the speed that’s needed to be efficient in wind. And that’s where our bolt wave [00:07:00] unit we’ve, that we’ve developed over the last. 18 months, let’s say, where all of our focus has gone to make it as slick and as easy for a client technician to pick up with minimal training. It’s through an iOS interface. Everyone understands it intuitively. Um, it’s a bit like using the camera app on your phone. You know, you’re just hitting measure, measure, measure, measure, measure 10 seconds a bolt as you move the, um, ultrasonic transducer across, and then the data gets moved. Automatically to the cloud, to our bolt platform. And customers can view it in near real time. The engineer in the office can see the inspections happened. They can see if there are any anomalous bolts, and then there can be communication there and then whether an intervention is necessary. So it’s sort of really changed the way our customers think about managing their, um. They’re bolted joints.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think these are, these are the kind of innovations that we love to see, right? Because [00:08:00] we regularly talk about a shortage of technicians, and this isn’t, I was just learning this this week too, like this is not a wind problem. This is a everywhere problem. No matter what industry you’re in. Use are short of technicians. But we’re seeing like a tool like this is developed to be able to scale that workforce as well. Right. You don’t need to be an NDT level three expert to go and do these things. ’cause there’s a very few of those people out there. Right? Right. We know the NDT people, a lot of NDT people, and that’s a hard skillset to come by. Yeah. This can be put in the hands of any technician. Yeah, a quick training course. Just, Hey, this is how you use your iPhone. You can check Instagram, right? Yeah. Okay. You can off figure. Yeah, have fun. See you at lunch. Um, but they can, they can make this happen, right? They can go do these inspections and you’re getting that, that, uh, data collected in the field. Centralized back to an SME that’s looking at it and you don’t have to put that SME in the field and try to scale their ability to go and travel and do all these things. They can be in the office making sure that the, the QA, QC is done correctly. I love it. I think that that’s the way we need to go with a lot of things. [00:09:00]Uh, and you’re making it happen.  Pete Andrews: Yeah. And it’s a real kind of. F change in mindset for us. So originally when we started Ebot, we were using third party hardware. Yeah. Which required a bit of that specialism. Yeah. A bit of care about the setup of the project, getting multiple parameters configured before you got going. And it wasn’t really something we could put in the hands of a customer.  Joel Saxum: Yeah.  Pete Andrews: Which meant Ebot scale was limited to what our own team could go and do, and regionally as well. You know, so we’re UK based. Probably 60% of our customers are uk, but now we have this Northern Europe offshore wind is obviously on our doorstep, but then increasingly we’ve done more and more in North America, so we’ve probably been to five or six sites now in North America and expect that to be a growth market because we can, we can now ship the devices over there, give some virtual training help. Uh, [00:10:00] people set themselves up and then that opens up that market, you know, so it’s been a real change in strategy for us, but has allowed us to have far more impact than we otherwise would just try to be a pure service.  Allen Hall: Well, let’s talk about the big problem in the states of a minute, which are the root bushing or inserts that are loose in some blades. When you lose that pushing, you also lose the tension on the bolt that can be measured. Is that something you’re getting involved with quite a bit now because of just trying to determine how many bolts are affected and, and where we are on the safety scale of can we run this turbine or not? Is that something that EE bolt’s been looking into? Pete Andrews: Yeah, absolutely. So I, I’d say there’s sort of two halves of what we do. There’s the, there’s the bulk wholesale monitoring of. Typically static connections to eliminate this routine retitling where it’s not needed typically, typically. But then we have these edge cases of certain [00:11:00] connections and certain platforms that have known bolt integrity problems, and we are working with clients to really, um, manage those integrity risks. Blade stud is an absolute classic, you know, sort of, I think almost every turbine OEM on some, if not all of their platforms has got. Embedded risk into their blades, pitch bearing connections. Um, so yeah, exactly as you said, our customers are using the technology for two things really. One is to ensure the bolts have been tightened to the preload that was specified or the target window. And quite often we find there is an opportunity to increase the preload and therefore increase the resistance to fatigue failure. So. You know, particularly on older sites where the bolts perhaps not in the condition they were on day one. Well, they definitely won’t be. Um, when people have gone and retti them, they haven’t got back to where they, they should be.[00:12:00] So we can prove that and increase a bit of that resilience, but then also start to look for the segments around the joint where, um, the bolt might start loosening or failures are occurring, and find areas where they can really hone in. And actively manage risk. And that sort of leads to what we’ve decided to do for the next year, particularly with Blade Stud in mind, is evolve this technology. So whilst it’s also measuring the elongation, we will do a defect scan at the same time. So you’ll monitor your blade stu, um, connection and we’re hoping that we can set the device to flag to you there and then. We believe this bulk has got a defect while you’re here, get it changed out before it fails and, and all the knock on problems, um, from there. Joel Saxum: So what you’re just pointing to there is a, is a workflow, right? So to me that is typical [00:13:00] of some of the amazing, innovative companies in the UK that I’ve run into throughout my career. And that is, you’re a group of SMEs, you know, bolted connections. That’s what you do, right? But then you’re like, hey. If there’s a tool, we could make a tool that would make our lives a bit easier, then it’s like, well, we could make the entire industry’s lives a little bit easier as well. So let’s iterate on that. And now you’re able to send these kits around the world to look at these things. Hey, you have a problem with this specific model. We can help you with this because we know the failure mode and we know how to look for it. Let’s do that for you. Also here, you’re doing bolt bulk measurements. We got that for you. But it all kind of flows back to the fact that Echo Bolt is a team. A bolted connection, SMEs that are making tools and being able to also provide consulting if need be. Yeah. Right. Um, to, to an entire industry. And I think that, um, this is my take on it, right? Wind is stop number one. I think you guys are gonna do a fantastic year, but there’s a lot of, uh, opportunity out there in bolted [00:14:00] connections as well. Allen Hall: A tremendous amount blade bolts being broken from defects in the crystalline structure. What appears to be a more. Rapidly developing issue across fleets that I’ve seen. I went to a farm this summer and the number of blade bolts that were there on the table that were broken on the conference room table was And the whiteboard office. Yeah. Yeah. This one,  Joel Saxum: this one.  Allen Hall: Your hard head is not gonna protect you from this one. It’s, it’s, it was this, um, I couldn’t imagine the amount of time they were spending hunting these things down. And of course, the only way they were finding ’em was they were broken. You like to catch ’em before they break because it becomes  Joel Saxum: a safety risk. Just not too long ago we saw an insurance case where there’s an RCA going on and it is pointing at an entire tower came down. Right. And it is pointing at a mid, mid tower section bolted connection. How often do you guys run into those problems? Or are you contacted by insurance companies or anything like that to, to take a peek at those? Pete Andrews: We haven’t done anything directly for insurance [00:15:00]companies, but we have been engaged by. Engineering consultancies that are doing RCA type activities. Okay. Um, things like at the end of defect liability periods mm-hmm. A customer has, has seen, they’ve had a lot of, uh, issues from an OEM, maybe an OE EM has offered a modification or an upgrade, assessing whether that upgrade is actually solved the problem or not. We’ve got involved in, um, but the tower. Issue specifically. It’s actually very rare we find, um, problems with tower connections, but where we do is often where they haven’t achieved good flange flatness, ah, during installation or the bolts have been, let’s say, left out in the elements for a period and lubrication has been, has deteriorated before the bolt’s been installed. So there are cases out there, but what I would say is. [00:16:00] To think about your whole life cycle, so ensure the bolt’s installed correctly and we can help with that with a QA to say, yes, this torque or tightening method has got you to the load that you want. Do some through life monitoring, but often if you install it correctly, it will it’s operational life. You will have very little concern. But then in the UK market, we’re increasingly getting involved again at the end of life, right? Life extension where life extension turbines are 20, 25 years old. How does an operator make a decision to carry on running without replacing all bots? Um, and that’s where increasingly we being asked to use the technologist just to say, actually the joint is fine. The bolts have run in a good, um, operational envelope. Run them on. Don’t replace a hundred percent of them like you might have been recommended to from your, um, yeah. Turbine supplier side. [00:17:00] Allen Hall: So Pete, if someone’s doing a repower where they’re basically putting a new one in the cell on an existing tower, they’re making a lot of assumptions about all the bolts from the ground up that they’re gonna be okay. And I know we’re talking about that. We’re in a lot of installations where. If the turbine has gone through a repowered or two. So now those bolts are 20 years old. Yeah. And trying to get ’em to  Joel Saxum: 30 35. 35  Allen Hall: 40. Yeah. I don’t know what they’re doing. By those bolted connections. Are they just like replacing the bolts? Are they hitting ’em with a hammer again? Is that the, yeah,  Pete Andrews: I mean, they might replace ’em, but you’ve got a problem with the foundation bolts. ’cause they’re obviously often anchor bolts set into concrete, so you have to reuse them and. With the projects, both in wind and in process power industry with the chimney stacks to try and ascertain whether foundation bolts that are set into concrete are still suitable for operations. So look for corrosion losses, look for [00:18:00] defects. Um, so yeah, they’re all things that need thinking about before you just make the snap decision to repower. But I think  Joel Saxum: a lot of that, uh, going back to a couple minutes ago, you were talking about at the commissioning phase, making sure that you have proper qa, QC of how these things were installed day one, and then making sure that before commissioning of a turbine, they’re checked. I think that’s really important. We’re starting to see that in the blade world now too, where we’ve been talking about it for a long time, and now when you talk to operators, they’re like, we’re getting inspections done on the blades before they’re hung. Or at the factory before they’re hung. After they’re hung. Like they want a good foundation baseline. Are you seeing that in the bolted connection world too?  Pete Andrews: Yes. Sort of. It’s just emerging for us. What we’ve found is, so most of our customers are in the operational phase ’cause they are the ones feeling the pain. Yeah. Of the routine retitling work. When they do major components, they sometimes engage us to come and say, can you check [00:19:00] before and after the blade was removed? What was it? Before we took it off from a a bolt load perspective, what is it afterwards? Can you then recheck after 500 hours When we retalk it? And what we’ve seen there often is the initial install hasn’t got them to where they needed to be and they’ve had to go and do the break in maintenance or the 500 hour REIT to get the bolts to the right load. So one of the questions that we have is whether. Some of the defects are actually being initiated very early on in that initial running in period and whether if, if actually you’d taken the time at, at the point of assembly to make sure you were correct, whether that avoids some of the knock on integrity concerns. So yeah, it’s interesting area.  Allen Hall: Well, bolts are what hold wind turbines together and you better know you have the right. Tension and [00:20:00] torque on your bolts to get to the lifetime of the wind turbine and to, and to check it once in a while. And I know there’s a lot of operators I can think of right now in the United States that are sort of doing that job somewhat. I I think they have missed out on opportunities to save a lot of money and to call it echo bolt. How do people get ahold of you? Because that’s one thing I run into all the time. Like, Hey, hey, you gotta talk to Ebol, call Ebol. How do they get ahold of you?  Pete Andrews: So the easiest ways are via our website. Which is echo bolt.com. Um, LinkedIn, you’ll find us at Echo Bolt on LinkedIn. Reach out. Our email would be info@cobolt.com. So any of those route and you’ll, uh, reach me and the team and more than happy to speak to you about any of your faulting concerns or problems. We are, uh, yeah, we’re passionate about your problems.  Allen Hall: Pete, thank you so much for being on this podcast. I, it is great to actually see you in person and see the bolt wave technology. It’s really [00:21:00] impressive. So anybody out there that needs bolt tensioning to checking tools, you need to get ahold of Pete at Echo Bolt and get started today. Thank you Pete. Thanks guys. It’s great to be here.

Ten Baltic and Scandinavian (and the UK) have agreed to come together to form a multi-national maritime force for crisis response around Northern Europe, specifically on the maritime border with Russia. All parties are NATO members, and members of the Joint Expeditionary Force – itself a NATO framework organisation. Ed Arnold from the D Group explains why this is about operationalising the JEF when the politics of it is wandering. But the credibility of the UK is being pressed hard when command commitments are growing, diverse, geographically spread, and rely on too few qualified and experienced people. Why should the UK command? Why should others follow? Why is Northwood the right place? And, how will the UK balance the long-standing habit of using US C2 systems with an announcement that declares an intent to command on whatever system European Allies favour? Ed Arnold answers all these questions and queries. Underlying the discussion sits some uncomfortable concerns about UK command credibility, the need for continued momentum if the Northern Navies Initiative is to survive, and the desperate need for some form of political prioritisation of tasks from London.

For centuries, the Sámi people have preserved their spiritual traditions across the Arctic regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula. Mythology of the Sámi (Minorities within Minorities) brings together the rich tapestry of Sámi spiritual traditions, revealing the profound differences between the various Sámi cultures that outsiders often fail to recognize. From the western coastal communities to the eastern reindeer herders, from the Forest Sámi to the lake-dwelling Inari Sámi, each group developed their own unique pantheon of gods, goddesses, and mythical beings.Nina shares some of her personal experiences from her family and the Sámi peoples from across Northern Europe. You can watch a performance of Jolk here: You can find Nina's book here: Thank you to Nina for joining me.Our Patreon is live, if you want to support the show and get Ad-Free episodes, bonus content, early release of the regular show and monthly prizes for everyone who signs up!Join now for $4 a month!You can also support the show by leaving a review to help spread the word.Don't forget, you can now show your support with our brand new Merchandise shop on Tee-Public!Click here for all the show merch!You can join us on Facebook and Instagram as well.You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel!Email us at mysteriesandmonsters@gmail.com with any feedback, guest suggestions or if you'd like to appear.           All artwork by Dean Bestall and the show was produced by Brennan Storr of the Ghost Story Guys. Our theme music is kindly provided by the amazing Weary Pines, you can find them here:  Intro - Zombies Ate My Shotgun     Outro - Into The Night #NinaMielipäivä #MythologyOfTheSámi #Finland #Norway #Sweden #Russia #Kola #Mystical #Animism #Reindeer #Wolf #Werewolf #NorthernLights #AuroraBorialis #Magic #Fish #Shamans #Witches #Drums #Jolk #Kofte

Mélanie Masarin is founder and CEO of Ghia, the Mediterranean-inspired nonalcoholic aperitif. Mélanie returns to talk about her debut cookbook, Riviera: Recipes from the Coast of France and Italy. In this episode, we talk about how the book is anchored by the handwritten recipes and philosophy of her grandmother Mymo. We also talk about working in the surging NA category and what is exciting in the land of Ghia. We have a lot of respect for Mélanie's career, and I really enjoyed going over it. Also on the show we have a great conversation with Nichole Accettola, author of Scandinavian Everyday: Vibrant, Simple Meals from Northern Europe. Listen to Mélanie's first appearance on This Is TASTE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

GUESTS: Nicole Accettola-Author Scandinavian Everyday-Vibrant Simple Meals From Northern Europe About us | Experience Scandinavian Flavors Today — Kantine To Celebrate National BBQ Day Ann Tussy and George Ah Chin Co-Owners Sweet T's Restaurant-Windsor Sweet T's Restaurant + Bar AND COMING SOON Hapa's on the Mainland    

Support us on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠---Just over one thousand years ago, an unknown scribe committed to vellum a fantastical tale of swordsmen and sea monsters, set not in contemporary Anglo-Saxon England, but instead in the distant swamps of Denmark, hundreds of years in the past and hundreds of miles away. In doing so, they would open a portal to one of the most mysterious and murky periods of European history. In this episode of Gladio Free Europe, Liam and Russian Sam return to the mighty mead-halls of the Migration Era for a discussion of Beowulf, the greatest work of Old English and one of the most fascinating documents of the early medieval world.The poem is effectively without parallel. It is a full-length heroic narrative written in Old English, whose eponymous protagonist is attested nowhere else. Though other works in this genre had been created, its sole survival and rediscovery made it the national epic of the English people, often compared to Homer's Iliad in both theme and content. As it was popularized in the early 19th century, the poem became useful to British, German, and even Danish nationlists who sought to use their ancient and medieval heritage to justify present-day political ambitions. But Beowulf does not belong to any existing society. Instead, it is an early medieval document of an idealized antiquity, possibly analogous to the role of King Arthur's Camelot to later medieval Englishmen. Beowulf provides a unique view into the Anglo-Saxon imaginary, illustrating how a deeply Christian population reckoned with their pagan past, and how the insular descendants of North Sea migrants understood their relationship to an ancestral home. But beyond its anthropological value, Beowulf is a mature reflection on ephemerality and loss. The setting, Heorot, is the most glorious of mead-halls, yet the audience knows from the start that it shall one day burn. Beowulf and King Hrothgar are the best of men, yet even their virtues cannot prevent the ruin caused by mankind's own doomed nature. The concept of wyrd, fate, features prominently in the poem. Despite not having a direct influence on the culture of high medieval and early modern England, Beowulf has profoundly shaped contemporary English literature. Its heroic narrative, prefiguring chivalric romance and King Arthur stories by several centuries, would inspire the career of J.R.R. Tolkien and shape the contemporary understanding of early medieval Northern Europe. Comparative studies with Norse and German literary works help us understand more fully the cold, courageous, and sometimes cruel world of early Germanic-speaking peoples. Most importantly, it is one of the most engaging and entertaining pieces of early fiction. Everybody, whether a proud Sea-Geat or a descendant of Cain, ought to read Beowulf.

Original airdate: March 7, 2023 What does it really mean to live well—and why do Scandinavian countries consistently rank among the happiest in the world? In this episode, we move beyond surface-level ideas of happiness and explore the deeper philosophies that shape everyday life across Northern Europe. From a grounded sense of contentment to a cultural emphasis on balance, these perspectives offer a quieter, more sustainable approach to wellbeing. I'm joined by Lola Akinmade Åkerström—an award-winning writer, photographer, and cultural storyteller whose work spans over 70 countries and has been featured in publications such as National Geographic, BBC, and The Guardian. Having lived across continents, Lola brings a nuanced lens to how culture influences the way we relate, work, and find meaning. Together, we explore what “happiness” really means in a Scandinavian context, the everyday philosophies that shape a more balanced life, and how culture influences our expectations of success and wellbeing. We also reflect on how these principles can be thoughtfully applied to our own lives, especially if the pursuit of happiness has started to feel more like pressure than peace. If you've ever felt that chasing happiness only makes it more elusive, this conversation offers a refreshing and deeply grounding alternative.

Subscribe at http://www.youtube.com/ferrycorsten Check out my tour dates, merchandise & more: https://linktr.ee/ferrycorstenofficial Get my Trance DJ Masterclass: https://djtips.co/ferry-course This week's episode is packed with melodic gems, driving grooves, and fresh energy across the spectrum. Ferry Corsten brings you new music from Adriatique & Emmit Fenn, Chris Avantgarde, Helslowed, EDX, and more—plus a powerful remix of Rise Up with Ruben de Ronde by AVIRA. After a great weekend in Scandinavia with a sold out show, I'm back in Northern Europe, this time in Helsinki! On Saturday I'm playing there at Apollo Club alongside my good friend Tempo Giusto. Hope to see you there! Links: http://www.ferrycorsten.com http://www.instagram.com/ferrycorsten http://www.twitter.com/ferrycorsten http://www.facebook.com/ferrycorsten http://www.tiktok.com/ferrycorstenofficialTracklist:Ferry Corsten - Connect (Intro Edit) [Flashover]Adriatique & Emmit Fenn - Closer [X]Mölly, Hessian & LeyeT - The Art Of Letting Go [Colorize]BUNT. & Malou - i need u [Arista]EDX feat. Julia Temos - Atmosphere [Sirup]Avenue One - Take Me Home [Colorize]Robert Falcon - Free Your Mind [Intercord]Michael Woods - Nitro (Ginchy Remix) [Z3]Moguai, Cassmae - Mother (Max Niklas & Helslowed Remix) [SNSD]Ferry Corsten & Ruben de Ronde - Rise Up (AVIRA Remix) [Flashover]Dansyn & Tom Westy - Feel Your Soul [AETERNA]Riordan x Bushbaby - Strong Rhyme [Safelight]Space 92 - Dimension [Takeoff]Chris Avantgarde - Obsessed [Hyperreal]Midnight in Amsterdam x Sebastian Wibe - Under The Moon [Heldeep]

In this Omni Talk Retail episode, recorded live at World Retail Congress 2026 in Berlin, Chris Walton sits down with David Boynton, Managing Director of Northern Europe at Pandora, for a conversation on the evolving intersection of AI, physical retail, and emotional commerce. Drawing from leadership roles across brands including The Body Shop, L'Occitane, and Charles Tyrwhitt, David shares why stores still play a critical role in building emotional connection, even as AI begins reshaping how customers discover and shop brands. The conversation explores Pandora's omnichannel strategy across Northern Europe, why more than 30% of sales now happen online, and how physical stores continue to drive customer acquisition and loyalty. David also shares a fascinating personal story about using AI to purchase a premium rain jacket, highlighting how conversational AI could fundamentally change retail discovery and decision-making in the years ahead. Key Topics Covered: • Why emotional storytelling remains central to jewelry retail • How Pandora blends stores, ecommerce, and marketplaces • The role physical retail still plays in customer acquisition • Why engraving and personalization are driving deeper connection • How AI is changing product discovery and purchase confidence • The difference between AI efficiency tools and revenue-driving applications • Why conversational commerce may reshape retail behavior • How retailers can combine digital intelligence with human service • Why leadership, team building, and “winning” still drive great retail operators Thank you to Vusion for supporting Omni Talk Retail's live coverage from Berlin. #WorldRetailCongress #WRC2026 #OmniTalkRetail #Pandora #RetailInnovation #AIinRetail #Omnichannel #CustomerExperience #LuxuryRetail #FutureOfRetail

As radiation spread across Europe in April 1986, so did the truth about a political system built on silence. Four decades on, RFI spoke to history and politics professor Oleg Kobtzeff about how the Chernobyl nuclear disaster exposed the USSR's culture of secrecy, and was among the catalysts for its collapse. On 26 April, 1986, a reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, sending a radioactive cloud drifting across Europe. For days, the Soviet Union said nothing. But as radiation alarms sounded in Scandinavia and the truth seeped out, the disaster became something bigger than an industrial accident. It pulled back the curtain on a system built on secrecy – and, some argue, helped bring that system crashing down. Four decades on, the question still resonates: was Chernobyl the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union? Oleg Kobtzeff, associate professor of history and politics at the American University of Paris, says the scale of the disaster was understood almost immediately in Moscow. “You have a complete meltdown of the core of the nuclear plant. We quite often forget the incredibly heroic attempts of the local scientists and the firemen and other responders who managed to prevent the worst.” Those early interventions, he says, prevented an even greater catastrophe, one with potentially global consequences. “A lot of people sacrificed their lives to contain the meltdown." Hiding the endless horror of Chernobyl Culture of secrecy But while the severity of the situation was clear to those in power, their response followed a different script – one shaped by decades of Soviet political conditioning. “Secrecy was part of the political culture, and habits that had gone on for four generations,” said Kobtzeff. “It was unthinkable to be transparent.” From childhood, Soviet citizens were conditioned to see the outside world as hostile and to guard information accordingly. “You are taught that we are surrounded by enemies and spies and we must not disclose any vital information,” Kobtzeff explained. “So obviously there's going to be about two, three weeks when the authorities keep it under the lid.” But when fallout was detected abroad – in Sweden, Norway and Finland, even parts of France – silence became impossible, particularly at a time when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was seeking to ease Cold War tensions. According to Kobtzeff, Chernobyl was an opportunity. “It became a pretext for Gorbachev and the liberals in the Kremlin to begin the reforms that they had already been thinking about for years." A new transparency What followed marked a sharp break with the past, as Gorbachev faced journalists and answered unscripted questions about the disaster. “He dares to respond candidly,” said Kobtzeff. “Conferences of this sort had never happened since the Bolshevik Revolution.” This shift was immediate and widely understood. “It was seen as an absolute revolution. People understood what was happening even before the word 'perestroika' was pronounced.” But this greater openness came at a cost. By exposing industrial mismanagement, environmental damage and decades of secrecy, the reforms also undermined the legitimacy of the Soviet system. “The tragedy of Gorbachev… is that instead of being seen as a reformer, he's seen as the last man standing of a completely flawed system,” said Kobtzeff. West pays tribute to Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader who ended Cold War The debate over Chernobyl's role in the Soviet collapse continues. Some argue the system was already in decline, weakened by economic stagnation and political rigidity. Kobtzeff acknowledges that view, describing the disaster as part of an existing broader malaise. But he is clear on one point – Chernobyl acted as a catalyst. “Whether it's a symptom or whether it's completely part of the mechanisms… I don't think it really matters,” he argued. “The important thing to understand is that everything is related.” A grim legacy That interpretation, Kobtzeff said, was shared at the highest levels of Soviet power. “They realised that Chernobyl was becoming a catalyst for everything that was wrong with the system,” he said, citing personal accounts from former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze. “They discussed this in government meetings – that it revealed what needed to be reformed if you wanted to save the system.” Forty years on, the physical legacy of the disaster remains grim. In parts of Belarus and northern Ukraine, communities still live with elevated rates of cancer, thyroid disease and birth defects. A vast exclusion zone surrounds the reactor, a place that is strangely both abandoned and revived, with wild animals thriving there, undisturbed by humans. “You have an entire zone near Chernobyl which is completely cordoned off,” Kobtzeff said. “It's like another planet.” He added that the site remains a long-term challenge: “We've got thousands of years of work to continue containing this.” In 1986, the Soviet Union too tried to contain the fallout – but the truth was harder to hide.

Radio International - The Ultimate Eurovision Experience is broadcast from Malta's Radio 105FM on Tuesday evenings from 2100 - 0059 hours CET. The show is broadcast live on Wednesday evenings from 1900 - 2300 hours CET on the Eurovision Radio International Mixcloud Channel as well as on the Facebook Page of Eurovision Radio International with an interactive chatroom.       AT A GLANCE - ON THE SHOW THIS WEEK  Interview with Delta Goodrem (Australia 2026) done at Eurovision in Concert 2026, Amsterdam Interview with Cosmo (Austria 2026) done at Eurovision in Concert 2026, Amsterdam  Interview with Jiva (Azerbaijan 2026) done at Eurovision in Concert 2026, Amsterdam   Interview with Lion Ceccah (Lithuania 2026) done at Eurovision in Concert 2026, Amsterdam  Interview with Satoshi (Moldova 2026) done at Eurovision in Concert 2026, Amsterdam  Interview with Alicja (Poland 2026) done at Eurovision in Concert 2026, Amsterdam   Eurovision Spotlight: Eurovision 2026 in Geographical Regions:  Northern Europe with Dermot Manning Eurovision News with Johannes Vitt courtesy of www.escXtra.com Eurovision Birthday File with David Mann Eurovision Cover Spot with David Mann Eurovision Calendar with Javier Leal  New Music Releases by Eurovision Artists  Your music requests    Meet the Stars of Eurovision 2026 (Part 3):  Eurovision in Concert 2026 took place at the AFAS Live Concert Venue in Amsterdam, the Netherlands on Sat 11 Apr 2026 with 27 acts from the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 performing their entry to many thousands of Eurovision fans. Members of the Radio International Team were on location and conducted interview with some of the acts. Meet more Stars of Eurovision 2026 this week.     Delta Goodrem (Australia 2026) with JP at Eurovision in Concert 2026 in Amsterdam   Interview with Delta Goodrem (Australia 2026):  The biggest calibre that is sent in from Australia to the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 is Delta Goodrem who is a mega music star and actress ("Neighbours"). The song that Delta will represent Australia with is entitled "Eclipse" and will be Semi Final 2 Song Number 11.     Cosmó (Austria 2026) at Eurovision in Concert 2026 in Amsterdam     Interview with Cosmó (Austria 2026):  Representing Austria at the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 is 19 year old or young Cosmó who like the Big 4 (this year) is directly qualified to compete in the Grand Final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 to take place on Sat 16 May 2026 due to JJ's victory at the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 with the song "Wasted Love". The Host Nation Austria as well as the Big 4 (5) Countries are directly qualified to the Grand Final of the Eurovision Song Contest2026.  Cosmó will performthe song "Tanzschein" at Song Number 25. Listen to the interview that Radio International's  JP did with Cosmó at Eurovision in Concert 2026 in Amsterdam on 11 Apr 2026.       Jiva (Azerbaijan 2026) at Eurovision in Concert 2026 in Amsterdam   Interview with Jiva (Azerbaijan 2026):  Representing Azerbaijan at the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 is Jiva who performs the song "Just go" in Semi Final 2 at starting position Number 2. Jiva was directly nominated by the Azeri broadcaster. Get to know Jiva in the interview that JP did at Eurovision in Concert 2026. Lion Ceccah (Lithuania 2026) with at Eurovision in Concert 2026 in Amsterdam Interview with Lion Ceccah (Lithuania 2026):  An amazing singer and performer is Lion Ceccah who will be representing Lithuania at the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 with the song "Solo quiero mas" in Semi Final 1 Song Number 12. Lion went through the tough national final in Lithuania and won it and with this the ticket tand the right to represent Lithuania at the Eurovision Song Contest 2026. Radio International's JP met Lion at Eurovision in Concert 2026 in Amsterdam and conducted an interview with the singer appearing in the silver colour. Get to know Lion Ceccah in the interview on the show this week.      Satoshi (Moldova 2026) with JP at Eurovision in Concert 2026 in Amsterdam   Interview with Satoshi (Moldova 2026):  What a bundle of energy Moldova will send to the Eurovision Song Contest 2026. Satoshi will be opening up the contest in Semi Final 1 being Song Number 1 competing with the song "Viva Moldova" on Tuesday, 12 May 2026. Part of Satoshi is Aliona Moon who represented Moldova at the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 with the song "O Mie (One Million)". At the recent edition of Eurovision in Concert 2026 in Amsterdam JP had the pleasure of an interview with with energizers from Moldova. Listen to the interview on the show this week.    Alicja (Poland 2026)  at Eurovision in Concert 2026 in Amsterdam   Interview with Alicja (Poland 2026): In 2020 when the Eurovision Song Contest was canceled by the EBU due to the Corona Pandemic hitting the globe Alicja had already won her national final in Poland before the Covid outbreak. At that time Alicja Szemplińska she won the national final with the song "Empires". In 2023, Alicja attempted again to get the ticket to the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "New Home" coming 6th in the Polish National Final.  At long last in 2026 Alicja was chosen to represent Poland at the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Pray". It will be competing in Semi Final 1 Song Number 14. Radio International's JP had the pleasure to meet and interview Alicja at Eurovision in Concert 2026 in Amsterdam. Enjoy meeting Alicja on the show this week.    The Eurovision Spotlight - The Eurovision 2026 Land in Geographical Regions:   Austria will host the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 in the Wiener Stadthalle on 12 and 14 May 2026 for the two Semi Finals and the Grand Finale to take place on Saturday, 16 May 2026. And as a tradition the Radio International Eurovision Experts have split the Eurovision 2026 participating countries in geographical regions and over the next weeks you will hear all the 35 Eurovision 2026 entries on the show presented by the Radio International Team.  This week Dermot Manning continues the series of the Eurovision Spotlight looking at the entries from the countries in the Northern region of Eurovision 2026 Land.   Eurovision News, New Song Releases, Birthday File, Coverspot, Eurovision Calendar: Also JP will be joined by David Mann for the Eurovision Birthday File and Eurovision Coverspot.  Javier stands in for Nick and will be presenting the Eurovision News courtesy of escXtra.com. There will be a lot of the great new releases of Eurovision artists on the show as well as great Eurovision Classics. Javier will be updating us on the upcoming Eurovision events in the Eurovision Calendar and lots more.   For full details of this week's Show Content and Play List - click here

Peacewarts: Chronicled Courage 101 - The Near-Misses (Class 10) Episode Summary: We explore moments where war was politically and militarily cued, only to be refused through deliberate human agency. We study the "ethics of stopping" in the U.S., South Africa, Costa Rica, and Northern Europe. Homework Research the “Cuartelazo” attempt of April 1949. Even after Figueres Ferrer took the sledgehammer to the walls of the military headquarters, a high-ranking official tried to use the remnants of the military to seize power. Find out who led this "near-miss" coup and how the lack of a traditional military response actually helped resolve the crisis. Write down one question about any of this episode's topics. If you don't have a question, write “no question.” Optional: Journal. Think of a conflict you are currently in. What would it look like for you to "lose face" in order to gain a durable peace? Learning Topics: The "Pen-Pal" Protocol: How Kennedy used a time-buffer during the Cuban Missile Crisis; The Boipatong Pivot: Why Nelson Mandela chose a "Sunset Clause" over a final battle; The Sledgehammer Choice: Costa Rica's 75-year success as a nation without a military; Nested Identity: How the Åland Islands used legal arbitration to solve a sovereign border dispute; Agency over Luck: Moving from a narrative of "lucky breaks" to "deliberate overrides." Get the book Peace Stuff Enough: AvisKalfsbeek.com/peace-stuff-enough Join the Community / Get the Books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com Podcast Music: Javier Peke Rodriguez “I am late, madame Curie” https://open.spotify.com/artist/3QuyqfXEKzrpUl6b12I3KW

Nicole Johnson Murphy, CEO of ECO TLP, and Gordon Jackson join to discuss concrete floating wind foundations, production-line construction, and markets from Hawaii to Japan. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Offshore wind obviously is a big deal right now. There’s a lot of, countries looking at it and investigating it, doing it, but not really at scale yet. And this is where ECO TLP comes in and. Nicole, let’s just start there with a background. What problem were you trying to solve when you started ECO TLP? Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah, so, we were designing for, a site off of Hawaii in 2011, for the HECO RFP. And so we were designing for 300 meter water depth from the beginning. so we were always trying to find a way to work with the ports, with the vessel, with the infrastructure that was existing off Hawaii. And with, and that worked with Jones Act vessels. So we were always trying to meet that [00:01:00] requirement with, and meet the cost, try to, we saw there were much tighter margins in offshore wind than in oil and gas, for example, at that water depth. So we’re trying to find something that was cost effective.  Allen Hall: Next question, obviously is what makes those deep water foundations so difficult? Gordon Jackson: It’s the water depth, primarily, you need to put foundations down in, extremely deep water. and they’re gonna be pretty flexible. so you’re trying to control the amount of motion that you get at the surface through your, your deep water, facility. it’s really. Really that challenge, and, the weight of components through the water depth, likes of chain would be completely impossible. in 300 meters of water. you need to use something that’s a little bit lighter. Yeah, to mow you to the, to the seabed. Allen Hall: [00:02:00] Because it does seem a little odd just not to make the foundations taller, basically. More steel drive it down in, we know that process, we understand that process. It works offshore, near shore in a, lot of locations. But once you get to what depth as it becomes financially or engineering wise, impossible.  Gordon Jackson: For offshore wind, fixed, structures in, maybe a hundred meters of water are gonna be. Economic. they’ll be costly compared to what’s been done now because, of all the extra structure you need for the, for the deeper water. But, I think you’ll see, a crossover between fixed and floating, around the, 70 to a hundred meter water mark. that’s sort the range. Allen Hall: And that leads to the next question, which is. It’s all financial, right? At some point, the numbers [00:03:00] don’t work. If the cost of foundations don’t come down, especially in fixed bottom offshore or floating offshore, we lose a lot of offshore wind resource. Nicole can you gimme a scale at what we’re missing if we don’t get to a more economical solution for floating offshore? Nicole Johnson-Murphy: So we’ve estimated for our market for, a very deep water market. So we now actually have a solution that goes across all water depths. So we’re starting with, this, gravity based structure now with, and, Gordon’s team has been really involved in that, development. And then now we can take that same slip form, concrete cylinder. Format and take it across all the water depths. so we basically can hit every water depth now for a very low cost. It’s a very simple, just, local, regionally designed and built, system. We, crowdsource the labor and the inputs. and so we [00:04:00] try to, and we also try to give the procurement team of our clients their, an ability to do their job and, be able to bid out aspects of our design, across. Different vendors. So you always wanna give, in construction, you always wanna give, the procurement team a job to do so they can actually get that price, keep that price down on the installation.  Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s a unique look that ECO TLP is putting to this problem. Which is moving away from steel, which is expensive obviously, and it’s difficult to transport at times to a more localized solution, which is concrete. And thinking about the problem a little bit differently, does that open up a number of doors then in terms of the countries that can get involved in, floating or near shore, wind projects, but just because you’re driving the cost down?  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Absolutely. And I’ll let Gordon speak to that.. He’s worked. His whole career in offshore concrete. But I think it’s, I think it’s a, great, it’s the only way we would do it. We actually have shipyards in our companies, our partners own [00:05:00] shipyards, and we, just would never probably ex try to create this many units across the world and scale and steel. We’d only do concrete.  Gordon Jackson: Yeah. My first concrete project broke the mold of how you do, construction of concrete offshore structures. it was entirely built within a dry dock and, After we’d gone on and delivered that project, that was in the late eighties. I spent the next 10 years, working on projects all around the world, looking at doing the same sort of thing in different countries. because you only needed, 10, 12 meters of water, at the shore and you could, build a structure and get it out there in the water. It really opened up the market for offshore concrete structures that, that, first project that we did.  Allen Hall: So using that first project as leverage and knowledge of how to do these things, how much advantage [00:06:00] does concrete give you over steel? Gordon Jackson: It’s difficult to say because it bends country to country. And, quite often you’re competing against, steel built in some, very low cost fabrication countries. so if you’re in a high cost, high labor cost country, I worked in Australia, and the labor cost there was extremely high. So concrete wasn’t particularly cheap, but the overall solutions that we came up with, were cheap. Allen Hall: So does that involve basically like slip forms or how are you, thinking about that problem? Because it’s a huge engineering task and you only learn. By doing it on some level because all great plans, always run into trouble as soon as you try to implement them. So you took all that previous knowledge and then applied it to this problem, and now you have, basically [00:07:00]trimmed or, slimmed, the design down into, you have a, very economical model, even in more uneconomical economies because of labor laws and cost of labor and access and those kind of things. What does that look like now? And what’s your thought process on, Hey, this is what it’s gonna look like? Can we get, quayside how do we do this and how do we keep this thing simple? Gordon Jackson: The key thing is we’re looking at, a production line approach, which has been, it’s tried and tested for, for marine, concrete construction, construction of quay walls and and the we’re using exactly that same system. We’ve just been tried and tested to create a production line of, ECO TLP units or ECO GBS units where we’re building, onshore and where we’re going from station to station, doing a task at each station. [00:08:00] So it’s exactly like a production line, that you’re be familiar with and, you load out the completed structure onto a barge, and then you. Submerge that barge and your structure floats off and that’s, the real key to getting the, the economy from the concrete basis.  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah, and I’ll say that the OpEX is really something we focus a lot on because it’s not just what you’re doing on the CapEx and the development and the port, it’s actually that 30 year lifetime maintenance. And this is a, when you, we fully submerge our floater, which is basically inert in the ocean. It’s, very eco-friendly with the ocean. There’s no paint, there’s no, maintenance on the floater over the lifespan. You’re, monitoring those, the moorings and the, weight of any marine, buildup on those moorings and things like that. But generally it’s a very low maintenance solution and it’s very heavy and a comfortable car [00:09:00] ride for the turbine. It really has slow motions. it’s, almost like a, a high skyscraper in the water. you’re just the top of that skyscraper is moving a little bit. But you’re, you’re really giving it that comfortable, slow ride over its lifetime. It’s not hitting a lot of turbulence, like a different type of floater.  Allen Hall: Yeah. It is a different concept, really, right? That you have this mass at the bottom and you have this mass at the top, which is the, cell on the wind turbine. And if you can design it just right, everything dampens becomes stable. Even in turbulent water. How long did it take you to figure out that aspect of the design? Because it does seem like a lot of projects hit a, an end point right there because the motion of the turbine is not good for the lifetime of the turbine.  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: We, look at it as a, kind of hybrid spar, TLP so, the original design came from my late father who was, who had designed Ekofisk for Phillips [00:10:00] petroleum in the early. Late sixties, And, so he’d come from oil and gas and he’d come from that concrete, construction background. And, he is very comfortable with it. And I think, Gordon, that’s part of why I like working with Gordon ’cause Gordon has that same, long-term view on, these construction principles. And I think that, what we saw though is the margins are so different from oil and gas, and so you have to have almost a poor man’s TLP is what we would call it because it’s. It’s gotta be a very simple version of a TLP that can roll out in mass quantities. And, as coming up with a company that, business plan, you’d wanna be able to really scale the business. And so we had to come up with something that you can make. In different parts of the world at the same time, you’re not tied to one shipyard or one construction. Allen Hall: Even in terms of ship usage, you’re going to reduce the size of the ship considerably. You’re not using big dedicated ships that are really [00:11:00]expensive to operate or to keep in the area, even just to have them there as a lot of money. You’re thinking about, a different design in terms of. Simple ships that you can find locally. How much does that really lower the cost of deployment?  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Quite a lot actually. it depends on, so the other, there’s this other, aspect of installing the wind turbine on the foundation. So we have this fixed to fixed platform concept where you come further, a little bit further offshore and, give you that, draft depth that we need. And then we have a fixed platform that just stays in place and, we bring the turbines to it and, float them out. It’s all a self floating unit, whether it’s the GBS that, Gordon’s been working with us and or the ECO TLP. So we’re really independent of those large vessels. for the most part, we’re, really try and then you, once you install the turbine, you can tow the entire unit out with two tugs. Two to three tugs.  Allen Hall: That’s remarkable. So essentially because you [00:12:00] used a basic henry Ford type process to, to create these foundations and to think about the problem differently. Not only can you deploy it, easier than a lot of things we’re doing right now on top of it, it works over a variety of depths and I think that’s a the hard thing for people to grasp because when we talk about offshore particularly start getting off the continental shelves here, you’re talking about. More than a hundred meters typically of water. But you also have a, the gravity based system and the TLP system are all interconnected into the basic philosophy. can you explain like the, backbone of how that engineering works? Gordon Jackson: It’s essentially, it’s, we’re using the same structural form in both, fixed and floating. It’s basically, it’s two cylinders, one inside the other. A little bit of structure, which joins the two cylinders together. that’s it.  Allen Hall: Gordon, you make it sound so simple, but the, [00:13:00]engineering is complicated to get to that point. And once you get to that level of, oh, that design actually works in a variety of depths, that opens up your customer base quite a bit. Have you had inquiries from nearshore people? Or fixed bottom people thinking whoa, I could actually save myself a bunch of time and money, which is the real limiting factor on offshore wind at the moment. Are you starting to see some momentum there that, operators, developers are starting to rethink this problem and not just do what they did last week? Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Absolutely. one of the ways we came about the g you know, taking the ECO TLP and transforming it to the ECO GBS was, recommended by a client, was, that was their ask actions. That’s always the best way to start a product development cycle because, somebody’s interested. and I think, and part of the reason I found Gordon to work with early on in our, the life of our company is, his background in, in GBS development. He did, he developed the Gravitas GBS [00:14:00] 10 years ago. So I think we, we got lucky that our, civil structural engineering partner with ARUP was, already really comfortable with, looking at this. So I think that’s, part of, you always want the clients to be interested, before you start investing. You don’t wanna design a product that’s in your head or your, in your company lunchroom without a real ask for it.  Allen Hall: And I, think also you have a, once you have the engineering pretty well done and. Obviously do now you’re trying to touch a number of countries and every culture has its own way of, one of the construction business to do it slightly differently. South Korea does it different than Scotland, for example. You are working across cultures and trying to make the same design. apply to all those different areas. Are, have you learned [00:15:00] some things from that? Is it, are you able to basically set the same assembly line in every place? or are there different, kinds of concrete, different kinds of access, different kinds of ports that you have to deal with? What are those variables there that, that change the way you do business? Gordon Jackson: All the characteristics, ports are, obviously different. Really you just need space. And access to reasonably deep water from, that, from that space. And, it can get surprisingly difficult to find that, certainly in the UK and, in Northern Europe, people wanna build marines and, waterfront living, rather than having, an industrial facility, on the doorsteps. In, developed countries it can be hard to find that space. But, in some, parts of the world, there’s lots of [00:16:00] space, available. some good port facilities that can be utilized. and then it’s just in, in all civil engineering works, you go to do the job, you go wherever the job is, you mobilize there. You put in the systems, and equipment that you need to build, a structure, and then normally you go away at the end of the job, you hand it over to the client. you know what, what, would be good here is if we could set up some regional centers where you’ve done the, investment in the yard, and then you can, you can amortize those costs of development over a number of projects. Then you should start to see, real, real good cost savings.  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Just one thing, our footprint of our, cylinders is about a third of the footprint of a semi-sub, for example. [00:17:00] So, our footprint on the land port is very small.  Allen Hall: I think that makes sense because if you watch the fixed bottom projects, particularly in the United States. The first thing they had to do is rebuild the ports. The ports weren’t set for the scale and so they needed to expand the ports. That means you have to acquire land, you’ve gotta develop it. There’s a lot of processes involved. ’cause you’re talking about city, state, and federal government being involved. Obviously federal in the United States is a problem. so just getting the port developed was a huge process for fixed bottom. You’re thinking about that differently though, because the reduced amount of space, the, you don’t have to be in a huge industrial area, but all obviously it would be nice, but you do run against that problem. Are you thinking, when you talk about regional centers, are you thinking kind of Mediterranean, west Coast, us, Australia, one in Japan? How do you think about that problem? Because [00:18:00] once you get a site established, it does seem like because of the, how fast you can move these things around that it’ll become a pretty good job center for a lot of people. Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah. There’s a long-term maintenance, crew that needs to be developed while we build these. Yeah, I think, it’s been a moving target of what’s really gonna develop in offshore wind. It’s like Lucy and Charlie Brown with football. I think we, constantly try to, get lined up to, to kick football and then it falls. It’s more of the developers I, I feel for on that ’cause they’re these investing tremendous amount of money for these, development sites. We are open to any, we’ve been, we’ve looked at, some developers are looking at steel production and concrete production, two different reports servicing. An array and we’re really flexible. It doesn’t, matter. When we first started on that Hawaii project, we were gonna do floating barges to slipform. [00:19:00]And we talked about that with ARUP. Some still this floating dock idea and submerging that dock. And it’s just a matter of finding the right, a large enough, dock for that type of, so then you’re not even using the land base port. You’re learn, you’re using just to. Maybe a 400 foot frontage on the, along the port. Allen Hall: That’s amazingly small, right? Because if you look at some of these ports right now that are doing, fixed bottom offshore, they’re massive, they’re huge sites. You’re talking about something roughly a 10th of the scale to get the same end result, which is turbines in the water. Nicole Johnson-Murphy: For our part of it. We still, you still have the components and those are, that’s a, it’s another logistical challenge, and so I understand why the ports are. Looking at a lot more lay down space and things, maybe at a certain point these components are so large that they just stay on a vessel and they, and we take them off of a vessel directly and load them in. Allen Hall: Yeah, I think that’s one of the considerations [00:20:00] is do you really tie it to land in, terms of needing a, massive amount of space, acres of space, thousands of square meters of space. Do you need that or is this, or can you do it much more efficiently because that overhead adds up over time. Not only are you trying to save on, the ships and the, especially the dedicated ships, you’re also looking at smaller footprints on shore and doing it a lot more economically. What does that future look like now, because it does seem like we’re at a precipice where floating wind is no longer just being discussed. In theory, it’s, going to be implemented. What are those next steps here for ECO TLP?  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: So next week we’re headed to Tokyo, to Japan for the wind expo. And, ARUP is also presenting at the Asia Wind Offshore Show. I think we’re, we’re, good to learn. There’s just so much to learn about each culture, and I think this is something that, Gordon and I’ve talked about in terms of these international [00:21:00] projects, you’ve, gotta understand your culture that you’re moving into and you’ve gotta understand how to mediate across those different companies that come in. Our company has seven different. Countries represented in our team. So right now, so, we’re, a US company, but we’re barely, we’re just by name, but I think most of our team members are not in the us and that’s international collaboration is something, I, really, loved working on it. And I think, so when we go to Japan next week, it’s really mainly just to learn. we don’t. We have a lot to learn about Japan, and that’s what’s fun about each of these regions.  Gordon Jackson: And that’s where we can help because, we’ve got a presence in Japan. We’ve been doing offshore wind in Japan, so we’re there, to help eight to ECO TLP with our, those little contacts and h do business, in Japan and things like that.[00:22:00] We have a big international network, so you know, it can help. Some, in some areas, open some doors and, forge some, some friendships between, count companies.  Allen Hall: Gordon you did a big project out in Perth, Australia, which is a difficult place, Australia is a very difficult place to manufacture things. What are some of the lessons learned and what was that process like?  Gordon Jackson: So he had a, client, a very small client who was prepared to. Seed responsibility for delivering his project to a, team, an alliance team. And he just, interviewed a number of teams and, we were lucky enough to be selected, as the team to deliver their project. There was no tendering, it was just done on, how the, client felt about the, individuals that he met. And that, that was [00:23:00] very new to me. And, the whole project was delivered, by companies from the uk, from Australia, from Singapore, from be Netherlands, the Marine, the marine, vessels. A lot of ’em are coming from, from, Northern Europe, even though you’re in Australia. And, every company wants to do things differently and they all want to look after their interests, but the big thing about this alliance project was that, you were focused on one particular project and we were, we were coached and, facilitated, and trained to, to throw away our, our company affiliations and work together. And, to collaborate together. And, [00:24:00] we’re all working towards the, end goal of delivering a particular product. And I think that’s, I think it’s got a lot of, lot of potential to be used in the offshore wind sector. This, was, an oil platform that we were gonna build on the, the northwest shelf of Australia, which happened to be built in concrete, because the client. The client came to us with a notion of, doing something in concrete, which we, took his idea, decided we could do something a little bit cheaper and more straightforward and, went on to deliver it. We were given the opportunity to deliver it. And, yeah, I, it was my best project. it was a tremendous experience for all the companies involved. And everyone made money so everyone’s happy.  Allen Hall: That is difficult, right? You do see on these offshore projects, people coming from around the world to [00:25:00] work on this one big effort, a lot of money, and at times, thousands of people involved. Companies stu stumble there, obviously because you’re trying to tie cultures, you’re trying to tie companies together, but at the end of the day, you have to get this project done. Are, there some top level lessons learned from that of, how to bridge those differences?  Gordon Jackson: I did another project, this was a steel project, where we had a US oil company. And, The successful contractor was Hyundai in Korea. And they said to, me over the course of the project, we always lose money with, with American oil companies. Why are we doing business with them? And it, all came down to the, the approach to the [00:26:00] contract. Hyundai used to working in a more collaborative way with our clients. Whereas, this project, this is what the contract says, this is what you’ve taken on to do, there’s no negotiation, you’ll do it and that’s how much money you’re getting. And, but they find that very difficult. And, it was at the time when they were opening up their business more internationally. And I think it was a big learning experience for them. Yeah I think a lot of the offshore wind tried to follow the same path and, yeah, I think more collaborative working is to be encouraged for me. More talking to each other and negotiating rather than, imposing.  Allen Hall: Where should developers go to find out more about ECO TLP? [00:27:00] Because you have a gravity based system. You got the tension leg platform, there’s a lot inside of the company. What’s the first stop? Should they visit your website? Should they connect with you on LinkedIn? Where do they go?  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: The LinkedIn where website is great.  Allen Hall: So go visit ECO TLP. It’s ecotlp.com. Nicole and Gordon, this has been a great discussion. I’ve learned a lot. It’s very exciting because I think you’re on the precipice of something great. So thank you for joining me today. Gordon Jackson: Thank you. Thank you.

Vestas hasn’t shared SCADA data after a South Korea turbine collapse, citing an expired warranty. Plus workers at Nordex in Iowa are concerned about tariffs. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Transcript The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by StrikeTape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strikeTape.com. And now your hosts. Allen Hall Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m Allen Hall and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes. And Fergus is here. Hi. Welcome to our top story. This week is a wind turbine collapse that happened in South Korea at the Changpo Wind Power Complex in Yeongdeok, and the turbine lost a blade. There’s some video here that was recorded when the turbine collapsed, so it happened a couple of months ago, and investigators have been trying to determine the cause of that failure. They’re having a little bit of difficulty because they would like to access the SCADA system of that turbine because that would have a lot of more information about [00:01:00] how the tower was operating at that particular moment. And they’re having trouble in that it is a Vestas turbine and Vestas has not released the SCADA data and it’s citing an expired warranty. Now, Rosemary, this leads to a lot of problems because obviously there’s a ton of sensors in wind turbines today, and they can help determine causes of failures pretty rapidly. But without it, you’re just really looking at video in this particular collapse. Rosemary Barnes It’s amazing that you can look at video. The video is far more useful than the SCADA data is, probably. Um, yeah, it’s, well, I’ve never actually, like, I’ve worked on a lot of RCAs and I’ve never actually got to see video footage of the incident, so that’s actually really cool that they’ve got this dash cam footage. Looking at it now, you can, um, see the lower, probably two thirds of the turbine tower, so you can see the blades coming past. I wish the video would start just like 10 seconds earlier. [00:02:00] Um, because maybe you can see a bit of wobble in the tower. You can see that one of the blades is already missing a tip, or the tip kind of flies off anyway, so maybe it was bent. So definitely looks to me like the root cause was that there was a blade failure. The, um, part of the blade broke off, caused a rotor imbalance, which then meant that one of the blades hit the tower and then it’s really easy for a tower to buckle once it’s got some damage in it. So that, that in itself, like, that’s not an uncommon scenario. Um, and yeah, for sure, like you would ask for the SCADA data, but, uh, I don’t think it’s accurate that they’re saying. There must have been a faulty sensor or something because when there’s a rotor imbalance, it should stop, um, stop the turbine. But I do know from experience, it does not always stop the turbine quickly enough to stop this happening. So, um, I’m not, I’m not sure that the SCADA data would tell you anything [00:03:00] groundbreaking. However, I think it is very interesting Vestas are very publicly not sharing because it’s out of warranty because to me, access to the SCADA data is a key part of being able to operate your turbine safely. And you don’t sell a turbine — like you might sell a turbine with a two year warranty, sure, but that doesn’t mean that you are selling a turbine that can only be operated safely for two years. That’s just like absolutely insane and contrary to — at least a lot of the world’s laws, there’s laws around, you know, how safely you can operate equipment, and especially energy generation assets have specific laws about that. You have to be able to operate them safely and yeah, from what we can see here, like you can’t get access to the SCADA data. So in, in this case, I don’t know if there was a problem with the turbine controller that contributed to this problem. I, I mean, I’m, I’m always a bit surprised that a turbine can shake itself apart and it’s not, you know, there isn’t a sensor in there that can stop it in time to stop the collapse because if you take just the population of turbines that have collapsed, which is, you know, [00:04:00] very, very few from considering the whole global population, but looking at those ones that have collapsed, it’s pretty common way that it happens is from, um, part of a blade falling off and then a rotor imbalance causing the tower to, um, start wobbling and the blades to hit the tower. Allen Hall So would it be in the control laws, Rosemary, where the shutdown would happen in terms of detecting vibration or motion? Maybe swing of the tower? Would that would then drive a safety circuit? Rosemary Barnes At a certain, at a certain level? Um, ’cause all of those, like the rotor does get in a bit of imbalance. The tower does accelerate in, you know, four and a half side to side, that all happens and can happen like quite, quite a lot as well. Like if you’re inside a wind turbine and when they stop it, um, then it makes like a very noticeable shudder right as that stops. And if you do an emergency stop, um, hopefully not while, you know, hopefully you’re not inside the tower when it goes from full, um, operation [00:05:00] to stopping as soon as, as quickly as possible. But that does make a big, um, jump. So, you know, like it’s not shutting down every time that there’s some kind of imbalance or, um, tower acceleration. But yeah, it just, the thing is, it’s, you just, they’re big and heavy, right? And there’s just so much inertia in the system that things can’t happen that fast. Like even if the control system can respond really quickly, it doesn’t mean that it can respond — like it can actually physically stop things before it’s had, you know, even one rotation to hit the tower, um, can be enough. What’s really interesting is that it could be a control system problem, right? That would — that they have now learned. There’s some faulty logic they need to replace it across the wind farm. But Vestas is saying, we’re not gonna tell you if that’s the case or not, because you can’t access this data. And I think that that is really interesting because like I’m constantly frustrated by how little, um, cooperation you can get for root cause analysis and like you can [00:06:00] understand it, no one wants to share their data, but it is in theory covered by laws, at least in, uh, Australian states. You, you know, that you, you’re required to provide information to operate the assets safely for its lifetime. And I, it just, to me is really highlighting that that’s not the case. It’s, it’s not an unusual situation, is kind of what I’m saying. Um, it’s very common that they don’t wanna cooperate, and I’m surprised that they’re happy to say that so, so publicly. Allen Hall Well, the threshold needs to be set somewhere when investigators are looking into an accident like this. I always think you try to help the investigators as much as you can. In the airplane world when there’s an accident, that’s one of the first things that happens is they go pull all the data from the aircraft and then go search through it and see what happened. In the wind turbine world, that’s not necessarily the case, but there is a lot of data at all the OEMs, and it’s not necessarily locked into the turbine. It’s usually remote access, so it would be very easy to give access to [00:07:00] investigators. So it’s, it’s curious to me as to why there’s any hesitation at all if the Korean investigators wanna see the data, just give it to ’em. Rosemary Barnes Yeah. Especially because like from just the brief look that I’ve had, it doesn’t look like it’s gonna turn out that there’s some problem with the turbine controller. If Vestas aren’t to blame, it would be much easier for them to just privately release the data under an NDA and say, look, hey, it’s nothing. It’s not here. But I will say that, um, in the RCAs that I’ve worked on, safety regulators can compel data from the owner and the operator, but it’s not so clear that they have the right to get data from the manufacturer. When you’ve got full service agreements, you can get that because the manufacturer is the operator. But in this case, if Vestas had nothing to do with the operation, then like, I don’t know what the laws are in South Korea, but it is possible at least that they don’t have any right to compel Vestas for the data. Um, for the data. And I think that [00:08:00] is wrong. And, um, this, you know, will hopefully highlight to people, safety regulators around the world — hey, you know, do we need to be changing this regulation a little bit to make sure that when you sell a wind turbine, or you know, any, anything else, any other big bit of industrial equipment, when you sell it, you have to — you have to provide enough information for the life of the wind turbine to operate it safely. Doesn’t mean you need to give away all your trade secrets, but it needs to be safe. And part of that is when you have a catastrophic failure, you do need to make sure that this is not gonna repeat itself across the whole wind farm or across, you know, every turbine of this type in the world. That’s why you do a root cause analysis after the fact. Like you’re not saving this turbine. It’s in like absolute pieces on the ground, right? Like the most value you’ll ever get out of this turbine again is probably recycling the steel. Um, that’ll be the most value. So you don’t do the root cause analysis for the lost asset. You do it to make sure that you understand what’s happened and you are [00:09:00] able to, um, know ahead of time if this is a risk for future assets. Um, and you can’t, yeah, you cannot do that if you don’t have all the data. So, yeah. Very interesting. Allen Hall Like we talked about at the WOMA conference a few months ago, access to SCADA data is paramount for a lot of operators. And, uh, when contracts are assigned, a lot of times that is not lined into the contract — that I will have full access to the SCADA data — and it can be, which I think a lot of operators don’t even consider. So that’s a negotiated item for most contracts and most wind turbine purchases. Especially in Europe now with the new data laws in Europe. I think all the OEMs have to provide that data regardless if there’s an accident or not. You just have — yeah, I think they have to give full access. The means of doing it, I think it’s being implemented this year. Well, it sounds like talking to operators they are just getting some of that data, but once that door opens in Europe, do you think the rest of the world will probably follow? Rosemary Barnes Yeah, I mean, it’s one thing, like they don’t want you reverse engineering their [00:10:00] IP. That’s, that’s basically it. All their trade secrets. Allen Hall Could you do that? I mean, that, that, that’s always the, the, the real issue, right? So I hear that quite a bit from OEMs. We don’t want you to reverse engineer the turbine, but can you do that from the SCADA data? That seems like an impossible task. Rosemary Barnes I also don’t think that anybody is doing anything that tricky, that it’s really gonna be worth the, the effort, you know. And it’s one thing, like it’s annoying — you can’t access the control system. Um, so you can’t make improvements, you know, like you could get a bit more yield out of your wind farm if you can start doing things like wake steering or, you know, changing the speed of operation to, um, you know, depending on environmental conditions, and those, like you, you can improve your operations a bit from that. And so it’s been annoying that you, you can’t actually do those cool projects because you can’t get into the control system. And you know, there exist companies that will come in and take a, a, you know, 10-year-old wind turbine, rip out the control system, put in a new [00:11:00] one, and people go through that whole painful, expensive process just so that they can get control over operation and the data. And that’s, that’s annoying. And, you know, maybe getting an extra, you know, I don’t know, two or 3% AEP out of your wind farm is a big deal. But, um, you know, that’s on the one hand. But on the other hand, when it comes to being able to safely operate your asset, it just shouldn’t be any question. You know? And I don’t know why a manufacturer would be really digging their heels in on this because like I do see, and I hope that this is the kind of incident that makes safety regulators go, hey, you know, this isn’t, this isn’t cool. This is not okay, that we don’t have the information we need to make sure that these turbines are safe across the rest of the, um, the country, you know. Like an overzealous safety regulator could easily be like, oh, okay, well we don’t have a root cause, we can’t rule out that there’s not a fleet-wide problem — all of these Vestas turbines across, um, South [00:12:00] Korea have to shut down now. You know, like that, that is a potential outcome that could happen. That would be terrible for Vestas. Um, so I just don’t understand why they don’t just give the data. — SPONSOR: PES WIND MAGAZINE — Allen Hall As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial — and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PESwind.com today. Allen Hall Well, a wind turbine factory in West Branch, Iowa just reopened after sitting idle for 12 years and already its workers are worried about tariffs. Nordex restarted the facility in July of last year to manufacture nacelles and drivetrains for the American and Canadian markets. [00:13:00] Orders are strong for this Nordex facility. Alliant Energy awarded Nordex contracts for up to 190 turbines — that’s pretty good — representing over 1,060 megawatts of capacity, the largest single award in the company’s 25-year history in American operations. Uh, but the concerns at the Nordex facility at the moment have to do with tariffs, where a lot of the components that are coming into the factory are running into hefty tariffs, which makes the margins really tough for Nordex to operate that plant. Uh, so the tax advantages of having a facility in the United States are really being offset by some of these extra taxes that are being levied on wind turbine components. Uh, this is not the only facility in Iowa that must be thinking hard about this. The TPI facility in Iowa that is going through the bankruptcy hearings at the moment. [00:14:00] There’s an offer from a company to buy that facility, or acquire that facility, and a couple of the TPI facilities down in Mexico. As it stands, GE is backing the Iowa plant in case those initial purchases of those factories fall through — GE would like to have the Iowa factory, most likely for tax purposes, because some of the projects probably depend upon the tax advantages of building particularly blades and large components like nacelles in the US. So Iowa is a real key here. The restart and some of the increased operations in the United States are indicative of how things are going, I think, globally in the wind energy world, where factories have been closed or they’ve been considering closing a number of factories in Europe and trying to find key places to manufacture components where maybe the tariffs are lower or the operational costs are lower, or [00:15:00] labor costs are lower. Uh, we’re seeing a real big shuffle at the moment. Do you think that this is gonna settle up very quickly? ‘Cause it does seem like there is a migration to the UK because of the amount of money being spent in the United Kingdom, and a migration out of Northern Europe, and probably a migration out of America over time. Rosemary Barnes I mean, it’s interesting how much governments are playing a role. You know, government policies are playing a role in where manufacturing is happening. Um, I think it’s not even like you would’ve said until really recently that you put factories where labor is cheap. And, you know, for the really big components, you want to get roughly close to where the final project is, or at least close to a port so that you can get on a ship and, you know, ’cause um, overland transport is an issue. Um, but now I don’t even think that the labor is the main factor anymore, and maybe even [00:16:00] the geographical location in the world is not even the biggest issue now. It’s about, you know, where are the favorable conditions, and whether that’s because, you know, because of tariffs. And so I do think that we see in the UK the biggest thing that they have — it’s certainly not cheap labor, right? Um, it is, it’s pretty well located for a lot of projects. Um, the UK government has got a good, um, plan for, you know, a decade or more into the future. Right. You know, they’ve also executed on some of those, so we know that it’s not all just talk, and they’ve got some pretty good certainty about these projects and how the economics are going to work out. Allen Hall The UK is a good example of, of maybe a process that’s going well at the moment, but the long-term prospects I think is where everybody gets a little bit nervous. This thing that happened in America like two years ago where everybody was really excited about creating new factories — and then we get down the line a little bit and now we’re not happy to have factories. It really depends upon how [00:17:00] dedicated the government is and how many, uh, barriers they put in to prevent the money from going away. Right? When you lock in long-term funding where it doesn’t put the projects at risk, then it’s great, but if it can be wiped away by the next administration or just the passage of a single bill, then it just makes it really risky. Rosemary Barnes I think I just wanted to make the point that, you know, labor is expensive in the UK, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t have manufacturing, even, you know, like wind turbine blades at least are a very labor intensive thing to manufacture compared to most things these days. Um, but even then it’s not the most important thing anymore. So, you know, um, any country has the ability to put in place the ingredients that would be needed to get, uh, manufacturing of wind turbines in their own country. Um, so, you know, it’s a choice to a large extent, but people are scared to commit long term. You know, the manufacturers are scared to [00:18:00] commit a factory. Countries are scared to commit to a pipeline ’cause they don’t wanna be, you know, interfering in the market. But it’s just, it’s a big lumpy market that just makes it hard for people to want to invest and commit. And so, you know, if you want that manufacturing in your country, then you can, you can get it if you give confidence. Allen Hall At what point do you make decisions about manufacturing for wind turbines or even solar panels in your country with what’s happening in the Middle East? Does that really change the dynamic quite a bit, where the incremental cost delta of making it in-country is totally worth it with the knowledge that you’ll be free of all, uh, connections to the Middle East and the turmoil that does seem to happen there every couple of years. Rosemary Barnes It’s not like a direct enough link that it’s gonna make people make that decision overnight. We’re not buying our wind turbines from the Middle East currently, right? So, you know, existing turbine supply chain. So I think [00:19:00] it could definitely make you wanna turn up the pace at which you buy wind turbines and install them. And if you’ve got, you know, um, bigger pipelines, then it nudges you more and more towards local manufacturing. I guess that people are nervous in general of relying on other supply chains, um, or supply chains from overseas, but it’s a huge difference between, you know, relying on liquid fuels, which are, you know, arriving every day and you need them to continue arriving every day. And if one strait gets closed and that’s a 20% decline in the, you know, volume that can be moved around — you know, try and take 20% of, um, demand out of the system — and that’s obviously huge. But if you had the same thing, if it was wind turbine blades being transported through the strait, then, um, you know, it’d be no new wind farms [00:20:00] this year. It wouldn’t be that all of your existing wind turbines have to be turned off — like they keep on running. It’s just that the future doesn’t grow as fast as you would like it to. So I think it’s just like a much slower timeframe for shocks if you are relying on, um, wind turbines and solar panels, even if they’re made overseas. I still think that it is worth considering, like for security, like if you got into a big long war, and especially with, um, China because they’re the ones that make most of, uh, solar panels and batteries — at least, not wind turbines, although they are a major manufacturer, they’re not the majority for projects outside of China. Most countries are investing in some, you know, local capability to make things, you know, like Australia is investing in capacity to make solar panels, even though we know that we’ll never make them as cheap as China. The US also has done a lot to encourage local manufacturing of solar panels. Um, everybody is [00:21:00] trying to make batteries. Um, so yeah, I think we are doing that. I heard on a podcast, I think it was the Energy Transition Show, reference to, you know, every country does their study about what is net zero gonna cost. Um, and whatever the study was done in the UK, the amount that the energy transition was gonna cost — net zero by 2050, what is the cost to the economy — um, and it was, I can’t remember the number, some amount of trillions. They pointed out that that is the same as one crisis. Like what we’re going through now costs about that same amount of money. Um, you know, one fuel crisis. So it’s like if you can save yourself from one crisis, um, yeah, if you can insulate yourself from one crisis, it’s paid for itself. Do we really think that in the next 24 years — and it’s not just over 24 years, it’s, you know, it’s forever after that — do you think that there’s only gonna be one? No way. There’s gonna be lots. So I’m hopeful that, [00:22:00] um, this crisis is gonna get people thinking, hey, we can insure against this sort of thing by electrifying, um, that, you know, we’ve had oil shocks before. We’ll have them again in the future. I mean, in Australia, like, I’ve heard international commentary saying things like, you know, Australia will be a winner out of this because we’re such a big exporter of LNG. But in reality in Australia, there are petrol stations that don’t have any diesel — um, like, you know, lots of them. So people with diesel cars are driving around and around and around to, um, you know, find somewhere where they can buy fuel. And in a just delicious piece of irony, like back two or three elections ago, um, the conservative party was having this point of difference with the more progressive party — the Labor party — that, you know, they wanted to promote EVs, and the coalition said they’re gonna ruin your weekend. They’re gonna end, they’re gonna end the [00:23:00] weekend, I think was the saying, because yeah, like EVs, you can’t go camping or whatever with an EV. And now we’ve got the Easter long weekend and people are legitimately saying I can’t find fuel to drive to my plans for the Easter weekend. So now it’s diesel specifically — you know, fossil fuel cars in general — that are ending the weekend. You know, people have had their weekend ended by, um, not having an EV this time around. So I think that it should really reframe people’s thinking, refocus us. Allen Hall But isn’t that what eventually happens — is that the realism hits, and so no matter what your ideology is or your thought process, you still have to deal with what’s happening on the ground at any particular moment. And this is not the first time these events have happened, they’re not gonna be the last time that they’ve happened. Your best mode of operation is to decouple from these events as much as [00:24:00] you can. Where I think the UK is headed. Obviously Norway has, in a sense, decoupled itself because of the amount of electric vehicles that it has and the natural resources that it has. Honestly, every country — every major country — if they can decouple, is going to try to decouple. Just to stop, uh, because it has seemed like in the United States, well, since the 1970s, it’s just been this rocky road. And the discussion — at least you hear discussions here now more recently about what are we doing? We just keep doing the same thing and we end up with these trillion dollar spends to create some new future, and the future never really shifts all that much. Should we be involving ourselves in this? In terms of energy production, I think you see more of a push for more independent energy production and decoupling, which I think Australia’s headed to and could do. The UK is [00:25:00] trying to do it, and other countries are trying to do it. If you have enough of an economy to do it, when energy is one of those things, I think you just can’t not do it — you would need to be involved in solar and wind. You need to be involved in batteries and you need to be involved in LNG if you can do it, you need to be involved in nuclear if you can pull it off. All of the above is gonna be the answer for a lot of countries to get out of the strait. Rosemary Barnes I think the US is a bit different though, because, um, unlike many countries, you could become more energy secure or entirely energy secure without electrifying. I think that you, you have enough of the various different kinds of, um, fossil fuels that you could. Uh, and I’m sure that will be the response as well in the, at least immediate future in the US. Whereas other countries who don’t have that option, we’re forced to move into the future. And I think that, you know, is better for us in the long term. Allen Hall Well, this is the thing about Australia — and we pointed out at WOMA — [00:26:00] is Australia is leading the world in a lot of ways, and electrification is one of them. So the rest of the world is watching what happens in the way that Australia goes about it. A lot of wind, even more solar, and some batteries — and how that plays out’s gonna affect where the rest of the world goes. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to subscribe, so you never miss an episode. And if you have found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. So for Rosie — Yolanda and Matthew are on holiday — I’m Allen Hall and we’ll see you here next time on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:27:00] Podcast.  

Fifteen thousand years ago, as the Ice Age loosened its grip on Northern Europe, humans returned to the previously inhospitable British Isles. But they did not come alone. Among their number was a companion once thought to be an impossibility: Britain's earliest known dog.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes Dr. Selina Brace and Dr. William Marsh from the Natural History Museum to explore groundbreaking new research from Gough's Cave that is reshaping our understanding of humans and dogs in Ice Age Britain. Together they uncover the story of a remarkable discovery: ancient remains once believed to belong to a wolf, now identified as Britain's oldest known domesticated dog. How did this dog live alongside prehistoric hunter-gatherers? And how is this discovery changing what we thought we knew about the arrival of dogs in Britain?MOREThe First Dogs:Listen on AppleListen on Spotify End of the Ice Age Britain:Listen on AppleListen on Spotify Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Former NHL All-Star Mike Richter leads Brightcore Energy, building energy-efficiency and geothermal systems for commercial and municipal buildings.Geothermal basics - Uses stable ~55°F ground temp as thermal battery; far more efficient than air-source systems in extreme tempsMarket gap - techGeology matters - Bedrock (e.g., Manhattan schist) lowers cost; sand and landfill increase complexity and capexFinancing wins deals - Energy-as-a-Service + 40–50% tax credits remove upfront cost barriers; nonprofits now eligibleCapital strategy - Took outside capital to fund equipment + long sales cycles; dilution vs bigger pie tradeoffFounder lesson - Transitioning domains requires humility; persistence beats speed in infrastructure markets--Work with mePrivate CEO group for VC/PE-backed climate tech founders navigating capital, strategy, and scale. Capped at 45 CEOs. → entrepreneursforimpact.comNewsletter3 decisions, 2 minutes. Climate finance, strategy, leadership. → entrepreneursforimpact.substack.comLeave a reviewIf you got value, take 30 seconds and do the community a favor. It helps push more capital and talent toward scalable climate solutions.

What can we learn about Jewish history when we stop focusing on great rabbis and turn instead to ordinary people? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz speaks with historian Elisheva Baumgarten about the groundbreaking volume she edited, Beyond the Elite: Everyday Jewish Lives in Medieval Northern Europe (Cornell UP, 2026). Beyond the Elite invites readers into the everyday world of Jews in medieval northern and central Europe—not through the voices of famous scholars, but through the lives of ordinary people. Using four powerful lenses—people, spaces, objects, and rituals—the book reconstructs how non-elite Jews lived, worked, traveled, celebrated, and struggled within majority-Christian societies. Across topics as wide-ranging as orphanhood, river travel, local political conflicts, pawnbroking, architecture, weddings, and religious practice, the volume reveals how Jewish communities were deeply woven into the fabric of medieval towns while still marked as outsiders. These stories capture the rhythms of daily life during periods of relative stability—and help explain how, by the late thirteenth century, anti-Jewish persecution emerged both from within existing social systems and as a rupture of them. Together, Baumgarten and Katz explore what happens when historians shift their attention away from elites and toward the margins—and how recovering the lives of ordinary Jews reshapes our understanding of medieval Jewish identity, community, and survival. About the Guest Elisheva Baumgarten is Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the leading scholars of medieval Ashkenazic Jewish life. Her research focuses on the social and religious worlds of ordinary Jews, including women, families, and those outside the rabbinic elite. She led the multi-year collaborative research project that produced Beyond the Elite, bringing together scholars to reconstruct the daily lives of Jews across medieval northern Europe. About the Host Marc Katz is the rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud. Through his teaching, writing, and podcast conversations with leading scholars, Katz brings cutting-edge academic scholarship into meaningful conversation with contemporary Jewish life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

What can we learn about Jewish history when we stop focusing on great rabbis and turn instead to ordinary people? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz speaks with historian Elisheva Baumgarten about the groundbreaking volume she edited, Beyond the Elite: Everyday Jewish Lives in Medieval Northern Europe (Cornell UP, 2026). Beyond the Elite invites readers into the everyday world of Jews in medieval northern and central Europe—not through the voices of famous scholars, but through the lives of ordinary people. Using four powerful lenses—people, spaces, objects, and rituals—the book reconstructs how non-elite Jews lived, worked, traveled, celebrated, and struggled within majority-Christian societies. Across topics as wide-ranging as orphanhood, river travel, local political conflicts, pawnbroking, architecture, weddings, and religious practice, the volume reveals how Jewish communities were deeply woven into the fabric of medieval towns while still marked as outsiders. These stories capture the rhythms of daily life during periods of relative stability—and help explain how, by the late thirteenth century, anti-Jewish persecution emerged both from within existing social systems and as a rupture of them. Together, Baumgarten and Katz explore what happens when historians shift their attention away from elites and toward the margins—and how recovering the lives of ordinary Jews reshapes our understanding of medieval Jewish identity, community, and survival. About the Guest Elisheva Baumgarten is Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the leading scholars of medieval Ashkenazic Jewish life. Her research focuses on the social and religious worlds of ordinary Jews, including women, families, and those outside the rabbinic elite. She led the multi-year collaborative research project that produced Beyond the Elite, bringing together scholars to reconstruct the daily lives of Jews across medieval northern Europe. About the Host Marc Katz is the rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud. Through his teaching, writing, and podcast conversations with leading scholars, Katz brings cutting-edge academic scholarship into meaningful conversation with contemporary Jewish life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

What can we learn about Jewish history when we stop focusing on great rabbis and turn instead to ordinary people? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz speaks with historian Elisheva Baumgarten about the groundbreaking volume she edited, Beyond the Elite: Everyday Jewish Lives in Medieval Northern Europe (Cornell UP, 2026). Beyond the Elite invites readers into the everyday world of Jews in medieval northern and central Europe—not through the voices of famous scholars, but through the lives of ordinary people. Using four powerful lenses—people, spaces, objects, and rituals—the book reconstructs how non-elite Jews lived, worked, traveled, celebrated, and struggled within majority-Christian societies. Across topics as wide-ranging as orphanhood, river travel, local political conflicts, pawnbroking, architecture, weddings, and religious practice, the volume reveals how Jewish communities were deeply woven into the fabric of medieval towns while still marked as outsiders. These stories capture the rhythms of daily life during periods of relative stability—and help explain how, by the late thirteenth century, anti-Jewish persecution emerged both from within existing social systems and as a rupture of them. Together, Baumgarten and Katz explore what happens when historians shift their attention away from elites and toward the margins—and how recovering the lives of ordinary Jews reshapes our understanding of medieval Jewish identity, community, and survival. About the Guest Elisheva Baumgarten is Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the leading scholars of medieval Ashkenazic Jewish life. Her research focuses on the social and religious worlds of ordinary Jews, including women, families, and those outside the rabbinic elite. She led the multi-year collaborative research project that produced Beyond the Elite, bringing together scholars to reconstruct the daily lives of Jews across medieval northern Europe. About the Host Marc Katz is the rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud. Through his teaching, writing, and podcast conversations with leading scholars, Katz brings cutting-edge academic scholarship into meaningful conversation with contemporary Jewish life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Lori has made her glorious return from Finland and Estonia and has a lot to say about why flying is bullshit. We also barely contain our glee while discussing a murder, chat about Iran, and play America's Favorite Game Show, Chuck Norris Edition. Listen, if you must! Has something we said, or failed to say, made you FEEL something? You can tell us all about it by joining the conversation on our Substack or you can send us an email here. Enjoy!Show RundownOpen — Being insensitive about airport chaos8:42 — Lori in the World49:10 — Handi-capable quadruple amputee succeeds at cornhole, murder52:40 — Iran war chat!1:18:26 — Donald Trump had to watch his mail order bride's closet get raped1:29:49 — Did CBS News's Senior National Correspondent Mark Strassmann Get Off a Good One?1:35:30 — Wrap-up! Project Hail Mary; Inside the Manosphere (redux)Relevant Linkage can be found by visiting https://brainiron.substack.com/, where, if you would like to support this and the other podcasting and blogging endeavors of the Brain Iron dot com media empire, you can also become a paying subscriber.The opening and closing themes of Cast Iron Brains were composed by Marc Gillig. For more from Marc, go to tetramermusic.com.

It's EV News Briefly for Monday 09 March 2026, everything you need to know in less than 5 minutes if you haven't got time for the full show.Patreon supporters fund this show, get the episodes ad free, as soon as they're ready and are part of the EV News Daily Community. You can be like them by clicking here: https://www.patreon.com/EVNewsDailySCOUT RESERVATIONS SWING TO RANGE-EXTENDED HYBRIDSScout Motors now holds over 160,000 reservations for its Traveler SUV and Terra pickup, with 87% of reservation holders choosing the gas-assisted extended-range hybrid over pure BEV — well above the 60/40 split CEO Scott Keogh originally expected. First customer deliveries have slipped to 2028, with delays attributed to technical challenges in developing a rugged ladder-frame platform with dual powertrains.RIVIAN DROPS $45,000 R2 STARTING-PRICE LINERivian has quietly removed the "$45,000 starting price" reference from its R2 product page, replacing it with a countdown clock ahead of a March 12 reveal at South by Southwest where full pricing and specs are expected. The R2 will launch first as a higher-priced dual-motor variant, with a more affordable single-motor base model to follow shortly after.BEVS NOW BEAT ICE ON COST IN MORE MARKETSAyvens' 2026 Car Cost Index finds BEVs now undercut comparable ICE models on total cost of ownership in a growing number of European markets, with Western and Northern Europe leading the way. In the compact segment BEVs hold a TCO advantage in 19 of 30 markets, and the BMW i4 beats the petrol 3 Series on TCO in 20 of 30 European countries.GLOBAL PUBLIC EV CHARGERS HEAD FOR 9.01M IN 2026Global public EV charging infrastructure is forecast to reach 9.01 million plugs in 2026, up from 7.11 million in 2025, though China alone accounts for 67% of the global total and the top eight countries host 88% of all chargers. Growth is slowing in Europe and losing momentum in the US, while Germany is on track to overtake the Netherlands in installed chargers during 2026.UK SUPPLIERS PULL FIXED DEALS AS GAS SPIKESUK energy suppliers slashed available fixed tariffs from 38 to 17 in a matter of days as wholesale gas prices spiked roughly 75% following disruption to Middle Eastern gas infrastructure, with the cheapest typical annual dual-fuel fixed deal rising from £1,509 to £1,640. EV-specific tariffs were also affected, with EDF pausing some EV tariffs and E.ON briefly freezing one, threatening the cost advantage of off-peak home charging for EV drivers.NEXTSTAR SWITCHES ON CANADA'S FIRST EV CELL PLANTNextStar Energy, a Stellantis and LG Energy Solution joint venture, has opened Canada's first commercial-scale EV battery cell plant in Windsor, Ontario, having already produced over one million cells since production began in November 2025. Beyond supplying Stellantis brands, NextStar aims to expand into stationary energy storage for municipal and provincial grids.STELLANTIS PLANS £50M ELLESMERE PORT VAN LINEStellantis will invest £50 million at Ellesmere Port to add an assembly line for electric Vauxhall Vivaro vans and other midsize zero-emission commercial vehicles from next year, building on the site's existing all-electric output. However, Stellantis warns the plant may not be commercially viable under the UK's ZEV mandate for vans, which carries an £18,000 fine per non-compliant vehicle at a 24% electric sales threshold that the industry is currently only half-meeting.MET SEIZES 52 ILLEGAL E-BIKES AND MOPEDSThe Metropolitan Police seized 52 illegal electric bikes and mopeds across London over two days, using targeted checkpoints in high-pedestrian-risk areas including Harlesden and Cambridge Circus. Officers also made arrests for dangerous driving, weapons possession, and outstanding prison recall warrants, linking illegal e-bikes to phone snatches and broader street crime.MEXICO AUTO PLANTS PIVOT TO HIGHER-VALUE EVSMexico's auto sector is shifting focus from volume to higher-value output between 2025 and 2027, with GM concentrating Cadillac OPTIQ production at Ramos Arizpe and BMW committing its San Luis Potosí plant to build the iX3 — its first Neue Klasse EV — from 2027. Both manufacturers have maintained their Mexican strategies despite ongoing uncertainty from US tariffs and trade policy under President Trump.FARLEY POURS COLD WATER ON ELECTRIC UTESFord CEO Jim Farley says current BEV technology is poorly suited to mainstream ute and pickup buyers who tow heavy loads, calling a large-battery BEV "a really bad tow-er," and Ford has already shelved the F-150 Lightning following weak demand and a $19.5 billion EV writedown. Farley backs extended-range EVs as the near-term bridge solution for work-capable vehicles, while dismissing solid-state batteries and fuel cells as not yet on Ford's product horizon.

Allen, Rosemary, Yolanda, and Matthew discuss highlights from Blades USA including the carbon blade debate. Plus TPI Composites’ bankruptcy sale hits major obstacles as partners dispute over $100M in claims. And Europe’s offshore and onshore wind developers clash over state aid, with WindEurope’s new CEO urging unity. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts.  Allen Hall 2025: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host Alan Hall, and I’m here with Yolanda Padron, Rosemary Barnes and Matthew Stead. Yolanda and Matthew have just wrapped up a couple of days at the Blade USA forum in Austin, Texas. Maybe we should start there. Thoughts on the forum this year? Things that were highlights?  Matthew Stead: Yeah. Lightning Root de bond. One positive was that, um, there are a couple of startups there, so, you know, kudos to them for, you know, making the investment. There was a. There was a startup around, you know, data analytics and, you know, bringing machine learning in. And then there was also another startup looking at recycling. [00:01:00] Um, really trying to get that, that food chain through of, um, you know, grinding and then turning into some sort of valuable product. Um, yeah. However, I think someone also from EPRI said that, you know, at the moment, you know, the recycling path is, you know, eight times more expensive than the, um, the landfill path. There was a lot of carbon discussion actually. So, and, um, yeah, a lot of discussion about repairs, a lot of discussion about testing, uh, a lot of discussion about, you know, how maybe a carbon blade can last 40 years. Um, so a lot of discussion about lifetime extensions around carbon. Um, but, but, but, but, you know, really, really hard to repair.  Allen Hall 2025: That goes back to the comments Rosemary and Morton Hanberg made about carbon blades. Should we be making. Carbon blades are not. And I think Morton’s opinion, and maybe Rosemary’s, I don’t wanna speak for her, was carbon blades are okay, but they are really difficult to repair. Almost impossible to repair. And is it [00:02:00] worth even building them?  Rosemary Barnes: I think if you consider the blade in isolation, then it probably is adding more headaches than it’s worth. But carbon fiber is a bit of an enabler for improvements across the whole system of a, a wind turbine. ’cause when you take, like you can take a lot of weight out of a blade by using carbon fiber. I mean, it’s never been cheaper to make a blade with carbon fiber than an equivalent blade with glass. You do, you buy the more expensive carbon fiber blade because it’s lighter, a like, a lot lighter, and then you can take, um, weight. It, it reduces the requirements for basically every other component in the wind turbine, but especially stuff like the pitch bearings. Um, so you solve a lot of other problems, but you create blade problems. So. I think if you ask some of the only works on maintaining blades, then you’re gonna be like, why would you make a carbon fiber blade? It is so much headache. Um, but that’s not the reason why they were ever made in the first place. [00:03:00] So you’d need to talk to, you know, somebody on, uh, I dunno, front end engineering. Someone from the sales team about why it is that they are going with a more expensive carbon fiber blade. Even acknowledging that they probably underestimate how many problems there are with o and m with, uh, carbon fiber blades. But even so, like they’re already aware that there are trade offs. Um, and yeah, there’s non blade reasons for, for taking, taking that pain.  Allen Hall 2025: Are there other fibers that could be substituted besides carbon? There, I, I know fiberglass. A, a good, relatively strong fiber and carbon obviously is much stronger. But are there things in the middle that could be substituted that are non-conductive? Rosemary Barnes: Uh, y yeah, there are, but carbon fibers, it’s not just strong. It’s really stiff. And that’s what its benefit is. Um, like there’s Kevlar but it’s not very stiff. So you would, we would make a really heavy blade if you used Kevlar. It would be probably bulletproof though. So I guess that would be a plus. I, I haven’t looked into it recently, but nothing is [00:04:00] at the, um, like got the performance specs and the cost specs that you would need to, um, make it replace carbon fiber. Matthew Stead: So one thing that I picked up I thought was pretty, uh, interesting was that by having a stronger, you know, carbon protrusion, you know, the, you know, the backbone of the blade, um, it took a little bit of pressure off the skin. And so therefore, um, you know, the life, life of the blade, um, and the ability to keep running it ’cause the skin is not so critical. Those seem to be a real, a real plus as well.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know, people talk about this in like absolutes, but everything is just a con continuum, right? Like you can make an all glass blade that would last a thousand years if you really wanted to. You just, you know, you just have to make it very, very strong. ’cause it’s, you know, it’s all based on fatigue lifetime. And the smaller that your, um, strain on every component in the blade is, then the less, um, the less fatigue damage is gonna accumulate. Making it a little bit stiffer will actually increase the lifetime by [00:05:00] a a lot. I think the main benefit to protrusions is just that you avoid all of the um, or you avoid a lot of the possibilities for manufacturing defects. It’s easy to control the manufacture ’cause carbon fiber, like much more so than glass fiber. It’s so, um, it’s so dependent on the fibers being perfectly straight. If you have a little wrinkle, like a little wrinkle is bad in glass fiber, but it’s like really bad in carbon fiber. So protrusions mean that you won’t get wrinkles. Uh, and you can, you know, control the manufacturing process a lot better, but they are barely repairable, right? So that’s the trade off. You can do some small repairs, but you’re not gonna be just. Um, if you’ve got a, a, a full thickness crack or something, it’s, you know, it’s gonna be game over. You’re not gonna be building that up again. Allen Hall 2025: Delamination and bottomline failures and blades are difficult problems to [00:06:00] detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. C-I-C-N-D-T are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their non-destructive test technology penetrates deep to blade materials to find voids and cracks. Traditional inspections, completely. Miss C-I-C-N-D-T Maps. Every critical defect delivers actionable reports and provides support to get your blades. Back in service, so visit cic ndt.com because catching blade problems early  Yolanda Padron: will save you millions.  Allen Hall 2025: Well keep going on the, the subject of blades. Imagine if you were selling your house and you told the bank you owe nothing on it. Then the bank shows up with a bill for over a hundred million dollars. That is essentially what’s happening right now in the TPI composites bankruptcy. Uh, the wind blade manufacturer canceled its [00:07:00] February 17th asset auction after only one bidder came forward. A firm called ECP five LLC, which is, uh, part of Energy Capital Partners, which is based in New Jersey. Uh, but before TPI. Can hand over the keys. It has to settle up with its business partners. TPI told the court many of those partners were owed little or nothing. Uh, the partners check their books. Strongly disagree. Now, the judge has a mountain of competing claims to sort through before the sale can close. And everyone, I mean, the, the claims are big. Uh, there are several large names listed, and if you go through the filings, uh, Siemens C Mesa is probably the largest one, and it, it claims TPI owes about 84 million plus an unpaid inspection, repair, and replacement costs. Plus under 22 million [00:08:00]under apparent guarantee. Others include Aurora Energy Services stating it is owned about $5 million, uh, for post-bankruptcy services, plus 38,000, uh, for before the filing of bankruptcy. The landlord up in Iowa for the TPI facility there is objecting because they’re owed some rent. Some other ones include, uh. Oracle, uh, which is, uh, has a lot of software licenses that TPI currently has, and they’re saying those licenses will not swap over to the new owner. So there, this is a series of these filings going on at the minute, and they’re pushing back the closing of the, uh, sale hearing until March 9th. So they got about another two weeks as we record right now. This is a big deal and, and although I have seen almost nothing about it in the press. Because it’s hard. One, it’s hard to find, and two, it’s really [00:09:00] difficult to sort through. Uh, but it is a major milestone for TPI that they’re gonna be able to sell the, or at least transfer ownership to, uh, energy capital partners. And the none of the buyers investors had bought part of the facilities. But GE Renova or Siemens cesa, for that matter, are not involved, at least at the top level. Which is really to, in my opinion, odd. I thought GE Renova would’ve been involved, at least at some level. They have been supporting TPI through this process. But in terms of going forward, doesn’t look like too much is going on with Renova or Siemens Ga Mesa in, in terms of the operations of these facilities. Thoughts.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I agree. It’s strange that they wouldn’t have taken that opportunity and that makes me wonder what I don’t know that, you know, ’cause obviously it’s not a strange decision to the people who have made it so. They’ve got more information, a lot more information than us. So what is it that made it unappealing to them? That’s, um, that’s my question. [00:10:00] Yolanda Padron: What did TP, I think was gonna happen with all of that money that they owe everyone?  Allen Hall 2025: Well, it’s a bankruptcy hearing. Obviously they like to wipe that debt free and so would Energy Capital partners. They don’t wanna pay the a hundred million plus of whatever, uh, the court would ict, but. You just like to get the assets. If you can do it, that’s your cheapest option if you’re Energy Capital partners. But do you see Energy Capital Partners running the facilities? There’s a lot of organization within TPI that manages those facilities and controls the operation. From the quality side engineering side, there’s, there’s a lot of pieces to TPI here. Do you think they’re just gonna pick it up and run, run the company as it stands today? Or, or,  Rosemary Barnes: oh my goodness. I would be so nervous to, um, buy blades, uh, from them in that situation. I mean, we’ve seen so many examples in the last few years of decisions being made by senior management that have really compromised the quality at the end of the day. Like in theory, yes, the factory, you know, all the processes are in place to do things. Um, to do things [00:11:00] right, but you know, as soon as they get the next new project, which they’re doing constantly, right? It’s not like they just make a blade and they just make it over and over again. They make many different kinds of blades. There’s decisions to be made and you’re trying to get the price right and the quality right. And then, you know, given that we know that TPI was not profitable the way they were doing it before, they’re gonna have to spend less money. Then somebody who isn’t from the industry is making those calls about where to save it. It just seems like totally implausible to me.  Matthew Stead: Can I just add though, you know, TPI was mentioned multiple times at, um, at Blades, USA, and so, you know, a lot of people are relying on them or have relied on them and so forth. And so maybe this is a strategy about supporting the industry into the future. Like I think Alan, you, you said that they’re involved in, um, this investment business has other wind assets, so maybe it’s just like. Securing supply chain and, which I mean, that’s a pretty logical approach, isn’t it?  Allen Hall 2025: Oh, it would be. Uh, they’re about 50% owners of Ted’s US onshore fleet and a number. There are [00:12:00] other projects they’re involved in a number of renewable projects. Uh, so it would make sense for them to try to keep the supply chain going. But the largest purchaser of GB GE turbines that I know of is NextEra. So you would think NextEra would want to step into the mix too and at least in all the court filings, I haven’t seen much from NextEra or nothing from them at all. It if Osted US is wanting to keep their supply chain and Energy Capital partners wanted to keep the supply chain going, that would make a lot of sense to me. However, I just don’t know if they have the infrastructure to manage it. As Rosemary has described on numerous occasions running LM wind power is not easy. There’s just a lot of moving pieces, supply chain problems. You’ve got people problems, you have quality problems, you have repair problems, warranty issues. It’s a lot to that business. It isn’t like you’re stamping out widgets. You, you have a responsibility to that product after it goes out into [00:13:00] service. So if you have problems out in service, you’re, you’re kind of on the hook for all those warranty claims. It’s complicated.  Rosemary Barnes: You make it sound like I was running lm  Yolanda Padron: Rosie runs the world. Rosemary Barnes: I just wanna make it clear I was not running lm  Allen Hall 2025: Not yet. Rosie. There’s still time.  Rosemary Barnes: I was ru running one very tiny, tiny corner of it.  Yolanda Padron: I’d almost be curious ’cause like since ECP is so much into risk management and just, just in general, they have so many things that they are like part owners in, but they don’t necessarily manage the day to day hands on. Uh. I’d almost be curious to see if maybe they take a page out of Rosie’s book and try to make one thing. Well,  Matthew Stead: mm, that’d be novel, wouldn’t it?  Rosemary Barnes: It has actually been tried before. Um, you know, it’s, it’s uh, not something that has escaped the notice of blade engineers, uh, that if you make one thing, you can do it right. And wind turbine blades are a pretty similar there. No, you know, like great [00:14:00] differentiator between. How well performing the blades are from one company to another. I know at, at least at lm, they did have a blade that they designed, and their plan was to sell just heaps and heaps of those to multiple different manufacturers and just no one wanted it. Um, so it just quietly died. Um, so yeah, the, the concept is good. I think it’s. A little bit harder to pull off than you would hope. There are also some Chinese companies that are kind of selling just parts, generic parts. And so if you wanted to make your own wind turbine, um, company, if you wanted to be a wind energy o and m Yolanda, you could just buy an assortment of parts from Chinese manufacturers and put a. Yolanda Wind energy sticker on it and um, and, and, and you could be an an OEM. So it is, it, it, it is possible. I haven’t seen any of these out in the wild. Um, I have [00:15:00] heard of, you know, people considering it for, you know, certain aspects of certain types of projects. So it kind of exists in a way.  Matthew Stead: But the financial aspect, I mean, that’s accounting 1 0 1, I mean. You gotta know your assets and to owe people a hundred million dollars, that’s absolutely shocking. Really?  Allen Hall 2025: They owed a lot more than that before the bankruptcy. It is a lot of money.  Matthew Stead: How do you miss that?  Allen Hall 2025: Well, I don’t think they missed it. I just think the warranty claims and some of the repair that was going on and the, the, it sounded like price discounting was happening to some of the OEMs just caught up to ’em. But at the end of the day, I, I, I guess the question is. Does TPI as an entity remain? Obviously the Vestas portion will, because Vestas is gonna make them Vestas factories in a sense, and, uh, integrate as part of their overall operations. But Renova is not, Siemens is not interested in doing it, at least as we speak. No one’s [00:16:00] making any noise over at Nordex. It, it does leave these assets questionable as to what the real value is. We haven’t heard how much, uh, ECP has paid for them yet. The Vestas factories that were purchased, I think the, the two TPI factories in Mexico, I think Vestas paid about $10 million for each factory, which is a really inexpensive price to pay for new factories because Vestus had talked about at one point a year or two ago, about standing up a new factory saying it would cost him roughly a half a billion dollars to do. So buying a, that same asset for $10 million is a discount, a deep, deep discount, which maybe Vestas figures, Hey, it’s 20 million bucks, plus they got the India operations. Uh, it’s not that much money. If it all goes sour, it’s not that much money and we’re okay. Whereas Ver Nova decided to not to participate in that. As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why [00:17:00] the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit p ps wind.com. Today, over in Denmark, a fight has been brewing between offshore and onshore wind developers and. Sted once State Aid brought back for offshore wind auctions, onshore developers say that would tilt the playing field against them. Well, some have even walked out on their own trade group, uh, over it. Now the new CEO of Wind Europe, Tina Van Stratton, uh, is stepping in the middle of that discussion with a simple message. We need both. Don’t let offshore and onshore wind divide us. Nearly 90% of Europe’s installed wind capacity sits currently on land, and [00:18:00] she says that is not going to change anytime soon. Uh, so there, there is a big dispute about this right there. There does seem to be a, a amount of money being poured into offshore wind and requests of governments to support offshore wind at the same time. Onshore wind, which has been the primary growth market for wind in Europe, is getting the cold shoulder. In a sense. How does this play out everyone? Is there a, a good solution to it or is the need for offshore wind so great that, that they have to ignore onshore wind development for a couple of years?  Matthew Stead: I think we should just all be friends. So, I mean, really. Yeah, we need both and, um, I mean for the diversity and, you know, uh, I’ll leave all the technical topics to Rosie, but, um, um, really I think we need both. I mean, so what, it’d be crazy to, to drop the onshore, onshore industry.  Yolanda Padron: Yeah. I mean, it makes sense that, or said, especially Orid Europe doesn’t have any onshore anymore. Right. So it’s just [00:19:00]offshore. It would make sense that they really wanna push for help for themselves. And it’s, it’s great. It, it’s, it’s great to help, but I, I agree with Matt. Allen Hall 2025: Well, the Northern Europe and Scandinavian countries are talking about 100 gigawatts in the water by what, 2050? Something of that sort. So that’s a lot of energy in the water. In order to do that, you have to devote a number of resources to it, which. Will mean onshore wind is not gonna get the support it probably deserves, even though it has a proven track record. Rosemary Barnes: I just think it, it’s really interesting because I guess wind is, um, a very Europe. LED industry. Um, and so yeah, in Europe, e everything big and exciting is in offshore and the volume is in offshore. Um, I feel like that’s kind of filtered through to other regions though, because I mean, in Australia we don’t even have any offshore wind yet. We are probably getting some, but you go to any wind energy event, it’s gonna be. [00:20:00] More than 50% offshore wind and sometimes like 90% offshore wind, um, focused, which is, I think crazy when onshore is, is exists and has plenty of problems that need to be solved, and we need to be building more, a lot faster. I, I do actually wish that. If we could spend as much of the, you know, like some of the effort and the political effort that’s going into paving the way for offshore wind, I think would be much better spent on solving the problems. Um, the obstacles stopping us from rolling out onshore wind faster. Because we’re not on track in Australia to meet our renewable energy targets if we can’t get that under control. And then in the US yes you have some offshore wind, but it is not a growth industry at the moment or it’s not very appealing at the moment, at least. Right. So, and I dunno how much you talk about it there, but I do hear a lot of, like a whole lot of talk about offshore compared to how important it is for regions outside of Europe. Yolanda Padron: I think it’s important too to [00:21:00] note that. When you have a lot of offshore wind in your fleet, like you can sometimes test out products onshore that maybe they’re, of course not the exact same conditions, but you can test out products to a degree onshore. And I’ve seen, you know, owner operators that have to go across continents just to test that product because it’s cheaper to do that onshore than to do it offshore in your home site, in your backyard. So I mean that that would really benefit from an RD standpoint. It would really benefit everyone. If  Allen Hall 2025: they gave it up attention  Yolanda Padron: to onshore.  Rosemary Barnes: When I was at lm, one of my, well my key team member who was an electrical engineer, he had, um, done a bunch of work for a system that was only implemented on an offshore wind farm. And it sucked up so much time when stuff started going wrong with that, like even small things. And he was the only one [00:22:00] that could do it. You know, you go out, if you’ve got a five minute job to do, to get, you know, like turn something off and on again off. Reconnect something that’s a whole day of work, right? Like you, and, and not like a normal day, but like a 12 hour day, you’re gonna go out in the morning, they, you know, they go around in a boat or whatever and drop people off and they don’t come get you when you’re done 10 minutes later, you know, they come get you at the end of the day when they’re picking everyone up again. So, um, it, it was, it was incredibly challenging. I mean, for him personally and the team. Um, and I always recommend to, or, you know, sometimes I’m advising, um, companies that have offshore wind, um, technologies. And I’m always advising anything that you can test on shore, do it and get creative about it as well. ’cause you might think that you can’t, you certainly can’t get all the way there without testing in your real operating environment. But any problem that could happen onshore that you, um, learn about when it’s onshore is gonna cost you probably like, you know, one 10th as much [00:23:00] to fix. Um. So, and, and the time as well. So, yeah, I, I think that you’re right that we should be actually considering onshore as an opportunity for, um, improving offshore technology as well.  Allen Hall 2025: Can we talk about, uh, data centers for a minute? Just off the top of mind, I’ve been listening to a number of podcasts over the last month or two talking about powering AI data centers and how much coal or natural gas. It’s gonna be needed to provide the stable, reliable power that these data centers supposedly need. In the meantime, there’s like this industry being built, uh, and you see the, the purchases of gas turbines going out to like, what, 2032? I think it’s what Renova is talking about now is when you could actually get in line for a gas turbine. Other manufacturers or gas turbines are basically saying the same thing in the meantime. [00:24:00] Elon Musk and SpaceX are talking about putting AI data centers up in space where you don’t have any regulatory issues. You don’t have to burn coal or natural gas or any of these things. So the, the ground-based AI data centers appear to be locked into making these really expensive buildings and assets and putting generation and transmission and, and this infrastructure together, which will cost them. Hundreds of millions at a minimum, likely tens of billions of dollars to do, and that’s just in the United States. Meanwhile, SpaceX is really on a pathway of doing this up in the sky for probably a fraction of the cost. Is there a break point here? Because it does seem like the, the natural gas, coal, oil, petroleum industry and the on ground build, the building, people are ignoring that. SpaceX has a [00:25:00] capability of doing this, and if Musk decides to do it, and SpaceX decides to do it, that all those gas turbine orders, all that infrastructure, all the gas pipeline, all the drilling that would have to happen would just go immediately. Poof. Gone.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know about immediately because I mean, we’re not at the point yet where you can just launch a data center into space. So there is a bit of a, a, a transition period. Um, I. I also think that it’s overblown that, you know, I think you might have even fallen into the trap also, where you’re like, oh, when data centers need more energy, so therefore it has to be coal or gas or nuclear.  Allen Hall 2025: Nope, I agree with you.  Rosemary Barnes: Those things aren’t quick to build either. If you truly wanted to do it quickly, you’d be putting in, um, you know, heaps of solar panels and batteries and, and you know, wind turbines where that made sense. But that said, I, I do agree that, uh, like I, I don’t think space-based data centers is farfetched at all. I, I guess the biggest [00:26:00] challenges, uh, are, um, the cooling and heating requirements space has very large temperature fluctuations. So I guess you’re gonna need to design that carefully. I don’t think it’s insurmountable. Um, and then the next thing is a cost of launch, which I’m sure you’re about to tell me how. Dramatically the cost of launch is dropping. Um, you know, like, it, it’s got, it’s got a very good learning curve. The space launches, which is basically, you know, SpaceX is probably the main reason why that is just dropping and dropping and dropping. So I don’t think that it’s unrealistic at all. I don’t know the timeframe. You would know more, Alan, you work in, um, aerospace. I just. You know, um, follow it for general interest.  Matthew Stead: I reckon it’s stupid. He’s really stupid on a number of grounds. So first of all, you know, why do that when. You just, I can’t see how it can ever be more cost effective and you know, [00:27:00] I, you know, you should really, should be putting that effort into things like, you know, better healthcare and so forth. I mean, what a waste of resources. But why? I mean, why, why?  Allen Hall 2025: Because it’s a lot less expensive and it’s faster.  Matthew Stead: You’d do it in the ocean before that, wouldn’t you?  Rosemary Barnes: No, but the ocean still has, like how do you power it? You, you get the 24 7 solar power in space. That’s what you. That’s what you get, um, which you can’t get on Earth  Matthew Stead: or you put it next to a wind farm and you, you, and you make the load go up and down depending on the wind. I mean, seriously, there’s so many other ways of doing it. You put it next to a wind and solar.  Rosemary Barnes: I agree with you, Matt, that I think that the, the bulk of the solutions with data centers is gonna come from one demand not being what people think it is today. Like the numbers that get reported are just like the. Absolute best, best, best case scenario and then multiplied by three or four times because they’re looking at different options for locating each of the data centers they plan to make. So I think I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with 10% of what people think that we’re gonna get. [00:28:00] Now, the first thing, secondly, people assume that it needs to be 24 7. Just, you know, like a hundred percent reliable power, and that’s. That’s simply, yeah, it’s not, not everything needs to be just, um, you know, done at, at the exact time that it’s requested. There’s heaps of things that can be shifted and uh, when the price differential is there, then people are naturally going to choose that. And in fact, there are already some companies offering different levels of reliability depend, you know, for different prices. And companies can choose which of their processes can be put on hold. Like a lot of the training stuff, you’re happy don’t. Need 99.999% reliability, you’re probably happy with 90% reliability. And so, you know, if it costs a whole lot less than you will, I, I agree with you, Matt, that that’s gonna take most of it. But I do still think that for the, like, super reliable, um, data centers, I, I bet that we see at least one. And even if it’s just because Elon Musk is the type to push something through, um, you know, [00:29:00] first and. Wait for the market to catch up later. Uh, maybe that will be the reason, but I, I honestly think it’s more than 50% likely that we see a data center in space in the next, in the next decade,  Matthew Stead: it would make more sense to like drill a hole to the center of the earth and get the, the hot well cutting rock  Rosemary Barnes: and or there’s also plenty of geothermal. You did thermal projects as well.  Matthew Stead: Yeah, it’s just ridiculous.  Rosemary Barnes: I think that we’ve had our first hot take from Matthew, so I don’t know some sort of sound effect to be added here. Claire. Uh, yeah, Allen Hall 2025: that wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Just reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please give us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. For Rosa, Yolanda and [00:30:00] Matthew, I’m Alan Hall, and we’ll see you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

AI is everywhere in the headlines—but what does it actually mean for jobs? In this episode of the Look Forward Podcast from S&P Global, host Aries Poon is joined by Sophie Malin (Principal Economist, Global Labor Markets) and Pollyanna De Lima (Economics Associate Director, Purchasing Managers' Index/PMI) to separate hype from real-world labor market signals.  The conversation starts with a crucial distinction: AI development (chips, data centers, capital-intensive buildouts) versus AI deployment (using AI inside everyday business processes)—and why deployment is what truly rewires hiring, productivity, and work design. Drawing on PMI special survey insights, Pollyanna breaks down where adoption is spreading fastest (with Northern Europe leading), which sectors are moving first (notably financial services and professional/business services), and how adoption differs across services vs. manufacturing. The guests also dig into what companies are optimizing for today—efficiency and customer outcomes over headcount cuts—and why the near-term impact may look more like slower hiring and shifting job tasks.  Looking ahead, Sophie and Pollyanna outline the biggest unknowns: how quickly AI capability improves, what happens to entry-level and graduate pipelines, whether productivity gains translate into hiring freezes, and how governments might respond if employment and tax bases come under pressure. They also point to key indicators to watch, including the PMI Employment Index and business outlook/hiring intentions measures, to track how labor demand evolves in real time.

The wait is finally over as we break down the newly released Disney Cruise Line Summer 2027 itineraries! In this episode, we discuss the massive fleet shakeup, including the headline news that the Disney Wish is heading to Europe for the first time to sail the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. We also cover the Disney Dream's move to Port Canaveral for short Bahamian getaways and the unique new routes for the Disney Destiny out of Fort Lauderdale. From Alaskan adventures on the Disney Magic to relaxing double-dip sailings at Lookout Cay, we help you decide which cruise is right for you. Tune in for all the details on booking windows, ship locations, and the most exciting ports of call for summer 2027.Want to be on the show? Fill out this form, and we'll be in contact with you real soon!https://dclpodcast.com/want-to-be-on-the-show/Support our show via Patreon:http://www.patreon.com/dclpodcastUse Christy's Travel Services:https://dclpodcast.com/book-with-christy/Follow the DCL Podcast via:http://www.facebook.com/dclpodcasthttp://www.instagram.com/dcl_podcastFollow Lake at:https://www.instagram.com/mouse.genhttps://www.youtube.com/@MouseGenFollow Christy at:http://www.packyourpixiedust.comhttps://www.instagram.com/packyourpixiedust

Happy Spooky Wednesday! Question: can you name one fun fact about Finland? No? Maybe it's because Finland… doesn't exist? At least that's what some people have come to believe, thanks to a conspiracy theory that spread on the internet. So if Finland isn't real, what's going on up there in Northern Europe? I guess you'll have to listen and find out!

In the sprawling Las Vegas campus of CES last week, electric cars were shown off as spaceships and rolling tech showcases. Meanwhile in the temperate climate of Northern Europe, at the Brussels Motor Show, the star of the show came back down to earth with a little box from Kia.Launched at the 2026 Brussels Motor Show, the EV2 is a small, upright SUV-shaped EV designed squarely for Europe. It is built in Slovakia, sized for tight streets, and priced to slip under the EV3 as Kia's cheapest dedicated EV in the region.Welcome back to another bonus edition of the show, and our mini-series called The Spec Sheet which runs the numbers on new car launches. Patreon supporters get the podcasts a week exclusively, but if you're happy to wait, everything ends up in the free podcast feed with a few ads. You're welcome to check out Patreon to support my work.

On this episode, Razib talks to returning guest, Francis Young, a historian who teaches at Oxford. Young specialises in the history of religion and belief from ancient times to the present day, and provides expert indexes for academic books and translates medieval and early modern Latin. He holds a PhD from Cambridge University and is the author, editor or co-author of over 20 books. On his last visit to the podcast, he discussed his book Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic, an account of the practices and persistence of Baltic paganism down to the 16th-century, the age of the Renaissance and Reformation. Today he discusses his new book, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples. Razib and Young first discuss what it means to be "pagan" in a European context, first during Classical Antiquity, but more recently in Northern Europe down to the early modern period. Young discusses how it is difficult to understand and define paganism without reference to Christianity, which was a major force in shaping the nature of pagan religion in Northern Europe. Razib asks about the specific nature of northeast Baltic paganism, and in particular, the late survivals of pre-Christian religion among Lithuanians and Estonians, and the differences between the two groups. Young explains his understanding of different religious practices and the various forms of non-Christian practice that persisted among different groups, including mixed "creole" identities. Razib also inquires about the Mari El, a Finnic group in the Urals that might be the only continuously officially pagan people in Europe, as well as evidence Young reports that Estonian peasants were never truly fully Christianized.

2025 was another exciting year in human origins research! In this episode, four scientists and Leakey Foundation grantees (and one podcast host) share their picks for the top discoveries of the year. Support this show and the science we talk about. Your tax-deductible gift to The Leakey Foundation will be matched! Click here to donate.  Want more science between podcast episodes? Join our monthly newsletter for human origins news and updates from Origin Stories and The Leakey Foundation. Links to learn more All research articles are open-access and free to read New research reveals the hand of Paranthropus boisei Earliest evidence of making fire Complete sequencing of ape genomes Highly selective cannibalism in the Late Pleistocene of Northern Europe reveals Neandertals were targeted prey Denisovan mitochondrial DNA from dental calculus of the >146,000-year-old Harbin cranium

The Hanseatic League was a medieval trading network that stretched across Northern Europe. Formed in Northern Germany in the 12th century, it was an economic powerhouse of the age. Over the next five centuries, it negotiated with kings, standardised regulations, created outposts across Europe, blockaded ports and even went to war to protect its trading interests.In this episode, Dan is joined by Dr Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Amsterdam, to discuss the League's unique structure, operations, and legacy. Together, they examine its innovative and flexible approach to trade, politics, and conflict management. Also, how the Hansa functioned without becoming a formal nation-state and its lasting imprint on European history and economics.To discover more about Justyna's work, please visit: https://premodernconflictmanagement.org/ or her personal page https://justynawubs-mrozewicz.blogspot.com/Produced by Dougal Patmore and James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.This was originally released as a subscriber-only episode in August 2025Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at ds.hh@historyhit.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.