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Today, we are joined by Carlos Salguero to talk about scaling beyond themselves. In just 12 months, he moved from being a novice investor to owning more than a thousand multifamily doors. And as a successful business owner, he wants to expand his businesses.   [00:01 - 08:21] Scaling the Business: Assets Vs Liabilities   Carlos defines "scale" as the ability to grow a business larger than what was initially planned or imagined Why it's sometimes difficult to make the investment to grow as a business   As his company expanded, Carlos was forced to recruit successors for himself. He eventually discovered how to scale his enterprise by hiring professionals to help him grow   [08:22 - 12:02] How Investment Brings Jobs and Growth to the Area   Carlos discusses his  investment in a mixed use community in Tennessee, which is already at 90% occupancy   Carlos shares about the importance of location How being close to major investments will benefit the property   [12:03 - 19:37] The Leasing Process   Carlos shares how he started leasing some vacant space and increased its value by $9 million in seven months How he found a unicorn deal in Tennessee and underwrote it for $40 million    Why we should always build your network   [19:38 - 20:36] Closing Segment Reach out to Carlos!  Links Below Final Words Tweetable Quotes   “I think that's one of the things that entrepreneurs and business owners sometimes don't do. Well. You gotta find yourself a replacement in certain things, and if you don't, you'll be stuck there. ” - Carlos Salguero   “Always be building your network. Always be meeting people” - Carlos Salguero   -----------------------------------------------------------------------------   Connect with Carlos! Follow Carlos Salguero on LinkedIn. Website: https://iamcarlos10x.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamcarlos10x/?hl=en. Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamcarlos10x   Connect with me:   I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.     Facebook   LinkedIn   Like, subscribe, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or whatever platform you listen on.  Thank you for tuning in!   Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:   [00:00:00] Carlos Salguero: Cause when we go to school, what do they tell us? Don't call pee. Right? Don't collaborate. Be independent. Be individual. So in the business world, man, I'd rather go after people that have already done it. See if they wanna share that success with me. See if they want to gimme some tips, pay for their thoughts. If I need to, because one thing they tell you could just take you in a whole different direction, and that's really where my business took off. [00:00:37] Sam Wilson: Carlos del Guro in 12 months went from being a novice investor to now owning over a thousand multifamily doors. That's incredible growth in a very short period of time. Carlos, welcome to the show. [00:00:49] Carlos Salguero: Thank you, Sam. Appreciate you having me here. I'm excited.  [00:00:52] Sam Wilson: Absolutely. The pleasure is mine, Carlos, here are three questions I ask every guest who comes from the show in 90 seconds or less, can you tell me where did you start, where are you now, and how did you get there? [00:01:01] Carlos Salguero: Oh man, it's a short time, but I started in South America. I was born in Kitto, Ecuador. Came to this country at 17 years old without money. No friends, no family. First ever in my family. Went to college, graduated, went to work for corporate America for five years. I just was not meant to be an employee, so I started my own business. I started an e-commerce business that over the years grew to multimillion dollar, Then I started a logistics company. Same thing with that, grew it to a multimillion dollar business still on it today. And that led me to real estate. I bought my first commercial building because I needed a warehouse for my logistics business. And that is how I started in the real estate arena. And then I became a hobby real estate investor for the better part of 15 years where I bought single family homes, duplexes, track clicks, Airbnbs, and I just kind of saw the limitations of scaling small property. So that led me to a big multi-family, which is what we do now. And like you said, over the last 12 months, we've scaled from seven units that I had about a year and a half ago to now over a thousand units in with an amazing, beautiful deal under contract right now that we're gonna close in January.  [00:02:19] Sam Wilson: That is incredible. Tell me, I mean, you know, the questions I think anybody would have in that is how? I mean, that's the only question I'll ask, How ? [00:02:29] Carlos Salguero: For Sure. I think for me, I always wanted to be successful. I knew that there was a vehicle that could take me there. I knew that I needed to get better. I needed to improve myself. I had parents that were business owners and entrepreneurs,  they never learned to scale big. You know, they became successful because of their perseverance, their commitment, their discipline. But they were never able to scale beyond themselves. They were solopreneurs. They had a small team, but if they were missing, the business couldn't run. So  I always looked at them and said, man, I wanna be a successful business owner, but I don't wanna get stuck where my parents got stuck. So I learned how to scale businesses, and that was one of the big things that I focused on along the way, because every time I felt stuck, I was like, man, I'm doing what my parents did. I need to go back and correct this and learn how to scale, delegate, and put great management in place so that I could go onto the next level and continue to grow. [00:03:29] Sam Wilson: Felt stuck. I think that's a very poignant way of putting that. Cause I think a lot of people feel that they hit a certain threshold and it's like they just can't seem to push beyond that. How did you define the right things to push on in order to kind of break through to the next level? [00:03:47] Carlos Salguero: Yes. You know, when I felt this way. I saw myself doing activities that were not conducive to my bigger plan. That we're more operational, that we're more working in the business, not on the business. Whenever you're not working on growth strategy, you know, scale, you're invariably working in operations, right? Taking care of customers or handling fires or, you know, just going in a million directions because you're the last man of responsibility. Whenever I felt like in that place, I just, you know, kicked and screamed and did whatever it could to find myself out of there and find somebody that could replace me. And I think that's one of the things that entrepreneurs and business owners sometimes don't do well. You gotta find yourself a replacement in certain things, and if you don't, you'll be stuck there. [00:04:44] Sam Wilson: How did you select, because it seems like anytime there is building a team, anytime you're growing, there's always that question of, if we bring this person on, how do we then turn them into an asset and not just a liability inside of the company? So at what point in time did you figure out what seats to put on the bus and at what time?  [00:05:05] Carlos Salguero:  You know, that's a great question. In the beginning , it was reactive, not proactive. Like I think most entrepreneurs, it was like, man, I'm doing way too much myself. I am my own bottle neck of growth. I just don't have enough hours in the day. And you know, we as entrepreneurs, we're like twenty four seven, three hundred and sixty five, right? Until our energy, it just completely depletes our mental capacity. I found myself in these situations many times over my journey. And eventually I started discerning. I said, you know what? I picked up a few books about business scale. I picked up a few books about, you know, Nod Beam, just a solopreneur about scaling big in the beginning it was like reactive. I was like, oh, you know what? I need an accountant. I need a sales guy. I need a manager.  because I was doing it all myself and I saw kind of the pieces just falling and me picking them up, right? But eventually, when I learned how to scale properly, I was able to look ahead and say, you know what? At this rate of growth, the trend that we're going, we're gonna need an operations manager, we're gonna need a regional manager. We're gonna need a logistics guy, a sales guy, an accountant. Right. And then it became more proactive so that when the growth hit that point, I already was prepared. I had to make investments. And that's, I think one of the struggles in every entrepreneur's journey is we sometimes don't make the investment for growth to happen. Right. And then we stop that, right? We grade friction in growth and momentum, right?  [00:06:49] Sam Wilson: Yeah. And maybe I'm wrong, I think so. I'm wrong a lot, so possibly, but I don't think there's any way to really scale and grow without building a team. That's what I'm hearing you say.  [00:07:01] Carlos Salguero: 100%. There's no way if you're gonna build something large, and when I say large, beyond just a couple million dollars of revenue a year, you have to build a team and you have to build that highly qualified team, you know, in this era. Virtual assistants and people overseas and all that stuff, that's good because it helps you take some stuff, all off the plate, but you're gonna need people just as smart as you, if not smarter than you to do certain things because your superpower is very well defined and you shouldn't know what your superpower is. Right? For me, my superpower was strategy, growth, and vision for the business. I didn't wanna be an accountant, I didn't wanna be my own cpa. I didn't wanna be my own sales guy or my only sales guy, which is what most entrepreneurs are. They're their own sales guys. And I didn't wanna be my own operations manager because even though I can proficiently do those things, they are not my superpower, my core strengths. So I better find somebody really good at this, that loves that and put that person and pay them well so that they can help me grow and do what I can do.  [00:08:017] Sam Wilson:  Talk to me about the deal that you guys are working if you can. I don't know if we can talk about specifics on that or not here on the show. Sometimes there's some people that can't necessarily share, you know, pertinent details. Either it's not live or it's a five O 6 billion. They can't talk about it on air. So if you can, you're working on a $40 million deal, I think, which we talked about this off air. You said, you know, kind of pinch myself. I can't believe that it's actually me doing this. Tell me about that. [00:08:47] Carlos Salguero: So the deals in your backyard, Sam, right there in Lakeland, Tennessee Sure is. Beautiful property, uh, great town that is, that is growing right now. Uh, it's, it's a beautiful mixed use community built in 2021 already at 90% plus. Occupied. It has eight commercial suites on the first floor. Mexican restaurants, port, bar and grill, a gym, a nail salon, a bakery and an insurance company already tenants at the property. So beautiful, beautiful asset. We had one vacancy for commercial space. And what that does is just gives this 138 residential units on top of the commercial a community feel. So, you know, if somebody needs a coffee, just walk downstairs and they have their own Starbucks  down in the courtyard. So it's super exciting. Close to everything. 25 minutes away from the 5.6 billion investment that Ford is making in the area for the ev uh, vehicle plant. You know, they're gonna make the F150 light. I mean, they're super excited. I'm sure you're excited about your property values close to that if you have any. Right. And of course, you know, this community of Lakeland is one very affluent community. It's $187,000 household income, one mile radius of the property. I mean very high income area. Price point for entry is $550,000 for a home in that community. We're buying the units for $245,000 a unit. So, you know, great gap there. And  we feel that rents are, you know, pretty, pretty under market still for what's gonna happen in the next couple years and the 6,000 jobs that Ford's gonna have in the area, plus all the extra stuff that happens, right? I've talked to other people that have been in communities where a big automotive company came and built a multi-billion dollar plant, and they say, man, it just gets transformed, right? I have a buddy from Chattanooga, Tennessee, who is one of my students, and he saw the Volkswagen plant being built there seven years ago. He said, Carlos, everything doubled here. Right? Home values double. Retail popped up like crazy. And, uh, that plant is not even half the size of what Ford is building in, um, in the Memphis area.  [00:11:12] Sam Wilson: Right. Yeah. That's gonna be a big boon, I think, uh, for the area that's, uh, that's, that's for certain it's, it's, it's fascinating both to watch it from the air. I'm a private pilot and I've flown over those developments and it's like, oh my gosh, this is. Massive. And then you, then you, you just, you see the, even the, even the, um, not a, I'm not, I don't know anything about electricity, but there's the giant power lines and, you know, the, the utility runs that they're clearing, you know, through the countrysides. Like, okay, this is actually gonna be humongous. [00:11:41] Carlos Salguero: Oh my god, 3,800 acres, Sam, 3,800 acres. It's, it's even hard to fathom.  [00:11:47] Sam Wilson: It really is. It really is. Until you get in the air and you look down, you see all the earth movers and earth where you're like going. Holy smoke. This is the biggest thing that happened to West Tennessee in a long time, probably ever. So a very, very cool project. How did you locate, underwrite and decide to buy this asset in Lakeland? I mean, it's kind of, unless you're from the area, somewhat obscure. So tell me about that process. [00:12:11] Carlos Salguero: So we looked in to see Sam. We, uh, we made an investment in Tennessee earlier this year. We bought a mixed use community in Murphy's World, Tennessee. Beautiful property right in front. St. Thomas Ruthford Hospital, very similar to this one. Uh, a little bit smaller. That one has 84 luxury apartment units and 37,000 square feet of commercial space. And um, you know, when we closed on that deal, the rents went up $400, right off the jump, right? They had under market rents. We started leasing some vacant space that the previous owner had just not really pushed too. And, uh, we in seven months increased the value of that asset by 9 million. That's how quickly the growth was for that property. So, you know, we, we thought, man, we found a unicorn. Is there anymore like this? So we've been scouring Tennessee left and right for the last six months, and I have a team that all, all they do is underwrite deals, buy deals, located deals, visit proper. We went  through probably a couple hundred deals. We underwrote it, and when we found this, it was through a broker that we had had communications before. I called this broker, and that's why I always recommend guys, keep those relationships alive. I called this broker about nine months ago for another property, for a property in Arkansas that I was interested in buying a 50 unit deal in Arkansas, close to a hospital. It didn't work. You know, I stayed on his email list. I stayed in contact, and then my team also stayed in contact and, uh, they just sent us this deal. It was, it was almost like, uh, hey, you know, check this out. Maybe you're interested. And, uh, we started underwriting it. We had a team there the day after I had partners that live in Tennessee. You know, they drove from Nashville to Lakeland, three hours away. They landed there. It's like, Carlos, this looks like other deal  also. Excuse. Same thing. You know, when we started digging deeper, we just started finding, you know, great things about it. The fort activity in the area, the growth of Lakeland Lakeland just built a brand new high school in middle school, literally three minutes away from the property, right? Couple 1% school district in the. In Lakeland. I dunno if, if you knew that, but you know, we've dug up so much  Intel now that you, every time we find something cool, we're like, man, this is a good move. And then we underwrote the deal conservative like we always do, you know, our strategies to cash flow right away after we buy our properties and that we saw, man, this is, this is an amazing cash flowing deal. And here's the thing, in this time of high interest rates, One of the best things about this deal is we're assuming a 10 year interest only loan that is only 4.35%. [00:15:03] Sam Wilson: That's fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. I love that strategy. I mean, if you, one having boots on the ground, I think's impaired it. Yes. Uh, but also having the ability to underwrite a deal of that size. What's it been like for you? I'm going back to the beginning of your story  here where you said, Hey, it's from Ecuador 17. No money. And one now doing deals like this, but then also talk to 'em about the capital raising side of things. I mean, that's, that's a whole new skill set to develop in, especially when you're taking down a $40 million deal. So you talk about both of those points, please.  [00:15:37] Carlos Salguero: Yes. You know, I always recommend, always be building your network. Always be meeting people, right. Uh, Sam, I've had several business. In the beginning, I didn't understand this. I, I saw my dad do it a little bit. He traveled to Germany in the US for conferences and things like that. And I, and I knew he was talking to other folks, but he never sat me down and said, Hey son, you gotta learn how to network, right? You gotta learn how to connect with successful people. I wish he had, man. Uh, and that would've been on my success book right away. But, you know, as I, as I grew my little business in eCommerce, back when I started in the early 2000, This feeling of getting stuck also came about and loneliness. Oh, do you know, man? I'm, I'm pretty successful now. We're making some money. I'm the most successful guy I know, right? And that didn't feel right. So I started seeking other people that were successful in my industry. I started going to conferences. I paid for mentorships. I paid for  my first mastermind in e-commerce was $25,000. I went and met a group of people that were already making seven, eight figures online. That level me up big time. Then I paid for another big one, right? A hundred thousand dollars. I didn't even tell my wife I was making this investment cause I was scared of what she would say. But you know what? That room led me to a much higher level and caliber of people, and there is where things started just taking it to the next level because I started learning the mindset And, uh, rubbing shoulders with his guys that had already done it. In Sam, it's a lot easier to copy success, right, than to create it on your own. Right? If we reinvent the wheel, it can take us decades, and that's why a lot of startups fail because they're trying to reinvent everything and they have to set up every single system, every single process, instead of just following a proven success path that you can. But we like to fight our schooling on this, right? Cause when we go to school, what do they tell us? Don't call, right? Don't collaborate. Be independent. Be individual. So in the business world, man, I'd rather go after people that have already done it, see if they wanna share that success with me, see if they want to gimme some tips, pay for their time if I need to, because one thing they tell you could just take you in a whole different direction. And that's really where my business took. So it was mentorship, it was me copying success falling blueprints already existed. And, um, you know, I, I've started businesses from scratch when I found multi-family, real estate, big multi-family real estate. One of the beautiful things I saw there was like, man, I'm buying an already existing cash flowing deal that I just need to take over, optimize and run well. And I don't have to reinvent this thing. I don't have to build it from the. It's already there. It's already making money. Right.  [00:18:36] Sam Wilson:That's brilliant. I love it. Carlos, I've really enjoyed hearing your story. I always, I, and I'm probably not the right way to say this, but the immigrant story is always probably one of my favorite ones because it's there. There, this is one of the few countries in the world where we can still do that. Where you can come here with no money and. I don't know how old you are, but however much time has passed, you're now taking down 40 million real estate deals. You're running multiple companies, and I just love, I love, love, love anyone who has the, uh, passion and the willingness to go out and hustle.And clearly that has paid huge dividends for you. So thanks for sharing that story today. [00:19:14] Carlos Salguero: I love this country just, just as a sign note. This country has given me everything that I ever wanted. It's the land of opportunity, man. The American dream is so alive and well in, for people that decided like, grab the opportunity and run with it and take massive action.There, it's unlimited. It's truly unlimited. Right.  [00:19:34] Sam Wilson: That's a great word, Carlos. Certainly appreciate that. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. If our listeners want to get in touch with you and learn more about you, what is the best way to do that? [00:19:45] Carlos Salguero: Thank you for having me, Sam. Best way to contact me is through Instagram, TikTok, or my website. The handles are, I am Carlos 10 x and on the website is I am Carlos, 10 x dot comly. Hopely we can get in touch.  [00:15:24] Sam Wilson: Right. I eove that. That's absolutely great. Before we sign off here, rich, I want to hear about your latest book. Can you tell me, uh, the name of it and then, you know, there's a lot of financial books out there. Can you tell me why is yours different? [00:15:39] Carlos Salguero: Yeah, there are a lot of great financial books in, I just got this two days. It's called a Wise Investor. This is my hard cover. I just finally got, it's the real deal.That's awesome. I've been waiting for a while. Supply chain issues. Right. I had to wait seven months for this book to get printed because the paper mills are so shy on paper. [00:19:59] Sam Wilson: Absolutely. I will make sure we include all of those there in the show notes. Carlos, thank you again. Have a great rest of your day. [00:20:04] Carlos Salguero: Thank you, Sam.  

We talk to the new owner of Bahn Brenner Motorsports about new products that are in the works! Check it!

This is the Idiot News Network where idiots aren't just in the news, they report the news! For Thursday December 1st, 2022:Jubal Fresh reports on Volkswagen catching backlash for their Italian Instagram handle reading "genitilia". Bennett reports on a woman suing Kraft Macaroni & Cheese for $5 million! Social Media Producer Christian Gray Snow reports on a Arizona teacher that was fired for shooting Only Fans content in her classroom!Leave a rating and review wherever you listen. It will help the show out in a big way. If that's not your thing, you can find us on social media here:https://instagram.com/thejubalshowhttps://twitter.com/thejubalshowhttps://www.tiktok.com/@thejubalshow

Josh updates us on the big hat, a drunk man, and Volkswagen's new account that's gone viral.

News with Shelley 11-30-2022 …Say, look at the genitalia on the Volkswagen

➤ New weekly insurance numbers out of China show continued strength ➤ Looking at TSLA short interest ➤ South Korean government discusses Tesla factory in more detail ➤ Cybertruck hiring updates ➤ Cybertruck casting machine update ➤ S&P shares research on EV market ➤ Tesla appears to update rear screen in refreshed S/X ➤ Hertz begins adding Superchargers ➤ Tesla updates mobile app ➤ Volkswagen discusses Foxconn partnership Shareloft: https://www.shareloft.com Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/teslapodcast Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tesladailypodcast Tesla Referral: https://ts.la/robert47283 Executive producer Jeremy Cooke Executive producer Troy Cherasaro Executive producer Andre/Maria Kent Executive producer Jessie Chimni Executive producer Michael Pastrone Executive producer Richard Del Maestro Executive producer John Beans Music by Evan Schaeffer Disclosure: Rob Maurer is long TSLA stock & derivatives

Tonight 'In Focus', one of Biden's puppy fetish transvestite officials was charged with felony theft recently for stealing a suitcase at an airport. Also, the White House runs cover after Biden says it's sickening that semi-automatic guns are allowed to exist.Plus, Alyssa Milano returns her Tesla to protest white supremacy and opts for Adolf Hitler's Volkswagen.

Alex Stone joined the show to discuss the lack of information and evidence in the case of the 4 University of Idaho students who murdered in their off-campus residence. Authorities are receiving an influx of 911 calls from the Moscow community weeks after four students were stabbed to death in an off-campus house. Moscow police said that since the killings, they've received 78 "unusual circumstances" calls and 36 welfare check requests. Its been two weeks since the bodies of the 4 students were found and detectives have no leads, no murder weapon and no suspects...  Actress Alyssa Milano was blasted on Twitter, including by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, after saying that she "gave back" her Tesla and replaced it with a Volkswagen.  Twitter users, many of them conservative, criticized Milano over the tweet with many pointing out Volkswagen's ties to the Nazi Party  Several drivers were cited Saturday night after police say they were caught driving recklessly and partaking in illegal street racing in Fresno, near Temperance Avenue and Kings Canyon Road. Officers say the group also performed illegal side shows throughout town and blocked several intersections during the process. Those drivers will also have their vehicles impounded for the next 30 days.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We often speak of economic development as a phenomenon of sovereign national countries, but the process by which that happens is through what happens at individual firms in the economy. The decisions by firms to upgrade their products (services), export, and adopt new technology are the most important determinants of economic development. The incentives and conditions that shape these decisions are the subjects of my conversation with my guest on this episode. Eric Verhoogen is a professor of economics at Columbia University school of international and public affairs. He is one of the leading thinkers and researchers on industrial development.TRANSCRIPT (edited slightly for context and clarity)Tobi; Usually, in the development literature, I know things have changed quite a bit in the last few years. But there is a lot of emphasis on cross-country comparisons and looking at aggregate data, and a lot less focus, at least as represented in the popular media on firms. And we know that, really, the drivers of growth and employment and the source of prosperity usually are the firms. The firms in an economy, firms are the ones creating jobs, they are the ones investing in technology, and doing innovation. So firms are really important. One of the things you often hear a lot is that one of the reasons poor countries are poor is that the firms are not productive enough. So that's sort of my first question to you, how exactly do we define and also measure productivity, you know, for us to be able to distinguish why firms in the developed countries are more productive than the lower income countries?Eric; Yeah, this is a big important question. So I agree, in principle, that firm productivity is very key. So countries that are going to be doing well are countries that are populated by firms that are being very innovative, and their productivity is rising, they're learning how to do new stuff, they're producing new products, etc. And so there's a reason why people are very focused on this conversation about firm productivity. The sort of, I would say, dirty secret of economics is that it's very hard to measure productivity well, right? And so the productivity measures we have, I think, are very noisy, and most likely fairly biased. But basically, the way you estimate productivity is you run a regression of like sales on inputs, okay, so on how much you're spending on labour and how much you're spending on materials, and then the part that's left over, we call that productivity. So it's like unexplained sales, you know, sales that can't be explained by the fact that you're just purchasing inputs and purchasing workers. But that is actually a very noisy measure of productivity. And so I've been working on a review paper, and a separate research paper kind of pointing out some of the issues with productivity estimation. So in principle, it's exactly what we want to know; in practice, it's very hard to measure. So one argument I was making in that paper is we should go to things that we can actually directly observe. Okay, so sometimes like technology adoption, we can often directly observe whether the firm has adopted this particular new technology, or if they're producing new products, we can directly observe that. Sometimes we can observe the quality of products that can be measured. Now, the standard datasets that we have typically don't have those things. It is possible now, in many countries, to follow manufacturing firms or even other sorts of firms, [to] follow them over time, which is great, at a micro level. But those that have the technology, they don't have quality, they do it now increasingly have like what products they're producing, often they don't have the product people are producing and so it's harder, you have to go out and you have to talk to people, you have to access new sorts of data, there's a lot more work, a lot more shoe leather - we'd say you wear out your shoe is going to talk to people trying to get access to other datasets in order to have these measures that you can observe directly. But I think there's a big advantage to that. Just in terms of measurement. Like, can we measure these things, and record that technology quality and product innovation together? I'm not sure that's answering your question. But, you know, I mean, I totally agree that what firms are doing, that's crucial, right? So the big macro question is, why are some countries rich and some countries poor and how can we make poor ones richer? That's the big question. I think that's kind of too big to be able to say much about. The much more concrete thing, which we need to be focusing on is how can you make firms in countries more innovative and productive. That's the absolutely right question. But that's just hard. There are challenges and research about, you know, how you actually analyze that, and it has to do with these issues of measurement.Tobi; I understand the measurement problem, and of course, TFP, the residual, and so many things like that. But practically, I want to ask you, what can you say, maybe if you have a handy checklist or something? what distinguishes firms in rich countries from firms in poorer nations? Eric; Yeah. So let me say what I don't think first, and then I'll say what I think. So it's become increasingly common to say that firms in poor countries are just poorly managed. The firms in rich countries have better management, and the firms in poor countries have poor management, right? And partly that's coming from the influential paper by Nicholas - Nick Bloom - and others, and David McKenzie and John Roberts. You know, they had consultants go to some factories in India. In some they camped out for four months, some they were there for only one month, and the ones where they camped out for four months ended up doing better, right? And they say that that's because these consultants improve the management of the firms and management matters. And I do agree that sometimes these management practices matter, but I don't think... sort of, one kind of implication of that line of work is somehow, like, the firms in a developing country are just making mistakes. They haven't gone to business school in the United States, and so, therefore, they don't know what they're doing. And I think that's incorrect. I think that's incorrect. I think the problem is, firms in developing countries face many, many constraints that firms in rich countries don't face. Right. So often, for instance, gaining access to high-quality inputs can be very difficult, right? That you just don't have the supply chains domestically producing high-quality inputs. Often skilled workers are very expensive relative to unskilled workers, and even relative to the price that you might pay in rich countries. Having skilled workers, including skilled managers, is very expensive. In addition, you have all these frictions on trying to get your goods to market or trying to, you know, trying to access export markets, often there are, you know, their costs involved in that. In addition, being productive requires know-how and often firms lack that know-how, right and so the question is, how do you get that know-how, you know, like, the distinction I'm trying to make is, it's not that they're making mistakes, it's just that they're doing the best they can given know-how they have, and given the constraints that they face. And so in that sense, I would sort of point to those constraints, right, those constraints both in know-how and both in the input and output markets, rather than just failure of management. So now, one of the constraints I should say, actually, so is often, you know, legal and regulatory institutions are much weaker in many countries. It is true in Nigeria, and it's true in many places, right? And so then that does create a complicating factor also when you're trying to do business with somebody, but you don't have the legal recourse of going to court to enforce whatever contract you write down. And so that creates friction. So then you have to do things differently in part because of that. And so you're likely to be much more based on, like, networks of various types. It might be ethnic networks, or it might be people that you know or that you have long-term relationships with. But then that means you can't necessarily just find the best supplier of something, you actually have to find someone that you trust, and that can complicate your life, basically, if you're trying to do business and develop.Tobi; So one thing I want us to discuss is the issue of firm upgrading. I mean, one of the things that have helped me in reading your work and taking this firm-level view of development is that, okay, on the one hand, if you look at a country like Korea, we can say the average income, the income per capita for Korea 40 years ago versus now and compare with say Nigeria, but also we can look at Korean firms 40 years ago versus where they are today. Today, Korea have global firms that are at the very frontier of technology. Companies like Samsung are innovating and making chips and making electronics and making smartphones and you compare with firms in Nigeria who have not been able to upgrade their products over that same period. And now what I want to ask you is how important is a firm's ability to upgrade productivity. I take your point on the measurement but controlling for that, how important is a firm's ability to upgrade its output? Its products on its productivity?Eric; No, no, I think upgrading is crucial. And upgrading in various ways, you know, more specifically technology, producing higher quality products, producing new products, new innovative products, you know, you might be reducing costs, right, all those things. I do think that's crucial. I think that's crucial to the development process. I mean, much of the conversation in development economics has often been not about firms. It's about, you know, social policy, or it's about education. It's about human capital accumulation. But I'm with you on that, the firm-level upgrading is totally crucial. You know, the question of like, why isn't it happening? Or how could you promote upgrading? That's a very difficult question. There are lots of papers that are sort of speaking to that subject. And this review article I was trying to write was basically all about that. So Alexander Gerschenkron way back in 1962, is a historian writing about late industrialization had this phrase, not very politically correct phrase, but basically, advantages of backwardness. So in principle, if you're a developing country, you should benefit from the fact that technologies have been developed in rich countries, and you should be able to go and adopt them off the shelf. But for some reason, that's difficult, right? It's hard to do. Partly, it's difficult because of, you know, know-how reasons. So I'd say that often, much of the knowledge that you need in order to implement these technologies is not written down anywhere, it's not really in the manual, right? You have to kind of talk to people who know it, rather than just downloading the instruction sheet. That's one reason. It's also true that many times, machines or processes, actually, may be context specific. So like the picker machine, in a very humid environment, they operate differently than in a non-humid environment. And so, you know, there are things that you need to learn. So I'd say that kind of like gaining the know-how is an important kind of constraint on upgrading. And partly that happens through networks or through... there's a ... Juan Carlos Hallak, who's in Buenos Aires (who would be a good person for you to have on your show, actually, I think that he'd be an interesting person to interview) as a very interesting paper. It's basically on like Argentina, looking at industries that have done well, they've been able to upgrade essentially and looking at what was it about them that made it possible, and especially the leading firms, what were the leading firms doing? And what we're basically finding is that often the key person in the firm, like, had been embedded in markets in rich countries, maybe in the US or in Europe or someplace. So they understood very much how those markets work and what consumers want. So one was like making boats, sailboats, or motorboats right, that was one of the interesting things he focused on. But knowing sort of what the people who are buying those boats really want to see in their boats ended up being important for what they're doing. And so that's an important part of the know-how. It's like, yeah, understanding the customer understanding also how if there are firms that are producing there, understand what the competition is. And so that's know-how that often has to be sort of gained in person rather than, you know, just reading a book or talking to somebody on the phone. And so when I think about... I don't know Nigeria very well, but when I imagine, you know, Nigerian producers, I think, partly what might be holding back is, sort of, maybe not having the understanding of what are the requirements, what are the expectations of consumers in the export markets, right, in the rich countries that they may be selling to?We've talked about the barrier, we can talk about the driver of upgrading. So then, like, gaining know-how would be a driver. So that's one. I think, and part of a lot of my work has been about quality upgrading, you know, producing higher quality. And I think that's in part driven by who you're selling to, right? So Mexican firms, you know, if they're selling to Mexican consumers, they produce different products than if they're selling to us consumers, which is their main export market, right? And so, you know, and if you're selling to Mexican consumers who have a certain willingness to pay for quality, we would say, right, they have a certain level of, you know, demand for certain characteristics, the optimal thing to do is keep producing that kind of lower quality stuff, right, rather than producing the higher quality. So I had this famous example of a big Volkswagen factory in Puebla, Mexico, which for a long time, it stopped in 2003, but for a long time been producing the old beetle. The old beetle that had first been produced in 1940, or certainly the 1950s. But for a long time, in the Mexican market, that was the main car that people were buying, and they were happy with that because it was cheaper. It was like, you know, it's very reliable. But that same factory started producing the New Beetle, basically, for the US market, right, for the US and European market, which is much more sophisticated, but also much more expensive. So it depends a little bit on which market you're selling into and whether you're going to upgrade or not. And so accessing export market can, in some sense, like pull the upgrading process, you know, once they access these export markets, they'll start producing higher quality stuff for these consumers. And that I think, actually, generates some learning, and I can talk about one paper that shows that a bit. But it seems to be that by gaining access to markets and producing high quality, then firms learn how to do stuff better. And so that can be an important driver of upgrading. And conversely, not having access to export markets or having a hard time breaking into export [markets] can be a reason why firms failed to upgrade. Let me tell you about one paper that, you know, demand effects can drive learning. Tobi; Yeah. Go ahead.Eric; Okay. It's a paper by David Atkin, Amit Khandelwal and Adam Osman. It's in Egypt. Okay, it's an RCT experiment, a randomized controlled trial. And it's among rug producers, producing rugs. What they did is they randomly allocated initial export contracts, right? So if they work with an intermediary, like a buyer of rugs, you know, among several hundred rug producers, they say, Okay, some guys are gonna get an initial contract, and some guys not. And so that was a way, this is a way of investigating basically what's the effect of exporting on the decisions and in a very clean way, and they found a couple of things. So one is those guys who had the export contracts and started producing higher quality stuff. So that's sort of consistent with my Volkswagen story, too, right? So increasingly, export markets produce higher quality and they did lots of measures of, you know, how thickly packed the rugs were and how straight the edges were - the very dimensions of quality of rugs. That was one thing. And then the other thing that they found which is very interesting is that you know, these weavers of rugs got to be better at producing rugs, basically. So then, when they took them into a laboratory, and they say, okay, produce this identical rug to a whole bunch of producers, both in their treatment group, and in their control group to produce this identical rug, and they found that the guys who had gotten the export contracts were better at producing that rug, they produce sort of higher quality rugs than the other guys. This suggests that demand can drive upgrading, right, in the sense that it induces firms to produce higher quality, but there's also learning involved in that process. These Egyptian rug producers became more productive as a result of having access to these export countries. Tobi; Yeah, I mean, listening to you, I can think of a few things that click in place. When I look at, say, a country like Nigeria, I think about the way the central bank has been running the exchange rate policy, which is messing seriously with the way firms actually source inputs. Some firms actually don't have access to the foreign exchange quota to actually source quality inputs. I mean, from manufacturing firms to agribusinesses who want to buy high-quality seeds overseas, I see how that can be a constraint. But two things I want to get at. Also, if you look at Nigeria whose industrial policy is really about domestic self-sufficiency, you could see that there isn't really an incentive for upgrading, and therein lies my question. If we talk about upgrading and how important it is, even though it's not really discussed as it should, what role do you think industrial or state-directed policies can play in this? Why because industrial policy is back in fashion, you know, it's being discussed everywhere... but usually, at least in my experience and in my opinion, what most scholars and advocates are focused on are [things like] state investments, you know, how the state can put money in one sector or the other. There really isn't so much focus on this sort of micro-level detail and what happens at firms, which your work is about. So for practical purposes, do you see industrial policy as something that can really, really, play a role and incentivize domestic firms to upgrade? For example, something like export quotas, you know, for firms?Eric; I mean, in terms of your question, do I think industrial policy can be helpful? I do. I do think that industrial policy can be helpful. Basically, I think that learning generates spillovers that firms themselves can't fully capture. And so I think there is a role for government to promote learning, basically, in a way. To subsidise learning such that - the socially optimal, or - the best sort of amount of investment in learning for society is more than individual firms to do on their own. And so there's a role for industrial policy. But I agree that it's got to be smart industrial policy, it's not just any old industrial policy. And so many countries have this idea...it's a little bit of nostalgia for import substitute industrialization, or it's very much like inwardly focused industrial policy. We're going to try and guarantee a domestic market for our producers, something like that, right? I'm not a fan. I'm not a fan of imports substitute industrialization or these very inward-focused strategies because then you get to the point where there's just not a lot of pressure on domestic firms to be more productive. They become kind of in a comfortable situation where they have kind of protected markets, not very competitive, they have a lot of market power in that market, and so that is a recipe for stagnation over the long term. So I think the crucial thing is that the targets for industrial policy be export-oriented, you know, outwardly oriented. You want your firms to be successful in world markets, right? I think that should be the key, rather than domestic self-sufficiency. Or rather than just the government investing in well, okay, so I don't have a problem with the government investing in infrastructure, investing in things as long as the aim is always ''what's going to facilitate our firms being successful in world markets'', right, I think that's a good target. Because those world markets are competitive [and] for firms to be able to be successful there, they're going to have to up their game and be more productive and be more innovative, subject to the measurement constraints we talked about, right and to upgrade. And so I think that the smart industrial policies are going to be things that sort of push firms to learn and to be more innovative and to be successful as exporters. Now, the other thing we have to keep in mind in thinking about industrial policy, is that [for] the governments, it's just very hard to [know] in the future what are the sectors that are going to be successful. What are the activities that are likely to have a future? It's just very hard, it's very hard for people who are, you know, private equity firms embedded in the sector... it's very hard to know, it's gonna be even harder for a government official or someone making government policy to do that. So I think we need to think about policies that have this effect of promoting learning or subsidizing innovative activities, but that, you know, don't require too much knowledge and understanding of the future on the part of the people setting the policy. Right. So things like collaborations between universities and firms for, you know, how to train workers to have the skills that the higher tech firms in your country need. That's something that seems like a good idea that's probably going to promote upgrading without having to pick and say, I think this product or this sector is the future of the Nigerian economy and therefore we're going to subsidize that thing. And you also want policies that are somewhat flexible, right, so that if something happens... so I'm working on a project in Tunisia, where the Tunisian Government was trying to promote exports. But the issue that they've had, and it's a matching grant program where sort of half of the costs of exporting of a certain category of costs of exporting will be paid by the government. The problem with that program, though, has been that it was somewhat inflexible. So basically, if something happened, you know, there's a big shock, and in fact, COVID shock, you know, and that changes what firms want to do. And it's very hard for them to switch gears and say, now I want to spend money on something else, can you please subsidize this other thing, and there were a lot of frictions in the program. And so that's often the case for government programs. The government sets a policy and then the world changes, firms want to do something else, but the policy is still stuck, you know, in the old world. So we need to think about how to build in, you know, flexibility into the programs so that if firms decide, actually, the market is moving in this direction, rather than this direction that we were expecting, that the support that they receive could move in the same direction.Tobi; Yeah, I agree. And I don't mean export quotas as hard targets. So I'll give you an example. Nigeria has this policy that we've been running for about six to seven years now, where there are multiple exchange rate windows for different parts of the economy or sectors that the government deems should have priority, you know, to import. And I recall a paper where Korea had a similar arrangement, but it was focused on firms that export. Firms that export to world markets sort of get priorities so that they can source inputs at a very low cost and seamlessly, you know, but it's not just something that we really think about in Nigeria, because we are so focused on the domestic market and how large the population is not minding, you know, how much of that population is poor.Eric; Yes, no, absolutely. So, certainly, Korea did this. But the Korean model, a key part of it, and they definitely picked sectors in a way that, you know, it's, there's a little bit of tension with what I just said about, you know, the government officials are not going to be very knowledgeable, there they seem to have done a good job of picking sectors to advance. But the key part was it really was oriented towards success in export markets. And the industries that were not successful on the export markets, they pulled the plug, they removed the, you know, they removed the support, which is politically hard to do, you need a fairly insulated, like, secure government in order to be able to do that. Because, otherwise, you start providing support, and then the industry lobbies a lot to maintain that support, you know, and so then it becomes politically very difficult to remove it. But I think if the government is committed to ''if these industries are not successful, we're gonna pull the plug on the support'', then this can work. Right. But you're absolutely right, in the Korean model, the key thing is the export orientation rather than the import orientation. And what you mentioned about exchange rates, I didn't comment on that. But I think it is an issue, you know, especially for a resource-rich economy, that the exchange rate can be, you know, highly valued, arguably overvalued, which makes it hard to develop the domestic industry. And so I think that's a real issue that, you know, some countries seem to be able to handle that, you know, ''what do we do with the natural resource wealth a little better than others'', if you just let it accumulate and people are going to spend and that leads to devalues your currency to increase that's going to make it harder to achieve export success in export markets for manufacturing goods or other exporting services. And so that is something that needs to be a focus of thinking about how to upgrade.Tobi; Yeah, I want to talk about technology for a bit. You had this very, very, an interesting paper on the soccer ball, we call it football, the soccer ball producers in Pakistan. And in a bit, you're going to tell me some of the interesting things you learned about that study. But first, Dani Rodrik and Margaret McMillan had this interesting paper about industrialization in Africa, and how domestic manufacturing firms are now shifting more towards capital-intensive technology. So hence, manufacturing firms are not creating jobs as much as historical patterns should suggest, do you see this as sort of a problem? I know so many other people have this worry about automation and how this technology can be exported everywhere, which is really a concern for maybe a continent like Africa with a large, jobless, and young population. So do you see this as a trend that we should worry about, you know, more capital-intensive technologies, or are there opportunities?Eric; Yeah. So I do see it as a trend. I do think it is something to be worried about. You know, Dani Rodrik recently organized a panel with the International Economics Association I participated in, along with Daron Acemoglu and Fabrizio Zilibotti and Francis Stewart from Oxford. And I sort of had two points there. One point was, yes, I think this diagnosis is correct. Basically, economists refer to it as appropriate technology. But the idea is that many technologies are developed in rich countries, you know, given factor proportions, we would say in those rich countries, so basically, skilled workers are more abundant, unskilled workers are less abundant, and so people develop machines that kind of conserve on unskilled workers. That's, in part, the background to the story that Dani Rodrik and Margaret McMillan are saying that in Africa, many firms are using this technology that's been developed in rich countries, that's very skill intensive, but it's not generating a lot of them. Right. So I think the diagnosis there is correct that that happens, right? And so the technology often is inappropriate for poor countries given, you know, their supply of unskilled labour, given how many workers they have that could use employment. On the other hand, the other question, though, was, what do you do about it? And so I was less convinced. So my worry about that. There are two versions of that concern about what you do about it. One is, given the set of existing technologies, you could try to encourage firms to use more labour-intensive technologies. Okay. But the problem is that you may encourage them to be less productive. Maybe they might generate more employment, but they'll be less productive, right? There was an interesting paper that I cited in Brazil by Gustavo D'Souza, which was sort of saying the Brazilian government basically put a tax on international technology licensing. And he shows that sure enough, firms were less likely to use International Technology. They're more like to use domestic technology. They actually generated employment, but they were less productive. Right, and they overall did worse. So there's a worry that you're gonna make firms less productive in an immediate sense. The other worry is that, like, if the Nigerian government starts encouraging Nigerian firms to develop new technologies, which are more labour intensitive, you know, then they'll generate more employment, the worries that you're gonna get sort of fall behind the world technology trajectory, I'll call it that. Like, you can think about the world frontiers moving in whatever, pick an industry, and the world frontier is moving at a particular place, and then, you know, firms are competing with each other and they're, you know, someone gets a patent, someone comes up with a new idea and sort of technology moves in a certain direction. And then Nigeria says, no, no, we want to be on a different trajectory that generates more employment, right? The problem is, you're going to be permanently behind where the technology curve is, right? Where the world frontier is. And I feel like that's worrisome, right, you're likely to have less learning, right, there's gonna be a gap between where the Nigerian firms are and where, you know, the world frontier is that it's gonna be hard for them to catch up afterwards. So in the short term, you might generate more employment, but you're gonna have a less dynamic industry as a result. And so I think, my own view, and this is, it's a feeling rather than something that's very research based at this point. But my own view is, even though it means that firms are not going to generate that much employment, they have to try and stick as close to the technology frontier as possible, or, you know, catch up as quickly as possible to where the world technology frontier is.Tobi; And so talk to me a bit about lessons from your walk with the Pakistani soccer ball manufacturers. What did you learn from that particular experiment, especially on the role of appropriate technology and technology use and the incentives that surround it for firms and investors? Eric; Yeah, so it was a study of technology adoption, what are the factors that encourage technology adoption? And what made it possible was that the football producers, I'll use that word football instead of the soccer ball, these football producers, there are a lot of producers using the same simple technology, right? And this football design is, you know, 85 or 90% are just these hexagons and pentagons. If you can imagine a, you know, a football, it's got hexagons and pentagons. And so the simple technology involves cutting out hexagons and pentagons and then stitching them together. And there were a lot of those and what made the project possible is we came up with a new improved technology, which is basically a way of cutting pentagons from these sheets. The main costs, you know, 50% of the cost are the sheets, they call it rexine. It's like artificial leather, that's the exterior of the ball. But they were cutting pentagons in a way that was wasting some material. Wasting more than they need to and so the new technology is a way of cutting these pentagons so that you can fit more into a given sheet so that you can get basically 8% more pentagons which ended up being about a 1% reduction in total costs. Which wasn't enormous but on the other hand, it's a pretty competitive industry, profit margins are about 8% so we felt like they shouldn't have been paying the 1%. And actually, when we started out, we thought we were gonna be studying technology diffusion, right, which is, you know, one person adopts, then is that their neighbours who adopt or is it their cousins? Or is it the, you know, people who share suppliers, and what are the channels of diffusion, right, and we're trying to keep everything secret, and we thought, okay, when we let it out, it's obviously the people we give it to who are gonna adopt right away, and then it's gonna spread. And so then we gave out this technology, for free, we gave it to 135 firms. And then, you know, we had a few firms adopt, and they started using it, and including one big firm that was producing - I can tell you the name later, but basically had like 2000 employees and is producing for Nike, and as a big producer adopted this technology, and, you know, is basically cutting all of its pentagons using our design and our die for cutting rather than the old one. So after, you know, 15 months, there were six total firms that had adopted. And that was puzzling and thought, you know, why is that? So then we started asking firms, we started talking to people and basically, it was revealed that the reason was that the guys doing the cutting... so the cutters are basically paid piece rates, they're paid per pentagon or per hexagon, or essentially per ball like, which is, you know, 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons they're paid. That was what their salaries were based on. And they didn't have the incentive to reduce waste, like, they weren't penalized if they wasted the material, right? And so they just wanted to go fast. And our die was slowing them down, right, made them go more slowly because they had to be more careful how they placed it and also, it was a different design, it was the design that they were used to. Now, it turns out that within about a month, they could get back up to speed, to the speed they were at before but they didn't know that, and in any case, for that month, their salaries would be way down, they'd just be slower and knowing that if the firm didn't change the contracts, their salaries would be lower. And the workers were figuring this out, the cutters are figuring this out, they said, this is not good for me, right, that my salary is gonna go down if I use this thing, I have no incentive to use this new technology. And so then they started telling their firms, you know, this is bad, bad technology, it doesn't work, it's dangerous, it has all these issues. Okay, so then we realized that this was happening and we said that we were going to do a second experiment. So, you know, half of the people we originally gave the technology to who hadn't yet adopted, we did a second experiment where we said to workers, we're gonna give you a month's bonus, which is not very much it is about $150 US dollar. So these guys are not paid very much we said ''a month's bonus if you can demonstrate to us and the owner of the factory that the technology works.'' And actually, that was enough. The workers were excited about that, you know, they got paid for doing this. Everybody who did it then subsequently passed the tests. So they demonstrated that the technology is working, and then a statistically significant share of the firms that they worked at ended up adopting the technology as a result. So those were the two experiments, those were the facts. What are we learning from that? I think we're learning that, basically, the lack of information flow from workers to their owners, to their managers, was what was getting in the way of technology adoption in this case. Like, the workers knew that the technology was working, but the owners didn't know because they sort of delegated the process of cutting the pentagons to the workers, and given the contracts, the workers didn't have the incentive to share the information. Right. So I think those sorts of, like, information flows or barriers to information flows are actually very important in the learning process. And kind of what our second experiment did when we did this bonus of a month's pay, which induced the workers to share the information and that was sufficient to make the technology be adopted. And so I think the punch line or the one-sentence version of this is, workers need to see that they're going to benefit from the adoption of new technology or from upgrading generally in order for the process to work well. They have to buy into the process. And they have to see that they have the incentive to do so. One recommendation coming out of that would be some sort of profit sharing, or some sort of gain sharing between workers and firms would actually be very useful. And will it help there be more innovation?Tobi; It brings me in a way to another very interesting paper of yours which [they] also had a summary essay about, I think, in VOX or something, which is about wages in poor countries. And I mean, thinking about the soccer ball story and the lesson. One issue and this has generated quite a number of debates between I think Rodrik and a bunch of other scholars who are thinking about Africa, is that the reason Africa is not really industrializing, or firms are not creating jobs is because wages are too high relative to the level of income. But what I learned from your paper, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that paying higher wages in poorer countries is not really a disincentive to creating employment and even generating productivity and profit. Tell me a little bit about how that works. Because, usually, we've gotten familiar with this logic that for you to be able to industrialize, if you think about China, and so many other countries, you need to have access to low-wage workers, you know, you need to be able to do very cheaply, and labour is where you can really cut a lot of your costs. And then it becomes a problem if your domestic wages are too high for the level of your income or what firms and investors are willing to pay. So tell me this high-wage, low-wage dynamics, especially... I remember the famous Paul Krugman was it article defending sweatshops in Bangladesh, where if you force firms who are outsourcing to pay higher wages or impose certain conditions, poor people in those countries will lose jobs, and they will lose their livelihoods. And so you should not mess with that process. What are your thoughts on these [issues]?Eric; Yeah, very interesting. So I think the article you were thinking of, it's related to the specific case of the football producers and seal coats. In Pakistan. Tobi; Yeah. Eric; There was a very interesting thing that happened. I mentioned that one firm adopted this new technology. And you know, one very large firm and it was producing for Nike, it's called Silver Star. The interesting thing about that firm is that because they're producing for Nike, which had had sweatshop scandals in the past, Nike required them to do a bunch of things, basically, so that Nike wouldn't be vulnerable to a further scandal, right? And among the things that they had to do was make sure they were paying the minimum wage in Pakistan. And the only way this firm could guarantee that they were paying the minimum wage in Pakistan, which many firms were violating basically, the only way they could is to say, we're not going to pay a piece rate, we're going to pay a fixed wage. Right. So this firm was paying a fixed wage rather than a piece rate. And actually, we talked to them about when they first won the Nike contract. They said their labour costs went up 20 to 30%. So they did a bunch of things. They had this fixed wage, there was a medical clinic on the factory grounds. They had sickness pay, they had some retirement benefits. So a bunch of things, they did raise wages. But the advantage of that was that the workers were much less likely to block the adoption of this new technology. Because in a specific way, they did not have a disincentive, you know, their wage was going to be their wage no matter what happened, rather than in other firms [where] what was happening is that the worker can see if they adopt this technology, their wage would go down. And so we believe, and I wrote this in an article that you saw in the Harvard Business Review, I think that's where it was, that those wages, you know, higher wage payments and fixed wage payments, which were imposed by Nike actually contributed to the process of innovation. The title of the article is how labour standards can be good for growth, and also in the process of upgrading. So that's an example of how having higher wages can actually be good for this upgrading process. Now, there are factors going in both directions, right? On the one hand, you know, the 20 or 30% higher labour costs, I think they did contribute to innovation. On the other hand, 20 or 30% higher labour costs may mean that firms will hire fewer workers or that the industry will be less competitive. So it's not that, you know, this innovation effect is all powerful and it's going to overwhelm anything that's about labour costs. But I think it is something that we need to take into account. And so, you know, labour market institutions that, you know, maybe promote profit sharing with workers, that promote longer-term employment so you have people who are around for longer, that have some job security, the sorts of things that often labour unions want to negotiate, can actually be good for this innovation process. And that's one factor that should be weighed against this issue of, you know, how higher labour costs and how competitive is the sector going to be. You often hear, like, the World Bank or the USAID, the development agencies will often say, you just have to be cheap. Like, you know, the competitive advantage of Nigeria is cheap labour and therefore, you should be focusing on having low wages and producing, you know, garments and textiles and toys and low-end manufacturing. But I think that's kind of a low-road model. You know, and I think that there are viable high road models, which would involve somewhat higher wages, some sort of gain sharing or profit sharing, and being more innovative at the same time. I can't tell you I have it all worked out exactly what that model would look like, I think it's going to vary by country. But I think we need to try to think about and push in that direction of where you can have, it may not be high wage, but it's gonna be higher wage than the market by itself maybe would bring about. So I am optimistic that that can happen. But again, the devil's in the details, you know. So Nigeria needs to think about what are we relatively good at doing right now and let's think about how can we be more innovative and move up to the quality ladder, the technology ladder in those industries. And then how can we get our workers on board to the process of moving up that ladder? And that will probably involve paying those workers more, rather than just trying to cut wages to the extent possible.Tobi; Before I let you go, let me... I know you're a relatively quiet person so let me draw you in a little bit... yeah, I know you're not active on Twitter or anything like that. Let me draw you into a little bit of professional controversy. And one of the things that I admire most about your work, I should confess, is that it's methodologically diverse. You know, you do structural econometrics, you do RCT, you do regular modelling and so many things. So there's this huge debate currently that I think, a lot of my colleagues may not think so but I think has important consequences for the policymaking process on development, which is that - is development research right now focused on the right things? You know, RCTs are like the standard tool for the investigation of development questions. Empirics have sort of taken over the field. But on the other hand, you have folks like Lant Pritchett who are constantly pushing back that this is encouraging researchers to think too small, they are researching cash transfers, and so many other key interventions, whereas we really should be focused on the big questions. And in my experience, these have real-life implications, especially in poor countries where they have budgetary constraints. We might say this is due to corruption, and that will be true, but sometimes they have a real balance of payment crisis, because a lot of these countries are resource-dependent, and it's often cyclical. So a policymaker may really want to know where to spend the most resources to have the maximum benefit for the citizen. So I find these questions very important. What do you think about this debate? As someone who transverses the field very often in your work, how have you been able to navigate this debate? And what do you think is the, maybe right is not the right word here...what do you think is the useful approach going forward?Eric; Yeah, good question. Yeah, in my own work, I've been very question driven rather than methods driven. Right. So I've always thought, you know, I'm interested in this question of from upgrading, what are the barriers to upgrading? What drives upgrading? How can we, you know, learn about that, and if we can learn about that using an experiment, that's great. If we're in about that using other methods, that's great, too. So I, sort of, don't have a dog in the hunt, as Bill Clinton would say about, you know, the methodology. And I'm kind of in the middle of the road, I think, in terms of this debate between, you know, J-PAL and Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee and Lant Pritchett or others on the other side. I think, you know, in situations where you can run an experiment, I think that is the most credible source of information. Okay, so I'd rather have a randomized experiment than do a correlation and put some causal interpretation on a correlation. At the same time, I do think that there are many questions, either that can't be answered with an experiment, or that are just very, very costly to answer with an experiment, right? And so it's very hard to run, you know, it's running experiments on firms. I've tried to do it, but it takes a long time. It can be very costly. You have to give much bigger shocks to firms to get them to react, etc. And so, I've heard Abhijit Banerjee articulate that, like, we should never do a policy that hasn't first been evaluated by random experiment, I think that's too strong. Because we're gonna be waiting years and years and years to get the experiments and with a huge investment of resources in order to get the experiments that would then inform the policy. So we're going to have to make policy and, you know, make decisions based on other sorts of information. And so there, I do think we need to be like small ''c'' Catholic, allow for lots of different types of methods, quasi-experimental methods, you know, even structural methods, and then also experiments. There's this famous joke about the drunk guy with a streetlight, you know, he's looking for his keys, and he's looking under the streetlight, because that's where the light is, maybe not where the keys have been lost. And so I take that point, like, maybe we really care about these big questions about, you know, what's going to drive growth, then in that sense, I'm sympathetic to the sort of the Lant Pritchett view. On the other hand, under the lamppost, we actually are learning stuff, right, I feel like we're more confident that we're making progress by looking under the lamppost. And so I think the, you know, the trick, the art here is to sort of stay near the edge of the lights and we're getting closer to the big questions, but in a way that's still credible, and that we're still, you know, we can believe the answers that we're actually given. To sort of counter the Lant Pritchett view, you can post these big questions, and you can, you know, think big thoughts. But at the end of the day, you have to be able to convince, you know, you have to show us the data, right, you have to show that this is really correct. And that's just very hard to do for many of these big questions. So we need to incrementally build up based on this work. That's why I kind of like this work on firms, we're getting towards these big questions about growth, but in a way that you can actually have some confidence that you understand what's going on.Tobi; In your experience doing this work, what are misconceptions that you have encountered in the field that either the professional development industry, so I'm talking about aid and the think-tank and all the other folks, or it may even be your academic colleagues, what are the common misconceptions that you have encountered? Eric; Yeah. I mean, so one big thought [is] I think that the of field development agencies, right, it's like, how are we going to spend aid dollars in a way that's going to have a positive effect? And I think there's value to that. All right. I'm all in favour of spending, you know, aid dollars, in the most effective way. But I think that you know, a set of questions does limit to some extent the impact of the field of development on the development process. So I actually think we could spend every aid dollar in an optimal way, and would it have a meaningful effect on the material standard of living of people in poor countries? I'm not sure. I mean, maybe a little bit, maybe marginal, right? I think what's really going to matter is, do these countries start getting industrialization happening? Are they getting upgrading? Are they growing? And so in that sense, I sometimes get a little bit frustrated with the development discussions, it's all about this, you know, how do we spend aid dollars, and let's do RCTs to figure out how to spend the aid dollars, rather than these bigger questions, which are going to have a longer-term effect on people's living standards. You know, that's changing a little bit. I'm encouraged. There are more and more people talking about firms, there are more and more people taking sort of industrial policy ideas seriously. They're talking about bigger-picture questions in a kind of micro-founded way. So there are some encouraging signs. But I think a lot of development is still about that issue of like, what's the right way to do social policy? What's the right way to do, you know, aid spending, rather than trying to understand deeply why is it that Korea was able to make this transition from a poor country to a rich country, essentially, in a generation? And why is it that many countries in Africa are not? What is it that's actually getting in the way? And for that, that's not really like how to spend aid dollars question that's more about how firms behave. What are the factors that constrain them? And those sorts of things.Tobi; This is a show about ideas. So I want to ask you, what's the one idea? Just one. One idea that you think everybody should think about and adopt, that you would like to see spread everywhere. What's that idea? It may be from your work, or it may be from other things that inspire you. What's that one idea?Eric; I think the one idea I would choose is, uh, workers have a brain. This goes back to the soccer ball study, that there's knowledge and information that, like, workers have or people who are lower down in the hierarchy have, which is not being taken advantage of. Right, the soccer ball thing was an example. The workers were understanding the technology, but because of the way they were paid, and because of the, you know, institutional arrangements, they didn't have the incentive to share that. And I think the world, including the economics profession, tends to undervalue the intelligence that people have. Even the people who are actually, you know, on the frontlines doing the work. And if we can figure out ways to harness that knowledge and give people incentives to share it and give people incentives to develop their own intellectual thinking about whatever it is they're doing, I think that'll have a big payoff. And so I'm interested in sort of investigating what are the sorts of arrangements, what are the sorts of policies that can lead that to happen more?Tobi; Yeah. Thank you so much, Eric. I mean, tell me a little bit about what you're working on right now.Eric; What am I working on right now? I mean, so one thing related to what we've been talking about that I'm excited about is, again, a paper on technology adoption. This is in Bangladesh, with an energy-efficient motor like sewing machines. They're different sorts of motors that the traditional ones they're kind of spinning all the time. And then people have the foot pedal they like to press the foot pedal and then the needle comes down and stitches right but they're actually wasting a lot of energy because these motors are spinning all the time. And so there's a new type of motor called a servo motor which spins Only when the needle is moving, right, so it's energy efficient, energy efficient motor, but it can just replace the old motor, you don't have to change anything else about the machine, you just put this new servo motor to replace the old clutch motor. And we're studying when new managers or when new owners, when do they make those decisions. And so we're trying to track we're giving them information in different intensities, like including installing the machines in their factory one is just showing a video when it's just providing information, but one is actually installing their machines. And we're seeing how they react to that information. So I think that's a big topic. It's like what's getting in the way of the adoption of energy-efficient technology? These are the people who are making mistakes, or they just don't have good information. Or that basically, maybe if they have the right information, they actually will adapt very quickly. So that's one thing I'm thinking about.Tobi; It's been fascinating talking to you, Eric. I enjoyed it so much.Eric; Thank you, Tobi. Good questions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

The U.S. men's soccer team must beat Iran today in order to advance in the World Cup. Alyssa Milano trades in her Tesla for a Volkswagen, because she claims Elon Musk is a white supremacist. Oh, the irony. You need to understand what is at stake when you move into a cashless society. Pat's neighborhood has a beaver problem, and the HOA is not helping out. Scientists are determined to cause an apocalypse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Épisode 880 : Youpi c'est lundi, le black Friday se termine, les fêtes approchent et les actus social media tournent autour de l'esprit communautaire ! On vous dit tout en 20 minutes !Nouveau Sticker communautaire InstagramLe communautaire se renforce sur Instagram avec l'apparition d'un nouveau sticker !Il n'est pas nouveau car il est en place chez Facebook et en test sur WHatsapp. Le sticker « Channel » Que l'on peut retrouver lors de la création de story vous invite à « créer une communauté sur les autres peuvent découvrir ».Le but derrière cette fonctionnalité est de créer de nouveaux canaux d'échange sociaux, bien sûr concentrés sur Insta.L'administrateur d'une Channel aurait la possibilité de supprimer du contenu ou décider de destituer des membres du canal s'ils enfreignent les règles de bienséance.En gros ça marche comme un groupe Facebook ou un forum .Une fois crée, ou lorsque l'on rejoint une Channel, on la retrouve dans un onglet spécial de la messagerie Insta juste à côté de « Principale » et « générale ».Derrière ces fonctions développées sur l'ensemble du groupe Meta, on voit l'envie ou le besoin de renforcer l'engagement et ce au travers de l'outil communautaire.[source](Instagram teste un sticker pour lancer des discussions communautaires) Amnistie générale pour les comptes Twitter suspendusOn sait qu'Elon Musk a des petits soucis de popularité en son propre pays depuis qu'il a racheté Twitter, et il nous propose maintenant une nouvelle stratégie surprenante.Sa dernière en date est d'aller chercher du soutien chez les dissidents… les comptes suspendus !Après la réintégration du Réal Donald Trump la semaine dernière.Cette fois-ci encore il démontre la force de son merveilleux outil « sondage » avec un nouveau tweet déjà icônique: « Twitter devrait-il offrir une amnistie générale aux comptes suspendus, à condition qu'ils n'aient pas enfreint la loi ou ne se soient pas livrés à du spam flagrant ? »Résultat : sur plus de 3 millions de votes, 72,4 % ont voté en faveur du rétablissement des comptes suspendus.La réintégration débute semaine prochaine !Encore une décision qui questionne l'ambition initiale de nettoyer Twitter, de rendre la plateforme plus safe et de renforcer le système de modération.sourceYouTube community post optionYouTube aussi bosse sur des options de messagerie communautaire qui fourniront aux créateurs plus de moyens de s'engager et d'interagir avec leur public dans l'application.Petit rappel, Les messages communautaires sont visibles dans l'onglet « Communauté », qui peut être consulté sur les chaînes YouTube avec plus de 500 abonnés.C'est à cet endroit que de nouvelles fonctions font leur apparition :Tout d'abord, YouTube étend son nouveau processus d'édition visuelle pour les messages basés sur des images, en gros, les fonctions d'édition de shorts dispos dans la messagerie communautaire. La même chose que dans les groupes privés Insta. Des filtres, du texte, des stickersYouTube ajoute également la possibilité d'ajouter des quiz, une option permettant de générer un engagement direct et une interaction plus intense avec ses audiences.Des fonctionnalités très cool puisqu'on sait qu'elles fonctionnent ailleurs. On est dans la pure déclinaison, mais sur YouTube on voit quel lien cela pourrait entretenir entre les créateurs et leurs audiences.sourceSnapChat et la réalité augmentée : ce n'est que le débutLa réalité augmentée devrait continuer à gagner en usage au cours des prochaines années. C'est en tout cas, la conviction de Snap Inc, la société mère de SnapChat. Snap s'est récemment associé à Breakthrough Research pour mener une étude sur la façon dont les consommateurs perçoivent la réalité augmentée et sur la probabilité que l'usage de l' AR influence leur processus d'achat.Ils ont interrogés 7500 personnes en leur proposant des scenarios de parcours d'achat dans le mode, l'automobile, la beauté et l'industrie du travel.Les résultats montrent un vrai enthousiasme des consos pour les expériences d'achat intégrant de la réalité augmentée.Ils sont 73% à estimer que la réalité augmentée peut les aider à prendre une décision d'achat plus rapidement. Globalement ils sont une très large majorité à estimer que la RA les aide à être plus confiants dans la prise de décisions.Bien que Snapchat ait d'abord créé les lentilles parce qu'elles constituaient un moyen amusant de communiquer entre amis, la technologie est passée d'un simple jouet à un vrai outil.Snap continue d'ailleurs d'investir fort sur la réalité augmenté avec sa fameuse Snap Lens. Ils proposent aujourd'hui une multitudes d'usages fascinants : la possibilité d'essayer des vêtements, des chaussures, une montre, du maquillage… Avec Snapchat Creator Studio l'idée est de mettre le développement de réalité augmentée à la portée de tous et aussi en dehors de Snapchat.——Le Père Noël est sur WhatsAppBouygues Telecom et l'agence BETC Paris réitèrent leur campagne de Noël en délivrant le numéro Whatsapp du petit Papa Noël. La campagne existait déjà l'année dernière mais elle reprend vie cette année avec un dispositif très très cool.Pour parler au papa Noël tu n'as qu'à envoyer un message au 06 25 12 25 12. Le truc marrant c'est que tu peux demander au Père Noël de t'enregistrer une vidéo avec ton propre message personnalisé. Tu choisis aussi le lieu de la vidéo : l'atelier de Santa, le salon…Au bout de 5 minutes tu reçois automatiquement une vidéo dans ta conversation WhatsApp.Une vidéo personnalisée. J'ai fais le test, je te montre.C'est vraiment pas mal fait. L'outil utilise une sorte de vidéo DeepFake avec intégration d'une voix synthétisée comme sur TikTok. Très marrant ! Parallèlement, Bouygues lance un podcast événementiel en 6 épisodes. Un comte de Noel pour enfant.——La coupe du monde : Ca y est les sponsors sortent du bois Coupe Du monde en plein hiver oblige, Volkswagen lance un pull de l'équipe de France.KFC lance sa campagne « Kiss The Chicken ». KFC offrir des burgers si un Bleu embrasse l'écusson du coq en match. De son côté SoFoot invite à prolonger le boycott. Le magazine donne rdv à tous les soirs de match dans un restaurant éphémère : SOFood à Paris. Pendant 90 minutes les fans de foot engagés pourront participer à des ateliers de cuisine sur le thème de l'adversaire du jour : espagnol, tunisien…source. . . Le Super Daily est le podcast quotidien sur les réseaux sociaux. Il est fabriqué avec une pluie d'amour par les équipes de Supernatifs.Nous sommes une agence social media basée à Lyon : https://supernatifs.com/. Ensemble, nous aidons les entreprises à créer des relations durables et rentables avec leurs audiences. Ensemble, nous inventons, produisons et diffusons des contenus qui engagent vos collaborateurs, vos prospects et vos consommateurs.

Today I open with the following three topics all entwined: virtue-signaling, Tesla and Volkswagen. What ties them altogether? Alyssa Milano. Over the weekend, Milano tweeted: "I gave back my Tesla. I bought the VW ev. I love it. I'm not sure how advertisers can buy space on a Twitter. Publicly traded company's products being pushed in alignment with hate and white supremacy doesn't seem to be a winning business model." I wish I could blame her utter stupidity on youth, but that option is way back in the review mirror for Alyssa Milano. The genius who through a crocheted facemask would keep her safe from an aerosol virus not thinks ditching an American car company is her way of fighting hate and white supremacy. Maybe someone needs to let the stunningly ignorant actress know that Volkswagen was started and financially supported by Adolf Hitler. That's right, in an effort to virtue-signal to the world, Milano ditched an American success story in favor of aligning with the Aryan Nation. You just cannot make this stuff up, folks! Moving into topic two, it seems Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, helped get $16.4 million dollars of federal money for his good friends Columbia Ventures. They are the same people who partnered with Warnock and Ebenezer Baptist Church to fun the low-rent apartment that has people living in squalor and horrible conditions. For a revered, it seems he's more interested in counting the money over saving souls. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni plans to revoke financial benefits to Italians who refuse to find a job. Good for her! She's taking a page out of the Governor William Bradford playbook (checkout my Thanksgiving Day special from last week if you missed it) and getting rid of communalism. She wants to stop rewarding people for not working. What a bold idea! We are on the cusp of a railroad strike and Joe Biden tells reporters he is not directly involved in the negotiations. Unfortunately for him, his Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre spent time two days earlier telling the press he is directly involved. Once again, this White House shows how one side has no idea that the other side is doing. Finally, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) deserves some mockery after saying that "...words nowadays can actually break your bones." So, be careful when speaking to someone, you may "actually break" their bones with just the sound of your voice. Who knew we humans had evolved to such capability. Take a moment to rate and review the show and then share the episode on social media. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, GETTR and TRUTH Social by searching for The Alan Sanders Show. You can also support the show by visiting my Patreon page!

Dan Prosser and Andrew Frankel talk about  VW Golf GTIs, Rs and VR6s – the highlights from almost 50 years of hot hatch history, plus the few examples that failed to live up to their billing. We've also been driving the new Golf R 20, which celebrates 20 years of VW's R brand. You can now give a subscription to The Intercooler as a gift! Visit our website to find out more. https://www.the-intercooler.com/gift-subscriptions/

What's the story with Volkswagen and emissions testing? How did the car manufacturer hide vehicle emissions? Scott Benjamin of CarStuff joins us to talk about it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Vanen tro åbner Millionærklubben hanerne for spørgsmål fra lytterne. Du kan sende dit spørgsmål allerede nu på sms 42 42 03 21 og start beskeden med “MIO”. I dagens panel sidder d'herrer Lars Persson, teknisk analytiker, og den erfarne fundamental analytiker Lau Svenssen klar til at svare på spørgsmål. Du kan høre mere om blandt andre: Mærsk, DFDS, NKT, Royal Unibrew, Anheuser-Busch, Vestas, Siemens Energy, Novo Nordisk, ALK-Abelló, Ambu, AstraZeneca, Volkswagen, Toyota, Continental, NKT, KION, Fluoguide. Din vært i dag: Simon Richard Nielsen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's been a while since we've done a roundtable episode. On this show George and Bill review what's happened over the past few months. We talk about one crazy weekend, OCTO, and more. We call up across the pond and talk to our homeboy and the finch from spikes vintage restorations. We discuss what the experience was like how the one crazy weekend fairs to other shows that he's been to. We discuss the Las Vegas VW club cruise we did, what it's like to eat at an old saloon built in the 1900s. We talk about Facebook marketplace ads for sale read some of the comments and have a few laughs. Maybe discuss a few project updates. Enjoy! 

Volkswagen und die IG Metall haben sich auf einen Tarifvertrag für die rund 137.000 Beschäftigten in Deutschlands VW-Betrieben geeinigt. In zwei Schritten gibt es ab 2023 mehr Geld. Web: https://www.epochtimes.de Probeabo der Epoch Times Wochenzeitung: https://bit.ly/EpochProbeabo Twitter: https://twitter.com/EpochTimesDE YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC81ACRSbWNgmnVSK6M1p_Ug Telegram: https://t.me/epochtimesde Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/epochtimesde Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EpochTimesWelt/ Unseren Podcast finden Sie unter anderem auch hier: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/at/podcast/etdpodcast/id1496589910 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/277zmVduHgYooQyFIxPH97 Unterstützen Sie unabhängigen Journalismus: Per Paypal: http://bit.ly/SpendenEpochTimesDeutsch Per Banküberweisung (Epoch Times Europe GmbH, IBAN: DE 2110 0700 2405 2550 5400, BIC/SWIFT: DEUTDEDBBER, Verwendungszweck: Spenden) Vielen Dank! (c) 2022 Epoch Times

In der heutigen Folge „Alles auf Aktien“ sprechen die Finanzjournalisten Nando Sommerfeldt und Holger Zschäpitz über ein positives Protokoll, eine tolle Traktoren-Aktie und neue Tesla-Kursziele. Außerdem geht es um Deere, Manchester United, Borussia Dortmund, TAG, Deutsche Pfandbriefbank, Hapag Lloyd, Deutsche Mittelstand Real Estate, Kloeckner & Co, DIC Asset, ProCredit Holding, TTL Beteiligungs- und Grundbesitz, Instone Real Estate, Fair Value Reit, LEG, ProSiebenSat.1, Mercedes Benz, BMW, Sixt, BASF, Wacker Chemie, Evonik, E.on, Volkswagen, Allianz, Deutsche Post, Fresenius, Covestro, Vonovia, Global X SuperDividend ETF (WKN: A3DEKS), WisdomTree Global Quality Dividend Growth ETF (WKN: A2AG1E), SPDR Global Aristocrats (WKN: A1T8GD), Lucid und Rivian.

In der heutigen Folge „Alles auf Aktien“ sprechen die Finanzjournalisten Nando Sommerfeldt und Holger Zschäpitz über ein lukratives Musik-Label, einen sich anbahnenden Mega-Deal bei Manchester United und über Börsen-Schnäppchen, die den Black Friday in den Schatten stellen. Außerdem geht es um Best Buy, Abercombie & Fitch, Bet at Home, iShares MSCI Saudi Arabia Capped (WKN: A14ZV2), ThyssenKrupp, Salzgitter, Lanxess, BASF, TAG Immobilien, LEG, Vonovia, Commerzbank, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, PNE, Shop Apotheke, Cancom, HVB Open End German Mergers & Acquisitions Performance-Index (WKN: HV7TPD)

Two hundred billion dollars of oil and gas money to through The World Cup in Qatar. Turns out Qatar is 'new money' and yet has a huge sovereign fund of $300B. Even they know the transition is coming. The governor of Tokyo suggests turtleneck sweaters for saving on energy. Will the trend take off? Donate to The Clean Energy Show via PayPal! COP27 was a big, fat compromise and we need to do better but it does seem the world is slowly coming together to oppose fossil fuels. The sexy new Prius is fast and sporty. Too bad it isn't an electric vehicle. We predict continued bad sales for Toyota. Biden pours billions into aiding the U.S. power grid to transition to renewable energy. Canada begins a program to replace oil furnaces on the East coast with heat pumps. Other topics: GoComics, Carlos Ghosn, Unilever to make precision fermented ice cream could be the blow to dairy we've been predicting, Mazda might be the only Japanese auto company to get serious about EVs and Volkswagen may be dropping the ball. A listener bought his first EV and is worried his reduced winter range won't come back. Don't worry, it will! Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show. Follow us on TikTok! @cleanenergypod Transcript------------ Hello, and welcome to episode 140 of the Clean Energy Show. I'm Brian Stockton. I'm James Whittingham. This week, with the World Cup underway in Qatar, we look at what might be the peak of petrol state decadence. I mean, what does $200 billion even get? Dennis a soccer tournament without beer. Hell, even my kids pee wee soccer tournaments had beer. The governor of Tokyo has solved the energy crisis. The solution? Turtleneck sweaters. Speaking as a Canadian, wait until they hear about Tukes and woolly socks. Well, the Cop 27 climate summit was a bit of a wash. You know, like standing in the middle of Miami. Domino's Pizza is moving to Chevy Bolt electric delivery vehicles. They've ordered 800 bolts from GM, and if they don't receive the cars in 30 minutes, they're free. All that and more of this edition of the Clean Energy Show. Holy brian we're back with another show, another week. We're nonstop robotic machines here. Yeah, a lot is going on. And also this week, will I fit into the surprisingly sexy new Prius? The answer will sadden you, I think. Biden gives billions to the US power grid, and Canada follows the US. And installing heat pumps in regions where oil furnaces are popular. And I still can't figure out why oil furnaces are popular. They just didn't want to run the they just became popular, I think. Rural areas where it's hard to get them on the grid, I guess. And how are you this week? I'm going to tell you right now that I'm not well. I've been sick. You sound terrible, James. No, I'm not possessed. That is, my lungs. I've had illness. I flu since last we met. Brian pretty much okay, but it's not going well. Here's what I did. I tested my family because they're all sick. They gave it to me. My daughter brought it home from high school, and I knew I was going to get sick, so I just tested they tested. My wife and my daughter tested, and they're negative. So I thought I'm like I was singing at my nose. It's not like I have something different. I don't go anywhere, as you know. Anyway, I've had a hellish number of days, so I am barely able to be here today. And by the end of the show, I will be soaked in sweat. Oh, dear. Because I'm still doing anything is like a chore. I skipped lunch yesterday because I couldn't go downstairs. Oh, no. That maybe answers my question, because the pet peeve of mine. People often say they have the flu when what they really mean is that they have a cold. So you said you have a flu. Do you really believe it's, the damage, or is it a bad cold? I was going to jokingly bring the CDC chart on this to the show, and I thought, no, I'm not going to. But now I wish I did. Yeah, well, people say that all the time. Oh, I had the flu. And no, you just had a bad cold. If you've got the flu, it typically means you cannot go to work or go downstairs for lunch. Yeah, well, there's overlaps, okay? But having fever and severe aches is very uncommon for colds. You can have a mild fever. You can have a brief fever. But to have a long fever and severe aches, which I did, even with pills, I've been thrown down pills left and right until yesterday when I decided I've had enough. But I took one for the show, so maybe it'll kick in halfway through. We'll see. Anyway, I had to do some harrowing things, like go drive my family home from the gray cop, the super bowl of Canada, because they were volunteering there, because my daughter is going on a school trip, and that was one way to fundraise. Well, it killed my wife. She was a little bit sick still, and she had to work 10 hours one day serving rich people, which is always fun. Then my daughter asks, dad, is it legal to quit high school and go get a job? And I said, look, young lady, you want to be the people getting served, not the servers, okay? You want to stay in school. You want to be those rich bastards getting horse Durham served to them by people like you raising money for school trips. You don't want to be the person who's 30 years old, has six kids, and is trying to serve. I mean, we need those people. Those people will exist school and becomes an entrepreneur and starts a million dollar web company. Well, sure. I think she's more likely to start a bakery or something. Yeah. Not a huge amount of money in that. No, but people do do that. There's a lot of people who do that. In fact, there's a number of successful local businesses which are at least popular with people who rave about their goods. Yeah, there's some great bakeries. Finally, there's great bakeries here. There never used to be. It was always ironic because we're surrounded by fields of wheat. There's just nothing but wheat around here. But 20 years ago, you could not get a decent loaf of bread in the city. It was crazy. But now there's some really great places. Okay, so breaking news. I think we're probably the first podcast to deal with this important topic. There is an important website on the internet that has been down for four days now. It's not Twitter. It's not Twitter. It's more important than twitter. It's GoComics.com. GoComics.com. Yes. This is a website I go to every single day to get my daily comic strips. You know, I was always a newspaper guy, and one of the reasons I like newspapers was reading the daily comics. Now, many years ago, I switched to reading the comics online because you can get whatever comics you want. You don't have to just settle for the ones that are in your newspaper. So I go to this website every single day, GoComics.com to read a handful of comic strips, and it's been down for four days. When was the last time you had a website you visited and it was down for four days? People don't have patience for that anymore. No, 4 hours would be pushing the limits for most people. Four days. And you can get a lot of the comic strips in other places, but there's a handful that are only on GoComics.com. It drives me crazy. I've been looking into it, and cyber security apparently is the issue. And there's not a huge amount of information on the web, which is why we're an important news source now for this story. But getting the word out there. Yeah. Anyway, it's driving me crazy. Go to homes.com. Do you want to explain what a comic strip is to people under 45? Briefly, a few panels in a newspaper, usually with a punchline. The one I'm really missing is Nancy and Nancy classics. And this was a comic strip I didn't know about really much in my youth, but Nancy by Ernie Buschmiller, which ran like in the they do reprints of this on Go comics as well as the new strip, which is quite good. So I don't know. I'm having withdrawals. Another problem I have is I don't have enough fluids to get through the show. Okay. I was about to start the show and I have this giant water bottle from Costco that I've got. Electric pump on the top with a lithium battery. And it shows now to quit. What? It's got a pump on it? No, I bought the pump on Amazon. You could basically use these things in water coolers, although they're not quite water cooler size bottles. They're a little below that, but they're still as much as a human can carry and maybe beyond. I had my son happened to be home for Thanksgiving, canadian Thanksgiving in the head. So we decided we're only going to buy it when our kid is home from college to lift it upstairs because it's crazy heavy. Like one of those giant water bottles with a pump on it. Yeah, I put the pump on it. You can buy these pumps on Amazon for like $18. And mine just went dead right when I needed it most. Before that, I was going to help a water bottle before the show. And now I'm like, I'm going to have to be careful, very careful. Any coffee fits and I'm done. The show's going to come to an abrupt end. Well, if you have to pause, let me know. I certainly can't go downstairs for water. I'm not, you know, that strong. No. Well, at least I mean, it sounds like you're in better shape than you were yesterday. What have you been watching on TV? Well, I've been sick. Yes. Well, it's time for Brian's movie corner. Brian's movie corner. You mentioned this last week. There's a documentary on Netflix called Fugitive the Curious Case of Carlos Gon. And have you watched it yet? No, I skimmed it a bit because I was trying to see if they talked about the leaf in his history. Okay. Sadly, there's no real information about electric cars, but it was a nice refresher in who Carlos Gon is. I'd kind of forgotten what a superstar he was in the automotive world. He was originally the CEO of Renault, like 20 years ago or something. Turned around, renew. And then he became the CEO of Nissan at the same time. Turned around Nissan? They were heading into bankruptcy as well, that he made both companies very profitable. And then he got arrested for allegedly embezzling funds from Nissan and then very famously, escaped the country in a giant case on a private jet. He literally snuck out of the country after he was released on bail. So. Yeah, it's a pretty good dock. It was interesting. Yeah. Unfortunately, there was really nothing about electric cars. He was one of the proponents of the original Nissan Leaf. So maybe they're lagging in electric cars because he's no longer there. I'm not sure. You know, in the documentary. Well, first of all, there was a documentary. Who killed the electric car? This is about the EV One program. The first attempted car company making EVs. Yes. General Motors EV. One like 99 2000 in that area. Then they destroyed them all. They didn't let anyone buy them. Legendary. And that was a good documentary. And then there was the revenge electric car, which came at the point where Tesla was getting launched and starting to get the S off the ground. Their first mass produced car, I believe. And there was Carlos talking to Elon at the auto show and they were kind of awkward. It was very cool encounter because it was awkward to Egomaniacs who didn't want to give anything away. Carlos had said at that time that we're doing this just to hedge our bets. If Latter Eagles take off, we'll be prepared. But he didn't really get behind them. He didn't make them compelling enough. He basically looked at the car for the first time without approving it. He just looked at it at the auto show. Oh. This is what it looks like. Okay. And it was not a great looking car. It was divisive. I don't hate it. There's a lot of you know, it's iconic in a way because it's designed with big buggy headlights to deflect the wind so that you don't hear them on the mirrors because you would in an electric car because they're so quiet. And then who else was there with Chevrolet? There was what's his name? With GM. The cigar smoking what's his name? I can't remember. Bob Lutz, the legendary Bob Lutz, who always said that EVs would fail and the Tesla would fail. But then he was the guy sort of behind the Volt, which was coming out. So there were three things. There was a trifecta, this is history now. This used to be just my daily life, but it was the Volt with a V, which was a plugin hybrid. Essentially. It was an EV with a backup engine. And then there was Tesla getting off the ground. This was all happening in 2010, and this is when this documentary was made. And the first model years were eleven. By the way, there is a Cadillac ELR, I think it's called, for sale in Vagina, which was based on the Volt platform. They only made a couple thousand of these things, so they're kind of rare. But it's a really good kind of plug in hybrid Cadillac with all the luxurious Cadillac. What's it going for? I'm not sure. It was still kind of incoming. I saw a little thing on the web. But anyway, so Carlos Gon, a controversial figure, and there's no particular conclusion in the documentary because he managed to escape Japan and go to Lebanon, where he is originally from. And he has, I guess, not been extradited or anything, so he's never gone on trial. So no one really knows what the full story is. But there was another executive at Nissan that was sentenced to, for helping to COVID up his salary. They were trying to keep his salary quiet because it was quite high. So somebody at Nissan did do time for that. And then the pilot, like the guy who was like a US special forces guy who got him out of the country, he ended up doing a couple of years of time. I hope it was worth it, buddy. Yeah, I hope it was worth it. I don't know. I mean, I assume he was well paid. Carlos has got a lot of money. When you're that rich, you're going to throw it to millions really quickly. Just take them, just get into freedom. Quite clear on why he ended up back in Japan and in jail when Carlos Gonz has managed to not go back. Well, I think the pilot, he probably had a business there. He probably had a relationship with Japan if he was able to. I mean he could be, but he was an American. But they didn't really explain that. But yeah, so they made the point a couple of times that in Japan the conviction rate is 99%. Wow. If you are arrested in Japan, there is a 99% chance that you will be convicted. So the documentary sort of implies that there's something kind of hinky with the Japanese justice system. Well, that's why you flee. You don't wait for your trial and that's why you flee. Basically the charge is the yes. Like as soon as you're arrested, it's game over. And Carlos Gon, in an interview after he got out, he barely did 150 days in solitary confinement when they first arrested him, what he says were inhumane conditions. No butler. It's inhumane. No butler. But, like, his hands were cuffed in solitary confinement for, like, 150 days. Yeah, I probably would have done the same thing. Guilty or not guilty? Yes. He felt like he wasn't going to get a fair trial and very luckily managed to escape. So he was in a case that they said was an instrument case. They pretended that they were musicians and it was a big square case, but they said it was some type of an instrument and it couldn't go through the scanner because it was sensitively tuned, like it had just been tuned or something. And you can't put it through the scanner. I can just picture them putting it through the scanner and seeing the Carlos Scone in there, all curled up. All curled up. So? Yeah. I don't know. It's only about 90 minutes. It's an interesting little dog. Well, he is guilty, Brian. I've looked at the evidence and it seemed pretty over. Pretty compelling case. I don't know what the punishment would have been for him, but why was he in solitary confinement? I don't understand that if he was, but also, why would he need to embezzle money? Like, his salary was nine, he was making €9 million a year. Why would he need to embezzle money? I don't know. Maybe a gambling dance. Maybe he was paying for the Leaf program. I don't know. Who does? I don't know. Well, let's get out of the show. Cop 27, wrapped up in Egypt, and that's been a mixed bag of stuff for them. I'm not going to talk about it too much, but what did you think about how that went? Well, it's how these things usually go is that there's lots of optimism and then it's ultimately a compromise. There's always a compromise at the end of it, because this is a UN climate summit with hundreds of countries and getting everybody to agree. I don't know, sounds like it was not the best, but also not the worst. I see this as a very crucial time because there's a lot of fossil fuel bad things going on. They're trying to claw at what they can to make as much money as they can, and they would be happy to throw the climate down and our targets with it. So Bloomberg had a story on it. They said the United Nations climate summit just barely avoided ending in a deadlock. They went into extra a day or so afterwards. And the final compromise left big doubts over the prospect for new efforts to curb emissions. I quote, despite attempts by big powers like the United States, India and the European Union, the agreement failed to raise ambitions on reducing emissions. That could mean the world misses the one five degree Celsius warming target that enshrined the 2015 Paris agreement calls to phase out all fossil fuels, not just coal. Which is all they could come up with. They couldn't touch fossil fuels and to peak global emissions by 2025, which is likely to happen anyway according to the IEA. We're shot down by many nations who export oil, and I'm proud to say we have a bad record, Canada on this, but we didn't oppose it. Even though we are a big oil exporter. I'm sure it had a different government been in power. That would have been the case, probably. So while the phase down of all fossil fuels didn't make it to the final text, momentum grew around the idea that wasn't even in the cars before the summit. As many as 80 countries now support it. So we're moving towards banning fossil fuels, basically. We're getting closer to that. There was like a damage fund as well, right? That was a big part. I agreed to put in money to a fund for the countries most affected by climate change. Yeah. And that's all I'll talk about on that. But we'll update some more stories as we go. Here what's happening with $250,000,000 in Canada, right? Yeah. So I think we mentioned this before. There's a few more details. So there is a Greener Homes grant here in Canada that I've applied for, and they have now expanded the program with another component to it, which is to switch people from heating oil to a heat pump. So there's an extra $250,000,000 now in Canada. It's a separate stream in the Greener Homes grant, and it won't technically be available until early 2023. But this is mostly for people in Atlantic Canada, where heating oil is apparently a fairly common thing, rural properties, and everybody gets heating oil delivered. It's not a thing around here at all. We don't have this here. No, even though we have lots of rural properties. We have natural gas. We have the government who did that. Right. We have a government utility. That's kind of why we have government utilities here. But if you're in a rural property, I think it's mostly propane here. You can get your propane tank filled up. But anyway, this is up to $5,000. It's only for middle and lower income Canadians. And the twist on this, too, is you can get the money upfront, usually with this program. Wow. You apply and you spend all the money and then you get a reimbursement. But just because it's meant for middle income and lower income Canadians, you can actually get the money up to $5,000 upfront to switch you. And the potential is to save, like, according to them, as much as $4,700 a year on your heating costs. So what would a heat pump cost? Have you done any looking into it for your own house? As much as like 2025 grand. But I think for a heat pump, it depends. We need, of course, these super frigid cold heat pumps. I think in Atlantic Canada it's not as cold, and hopefully it wouldn't cost as much, maybe 10,000 or $15,000. But yeah, you get the money up front. And I checked in on the this is sort of similar and in line with what's happening in America with the biden. What's that called? The IRA. The Era. The IRA. The inflation Reduction act that starts on January 1, 2023. If you want to get a rebate on your heat pump in the US. It's anything installed after January 1 so you can get after the factory bait for yourself. Not going from an oil furnace. Right? Yeah, I'm going to go through the normal program, and I think I'll get up to 5000 as well for myself. It's too bad, though, because that would be hard for somebody low middle to finance ten grand if they weren't pressing. Yeah, and I guess that's why this program is that way. In Atlantic Canada, rural properties are probably fairly inexpensive, so you can have lower income people that own houses and they're going to be in trouble. But yeah, you can get the money upfront, which is very cool. And yeah, very much in line with what's happening in the US with the Inflation Reduction Act. So I encourage everybody to check your local jurisdiction, your local state, your local province to see what rebates are available. And things are really going to get rolling in 2023. So basically, they're starting with the biggest bang for the buck is so the biggest savings would be for people with oil furnaces, so they would be most compelled to make that switch. Right. And heating oil is one of the things that's really gone up in price with the recent inflation that we've been having. I was doing some research on this this morning, and I said that heating oil heats up twice as fast as you get more bang for your BTU, basically that it really heats up fast anyway, but probably causes more pollution than natural gas. Yes, natural gas is relatively clean as far as fossil fuels go, although there's a lot of methane in there. The new priest finally was announced on Wednesday in Tokyo and in the La auto Show, and there's been lots of speculation about it, so I've been kind of curious. Ultimately, though, there are actually Prius fans out there who are saying, wow, it's great, look at this. And what do you think? I've got a picture of it up. Well, I love the styling. Like the design road that Toyota has been going down the last few years, I just do not like. And they reached a kind of an apex with that excessively angular design of the Prius. So I think they had kind of no choice but to go in the opposite direction. But it almost looks to me like they designed it to be an EV. Like, EVs are often designed for aerodynamics. That's right. That's right. Yeah, they did. They cut down the roof line for that very reason, because there was no other way to gain efficiency. So it's just a huge shame it's not a full EV, because it looks like it could be. It looks a lot like the original Hyundai Ionic, which was a very aerodynamic shape. So I love the direction they're going. This is a huge improvement in terms of the style, I think, of the Prius. But just a shame it's not fully electric. It just feels like that would have been the correct move on it. Yeah. Obviously, you refresh the models every few years and it's totally time for a full EV refresh. And that's not what this is. Now, some people make the argument that at the moment in time that we're in right now, that a plug in hybrid, which there's a version of that right? There's a plug in version of the Prius. Some people think they all plug in. They don't. They're basically just a hybrid power train, which utilizes an electric motor to be more efficient. But it's all gas during the energy. So the plug in version has gone up in range from pretty significantly. Basically, the energy density of the batteries have gone up. It's taking up the same space to go from, I think it was, 40 range, which is a lot more usable. And in Canada, we would get the full $5,000 off. So that means you've heard it here first, because no one else has said this. The plugin. Prius prime PSE e v will be cheaper than the normal prius So why would anyone buy a Prius rebate? This is the situation that was like that in California when the Prius Prime first, there was no point. I mean, even if you don't care about plugging it in, why would you buy it? Because you have to resell it. You have to have a residual value. You might as well have the one that costs more. So it makes no sense for them to sell anything but the Prius Prime in Canada, and they also went with more horsepower, which I thought was a bit weird. Yeah, they really bumped up the horsepower. Finally, after 20 years of being mocked by truckers, by bumper stickers on truckers. Yeah. So it's quite a lot faster now. But of course, that cuts into the miles per gallon a little bit, but not too bad. Yes. Overall, though, I think it could be more efficient than it is. But the zero to 60 is a lot faster. Way faster. Yeah, that's fun. But here's my big problem with it, and that is that it sits lower. And then my wife has a Prius if you're new to the show. And that's her work car that she has to have inspected constantly because it's used for work. She takes social work clients around in it. They're not going to even talk about pricing or announcing it until sometime in the first half of next year as far as the prime is concerned. So that doesn't do me I need a car now. Brian should go buy that. Buy that Caddy. Yeah, you should actually look into it. It could be fun. You'll ever may launch ice cream from cow free dairy in a year. This is an update to a previous store because we've been talking about precision fermentation. And here it is, Brian. Here's the headline. You wait for things to happen and then there it is in front of you. Yeah. And the dairy industry likely to be the very first of the animal based products to be severely disrupted. Here's a clip from the robot who reads the Bloomberg stories. The company is working on a process called precision fermentation that uses substances like yeast and fungi to produce milk proteins in a VAT. A product could be available in about a year. If successful, unilever could be the first major food company to create an ice cream made from cow free dairy, dubbed lab grown milk. In a burgeoning industry dominated by smaller startups, a consumer giant like Unilever developing a precision fermentation version of one of its major brands raises hopes that the technology can scale up and be cost effective. The idea is that it's going to be cheaper and then also cleaner. Much cleaner. Yeah. I think a version of this ice cream already exists because there was a picture of Tony Siba eating some of it in that last YouTube video that he put up. So I think this does exist, but it's probably kind of expensive and only in health food stores. Whereas Unilever would make it a mass market product. It would probably be quite expensive. Yeah. So right now, the ideas he says by 2030 that the proteins in milk is going to be replaced by fake stuff, precision fermentation, and it's going to be cheaper and dairy is going to go bankrupt. And this is the first sign of that happening. They're doing it. Maybe they'll advertise it as an expensive but greener option, I'm guessing. At first, yeah. And more expensive at first, but I think eventually, ultimately cheaper. And unlike beyond meat, there really will not be a difference. It will be identical. It'll be very identical. Yeah. Because you're mostly tasting the fat and the sugar. The milk protein is a minor part. I think most of it is water. It's 10%. That's not water.   That's the part you replace. The others are fats and sugars, which are easily replaced, obviously. Yeah. Anyway, speaking of Japanese automakers, Mazda looks like it could be, and I'm not convinced of this, but it could be doing something significant. They could be the first of the Japanese automakers to actually set a target. That is reasonable. Mazda is raising its EV sales target to 40% by 2030 and they're investing $11 billion to accelerate this transition. Sounds like they got the memo. Yeah, well, we were making fun of them for their MX 30, which is. A very low range electric car. They are down to selling, like, only a handful of them. So they've been a real laggard. And so this is their first step up to the plate. I mean, it's not maybe what it should be, but it sounds like they're getting the idea. Right. That's something. It's probably too late. I don't want to be a naysayer, but at least they have a target. Hopefully they survive. Brian 505. I've sold more brownies at bake sales than they have in these cars. It's 100 miles of range, 160 range, which is in today's market, no good unless it's a cheap car. But it's 33,000 us. Yeah, that's a lot of money. You expect something for that. I mean, you can get a Leaf, you can get a Chevy Bolt that does way more mileage than that and probably is a more capable car. Yeah, for maybe only slightly more money. And they even said this EV has been sold out, so you can't find one. So there was a demand there. There's going to be some Mazda fans who want to go EV. But anyway, this is a story about VW maybe delaying their EV plans. Like, VW was maybe one of the great hopes of the EV transition. And now the CEO's been replaced, right? Yeah. As we reported, they're on track to deliver 500,000 EVs this year, which is a significant amount. That's way ahead of everybody else except for Tesla. Herbert Dies was their CEO that put all this in motion. He really had a radical vision for VW and really felt like it had to be a radical remaking of the company or, you know, they were going to run into problems. And so yeah, so he started a lot of ambitious programs that have gotten them to 5000 EVs a year, which is significant. But he was sort of moved out recently as CEO, and the new CEO is definitely scaling back these plans to be much less ambitious. I don't like that. No, I think Herbert Dees was on the right track. And you what, like with Mazda? So Mazda wants to sell 40% EVs by 2030, but that means there's going to be people to buy the 60% of EVs that are gas in 2030. No, it doesn't work that way. Doesn't work that way. When EVs are available, people are not going to want the gas cars. So I don't know. The new CEO of VW seems to be betting that such things are possible. And every car commercial on television is electric. Can you buy the cars? Not so much. Not so much. But for some reason, we're in this weird time where, yeah, all the car companies are vying to look like. Then there's Toyota, who says, we're electrified. That's enough. Right? Electrified. So, VW, they've got the second generation platform that they were planning to come out in 2026. They call this their trinity. EV. And now it's going to be more like 2030. Under the new CEO, 26 might have been difficult to actually achieve, but if you're moving the goal post down to 2030, even 2030 may not be moving it up to 2024. And hey, you may not make the deadline, but the commission should be moving up anyway. So that's a three year delay, basically. Or worse. Let's hope not. And that's no good. We can't deal with that. And it was already a kind of a target that wasn't even as gracious as it should be. They've got a lot. It takes a lot to turn a giant ship like VW around. I don't know. They're the best at it. The biggest car company in the world are the best at it. They are manufacturing in and out well. They do really well to get up to 5000. That's impressive. I think what they're not getting is what you said, that once the pendulum sort of swings towards EVs and that the weight starts to get on the teeter totter on the EV side, look out, it's not going anywhere else. It's going to chip way over and then you're going to be caught with your pants down. So who's going to be able to provide those cars? Hopefully? Well, Tesla, you and I are already at the point where we would never in a million years consider buying another gasoline car. But we're still kind of the outliers. But every year the percentage of people who won't consider a gas car just goes up. Yeah, and it is regular people are considering EVs. And there's people around here with pickup trucks. I'm reading about them all the time. Their neighbors are, their business associates are, their clients are. This becomes normalized very quickly now. It's really going to pick up. Yeah. So, moving on to Tokyo, the governor of Tokyo, this is Eureka Koiki, has suggested everybody wear turtlenecks to help reduce their energy bills. Okay. It's sort of a funny thing and a fun thing to make a joke about off the top of the show, but I'm in favor of this. There's an energy crisis going on. Everybody's going to be struggling to make enough power, make enough heat. Can I make a turtleneck work? I mean, not everybody can. Yeah, I don't think I own any turtlenecks, but everybody. The idea is that dress warm and you can save money on your electricity bills, which are going up in Tokyo, just like they're kind of tending to go up everywhere is in my neck. That's the coldest thing, though. I mean, really. Well, the idea is here's the quote, warming the neck has a thermal effect. I'm wearing a turtleneck myself. And wearing a scarf also keeps you warm. This will save electricity. This is what the governor of Tokyo said around the house is true. He wants people around their tiny little Tokyo apartments to wear a scarf. I mean, it sounds radical, but why not? We have a problem here. I don't know what it's like in other places, but we often have this problem in North America where like, office buildings particularly often have very poor heating or cooling that can't be controlled very well. So there's often a problem around here where people have to wear sweaters in the summer because the air conditioning is ranked too high and nobody can seem to turn it down. Or I've actually heard of people who have electric space heaters under their roof. Yeah, I've seen that it's really bad in the summer. I've seen that it's too cold because the air conditioning is too high. That's not good. Yeah, so you're overusing the air conditioning and then some poor employee has to use UTC heater to sort of gain back the energy. So I think this in many ways, used to be like a common sense thing where people just dressed warmer in the winter because it was kind of common sense. But then you go to work in an office building where the heat is all wonky, so maybe it's too hot in your office in the wintertime and then you just end up wearing a Tshirt instead in the winter. It's all messed up. I wear fleeces and sweaters inside the house now, but that's because I'm getting old, right? Yeah. I'm still turning up the temperature tin more than it should be. And then I'm also wearing those things. That's not good. I do the same thing. Yeah, it's not good at all. I can't laugh, by the way. Otherwise I'll go into a coffee and fits. I don't sound anything funny. Well, Brian, as you know, the World Cup has started. And I know you don't have world cup fever, but I do. Is that what you're suffering from? Sure. I took a title for my World Cup fever this morning. Argentina lost to Saudi Arabia and the biggest upset in World Cup history. Some people say, wow, I'm sorry, Argentina, if you're listening. In fact, this is probably way too soon for me to even bring it up, but I apologize anyway. Of course, all the coverage, it's been announced like ten years ago that they were getting this. So a Qatar, which is a small nation state with oil, was accused of using their oil money to spend on the World Cup and bribe. And there's been some people who've actually been, you know, charges and so forth. There's a new Netflix documentary. I won't make you watch it, but it's there. OK on FIFA. This is a tiny Middle Eastern autocracy with a population of barely 3 million people. How do they get the world's biggest sporting event? You know, like, this is by far the world's biggest sporting event. It happens only every four years, but the temperatures there in the summer are 50 degrees Celsius or 122 Fahrenheit. And that's when the World Cup you normally played during that time and I, as you know, was in Death Valley when it was that temperature. And I could only get out of my healthier, man then, and I could only get out of my car for ten minutes at a time. My kids could do 1213. But then you're like facing the Grim Reaper. He starts to encroach on your area, looking for you, to kill you, because you can't play soccer in that, I guess. They spent $200 billion of their petrol money on this games. They've built eight stadiums. One of them I'll talk about in a minute. That's a little bit different than the other ones. It's recyclable, we'll just put it that way. But yeah, they've got air conditioning. The temperature is only 24 degrees with like 64% humidity. These games have been checking on them. So, yeah, it's perfectly reasonable for soccer. But I read you a bit from the Atlantic here. It says Qatar might now be home to about 3 million people, but the proportion of actual Qatari citizens who lived there is a little more than 10%. So there's hardly any. The rest compromised some very rich expatriates of other nations and a huge army of poor migrants up to 6000. And some may have died, by the way. This is a whole separate issue which is not part of our show. But my God. My point is that this is the pinnacle of oil decadence. And to think that thousands of lives were not cared about and lost from other countries to make this destruction of everything and we'll never have this again. This is peak oil. I don't think we'll see crap like this ever again. This is the moment in time where it's all going to fall apart. They did not have any infrastructure, they're not a sporting nation, they didn't have a fan base, they had nothing. But they were very rich with their oil money. But Brian, their new money, they haven't had this money for very long at all. Guitar has had huge reserves of natural gas, which was discovered, I think, quite a while ago, maybe the by Shell, but they just left it there because they couldn't do anything with it. They had all this natural gas and nowhere to get it anywhere. So in the was this coup, I think the leader of the country, the King or whatever the term they use for it, left to go on vacation to England and his son took over. Which is why if I'm ever in that situation, I'm never leaving because my son would take over in a second. He was just sorry, Dan. But he did a good thing for the country in a way, because he invested in liquefied natural gas tank so that it could be transported on a ship. So when you cool it natural gas. It's like transporting oil on a tanker. But it's ridiculous how much -165 degrees celsius or something like that they are now the third richest country in the world. And they learned how to extract natural gas from the ground much more cheaply. So even after they cool it and put it on a ship, a tanker full of natural gas is four times cheaper from Qatar than if it originated in the United States through their normal channels. That's why they are so rich, is because their gas is cheap, even though they have to do that. So they started a sovereign wealth fund, though this is the shocking part that I didn't know about. Even though they blew 200 billion on these Games to make them a respectable country, which is not working out, by the way, because all we're doing is talking about how crappy they are, the LGBTQ rights and everything like that, and the fact that they can't serve beer at the games. And they yanked that privilege two days before. So they started a sovereign wealth fund like Norway did, and they have $300 billion in it because they saw the writing on the wall. They knew that our Canadian jurisdictions here who have oil in the provinces don't think that way at all. They think spend, spend oil forever. But when you had something they didn't always used to have this. So they've only had it since the 90s. So in that short time, they've got a 300 billion dollar sovereign wealth fund and they're building up infrastructure. Part of the game spending is that to make it for an investment possible. And I don't know that that's going to work, especially with their human rights problems, that a whole lot of people are going to go there, but they are planning for the end of oil by diversifying their investments around the world. So, yeah, that fund is going to do all kinds of things around the world. So there's been of course, it's supposed to be a carbon neutral World Cup. And it's a joke. It's a bloody joke. Here's a clip from Bloomberg. Organizers estimate that the World Cup will emit three six megatons of carbon dioxide. International flights in and out of Doha will account for the majority of emissions. However, organizers argue that this World Cup will be more energy efficient than others, since fans won't have to fly to different venues and can instead just take public transit. The sticking point is always the flights. Most Olympics and World Cups, it accounts to more than 85% of total emissions. So that surprised me. I guess it makes perfect sense when you hear it, but it's not the building of these eight giant stadiums and you know, all the infrastructure around it, it's the flights and during the actual Games. And it's the same with the Olympics. It's a very carbon intense thing when all these people do that. Yeah, when you got to travel so many people around the world, that's what you do, you fly. Now, the game today was in stadium nine seven four, which is built with shipping containers it's not entirely shipping containers. It's like steel girders and shipping containers. But the 400 seat stadium can be disassembled and rebuilt elsewhere. So this is the world's first tear down build a back stadium, supposedly, and apparently, if everything goes on shipping containers, it can be shipped anywhere. Yes. So this will be available for my Ikea soon. Quite the price, but yes, it was designed by a French architectural firm. Other things they're trying to do is they have built solar farms to offset the emissions from the games. They're using electric buses, an electric mass transit. So that's good. They're not burning their own product, and they are supposedly buying carbon offsets, but they're way behind on that. Brian yeah. So Domino's Pizza has announced, and this sort of falls into that category of story that we're going to have to stop reporting soon, because this is just going to be business as usual very soon and maybe is already. But Domino's Pizza in the US. Has ordered 800 Chevy bolts, and they're kind of custom painted with the Domino's logo and everything. And they've got about 100 of them so far. And these are going out to Domino's Pizza locations in the US. So they will eventually have 800 fully electric delivery vehicles for the fleet of pizza delivery vehicles. And of course, they're doing this because it just makes sense. And the bolt is not a particularly expensive car. So imagine all the money they'll save on gas. This is just the EV calculation that every business in the world is going to be making when it comes to fleet vehicles. I wish on your Domino's app, if you could select an EV to have it delivered like you can on other apps for a ride sharing, that would be nice. Do you ever eat domino's? Never. I would think he would hate Domino's. That would be an anti Brian pizza right there. No, when we have excellent pizza to choose from in our city, I don't see a reason to use donald okay, well, I agree. The pizza shows up in advance a lot of times where people have some there. Okay, so Joe Biden has promised $13 billion for the US. Power grid. So this is part of the green spending from the US. And as we talk about frequently on the show, the grid all over the world is going to need some upgrades. And so this is a decent amount of money, $13 billion to upgrade the grid. And as we go greener in the next couple of decades, it's important to get the foundation correct first before we do that. So this is a nice, like, really forward looking thing. I think that the US government is doing $13 billion available to do grid upgrades around the country. So I think that's great. It is subsidizing what they could probably do themselves, though. How do you feel about that? Yeah, well, I mean, it's a weird thing about all of this spending. Right. Because companies like Tesla don't even need subsidies, really. Their cars are profitable already and yet they're going to benefit from these subsidies. So it's always a bit weird and taxing fossil fuels. A carbon tax, it would probably have been the better way to go with all of this. But however it gets done, there are certain things politically that are difficult to do. Like a carbon tax. Yes. It wouldn't necessarily be my first choice for how to deal with it, but at least they're dealing with it. Let's dip into the mailbag. Brian. This is a message from Nick. Hello, Brian and James. I live in New England, and recently got a 2022 Ford Mac E. That is an electric vehicle, small crossover. Right. My battery life, as he calls it, was originally at 230 miles. He means range. So the range of that car when he first got it was 230 miles or 370 colder out. It is 170 miles and 274. So it's a lot. About 100, roughly of range. So I know about range decreasing in colder weather. My question is, does the range come back when the weather gets warmer? With the cost of new EVs, a range of 170 miles is not acceptable. Fan of the show since day one. Thanks. Wow. Thanks. How many episodes? 140. Congratulations, Nick. Thank you for sticking with us. So, yes, I would be bold. Enough to say that I think, James, you and I are the two leading experts in the world on EVs and cold weather. Yes. You've come to the right place, Nick, because Alaska has nothing on us. We're in the Southern Canadian prairies where it gets to -40 and it has recently not this year, but it has and -40 celsius is the same as -40 fahrenheit that's where the two scales cross over. Yeah, it does get that cold here. So I don't know everything about how the mach e battery meter works, but yeah, usually the range on any car is calculated on your recent trips. So if your recent trips have been in the cold then your car is going to be smart enough to figure, okay, well, the next trip is going to be so I assume that range will come back in the summer. Of course it will. But in a way, Brian, this is a stupid question for us, to us, for people like us. But that concerns me that the people buying EVs, really, that there are things that this would be scary to somebody nick's, obviously an EV enthusiast, but a regular person who doesn't care, who just goes out and buys their next car, might be very concerned about this if they don't know about it. That's right. You're going to look at the range thing. Now, the one thing I can recommend is I don't know if you can do this in your car, but in a Tesla you can change the battery to percentage rather than miles. Or kilometers. So when I first bought my car, it would give me the range in kilometers and started around 400 km. But then you tend to get obsessed about that range and every time you plug it in, it's like, oh, it's 5 km less than it was last time I charged it. So I just switched it to percentage. And so then you don't end up obsessing about that mileage. But then if you're going on a trip, you use the trip calculator. And the trip calculator will tell you in a Tesla that gives you a graph that says, okay, you'll get at your destination and your battery will be 20%. And that's what you monitor. And sometimes it's a little bit off in a Tesla. Now these days, about 5% error. Is that's pretty good though? Actually for this they are getting better. It used to be about a 10% error where it would tell you, oh, your battery will be 20% at your destination and then you'd get there and it would be more like 10%. Yeah, is way worse though. So we're slowing down that's one tip. Yeah, it's switching it to percentage and not worrying about it. Now when you get to the summer and it is not giving you the same range, it is always possible that your battery has cells that have deteriorated or something. So it is something you have to keep an eye on, but presumably that will come back. Yeah. And the way we do it on the Leaf is you put in the little data reader you buy on Amazon. It's a bluetooth device. For $20. It hooks up to an app for your car that's made by a third party. Mine is called Leaf Spy. Tesla is a little different because they have a different connector. I don't know how you guys do it or even if you need to, but there would be if you got into this, you can see how your battery is doing and know the state of health of it, but this means nothing. Okay, so let's say you lived in Hawaii where it's the same temperature every day. If you drove like a mad person for a day or two, it would show that you have a lesser battery, right. Because you're driving with a heavy lead foot. But if you're driving like a nun, then you're going very slow and gentle and that's going to show a higher range. It's not really showing what your battery is capable of, it's just what it's capable of based on your recent driving. And that is a weird concept to get around to people. And also I mentioned too, it is typical for batteries to lose range like battery degradation. And the typical formula seems to be you are going to lose about 5% of your battery in the first couple of years and then it kind of slows out. So I assume my battery has lost about 5% of its capacity but I don't know exactly how I would confirm that. Yeah, and it's not something you should obsess about. You should know that when you buy the evidence, buy bigger than you think you need, and then you don't worry about that. Right. That's always a good thing. But there's lots we can talk about here very quickly. Okay. Now, the first thing is that in winter, a gas car loses range. You just don't notice it. You're not thinking about that. Right. There's many factors. There is the dense winter air, so your aerodynamics are off. This affects EVs a little bit more because they're more efficient. And they're also usually more dependent on the aerodynamics of the vehicle for efficiency. So if you put winter tires on, that's going to be less efficient, for sure. That could lose you 10%. It could lose even more depending on what your tires there's the snow on the ground or ice on the ground. The fact that it's just not a smooth, rolling surface. It's like if you're pedaling a bike through snow, it's going to be harder to pedal that bike. There are different factors like that the battery becomes less strong in cold weather. When the battery is cold, it's chemically not capable of holding as much of a charge. It can't hold as much of a charge, the battery, in colder weather. And don't forget that you're using your battery to heat your cabin. That is a lot of heat. Even if it's a heat pump, even if it's just not that cold, but a little bit cold, you're still using a lot of energy. In fact, it's different in every car. Your car is a PTC heater. Mine is, too. So it's just like a toaster. It's like red hot elements heating up. That's the least efficient. And then the heat pumps. Sometimes there's both a heat pump and a PTC heater. Sometimes there's just a heat pump that uses less energy, but it's still using energy. Brian yeah. When I checked in, the Mustang Machoe does not have a heat pump heater. So it has a normal oh, really? Heater, which is not as energy efficient. So you're definitely going to lose range with that. Yeah, you're definitely going to use range. Unless you're using it to make these long trips on the highway, then that's when the only time you really need to concern yourself. Unless you have a long commute, for the most part. If you can charge every night at home, just don't think about it. Nick. Don't think about it. Enjoy your fast heating car and your efficiency and how wonderful it is. And, you know, keep us up to date, too, as you drive it through the winter, because we're not in the worst part of winter yet. Drop us a line again and how you like the car and how it made it through the winter. Yeah. And it's really only on road trips that you ever need to think About It. If you're just driving around the city like you said, you charge at home, you're always going to have enough. With Tesla, they spaced the superchargers about 150 km apart. Roughly. It varies a bit. So that's about 100 miles apart. If you're going to go nick on a road trip. You want to make sure that there is a charging station. Roughly every 100 miles and you should be fine like around here when it does get -40 I don't think it's going to get to -40 where nick is so he's probably not going to have to worry about it. But they based on about right. So mine. I've got the standard range. Tesla model. Three and it can just barely make it between chargers when it's -40. If it's only -20. -15 celsius. I mean it's not constantly -40 but we call that the worst case scenario around here. Okay. EV drivers call that you want to be prepared for the worst case scenario. We've gone years without it getting that cold. Yeah. And then the last couple of years, it's gotten a few days. That cold. So you want to be prepared for those days. And it's usually only that cold overnight. But last winter, and this was covered on the podcast, I drove up to Saskatoon and The Daytime Temperatures was -36 Celsius, which is about -32 Fahrenheit daytime Temperatures. This was at Noon, and that's what I had to drive through and just kind of barely made it in my Standard Range car. Yeah. So that's an issue. And another thing to keep in mind is if you are doing highway trips so that in winter it charges slower, the battery can't take the charge as fast because it's like regenerative braking too. You can't put your brakes back into the battery pack as well when it's cold. No, that's kind of the biggest thing for me because summer road trips, I'm only spending about 20 minutes at the charger. But the winter road trips in these cold conditions, it's more like you're spending an hour at the charger. And at that point, it gets annoying. And I'm at the point now where if this winter, I have to drive up to Saskatoon and it's -40, I'm going to take a gas car because I just don't want that. I have to wait an hour at the charging station. The worst case scenario in the worst place in the world is what we're talking about. And we tell people around here that you could lose up to 50%. It varies from car to car. I've heard somebody talking to about 17% in his ionic five when it wasn't too cold. Okay, but that's, like, the worst worst case scenario. Now, if you're driving around the city and you do 60 miles in a day, at the very worst, and you have 170 miles, who cares? You plug in at night, it's going to charge the same way as it always does. If. You're on the highway and it takes you a half hour to charge, it might take you an hour to charge. And that's a major change, too, in habits to be aware of. Yeah. And of course, electric cars, they're not as efficient on the highway as they are in the city. Higher speeds are tougher for electric cars. You drain the battery a lot faster. And I really wish that when they publicized the range for electric cars, that they did a highway figure and a city figure. I think that's the way it should be done. But they don't do that. They pick a number kind of somewhere in between the two. Yeah, but you'll get used to this, Nick. There's a lot of weird little things that people fret about when they try something new. I did it. Brian did it. It's normal. We EV owners tend to think too much, but just enjoy the car. You'll get used to it. And tell your friends about it. Time for the lightning round of fast paced look at the rest of the news. And Brian, we've overstayed her welcome, which is good because I don't have a lot of stories. This week. Rivian starts international deliveries of the R one T, rather, and the R one S in Canada. So you've seen one here, right? Yeah. It must have been an American one that drove up over the border, because I saw one on the road. But yeah, officially, deliveries of the Ribbean just started in Canada. Now, post the IRA, the inflation reduction at next era expects wind with storage will cost $14 per megawatt hour United States later this decade. This is only because this act was passed. And solar with batteries, $17 per mega, 1 hour. This is down because of this act. This is how much the IRA is going to affect everything and speed things up, if I may say. Yeah, for sure. This is a Brian story. I can't believe you didn't see this one, Brian. There's a induction oven maker who has added a battery to their stoves. Lithium battery. This is because, I guess some of these induction stoves use a lot of draw, right? Yeah. And some places aren't wired for it. And you'd have to get an extra panel if your panels full. So they've solved that problem. Interestingly with putting a battery in a stove. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So the big draw when you need it comes from the batteries. Well, we talked about this before in terms of heat pump, water heaters, because that's a similar problem with those, because you tend to need a few thousand watts to run those, I think up to 7000 watts to run an induction cooktop. So that's a lot of juice. It's one of the reasons I did a panel upgrade on my house. But it cost a few thousand dollars to go from 100 amp to 200 amp. So I guess the idea is you can charge up this battery and so it can draw more power. You can sort of just plug it into in a regular outlet, as it was, but with the battery have much bigger output. Right. So that solves that problem. But it's just weird, that sort of appliance with a battery in it. And I imagine it adds to the price, but it's cheaper than maybe rewiring your house, if you want to do that. So I thought I thought it was quite interesting BYD the Chinese, mostly EV maker and bus maker has sold as 3,000,000th, Bee, V or PHEV. I thought that was an interesting milestone. Some are plug in hybrids, but that's still an impressive number. Oh, it's time for a CS. Past 636 fossil fuel lobbyists were preying on government delegations at Cock.   Oily bastards. That's a lot. Scotland approves a 38 megawatt solar plant next door to a closed nuclear plant. And guess how much the objections were in the community? Zero. No objects were their objections. Will they put up a nuclear plant? Probably. Probably. Some concern solar. Not so harmful, not so scary. A village in the French Alps this is from CNN demolishes its ski lift because there's no snow left. It hasn't snowed in years. lack of snow meant that the last time it ran was about 15 years ago, and just for one weekend. And since then, it has not been. This is sad. Sad. This is why the Winter Olympics will now be held in Qatar with fake snow and perhaps potato flakes. Finally, this week, India is looking to produce its own solar modules to meet all of its demand and then some. That's right. India requires a lot of solar, and they want to make it themselves. You know, it makes sense. Perfectly capable country of ramping up something like this. I'm looking for takers for a $2.4 billion in government aid to offer stimulation to domestic manufacturing of solar equipment. They want to do all of their solar and export all as well. That's great news. That is our time for this week and a bunch more. I apologize to myself more than anything. My body wasn't ready to go long. It was ready to go short this week, and I went long. So see you next week. See you next week. Bye.

Rosero McCoy, who will be joining Mick & Mook on November 23, is one of the most established and well-rounded Choreographers in the Entertainment Industry. He has worked with the likes of Emmy Award Winner, Zendaya, Usher, Prince, and former First lady Michelle Obama.Some of Rosero's choreography film credits include Rags, Rio, Honey 2, Camp Rock 2, Alvin and the Chipmunks 1 & 2, Step Up, Beauty Shop, Vanilla Sky, and Garfield 1 & 2. His choreography can also be seen on hit TV Series' Austin & Ally, Shake It Up, MTV's America's Best Dance Crew, Good Luck Charlie, and Call Me Kat.He is known for his versatility in all styles of dance shown in commercials for Shoe Carnival, Volkswagen, Target, Sprint, and Playtex, as well as music videos and stage shows for Usher, N'Sync, Ellen DeGeneres, OutKast, and Gloria Estefan.Collaborating with production to enhance the overall visual quality of any movement-oriented project is one of Rosero's many strengths.Be sure to join Mick and Mook on November 23rd for this interesting episode.

➤ Interesting development in Australian energy market could have implications for Tesla Energy ➤ Tesla brings new energy storage project online in UK ➤ China concerns rise ➤ Report on TSMC and Tesla ➤ FSD Beta v11 full release notes ➤ Peterson exhibit opens ➤ Apple Music appears to be coming soon to Tesla vehicles ➤ Two more over-the-air recalls ➤ Volkswagen's OTA update Shareloft: https://www.shareloft.com Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/teslapodcast Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tesladailypodcast Tesla Referral: https://ts.la/robert47283 Executive producer Jeremy Cooke Executive producer Troy Cherasaro Executive producer Andre/Maria Kent Executive producer Jessie Chimni Executive producer Michael Pastrone Executive producer Richard Del Maestro Executive producer John Beans Music by Evan Schaeffer Disclosure: Rob Maurer is long TSLA stock & derivatives

Es gibt ein erstes Signal, dass die steigende Inflation nicht von Dauer sein könnte: Die Erzeugerpreise sind gesunken. Doch wann ist es so weit? *** Hier geht's zu unserem Abo-Angebot für unsere Morning Briefing Leser: https://www.handelsblatt.com/mehrerfahren

Danny's new acquisition, salt, and fat birds!

Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from Electrek. Quick Charge is available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn and our RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players. New episodes of Quick Charge are recorded Monday through Thursday and again on Saturday. Subscribe to our podcast in Apple Podcast or your favorite podcast player to guarantee new episodes are delivered as soon as they're available. Stories we discuss in this episode (with links): Tesla reportedly places massive order of next-gen self-driving chips with TSMC Tesla teases Apple Music integration coming soon Does Buick's first Ultium-based EV revealed in China deliver the electrification the brand needs in the US? An electric Volkswagen pickup? New global head says not this decade Domino's acquires 800 Chevy Bolts for delivery fleet, cutting costs and attracting drivers Sony Honda Mobility has a (not so secret) weapon to challenge Tesla in the EV market U-Boat Worx's all-electric Super Sub can now cruise faster than a dolphin https://youtu.be/THYNlnITPq0 Subscribe to the Electrek Daily Channel on Youtube so you never miss a day of news Follow Mikey: Twitter @Mikey_Electric Listen & Subscribe: Apple Podcasts Spotify TuneIn Share your thoughts! Drop us a line at tips@electrek.co. You can also rate us in Apple Podcasts or recommend us in Overcast to help more people discover the show!

Porsche has such panache that it's easy to assume they've been a rock-solid luxury import since the beginning. They're owned by Volkswagen, they have a stellar racing resume, and they're one of the most respected brands by aficionados and casual drivers alike. But it wasn't always that way. Porsche has been on the brink of bankruptcy not once, but three times, since they began production. How did they survive?! Today, on Past Gas – the story of how Porsche has gone from penthouse to outhouse and back again, while creating some incredible vehicles along the way.  More about Show: Follow Nolan on IG and Twitter @nolanjsykes.   Follow Joe on IG and Twitter @joegweber. Follow Donut @donutmedia, and subscribe to our Youtube and Facebook channels!   Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or using this link: http://bit.ly/PastGas. If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be helpful! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: http://bit.ly/PastGas. Thanks to our sponsors: Get Valvoline for your car! This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp Therapy Online. Visit https://BetterHelp.com/pastgas to get 10% off your first month. Get 20% off + free shipping sitewide with our exclusive link https://vincerocollective.com/GAS  Sign up today at https://philo.tv and use promo code GAS to get 50% off your first month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Your personal tone and demeanor can work against you. Too often leaders focus on perfecting their message but completely miss the attention that is essential for how it's being delivered and heard.If you're not focused on how you're “coming across”, then you're weakening your message.Worse, this disconnection causes confusion, disengagement, and pessimism throughout the organization.It's vital that leaders harness the power of optimism to convey a message of possibility and opportunity in the face of adversity to keep their team aligned and driving to their goal.President & CEO of Volkswagen Group of America, Pablo Di Si, shares the power of optimism and why it's a vital leadership choice we must ALL make every day.Pablo leads all Volkswagen operations in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. He also leads U.S. operations for Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, and VW Credit Inc. and oversees manufacturing, engineering, research and testing, purchasing, and distribution across the U.S.LinkedIn Profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/pablo-di-si/Company Link: https://www.vw.com/en.htmlWhat You'll Discover in this Episode:How becoming a collegiate athlete shaped his leadership approach.His biggest leadership lesson from playing soccer.A strategy he's using to unify his global team.The inspiring transformation he's planning for Volkswagen Group of America.The legacy he hopes to leave behind.Why leaders should foster optimism in their team.Essential advice for leaders who want to communicate their ideas to C-Suite. A failure in his career that accelerated his growth.Three success strategies for every employee. What it's like being the first Latin American CEO of the Volkswagen Group of America.Quotes:“Innovation, creativity and optimism are critical for success, and it's the CEO's job to nourish and drive these in the teams.” “Fight for Your Ideas”-----Connect with the Host, #1 bestselling author Ben FanningSpeaking and Training inquiresSubscribe to my Youtube channelLinkedInInstagramTwitter

As the world emerges from a pandemic mindset, we find ourselves confronting new geopolitical realities with Putin's war in the Ukraine as well as increasingly fraught relations between the US and China. How is this geopolitical landscape changing the compliance landscape? In this episode of the Principled Podcast, host Susan Divers is joined by Tom Fox, the founder of the Compliance Podcast Network and aptly accredited “Voice of Compliance.” Listen in as the two discuss the impact of geopolitics on ethics and compliance, and what issues should be top-of-mind for E&C leaders in the near future. To learn more, download a copy of Tom Fox's white paper Never the Same: Five Key Areas in Which Business Will Never Be the Same After the Russian Invasion.   Featured guest: Tom Fox Tom Fox is literally the guy who wrote the book on compliance with the international compliance best-seller The Compliance Handbook, 3rd edition, which was released by LexisNexis in May 2022. Tom has authored 23 other books on business leadership, compliance and ethics, and corporate governance, including the international best-sellers Lessons Learned on Compliance and Ethics and Best Practices Under the FCPA and Bribery Act, as well as his award-winning series "Fox on Compliance." Tom leads the social media discussion on compliance with his award-winning blog, and is the Voice of Compliance, having founded the award-winning Compliance Podcast Network and hosting or producing multiple award-winning podcasts. He is an executive leader at the C-Suite Network, the world's most trusted network of C-Suite leaders. He can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.   Featured host: Susan Divers Susan Divers is the director of thought leadership and best practices with LRN Corporation. She brings 30+ years' accomplishments and experience in the ethics and compliance arena to LRN clients and colleagues. This expertise includes building state-of-the-art compliance programs infused with values, designing user-friendly means of engaging and informing employees, fostering an embedded culture of compliance, and sharing substantial subject matter expertise in anti-corruption, export controls, sanctions, and other key areas of compliance. Prior to joining LRN, Mrs. Divers served as AECOM's Assistant General for Global Ethics & Compliance and Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer. Under her leadership, AECOM's ethics and compliance program garnered six external awards in recognition of its effectiveness and Mrs. Divers' thought leadership in the ethics field. In 2011, Mrs. Divers received the AECOM CEO Award of Excellence, which recognized her work in advancing the company's ethics and compliance program. Before joining AECOM, she worked at SAIC and Lockheed Martin in the international compliance area. Prior to that, she was a partner with the DC office of Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal. She also spent four years in London and is qualified as a Solicitor to the High Court of England and Wales, practicing in the international arena with the law firms of Theodore Goddard & Co. and Herbert Smith & Co. She also served as an attorney in the Office of the Legal Advisor at the Department of State and was a member of the U.S. delegation to the UN working on the first anti-corruption multilateral treaty initiative.  Mrs. Divers is a member of the DC Bar and a graduate of Trinity College, Washington D.C. and of the National Law Center of George Washington University. In 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 Ethisphere Magazine listed her as one the “Attorneys Who Matter” in the ethics & compliance area. She is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Rutgers University Center for Ethical Behavior and served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Institute for Practical Training from 2005-2008. She resides in Northern Virginia and is a frequent speaker, writer and commentator on ethics and compliance topics.  Principled Podcast Transcript   Intro: Welcome to the Principled Podcast, brought to you by LRN. The Principled Podcast brings together the collective wisdom on ethics, business and compliance, transformative stories of leadership and inspiring workplace culture. Listen in to discover valuable strategies from our community of business leaders and workplace change makers. Susan Divers: General Pete Schoomaker made a remark some years ago that's always stayed with me. He said, "People like to think that life is an opera that unfolds over several acts, but it's really a rodeo. You never know what's coming out of the shoot." So much of the ethics and compliance sphere clearly demonstrates the truth of the general's remarks, especially recently. LRN's last two program effectiveness reports focused specifically on the impact of the pandemic on ENC programs. Now we have the war with Russia in the Ukraine and increasingly fraught relationships with China. How is the geopolitical landscape changing the compliance landscape? Hello and welcome to another episode of LRN's Principled Podcast. I'm your host, Susan Divers, director of thought leadership and best practices at LRN. Today, I'm joined by Tom Fox, the founder of the Compliance Podcast Network and aptly accredited Voice of Compliance. In addition to his 30 plus years of legal experience, Tom is the author of the award-winning FCPA Compliance and Ethics blog, and The Complete Compliance Handbook now in its third edition, which is by far the best source for best practices in one place about ENC programs. We're going to be talking about the impact of geopolitics on ethics and compliance and what issues should be top of mind for ENC leaders in the near future. Tom, welcome. Tom Fox: Susan, thanks. I have wanted to be on this podcast for a long time. I particularly enjoyed your reference about rodeos because in the great state of Texas, that's a college sport, rodeoing, so lots of rodeos and it's certainly an apt metaphor for what we're going to talk about today. Susan Divers: Well, great, Tom and I really appreciate the opportunity to have any conversation with you, but particularly on the podcast. So Tom, first, generally, how do you see the ongoing war in the Ukraine as disrupting trade and the rules, both formal and informal, that have governed the world for the last 20 years and is the World Economic Forum vision of trade now dead? Tom Fox: Susan, in addition to the rodeo metaphor you gave us, the most prescient comment I heard during the COVID-19 pandemic is that we've moved from disaster recovery to business interruption to, excuse me, to business resiliency, to business as usual. Literally now, we can have a weather event, we can have an economic event, we can have a geopolitical event, we can have any event and the requirement of a company is how do you respond? How do you respond tomorrow? Have you planned for this? I think the type of thing that we saw with the Russian invasion, as tragic as that was, it's one more, it's just an event and we're going to talk about that in some detail. But every company has legal, ethical and business obligations around that event. I was also particularly struck by your reference to the World Economic Forum, and when I read that, it put a frown on my face. And it put a frown on my face because the World Economic Forum, in my mind, has been one of the biggest leaders for the global economy. Since at least 1990 when I started paying attention to a global economic framework because I was in the energy industry and began to think about these issues on a global basis, the World Economic Forum and their symposiums, their position papers and really their raison d'etre was to talk about a global economy. Although I certainly thought we would have regional conflicts, as we have always had, I never thought we would, I guess my hope was that the global economy would help drive us towards a more integrated global community and that we wouldn't be put near a brink again of a global conflict. I don't pretend to say that's where we're going in Ukraine, but when you start talking about tactical nuclear weapons, that's a conversation we haven't had in this country since the '60s with seriousness. The World Economic Forum, the world they envision, the world you and I grew up in professionally, I think that world is gone. We're moving to something else. I use the Russian invasion of Ukraine really as an ending point or an exclamation mark on trends that we have seen percolating probably 10, 5, 3 years that accelerated extraordinarily greatly in the COVID-19 pandemic up to the war in Ukraine and the disruption that that has caused really impacts businesses, and this is going to be something, I think, we're going to have to deal with literally on an ongoing basis forward. Lots, really, to unpack there, but I do have to acknowledge you for pointing out it was really the World Economic Forum that has led, I thought, the charge for a global economy and globalization and unfortunately, I think that world is now dead. Susan Divers: I hear you and I feel the same way about the Forum. LRN participated in it quite actively until fairly recently, and the Forum really did an excellent job of helping global leaders cooperate, frame some of the rules and the practices. Maybe when the current situation resolves itself one way or another, there'll be an opportunity to do that again. But getting a little bit more granular at this point. You've written about the impact of the Ukrainian war on the supply chain and certainly for business that's one area where the rubber really hits the road. Can you explain that a bit to our listeners? Tom Fox: Sure. The Ukraine War, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as I said, put a exclamation point on this. One of the key disruptions from COVID-19 was indeed supply chain. Here, I think for the first time, Susan, we started to look at geography as a risk. Geopolitical risk has been known for quite some time, but with the COVID-19, we have the swaths of the world that were unavailable to us because of the pandemic. As the pandemic raged through China and moved to India and moved to Africa, large parts of the global supply chain were literally shut down completely and they couldn't get back up, couldn't get running again. We saw, from COVID-19, a geographic risk that we have perhaps not considered as much before. This is different than an island that may worry about climate risk or flooding or fires in California or something like that. We had real geographic risk. The Ukraine War really put an exclamation mark on geopolitical risk. What is the risk? What was the risk in 2019 of Russia invading Ukraine? Certainly there were discussions at the highest level of our government. Frankly, I don't think you and I, wasn't on our radar. Maybe if you read foreign policy, it was on your radar, but for the business practitioner, from the compliance professional, I don't think we were thinking about a Russian invasion and what that might do to either our supply chain or business partners or customers. Well now, if the Ukrainian grain cannot be put in the global food supply chain, that's a huge disruption. The question that I thought about is what would be the effect of the disruption of the global food chain on one of our former employers, Aecom, Halliburton, businesses that you and I have both been involved with, but we don't think of as having perhaps a food risk. Nevertheless, if grain is not available, what do those types of risks mean for employees in allegedly or apparently unrelated companies? Companies have to start thinking about these kinds of things in ways that we haven't done before. I did a podcast earlier this week where someone said, "Look, the issue now is China and Taiwan." And he was absolutely right. That could be a military issue, could be a geopolitical issue. 82% of US semiconductors are made in Taiwan. That's a huge issue. Let's go back to our former employers who are now heavily invested in tech and actually use semiconductors as part of their manufacturing process. They're going to be impacted, let alone the US semiconductor industry and the US computer industry. That is something now that we have to consider. Are there any other geopolitical conflicts that could erupt, which might negatively impact our supply chains? And when I mean negatively, I mean you can't get your supplies out of those countries, whether it's a raw mineral, whether it's a extractive mineral, whatever it may be. Those types of issues now are more front and center than they ever have been. From the business perspective, Susan, supply chains, since at least the late '70s or early '80s, the primary goal was efficiency. That was generally translated to just-in-time. It was seen because of the experience in the '60s where particularly in the auto industry, you had lengthy supply chains and actually large number of parts piling up in warehouses that was deemed to be inefficient. They wanted it just before they needed it. That led to just-in-time. That led to one or two suppliers. We found that sole suppliers or sole plus one suppliers has a risk. That risk is, if they're in a geographic area that's wiped out by COVID, if they're in a geopolitical area that is no longer available to us, then we, as a company, have a problem with our supply chain. Certainly there are many industries that have been offshored outside of the United States. From our industry and service, or rather service industry folks like us, to manufacturing, to everything in between. That is now trying to be reshored on American soil. Can we do it? Yes. Can we do it tomorrow? Probably not. Can we do it in time for Christmas? Probably not. We're going to have to retrain, we're going to have to retool. We may have to allow greater immigration to get people in to do those jobs and it brings up an entire series of questions. It brings up economic questions. How much more is it going to cost to reshore? How much more does it cost and pay an American wage as opposed to a Philippine, Bangladeshi or other wage? Or you name the country outside the United States where the wages are disparate. All of those issues are now in play in a way that certainly they were percolating around and percolating along in the second half of the last decade. COVID-19 accelerated those conversations, particularly around just-in-time and sole source suppliers. But now, I don't know how much of the globe Russia consists of. I think at one point, it was 12%. That's not available to us as a supply chain partner now and Russian partners are not available to us as supply chain partners. Now, what happens if China is not available to us as a supply chain partner or Taiwan because of an armed conflict with China. How is that going to play? Or can we even get semiconductor chips out of Taiwan if they're in an armed conflict with China? All of these issues are now front and center and I think every company has to be looking at their supply chain, who's in their supply chain. Then obviously, this ties into things that were not deemed to be connected to all of these issues before, such as conflict minerals. Conflict minerals required you as a company to determine or any of the minerals you're buying, the four Ts, I think, coming out of countries primarily in Africa under conflict. This was the first time companies had really taken a deep dive, not to their direct suppliers, but to their sub-suppliers and they found out we don't exactly know who all of our sub-suppliers are. Obviously the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act has huge impact on supply chains and hopefully, we can talk about that at some length in a little bit, but all of these issues on supply chain, it's elevated the discussion of the corporate supply chain, I hope, to where it properly belongs, in the board of directors level. But for the people that we deal with, the CCOs and compliance professionals, I think it should be a part of an equal conversation because what are the risks? I was going to say implications, but what are the risks of moving your supply chain, reshoring it? It's a change so the risks change. It may not be an FCPA risk because you may be in the United States, but almost every state in the US has an anti-corruption law and a state anti-corruption law. I had to look at it one time, 37 states do. That's not that you can't bribe our state government officials, every state says that, but 37 with regular commercial private or private anti-bribery laws. When was the last time you, as a compliance professional, had to assess that issue, that risk? Lots of new risks and you, as a compliance professional, need to be a part of those discussions so you can begin preparing your corporation for those eventualities. Susan Divers: Well, that's a perfect example, or I should say it's an example on steroids of how you have to respond to the risks that face you today and hopefully, tomorrow, try to look around corners. I remember, I think it was in the 2020 guidance that DOJ put out. They said that you can't let your program be a snapshot in time or go on cruise control. That's one of the biggest traps I see people fall into. You ask them what their risks are and it's kind of like what the risks were last year. With this environment and with what you just outlined in terms of supply chain, there's going to be a lot for compliance teams to do. How should people be addressing that right now? I know we'll talk later about sanctions and anti-money laundering being the new FCPA as Deputy Attorney General Monaco said recently, but what's your advice today in terms of how to think about those risks? Tom Fox: Susan, you hit it exactly on the head. Assess your risks when your business changed. You reference the 2020 update to the Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs. That's where the first time the Department of Justice formally said, it's not an annual risk assessment. It's not a biennial, all-encompassing $100,000 risk assessment. It's an assessment when your business changed. The beauty of the timing of that statement, it was June, 2020, everyone's risk had changed because we were working from home. It didn't mean your risk increased or decreased, they changed. How do you assess working from home or how did you assess working from home from a compliance perspective? Once you made that assessment and then you found there were actually new risks, then you had to put a risk mitigation strategy in place, then you monitored that strategy to determine its effectiveness and then you used that information to upgrade your compliance program. The formula is in place for all of these things, but it starts with exactly what you said, Susan, assess your risks if your business has changed and everyone's business has changed literally, particularly in the supply chain. You've got to know who your suppliers are. From the business perspective, who can supply us is paramount. Pricing is going to be paramount. But from the compliance perspective, where are they getting those? If you're a clothing manufacturer, how many of your suppliers are coming out of Bangladesh and how many of those suppliers are violating any sort of fair trade or human rights laws? Even what's the safety, as we know from the Plaza collapse a few years back in Bangladesh. You have to know who's in your supply chain to a level and degree that you didn't previously think about unless you were in conflict minerals. But the beauty of that is that if you make that assessment down into your sub-suppliers from your supply chain, you as a business will be stronger. You will see, number one, if there are inefficiencies in our supply chain, but two, if there's a disruption, you'll be able to mitigate that if a disruption occurs because you can move to another supplier because you know where the parts are coming in from and hopefully, you'll be able to have prior knowledge or planning around that. But think of a weather event. In 2021, I was living in Houston. It hit seven degrees. That was the first time we'd had single-digit weather in Texas since 1890. Well, we can't prepare for that, yeah! This is a town that had gone through two 500-year floods and 1,000-year flood over the past 18 months. We had a wildfire north of Houston. We'd never had a wildfire in Houston, Texas in my lifetime. All of that's to say is that things have changed. I don't pretend to say I know which way it's going, I just know that you have to be there. You have to have assessed those risks and have a plan in place if you can't utilize all the way down in your supply chain, but that gives you the opportunity to be more business efficient and if a catastrophe does occur, you're more quickly able to respond. Starts with a risk assessment, put a risk management strategy in place, monitor that strategy, and then improve your compliance program as information becomes available to you. Susan Divers:I totally agree with that, Tom and I want to relate it back a little bit to a point you raised earlier too, which is this gives you an opportunity to make sure that you're dealing with ethical sub-suppliers and that your whole supply chain meets spec. I think I've seen in the past, in my long years as an ethics and compliance lawyer, and before that as more of a specialist on FCPA that a lot of times, people don't know who their sub-suppliers are and the first they find out is when there's fraud or potential bribery issue or diversion or a theft of intellectual property. It does give you an opportunity to get a more solid grip on your suppliers and make sure that they are the right people that you're dealing with. Let's turn from that, which is I think a very good segue to the issue of economic sanctions. There's really been a quantum leap in that area, even it was starting before Russia, I think, with the sanctions on Huawei and the heating up of tension in the US-China relationship, but now it's on a completely different level and that really, I think, has to be top of list for companies when they review their ENC programs. Can you talk about that and give us some guidance? Tom Fox: Sure. Once again, Susan, let me use the Russian invasion as the exclamation mark because under the Trump administration, we saw an exponential increase in the use of trade and economic sanctions. I had several friends in that space and every once in a while, I'd email them, "Well, we had three changes today. What do you expect this afternoon?" The point being that the prior administration saw those as legitimate and important tools for US national security. That has only increased now on steroids because of the Russian invasion. What the Trump administration's use of those tools did was it elevated the discussion of the trade compliance director in a corporation to the board of director level. It may have elevated them within the compliance function or generally within the C-suite because people now had to call trade compliance and say, "Anything new today?" Well, the sanctions that have come out after the Russian invasion have been all encompassing. Now, I looked before this podcast, I think we're on our seventh round of sanctions and more to come. That's seven rounds from the United States. That doesn't even count the UK and Western Europe who have equally sanctioned Russia. Many US multinational companies are also subject to UK or EU trade sanction directives. You need to be cognizant of those. But the current trade sanctions that have been levied, and when I say there's still more to come, we haven't gotten to the nuclear option, which is secondary sanctions. If we get to secondary sanctions, that's an entire level of trade and economic sanctions literally that we have not seen since World War II. Discussion though, around trade sanctions, and once again, I've talked to several of our colleagues who have that as their specific compliance remit and their specialization is they now feel elevated within the corporation. They feel that the issues they've been dealing with, their professional careers are now being discussed literally at the board of directors level because of these huge potential fines and penalties, the huge visibility. As important as these legal restrictions are, Susan, it's actually the reputational damage. Just think about the companies that either drag their feet about leaving Russia or were slow or less than somebody's idea of we need to be out of there. They were excoriated in the press for doing business in Russia after this invasion. Those conversations have largely on by the wayside because I think most US companies are out of Russia now, but the reputational damage for the violation of trade sanctions or even some sort of norm or standard now costs more than perhaps even the finer penalty would've cost. It's really a huge change for our colleagues. It's an important change because now, those issues are being evaluated together with supply chain at the board level in a way they have not been previously evaluated. You may now need to look, you need to call your trade director of trade compliance about issues in your supply chain. You need to call your director of trade compliance about where are we doing business? How are we doing business? Who are we doing business with? Who's our customer base? Are we selling with commission sales agents, company employees or distributors? If we're using distributors, are they reselling our products into Iran? Are they reselling our products into a country that's exporting to Russia? All of those issues now, I think, are being discussed at the highest level of a company. But for me, Susan, the real beauty of this discussion is finally, I think, the silos are coming down within a corporation and you're seeing a much more holistic approach to many of these issues that we'd not seen previously. Once again, if I could go back to the DOJ's June, 2020 update to the Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs as presaging all of this, they said in that document compliance must have access to all data silos within a company because compliance needs to know what everyone's doing so compliance can do its job. Well, that turned out to be true, but it turned out to be true much broader. I think the DOJ was onto something when they said that, and I think now, companies are realizing you have to have this holistic approach. Trade sanctions and export control sanctions are here to stay. The other insight from the Trump administration use of them and the Biden administration use of them is they're administration agnostic. They're not going to go away and if 2024, we have a Republican administration, they are probably going to continue those and they're not going away. If there's a Democratic administration, they're not going away. They're probably going to continue those. Sanctions, trade sanctions, export control sanctions are here to stay. They're probably going to get more robust. And until Russia pulls out of Ukraine, I think companies have to take these very, very seriously, both for a potential legal finer penalty, but even more important is in the commerce or the business place of public opinion. Susan Divers: I totally agree with everything you've said and you've made a very articulate vision of what a major challenge is for compliance teams. The only thing I would add is, it's interesting to me, that this can affect small and medium-sized companies that don't think in these terms and may not even really be very sophisticated. When I was looking a couple of months ago, I came across a case involving a false eyelash manufacturer who was importing what turned out to be false eyelashes that sourced in North Korea. I mean, it was a Chinese supplier, but the sub-supplier was North Korean and they got in trouble. As you know, it doesn't really matter if you don't know. That's no defense and they paid a fine for that. It was a good reminder that trade sanctions can affect everyone and that you really, hopefully, have to have that on your radar. Let's take an interesting topic off of this, which is have the enhanced sanctions started to really impact whistleblowers? I mean, we know that FCPA enforcement has certainly inspired a lot of whistleblowers, as well as SOX and other areas such as that. But what about trade sanctions and what about AML and what we're seeing? Tom Fox: That's been, I don't want to say it was an unintended consequence, but one of the most interesting outcomes or aspects of the Russian invasion. For the first probably 30 days, the most ubiquitous picture of the Russian invasion was a yacht steaming away because it was a Russian oligarch's yacht and they were trying to steam to a port where the US couldn't come in and forfeit them because of trade sanctions and sanctions put on the Russian oligarchs. But here's what happened. On January 1st of 2021, US Congress overrode President Trump's veto of the National Defense Authorization Act. In that bill, there was something called the AML law of 2020. The AML law of 2020 was the first update to our anti-money laundering laws and trade sanctions laws since the Patriot Act passed in the wake of 911. As part of that change, a bounty program for whistleblowers was put in place similar to the SEC bounty program put in place in Dodd-Frank. That Department of Treasury money laundering or anti-money laundering bounty program applies to those Russian yachts because if a yacht is seized and sold, the person who reported it can be eligible for up to 30% of the proceeds of that sale. This created an entire cottage industry of marine yacht hunters who knew and they are working with law firms to actively, and when they find one in a port that the US can get jurisdiction over, these law firms notify the DOJ and then the DOJ does whatever they need to do to try to get seizure of that yacht in a foreign country. That was viewed as hugely popular and the American public is cheering them on in a way whistleblowers have never been cheered on in our lifetimes. I remember I interviewed a woman whose law firm specializes in whistleblowing and I said sort of in an offhand manner, "Are you telling me that whistleblowing is sexy?" Her response is, "You mean, it hasn't always been that way?" No, it hadn't. But now, it was seen as directly in the interest of the United States, particularly our national security for these whistleblowers to come forward. As important as whistleblowing is to the SEC, I don't think it had ever been considered a national security issue. That ties to what the Department of Treasury has announced publicly that they expect US corporations to be in on the fight of trade and economic sanctions and money laundering by self-reporting. I had had a little trouble tying self-reporting of your own violation to the fight against national security. But what the Treasury Department argued was, come to us, tell us if you find people within your organization violating trade sanctions or economic sanctions and we'll give you credit for that, that may be a declination up to it, including a declination. The DOT has truly tried to incentivize companies to be a part of this fight and that is now the same for whistleblowing. Whistleblowers are now seen. There's one other document called US Strategy on Combating Corruption, which came out in December, 2021. In that document, the Biden administration pointed to whistleblowers as a component of the fight against bribery and corruption, which that document elevated to national security status. Now, we have whistleblowers who before the Russian invasion, certainly were a part of the legal landscape and part of the compliance landscape, but now they're being told, you are a part of our national security interest and you are a part of our national security fight and if you bring us this information in the form of blowing the whistle, you will be rewarded. The US public is saying, you go. You go find those yachts. You go find those people who are doing business with those that are not in the national security interest of the United States and we'll support that. That's, in my mind, just a huge psychological change. Susan, I know you have written and said more about whistleblowing and how to treat whistleblowers than about anybody and I know this is something that you've been talking about for a long, long time, but I really see this as a true shift in the way whistleblowers are thought of in the United States. Susan Divers: Well, I'm glad you brought that point out because I think that's true. Tying it furthermore to the impact of corruption on national security, I think is an idea whose time has come and we're going to do a whole other podcast on that as part of this series so I won't get into it a lot. But the concept of corruption as a victimless crime has been around as long as I've been practicing, which is a long time. It's not a victimless crime. I don't need to convince you. But it basically corrodes good governance, it corrodes social structures, it makes it harder for the poor. I mean, if I can go bribe my way, get a MRI ahead of everybody else in some less developed country, I'm jeopardizing the other people who can't afford that in that country and I'm also corroding ethics and good governance, but it hasn't been seen that way in the past, either by the government really or in the corporate community, and so we'll get into that more in the next podcast. But that's fascinating to tie the whistleblowing into that and it has the additional benefit of being true, if you will. I have to say, I love the image of the yacht hunters. It's one of the first things I read when I open The Wall Street Journal in the morning to see if there's some oligarch's yacht that's being towed away or whatever, but it's definitely an idea whose time has come. Tom Fox: For those of you who think our ever new ideas, I think if you look back in history, that was called piracy and or rading by English- Susan Divers: Letters of marque. Tom Fox: Yes, exactly. Letters of marque. It's an old concept, but it's equally valid today. Susan Divers: Well, let's close off this session because we're going to do another podcast and talk more about anti-corruption and sustainability. But one of the things I was curious about is how does all of this tie in to the level of transparency that we're seeing in international trade, in commerce? Our chairman of the board, Dov Seidman, whom I know you know of and know has written a lot in the past about radical transparency and how does that tie in to what we've been talking about? Tom Fox: Susan, let me go back to 2015 and the Volkswagen emission testing scandal. I read a speech by the head of the German Manufacturer's Council, so the German trade group for manufacturers. In that speech he said, "The answer is compliance and transparency." One, be in compliance, but two, be transparent about it. That is how we, as a German industry, will get through this. Volkswagen has done what they've done. We can't stop that or do anything about that, but we, the rest of German manufacturing, can be in compliance and can be transparent about that compliance. That really struck me at the time and it stuck with me since then. The transparency, the radical transparency that Dov talks about is even more important in 2022 because of things like the Business Roundtable Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation. How many stakeholders are there now? Previously, there have been only shareholders, but now you have multiple stakeholders. It can be your employees, it can be your third parties. It can be those localities where you do business and that's where that radical transparency is so critical because they may not own shares and they may not be able to vote, but they can vote with their pocketbook. The radical transparency allows you to demonstrate to stakeholders who are going to vote with their pocketbook that we do business ethically and we are in compliance, and that you can and should do business with us because our values are what your values are. That's, to me, the power of radical transparency and it's the ability to demonstrate to those who are not regulators. Because remember, if you're fined for a regulatory violation, that's seen as a below the line sunk cost. Just the cost of doing business. Tell me how much my fine is and I can reserve for it, whatever it is. What I cannot reserve for is if 5, 10, 25 or 50% of my customer base chooses not to buy my products because I've been found to have violated sanctions or I've been found to have used Uyghur labor in product site sourced out of China, or you name the issue. That's not a bottom line cost. That's a top of the line cost. That's a cost you can never get back because you can't reserve for non-sales. It's a cost you can't anticipate, you can't reserve for, you can't mitigate the risk because once you don't have sales, you don't have sales. To me, that concept of transparency, that concept of doing business ethically, in compliance and that concept of radical transparency all really protects you and allows you as a corporation to say, "This is what we stand for. This is why we're proud to sell a product to you and hopefully, you're proud to buy a product from us." Susan Divers: Well, you're right and that really tees up the heart of sustainability. Sustainability isn't one giant checklist after another. It's what are we really doing and how are we doing it? What you're also saying too is, and it ties with things Dov said in the past, that we live in an age of radical transparency where anyone can go on Twitter, I guess, if they pay the $8 now or post on Facebook or Instagram or wherever and expose concerns. And with the incredible increase in sanctions and money laundering controls, it's just a further reason, if anyone needed one, why you have to get your house in order and you have to make sure that you are dealing with those risks effectively and of course, walk the walk as well as talk the talk. We are running out of time, unfortunately, but I'm excited to mention again that we're going to continue this conversation in an upcoming podcast. It's been such a pleasure having you today, and I know we could keep talking for another couple of hours, but we'll have further opportunities in the future. Tom Fox: I always have way too much fun when you and I sit and chit chat, whether it's over a lunch, a coffee, or a podcast, so thank you, Susan. Susan Divers: Oh, I feel the same way, Tom. My name is Susan Divers and I want to thank you all for tuning into the Principled Podcast by LRN. Outro:  We hope you enjoyed this episode. The Principled Podcast is brought to you by LRN. At LRN, our mission is to inspire principled performance and global organizations by helping them foster winning, ethical cultures rooted in sustainable values. Please visit us at lrn.com to learn more. And if you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen. And don't forget to leave us a review.