The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – How Building the Future Really Works: From Information Technologies and Space Technologies to Power Production and Electromobility—What Society Needs to Take the Next Leap Forward by Mats Larsson

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

How Building the Future Really Works: From Information Technologies and Space Technologies to Power Production and Electromobility—What Society Needs to Take the Next Leap Forward by Mats Larsson https://amzn.to/3NkEDYN "How Building the Future Really Works" discusses how the present generations need to drive the development and implementation of the technologies of the future, such as the implementation of electric and autonomous vehicle systems. There are laws of nature in business and technology development – almost as immutable as the laws of physics. They have never before been summarized in an accessible way in one book. You can learn them by spending your life studying the history of technology and economic development and putting the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together, one by one. Or you can read this book and jump-start your journey toward an understanding of how we as individuals, our companies, and countries need to build the future. First of all, we need to admit that we do not know exactly how to build the future – then we need to start building it.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, folks. When the Iron Lady sings it, that's when you know it's official. Thanks for tuning in.

As always, the Chris Foss Show. We couldn't do it without you guys because if we didn't, we'd just be two fools sitting here talking all the time. For 16 years, we've been bringing you the smartest people in the minds, people that bring us their greatest stories and all that good stuff. The CEOs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, the governors, the congressmembers, the U.S. ambassadors, the astronauts, the Pulitzer Prize winner, TV anchors, you name it. They have been on the show.

And they bring their stories and deliver them in a concise format that helps create this elite crowd that we call the Chris Voss Show audience and give you what we also refer to as the Chris Voss Show glow, this aura of intelligence that washes over people listening to the show. As always, refer to the show to your family and relatives. I like the aura part. I think I got to write that down. As always, refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com for Chris Voss.

Lots of great author stuff on there. YouTube.com for Chris Voss. There's LinkedIn.com for Chris Voss. there's linkedin.com fortress chris voss the big linkedin newsletter that grows like a weed the 130 000 linkedin group as well and chris voss one on the tiktok and chris voss at facebook.com we had an amazing gentleman on the show he's the author of six books his latest book could come out august 14th 2023 how building the future really works from information technologies and space technologies to power production and electromobility. What society needs to take the next step leap forward.

There you go. So we'll have Matt Larson on the show with us today. He'll be talking to us about his books, some of his thoughts and feelings on all this great technology and data. He is the, let's see if we can get to this. He is the consultant and expert on electromobility for Global Energy Transformation Institute. Welcome to the show, Matt. How are you? Thank you very much, Chris. I'm fine, thanks.

There you go. And do I have the pronunciation of your name correct? Yes, you did. There we go. So give us a.com. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Where they find me? Yeah, whatever.coms, websites. Yes, getinstitute.com. Okay. That's my site. All right, there you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of what you do and how you do it. I'm a consultant.

I've been working as a years exploring the amount of resources countries will need to change transport systems to electromobility. And I found that a lot more resources will be needed than people expect and definitely much more will be needed than most decision makers expect. You know probably that air regulators in California have decided to ban the sales of gasoline cars from 2035 and there will be a huge need for electricity in order to do that and that's what and grid capacity and charging infrastructure. Those are the aspects that I've looked into for the past 18 years. There you go. And so you help them understand what they need to do and how they need to do it to possibly achieve those goals or see the fallacies of them?

Yes. Exactly. There you go. So give us your bio, your background. How did you grow up? How did you get in this field? And what kind of led you down this path? Well, I grew up in Sweden and I studied business administration at university.

And I then started to work as a business consultant, working with big companies, change management, strategy development, and various, well, similar tasks for more than 30 years. And 18 years ago, I started to explore how much resources will be needed to change the world's transportation systems to electric vehicles. And I got hooked on that issue because so much electricity will be needed. For example, to change the transportation systems of the United States, cars, trucks, buses, you will need to double power production. And that's a lot. So doubling power plants, basically, right? Yeah, basically. At present, the United States generates 4,000 terawatt hours.

And that may not mean much, but it's actually the annual generation of 350 nuclear reactors or 1.2 million wind turbines. And you're also facing the need to dramatically expand the capacity of power grids and the charging infrastructure. Oh, wow. So where are we at to meet those goals? Where are we at now to meet them? Are we halfway? Are we a quarter of the way of what's needed?

No country so far has come very far. In the United States, you have 2% or 3% electric vehicles out of 285 million cars, there is still not many electric cars on the roads and very much fewer electric trucks and electric buses. And the country that's leading this development, Norway, they have 20% electric cars so far, but still no country has experienced a situation where the majority of cars are electric. And no country has even started to prepare for the large-scale expansion of electricity production and grid expansion and so on. Wow. So what percent would you say are we on right now, assuming everything goes according to plan? What speed are we at? I don't know exactly, but countries have not started the expansion of power production because there has not so far been any debate in countries regarding the need to expand power generation or the need to expand grid capacity and so on. For example, in Sweden, our government has decided a few weeks back to build two new nuclear reactors. And they will be ready at, well, if we're lucky, they will be ready in 2035.

If countries now start to make decisions or governments start to make decisions to expand power generation, we will still have to wait about 12, 15, maybe 18 years until we have new big nuclear reactors online. And of course, wind power can be expanded faster, but we can't rely entirely on wind because then we won't have the ability to balance power grids. So there's a need for big power plants to complement wind and solar generation. Yeah. So in the notes you sent me over, this is quite extraordinary that I was taking a look at. And here, let me see if I can pull this up really quick again. The notes that you sent over to me,

you had said that we would need up to an equivalent generation of 350 nuclear reactors or 1.2 million wind turbines and god knows what else i mean would the irony be we'd make more coal plants yes of course it there there is some surplus electricity that can be used. I mean, not all electricity at all times is used for the moment. So to some extent, electromobility can be expanded using existing power generation, existing electricity resources. But as you know, there are already times in California, for instance, when there are shortages or where a year ago when this decision had been made, utilities asked users not to charge their electric vehicles during the Labor Day weekend because they expected that there wouldn't be enough power. There is already this shortage or this constraint on generation and constraint on charging vehicles.

So with increasing fleets of electric cars, electric trucks and other electric cars, electric trucks, and other electric buses, there will be, well, increasing strain on the power needs and more risk of brownouts and other problems. Yeah. I mean, it seems like we finally hit kind of almost scale where, you know, even the new Cybertrucks pumping out. I just saw Elon shared something with some of the other automakers at making a certain power base for electric vehicles, giving them a schematic for it, which I think is interesting.

I imagine that fits into what his network runs on. But we're going to need more of those charging stalls, charging stops, charging stations. What would be the anticipated cost, you would think, to scale this up? Do you have any estimates? Well, it's difficult to calculate the cost exactly, but a nuclear reactor costs between $6 and $9 billion. Scaling up wind turbines would be less expensive up front, but to do that, you also need

additional balancing power from some big power plants and so on. So scaling up wind power couldn't be done on its own. That will also be a need for storage, physical storage and batteries, because wind doesn't blow all the time and solar doesn't generate at night and so on. So there are a huge demand on developing these system solutions so that the systems become both user-friendly, reliable, and cost-effective. I often use the Apollo program as an example because they couldn't have made the Apollo program or succeeded with sending a man to the moon and bringing him safely back to Earth had they not had all the components of the system, like the space center in Houston, the launch pad, the rocket, the landing module, etc. So we need a lot of different components. And it's the same with this expansion of electromobility. We need to build systems that include all the components needed,

not only to drive the cars, but to charge and to generate the electricity and so on. There you go. I just saw that there's some new funding that was given to trying to run a train between Las Vegas and LA. I believe the Biden administration is announcing it this week. And I think they're giving $3 billion. There's like $18 billion they're trying to raise to build this thing. I don't know if it's an electronic train or some sort of super fast thing like other countries have. Do you know about that yet?

Have you heard about that? No, I haven't heard about it. It just was announced yesterday, I think. Now, building trains is also power consuming. They need a lot of power as well. But I'm not so familiar with how much power trains need. But just a train between Los Angeles and Las Vegas wouldn't be a huge power consumer, I think. But consider a situation where everyone is going to have an electric car, where all 285 million cars in the United States would be electric. Everyone needs to charge it on a daily or as often as they need to be charged.

And that would demand extreme capacity of power grids, of charging infrastructure, much more than a single train line. Yeah, yeah. So we have a lot of building we need to do for infrastructure, at least like here in America, right? Yes, absolutely. in an efficient way, the systems that will be needed have to be mapped so that we develop the most efficient, cost efficient, energy efficient, and user friendly types of systems because there are different technologies for charging. There are stationary chargers, fast in the form of fast chargers, normal speed

chargers that are slower, you charge overnight. But there are also new technologies like electric road systems where vehicles can travel and charge via tracks in the road dynamically. So that's really, those are different alternatives and depending on which ones you use, you will need to expand power generation, for example, and the grid capacity to different degrees. Because if you want to, if you are able to spread charging out across the 24 hours of the day, you'll have a different situation compared to how if you build systems where you need to supply all the electricity during the day, for example. So people need to learn about these system relationships and learn how to build cost-effective and energy-effective systems. And to do that, there will be a need for new roles, new competencies that are not so very common today, like electrification strategists and electrification architects. There you go. It's something that we're going to need to try and do and pull off. Do you find that our politicians are ready for the challenge ahead? I mean,

are they even mindful of the amount of power we need, especially here in the U.S.? I think you're in Sweden, but I'm over here in the U.S., and we're kind of an important country sometimes. Yes, absolutely. No, I don't think politicians in any country are ready for this, because the expansion of electric vehicle fleets has been seen as an environmental issue and a matter of sustainability and so on. And it has been treated by and pushed forward by sustainability experts and so on. But very few or almost no experts on change management, business development have engaged with this. And politicians have listened a lot to sustainability experts and who have said we need to do this. But no one or very few people except myself have started to investigate what will be needed to do it. And business people have also not engaged with it.

Elon Musk actually, he made a statement at the conference in 2021 called CodeCon 2021 on a question from the audience where he said that in order to change to electric vehicles, the United States would need to double power production. And that's the estimate that I refer to. So I've made the same calculation. In Europe, we need to increase power production by some 50%. And in the United States, you need to increase it by 100% because you drive twice as far as we do on average using each car. Yeah, we're really big on that.

Hmm. No, I don't think politicians have anticipated this huge need for resources, need for investments, and need for planning and managed change programs. All right. Well, so we're behind the eight ball. Do you think that some of our things were, oh, we shouldn't build nuclear power. It's dangerous and bad. Do you think that's going to put us, I mean we going to end up in a in a crux we're going to run out of energy and like i'll be like oh god people are driving their cars i can't turn my lights on today well there there has been some wishful thinking in the the debate regarding the

development of of the power systems of the future and so on. And a lot of focus have been on wind power, solar power, and those are important, definitely. We need to increase the generation through wind and solar, but we can't rely entirely on those. We need also baseload in the grids, big power plants with large turbines that balance the grids and that make sure that large industries, large production facilities and plants get all the electricity

they need. And in order to do that, we need, cannot only rely on these intermittent resources, but we actually also need to expand nuclear generation. Because there is no way to come around the fact that we need to have reliable, large-scale generation systems. Definitely, definitely. So in your book, How Building the Future Really Works, you talk about all this in detail, about how we can try and put this jigsaw puzzle together. Do you see any sort of innovations of technologies,

per se, like nuclear coal fusion or any sort of things that are on the horizon that could potentially be the breakthrough energy that's like this is the new big thing and this could save us well fusion will not

as I understand it be developed or expanded on a large scale within the coming decades. So we may have, or future generations may have access to cold fusion reactors and so on. But my generation and probably your generation are not likely to experience that. So we need to do with existing technologies. And there are innovations,

but we haven't seen any dramatic new generation technologies in the past years that could solve this in an entirely new way. We have the same, basically we have the same power sources that we had we've had over the past decades and the past 50 years and with addition to wave power that may may come online and increase in the future i think there are not very many of those new technologies. What may be possible could be new battery technologies for electric vehicles and definitely there will be a lot of innovation in the area of

charging and charging technology, charging infrastructure, electric roads, storage, battery storage, storage in the form of hydrogen and methanol, for example, other forms of power storage, but unfortunately not so much in power generation. Wow. So it's going to be interesting how this is all going to play out. I mean, we're pumping out of these cars. Do you have an anticipated, with all the electronic vehicles that are for sale right now, do you have a anticipated run-out time if we don't get our act together and get everything fixed?

Well, there are different issues. This change has been discussed as a way to combat global warming and emissions of carbon dioxide. But there is also the risk that global oil production will start to decrease and we don't know exactly when this will happen but the production of of oil, normal oil and not fracking or the new types of shale oil has been, the production of normal oil has been at a stable level over the past two decades. And there doesn't seem to be very much opportunity to expand that production because not very many new oil wells are found over the past 10 years. The number of new wells has been decreasing constantly over the past 10, 15, 20 years. And the biggest discoveries were made in the 1960s and 1970s when oil prices were really low. So despite increasing oil prices, new discoveries have continued to decrease. And the world is potentially facing,

will potentially face decline in oil production over the coming decade or decades. So we need to prepare also for that. And we don't know exactly when we will face any real problems in that respect. But we know also that we need to reduce the use of oil and the use of carbon dioxide emissions in order to reduce global warming. And then I don't know. I mean, we're still a growing country. I think we may have slowed births after over COVID, but I think they're back up and running again. I think there was a big bump in new kids, but we're kind of a declining nation when it comes down to it. When it comes down, you know, we have most of our baby boomers are retiring.

They're still alive, but, you know, they're fading away. I don't know how much consumption they're doing. It doesn't seem like we're doing a whole lot of new building. Right now, we have offices that are empty, malls that are empty. COVID and remote workforce has really taken its toll and actually created some crisis when it comes to the economy where these buildings are sitting empty, these downtowns are sitting empty because people don't want to go back to work inside buildings anymore. And they're kind of spoiled with the whole thing.

There's kind of a non-consumption being there. One thing that's interesting too is I believe Texas is the only state in the nation of the U.S. that isn't attached to the grid. I guess they have their own sort of profitable system for billionaires that can charge the hell out of people. And I guess they, they do your, your,

your, your electric bill can get pretty crazy down there. And I think they have like hundreds of providers or thousands of providers, which is insane, but welcome to Texas. The, so I don't know. I mean,

it seems like, it seems like we need to have more politicians aware of what's going on, more planning for the future. You know, we still have people that are in denial about, you know, the need for clean energy, the need for, you know, if there is really a, you know, the politicians are still denying if there really is a, you know, global warming.

You know, meanwhile, you know, we're seeing lots of events in our weather and stuff that we just had like a first hurricane or something like that or tornado in 200 years come on in the coast of the land of the coast of California. So it's like insane. We're seeing stuff that's weird. So by people reading your book and stuff, do you think it gives give people a mindset of how to be better prepared for these things? Yes, I bring up a number of experiences from the past. And whether or not we believe that we will need to implement electric car systems or electric vehicle systems, we still need to prepare for change in the future and there are other areas in society where

electricity demand is going to increase. We're talking about the hydrogen economy and hydrogen production requires huge amounts of electricity because hydrogen is produced through the process of electrolysis. So just to take an example, if you would run the US vehicle fleets on hydrogen instead of electric car batteries, you would need twice as much electricity to produce the hydrogen because of the energy-intensive production technologies used for hydrogen production. So we need to prepare for big changes anyway and for a big increase in the demand for electricity.

And we would have to learn from past experiences like the Apollo program, the development of computers, the development of airplane technologies, aviation technologies, space technologies, mobile phone technologies, and these technologies have been developed to a large extent in programs of computers from the end of the Second World War. And computers were developed to serve a number of the needs of the government and so on. And with this development of electromobility, politicians and sustainability experts and so on, they expect that we will be able to implement new competitive and cost-effective systems of electric cars and charging infrastructure in only a little more than a decade, and that these systems will become competitive against the very highly efficient systems of fossil fuels. And that's not realistic. We need to learn from those past experiences and see how were these technologies developed, how were they implemented on a large scale,

and what role did different actors play in this development? There you go. It's going to be an interesting ride. So anything I should have asked you that we might need to know for our listeners out there? Yes. might need to know for our listeners out there? Yes, you were actually touching upon one of the main things with this change earlier in the interview when you mentioned Texas and the number of different providers down there, because a lot of organizations and companies will need to

be involved in this change in order to make it possible. It can't just be decided by a few high-level politicians in Washington or in the state capitals. It has to be, these systems need to be built up through investments by a large number of different organizations, utilities, companies that run car parks, real estate companies, and also cities and towns in different states and state governments need to be involved as well in the planning of the transformation and the various activities that will be involved. There you go.

It's going to be an interesting ride. So as we go out, give us your final pitch to people to pick up your book, check out your website, see about consulting with you, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, thank you. My book is called How Building the Future Really Works. It's available on amazon.com and on all other Amazon platforms. It's available at a discount right now, $2.99 plus sales tax, $3.17 at present. And there is also hardbound copy and the paperback copies that can be ordered

from amazon and i'm available i'm one one for consulting services i'm one of the few persons in the world who has at this point looked into the the system aspect and the the large scale change aspect of of the transformation to electromobility. And I'm available, and you can reach me at my website, getinstitute.com. getinstitute.com, Global Energy Transformation Institute, G-E-T Institute for short. There you go. Well, there you go. It's been wonderful and insightful to have you on the show. We

certainly appreciate it, Matt. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. I really enjoyed recording this. There you go. And thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com for a test. Chris Voss, order up his book, How Building the Future Really Works from Information Technologies and

Space Technologies to Power Production and Electromobility. What society needs to take the next leap forward. Thanks for tuning in. Go to linkedin.com for Chris Voss, Chris Voss 1, and Chris Voss Facebook to see us on the show. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.