We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher

Episode Date: July 7, 2024

In this episode, William Green chats with Bruce Usher, author of a book titled “Investing in the Era of Climate Change.” Bruce, a successful entrepreneur, investor, & Columbia Business School professor, discusses the “once-in-a-lifetime” investment opportunity created by the transition of the global economy to a low-carbon future. He explains how to protect yourself financially as environmental risks intensify, & how to profit as trillions of dollars flow into innovative climate change solutions that will change the world—from electric vehicles to solar energy. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 05:37 - Why Bruce Usher sees climate change as a huge opportunity (& risk) for investors. 08:34 - How the transition to a low-carbon future will transform the global economy. 10:53 - How extreme weather is finally altering perceptions of climate change. 13:45 - How to protect against environmental threats to your property. 20:39 - Why electric vehicles & renewable energy are key drivers of decarbonization.  33:42 - How Berkshire Hathaway is playing the energy transition.  49:05 - Why leading companies like Apple & Microsoft are serious about sustainability. 54:02 - Why it’s wise to consider environmental factors before buying any stock. 01:03:53 - How to invest in funds & ETFs that reduce your exposure to climate risk.  01:12:44 - How billionaires like Bill Gates & Jeff Bezos invest in climate change solutions. 01:23:01 - What consumers can do to reduce their negative impact on the environment. 01:27:47 - Why Bruce thinks humanity might still avoid catastrophic climate change. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Bruce Usher’s book, Investing in the Era of Climate Change. Bruce Usher’s book, Renewable Energy: A Primer for the Twenty-First Century. William Green’s podcast interview with Bryan Lawrence. William Green’s book, “Richer, Wiser, Happier” – read the reviews of this book. Follow William Green on X. Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes here. Enjoy ad-free episodes when you subscribe to our Premium Feed. NEW TO THE SHOW? Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, Kyle, and the other community members. Follow our official social media accounts: X (Twitter) | LinkedIn | | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.  SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

You're listening to TIP. Hi there, it's great to be back with you here on the richer, wiser, happier podcast. The subject of today's episode is one of the most important issues of our time, an issue that has enormous implications for all of us in terms of our financial well-being. We're going to discuss climate change and specifically what it means for you as an investor. As you'll hear in this episode, we're in the early stages of an historic transition from a global economy that's deeply dependent on fossil fuels, to a low-carbon future in which we radically reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases. Hopefully this shift will happen fast enough to

avert or at least lower the risk of catastrophic climate change. For businesses and investors, it's hard to overstate the scale and significance of this race to decarbonize the global economy. The Boston Consulting Group estimates that $150 to $200 trillion of investment will be needed over the next three decades to finance this transition. At the same time, obviously we're seeing more and more vividly the dangerous effects of climate change, including heat waves and wildfires and flooding and hurricanes and all sorts of other extreme weather events. Already, 2024 is shaping up to be the hottest year on record, so this may just be the beginning. Capitalism has no doubt contributed to a lot of these problems, but it also creates a lot of ingenious solutions to our problems.

So, as you'd expect, we're seeing an unprecedented flow of capital and talent that's focused on finding effective climate solutions. The financial opportunities are so compelling that they've attracted some of the shrewdest and most pragmatic business people in the world, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio, and Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway has huge investments in oil and gas, but Buffett and his designated successor, Greg Abel, are also betting very heavily on clean, sustainable energy sources like wind and solar energy. The commercial opportunities are pretty astounding. For example, the economist recently published a cover story. titled The Dawn of the Solar Age, which was all about what it called the exponential growth of solar power.

About 6% of the world's electricity is currently generated by solar energy, but the economist predicts that solar energy will be the single biggest source of electricity on the planet by the mid-2030s. It's striking to me when a sober publication like this describes the rise of cheap, plentiful solar energy as a revolution that, quote, will change the world. That gives you a sense of why it's so important to understand not only the risks posed by climate change, but also the groundbreaking innovations that we're seeing in response to it. Our guest today is one of the world's leading experts on this subject. His name is Bruce Usher.

Bruce is the author of a seminal book titled Investing in the Era of Climate Change. Before that, he wrote another book titled Renewable Energy. He's one of the most popular professors at Columbia. Business School, where he teaches massively oversubscribed courses on climate change and business. He also chairs a committee that advises Columbia on how to invest its endowment in a socially responsible way. As you'll hear, Bruce has a rare gift for speaking rationally and objectively and unemotionally about these very complex and often controversial topics, but he's not only a first-rate thinker and writer. He's also a successful investor and entrepreneur.

who spent many years investing in companies that provide solutions to the challenges of climate change. Among other ventures, he was the CEO of a company called Eco Securities, which he took public and subsequently sold to J.P. Morgan. Bruce and I spoke several months ago towards the end of last year, and it's taken me a while to actually edit this episode, so I'm excited to be finally sharing this very rich conversation with you. As you'll see, Bruce does a brilliant job here of highlighting not only the challenges of climate change, but also the lucrative opportunities presented by what he describes as the greatest reinvention of the global economy since the Industrial Revolution. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Thanks so much for joining us.

You're listening to The Richer Wiser, Happier Podcast, where your host, William Green, interviews the world's greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life. Hi, folks. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome today's guest, Bruce Shasha, who's at the forefront of an incredibly important development in business and investing, namely the race to invest trillions of dollars in order to shift the global economy toward a low-carbon future that mitigates the risks of climate change. Bruce is the author of an excellent book titled Investing in the Era of Climate Change, which I have here. He's also been an entrepreneur and a successful CEO and an active investor in early stage companies and a very renowned professor at Columbia Business School. Thanks so much for joining us, Bruce. Welcome. Thank you, Elliot.

Pleasure to be here. Part of your mission as an author and as a professor is really to raise awareness among investors that we've entered a new investment era and that there's an extraordinary and possibly once in a lifetime opportunity to invest in a business. wave of innovative climate change solutions, including things like solar energy and wind energy and electric vehicles and the like. In your recent book, you wrote that this is the greatest reinvention of the global economies since the Industrial Revolution. And you also mentioned that the transition to a global low-carbon future has begun providing investors in the era of climate

change with the opportunity and challenge of a lifetime. Can you talk about the scale of this economic challenge and the investment opportunity that it's creating? Sure. So let me start begin with the big picture, right? The thing is since the industrial revolution and the agriculture revolution and followed it, you know, William, we've spent 300 years building a global economy, it's mostly a market-based economy. Then, by many measures, it's extraordinarily successful. And the average human being today is 50 times as well off in real terms than they were pre-industrial revolution. We have food production. We have transportation.

We have housing. We have things that were unimaginable, not that long ago. But there's a cash, right? And the catch is that global economy emits massive amounts of greenhouse gases. And we know very well at this point that that is truly unsustainable. We will keep doing that and that will be the end of the global economy. and more. So after 300 years of building this, what I think is a pretty incredible thing we created as humans, we have about 30 years to entirely rebuild our global economy so that it still reduces

a level of prosperity, ideally for all, but does not make greenhouse gas emissions. And with the climate scientists tell us, and I have a lot of trust and then signs of what that closely and I've followed for a long time is that we need to reduce our mission. not just a little, less or a lot, we actually need to reduce our emissions essentially to zero, what they call net zero. So this is going to require a massive, literally rebuilding in the economy. When I see rebuilding, it's not going to, it's not just a software. It's going to solve this problem for us or an app that's going to solve this problem for us.

It's literally mostly physical infrastructure because most of the things that emit greenhouse gases, whether it's production of electricity or transportation, cars and airplanes, buildings, and make greenhouse gases are agricultural. and miscreenish gas, these are physical things. And these physical things are going to change. And that creates both the enormous challenge to do this in a short period of time, but also an enormous opportunity from both the business and investment perspective, because it is going to take trillions of dollars to reinvest and to rebuild that economy. And I think you quote at one point a number from Boston Consulting Group from 2021, where they

said $150 to $200 trillion of investment is needed in the coming three days. decades to protect the planet through financing the decarbonization transition. So in a sense, this is terrible news for the planet, the scale of the challenge. But for investors, it's actually, there's kind of an alluring capitalistic case that this is an enormous opportunity. Absolutely. And like, first of all, like any great change, this is going to create opportunity. It's also going to create, you know, companies, investors who are going to do a very

very poorly, in some cases, companies are going to go away. So this change is going to be very disruptive, right? An analogy to that is the change that we've seen with the digital revolution in the last couple decades. And let's take it from 300 years down to like the last 30 years. And we've started thinking about the last 30 years, roughly the time since I graduated from business school to where we are today. And I'm dating myself here away.

We've seen the globally economy change dramatically because of digital technologies. There's not a single business in the world today that's not affected in some way by digital technologies and has created a lot of new winners in business and investment and a lot of firms that have suffered and gone out of business. And there was a wave of investment behind that, which continues to the state, including things like AI that's not going away. What we're going to see now in the next 30 years or so is another massive wave investment into decarmonization of global economy. The number you quote is BCG number. I don't know if that number is right or or wrong. Nobody knows for sure. I think it's a pretty decent guess. It's a huge number, but it's also

more and put it in context, it's also a doable number. In other words, if we sort of in my book, I look at how much capital is there available in the capital markets, a fixed income markets, equity markets, and so on, venture capital alike. And that capital exists and a lot of it, actually close to half of it that we need, it's already moving in this direction with a caveat and the caveat being that investments and low carbon solutions in developing country or emerging economy is really lacking. And there's no clear path to how that's going to change anytime soon. That's a whole special challenge. But a big picture, a lot of capital needs to move, a lot of capital already is moving, and the capital is available. You mentioned in the book that there are five

major trends that are driving this very rapid and sustainable flow of capital into climate solutions. And we'll talk very specifically about some of those climate solutions, whether it's renewables or electric cars or whatever later. But I really wanted to talk in some depths about these trends, because I think it's very clarifying. It makes it really clear for our listeners why this is such a profound shift. And so the first trend is the manifestation of physical risks. Can you talk us through that? Because obviously, we've just lived through, I think, the hottest summer in recorded human history. And we've seen many of these extreme weather events lately, whether it's wildfires in California or Canada or heat waves in Oregon or India or wherever

and flooding in Florida and record-breaking hurricanes and the like. My impression from you is that something has shifted and people are starting to become really aware of it. That's right. So one of the challenges in addressing climate change, it's always been a problem of the future. Scientists are telling us, you know, if we keep going this way, it's going to be a very serious problem, potential catastrophe. And it's hard to take action, particularly, you know, really challenging changes and big investments for something that's so far in the future.

And frankly, something that until very recently, none of us experienced. You can see or taste or feel climate change. And so that kind of risk is a really hard one to deal with. We're not good as humans dealing with that kind of risk. And what has changed very recently is arose a physical manifestation of this risk. In other words, we're starting to experience climate change. Now, this is not a good thing. This is a very bad thing.

But there's a silver lining. The silver lining is getting people's attention. And they're starting to realize that this thing that was talked about, that would be years or decades in the future, is happening today. And it's almost certain to get worse. So it's getting people's attention. And that is starting to change things. That's the first of the big trends I identify. I was very struck by a quote in one of your talks or in the book, perhaps, from the World Bank

Report in 2022, where they warned that India could become one of the first places in the world to experience heat waves that break the human survivability limit. But then you're also talking about these issues much closer to home, like with flooding in places like Florida or wildfires in California. And you quoted somewhere Zillow, the real estate company, estimating that I think 800,000 US homes worth something like $451 billion, are at risk of flood inundation by 2050. Can you talk a little bit about how, before we get to the next of these five trains, how we actually, in practical terms, can protect ourselves from this very real sense that there's an actual pragmatic and urgent risk to things like our property.

Yeah. So first of all, let's put things in context here, right? It's, I do not believe or agree with those who predict this is existential crisis. It's the end of humanity. We're all going to die. You know, it's a hopeless situation, what some people call refer to climate defeatism, where we're done for as a species. Humans are incredibly adaptable, we're incredibly innovative, and we're very good at dealing

with challenges when we set our minds to it. So the World Bank report for India is very worrisome because when temperatures get above a certain level, particularly combined as humidity, what they call wet bulb temperature, the human body can no longer sweat and you will die, in fact, in the circumstances. Now, of course, in many economies, we have air conditioning. That's what keeps us alive when it's, is that hot and humid. And, you know, we have places to stay cool, and ability to do that. So the question is, you know,

how does one think about this in an economy like the U.S.? Or much of the world, these changes that are coming? How are you going to adjust us? What does it mean? What it means is that these physical changes are ending us now and they're just going to keep getting worse until we've decarbonized. That's the first we understand. The same thing I understand is we will, to a certain extent,

adapt to us. We will use more conditioning. We will be moving people away from coasts where there's constant flooding and the like. We will have to fight more wildfires. What happened in Canada this summer was pretty interesting. It was 10 times as much wallfires they've ever experienced

before. In a place like New York City here, we got indebted with smoke, which is not just annoying, but actually very bad for your health and so on and so on. So we want to see a lot more that we're going to be dealing a lot more with that. And from a financial investment or business perspective, we're going to see that we will have to invest in the injustice. And this is whether or not you, you know,

clinical believe in the climate of science. Climate, sort of science of climate change, excuse me. It's sort of irrelevant. You know, I don't believe or, I don't believe in gravity or not believe in gravity. It's physics. It's basic physics. And climate change is also basically physics. You're basically forcing more energy from the atmosphere to remain,

remain on Earth as opposed to being reflected back in a space. So you can believe in physics, not believe in physics. They're not relevant to this discussion. What's relevant is these changes are happening and there's going to be as a result of that one will have to, we will have to invest differently in the future. You mentioned somewhere in your book that it's worth avoiding a Minsky moment where suddenly an asset class is totally repriced as happened. with something like subprime bonds in 2008, and that there can be these sudden kind of collapses where it becomes really difficult, for example, to get insurance for certain types of property in areas that are very at risk of flooding. And I was interested that one of your practical

pieces of advice was, look, it's better to act early than late. And so it's smart to trade out of assets facing climate risk. When you look at the immediacy of some of these extreme weather effects, does it make you think there are certain places you just want to sell your property? It's not a smart place to be. Yeah, basically, yes. Or at least be diversified around it. In other words, I mean, all your assets, all your assets in a basket that is exposed to, you know, perennial flooding, chronic flooding, or potentially a disaster stormes isn't too smart. Now, it's not just the greatest risks are not necessarily the physical ones.

And when people think about climate change and risk, they're changing with physical risk to their assets. But in fact, a lot of that risk is what we call transition risk, as markets change and as business changes. And what's happening in insurance is a good example of that. So just because you say, well, I'll take the risk of a storm coming and or, you know, I can deal with the rising cost is. At some point, you know, your insurance rate starts to go,

Now, insurance in this country, particularly flood insurance, the market's a bit, it's affected by government action. It's not really a proper free market. But eventually insurance rates go up or even worse, you cannot get insurance. Now, if you can't get insurance in your home, you can't get a mortgage on your home.

If you can't get a mortgage on your home, good luck selling your home. And by the way, the community that you live in, if you're not the only one, and it's highly likely it's just one home that's going to be whole communities. And that community tax base starts to class. And when the tax base collapses, you know, goodbye to the good school system and the health care and so on.

So what you see is the transition risk associated climate change is actually the one that you really need to think about. What's going to change to this in the next couple of decades as we deal with climate change and decarbonize? And what does that mean for me and my assets? That's really the concern. Yeah. And I think the underlying theme of this discussion is we're not trying to be. fear mongering. We're just trying to give people better information because there's so much misinformation in this area. So once you can think a little more clearly about this,

you can start to say, okay, this train is coming whether I like it or not. And I would be smarter to be aware of the things that are going to happen so that I can plan accordingly. Exactly. I think that's the most important thing here. I'm the way at the end of the day. I know people who wrote my book had come back to me and said, wow, you're an optimist of a climate change. I'm not an optimist. I'm not a pessimist either. I'm a realist. And what we see is this pretty massive challenge. It's a very serious challenge. It's a complex challenge. But I think we'll discuss this in a few minutes. We also have the capital and most of the technologies we need to address a challenge. And I'm pretty optimistic, but I'm much more optimistic than I was a decade or two

ago when I began working this area because we made a lot of really tremendous advancements. So it's not a question of fear mongering, for sure. I don't think that's helpful, by the way, or being optimistic specimens. I think it's just about understanding where are we and where we're headed. And to your point, there's unbelievable misunderstanding out of theater. I think the media tends to report extreme situations that gets people's attention. I think politicians don't help because they tend to make misleading statements. And so, you know, I really want to get people understand what's going on.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Your goal here is to clarify, not to terrify. Exactly. So getting to trend number two, the second of our big five trends that are driving this tremendous wave of capital into climate change solutions. This is technological innovation. You've been in this field as an executive, a CEO, an investor, and the like, really since I think about 2002.

Can you give us a sense of what's changed for? from those early days in terms of technology, when this stuff didn't really seem to be that competitive or viable or scalable. Yeah. Honestly, it's unbelievable what has happened that a little more than two decades and then involved in this.

Let me give you some data that bring that to lights. The first is when I got along this field, you know, we had solar power. It existed, some wind power. But if you added all the solar panels in the world, he collected them all together. And you said how much electricity they generate, it was equivalent to about one coal-fired plant.

Nothing. And the reason why it was very expensive and there was no scale. Fast forward to today, we'll construct in this year globally, when I say we globally, somewhere it gained 200 or 300 coal plants worth of solar will be built. I mean, that's we know that it's going to replace hundreds of coal-fired facilities this year in solar alone without even getting to other renewable technologies. Why? because today it is the cheapest form

of new power generation in much of the world. It's not just good for the environment. It's just a great product. It's the cheapest product to produce electricity. It has challenges running intermency and other issues, but that's an incredible change. There's a product that's come down since it was first used a couple decades ago.

It's declined more than 99% in cost. Then there's electric vehicles. They got into this field decades and there were no electric vehicles, right, like golf carts. There's nothing that was practical. Today, the entire automobile industry is going electric. And why is that? Well, it's good for the environment, it's good for climate,

but the main people, maybe some people who drive EVVs, it's because it's a better vehicle. It's more fun to drive. It accelerates faster. It handles better. And over the lifetime, the running costs are much, much lower. So we're coming out with these better products that literally 20 years ago, didn't exist or we're just,

completely uncompetitive. That's the innovation that's happened in the last 20 years. And that's the big stuff. And we actually take just those two categories, renewable energy, wind, solar, electric vehicles, and energy storage, which essentially,

mostly lithium-mine batteries. If we just take that and we scaled all that globally, and by the way, it is scaling globally at this point. But if we go 100% on our land, which we will, that will reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, but about 50%.

That alone, takes us about halfway to addressing this problem, which is amazing. And then we talk about innovation, the other half, we don't have scalable solutions yet, but we've got thousands of technologies and thousands of business models under development and company innovation to get to the other half. And I can't tell you with certainty which of those technologies will succeed. I think there's some pretty interesting ones out there that I've been looking at. But I have some confidence that those technologies will also,

be developed just as we saw solar and others in the last couple of decades. So to me, the biggest trends are most important one, I should say, is this trend in innovation. Well, you know, we now have the ability to decarbonate and slowly calming, which when I got this 20 years ago, sure, we had more time to address climate change back then. And time is our big challenge here. But we actually didn't have the solutions we have today. And that's a fundamental difference. And my sense is that the kind of hierarchy of technologies in terms of their impact and importance is probably renewables like solar and wind power, electric vehicles led by companies like

Tesla and BYD, energy storage, maybe a little further down the road, green hydrogen and carbon removal. That's right. So that's sort of the heart of it. Yeah, because that gets most of your decarbonization. That gets you the majority of the way that you need to get to. But I would sort of break those into two groups. And the first group being renewables, electric vehicles and storage,

those industries are already competitive with the incumbent products, the fossil fuels or other polluting products that are out there. And they're already at scale. All right. These are multi-100 billion-dollar industries already. So it's not a question of, is this stuff going to work? It's just a question of how fast can we get to 100% with those technologies? And based on the current, you know, how fast those sectors are growing, I think in the next, you know, well within the 20 or 30 years we have, those sectors will be 100% renewable pretty much.

You're very close to it, 100% electric vehicle on automobiles, not necessarily on heavy trucks. Then the other group of technologies, you mentioned green hydrogen carbon capture. And there's some other technologies there. I put them in a different bucket because they're not yet competitive. You produce those technologies and it's going to cost you more than the current. technologies you're trying to, you know, the polluting technologies you've got right now. Now, with government subsidies and life, you can compete, but that's not, you can't rely on government subsidies forever. And so those technologies got to drive down the cost curve in the next couple

decades. Otherwise, they're not going to, they're not going to be there for a long term. I was chatting to a friend of mine, Brian Lawrence, who you may know, who's a hedge fund manager at Oakcliffe Capital and a member of Yorktown partners. And we were talking this morning about the fact that I was about to interview you. And I was saying, because he's an expert on renewable energy and coal and the like, I was like, what should I ask Bruce? And he said, look, you've got to raise the fact that all of this media coverage about the falling cost of wind and solar and how they're cheaper than coal and natural gas is fundamentally flawed. And he said, actually, on average, solar may be cheaper than a coal plant, but only between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. And then

And there's this big difficulty of asking, well, who provides the power when solar isn't running? Who's going to pay for the batteries? And he also sent me a report from a guy called Michael Sembalist at JP Morgan. I'm sure you've read there was way above my head that talked about the levelized cost of energy. It was basically saying, look, the actual cost of wind and solar power is greater than it's presented as in public because people aren't really taking it. taking account of things like the need for backup power or storage or reserve margins to maintain

the system so it's reliable or just the need to overbuild wind and solar capacity to meet demand in these very decarbonized systems. This is way above my head, but I feel like I need to ask you about this because again, there is a little bit more. So yeah, guide us through this in a way that, you know, people like me who struggle with the technology can understand. So that concern regarding renewable energy is a valid concern, but oversimplifies the situation, and it is complex. So again, let's start with the big picture.

The big picture is we're going from a world of what we call it a centralized power generation where big power plants, cool, natural gas, nuclear, produce electricity, and push it out to the grid to our homes, our businesses, right? are moving to a decentralized or distributed model where power is being produced in millions of sites, home solar panels and wind projects and so on and so over the place, and stored in many different sites, whether it's through batteries or other ways, which I get to in a minute. And so moving by a centralized and decentralized model adds a lot of complexity to how we manage electricity going forward. The second point I would make is there's sort of this, you know, and those points that are made,

this idea that we're going from power sources that are perfectly stable and very easy to manage to power sources as intermittent, which is true and therefore, you know, super complex and very expensive. The realities that agreed today before there was renewable energy, it was already a very difficult thing to manage because even constant source of power like coal in the life, they're not 100% reliable. Coal plants run something like two-thirds at a time on average. And more importantly, the main size is never constant. It's called the load profile. You know, think about it during the, you know, our conversation here in the afternoon,

we're using a lot of electricity. It's some of our country very warm, so air conditions are on, or the winter gets very cold, so heating goes on and so on. We draw a lot of electricity in the afternoons. When we go to bed at night, our electricity needs drop. And depending on any moment, any time, our demand and our supply have to be kept in balance. This is a really tough thing to do.

And so, for example, there are hundreds of what we call peaker plants all over the country. These are natural gas-fired facility. It's been almost the entire year turned off. We don't use them. You think, what kind of crazy asset is that? If you only get used on those rare days when demand is so high, we call the peaks, you turn on the peaker plants. So let's start from the fact that the model we got right now is not a perfect invent. balance. Oh, it's so simple and so cheap to run. It's actually already a really difficult thing we're doing. And now we're adding these intermittent sources of power when is solar. Well, up to about 20% of power generation, this doesn't really change the storage issue at all. In other words, you can add more intermittent power to the grid and you balance it just as we do today. So up until now, it's been kind of a non-issue. It's becoming an issue because solar and wind are so cheap and attractive.

In other words, it's a good problem to have, but it's a problem. So that's where I say that, you know, this criticism is both correct. It's a problem, but it's becoming a problem because we have such a good power generation source. So now we've got this super cheap source that we can scale. And yes, the more you start to add to the grid, you start to run into some intermincy problems, which sometimes called a dot curve problem, which is a lot of your conversation. But here's the interesting point.

There's a lot of ways to solve that problem. It doesn't necessarily mean we got to spend trillions of dollars building a lot of batteries. And let me give you one simple. No, we're not simple, but one example. So at the same time we're growing rid of energy, we're also rapidly growing the number of electric vehicles that are on the road. So what's an electric vehicle? Electric vehicle is an energy storage device on wheels. That's essentially a large battery on wheels.

Well, it turns out that energy storage device on average in America is used 48 minutes a day, 23 hours a day. plus it sits idle. And of course, while it's sitting idle, you could charge it if it needs more power, but you can also discharge it. It's called Vehicle to Grid. So we've got these energy storage devices that will soon be all over the country, all over the roads, that can be part of this solution to balance the grid. Now, it's not a simple thing to do, and there's certain drawbox and complexities you need to

account for in Vehicle to Grid, but it's just one example of, of how this intermincy issue, which is a real issue, is likely to get resolved. And there are a lot of other technologies coming along that will help balance it. So I think it's a valid concern. I'm not that concerned about whether or not we're able to take care of it going forward. Let me tell you what I am concerned about, much more than those articles. I'm really concerned about it. Begin of a conversation we talked about we've got to rebuild the economy.

Well, it turns out that building stuff, that's a technical word. often. I really need this. You know, building anything in America is really hard to do. And it's really hard to do because we do not have a building-friendly environment. The rules and regulations, whether those are federal regulations, but much more often at sometimes the state level, any of that local community or county level, city level, make it incredibly difficult to build.

So a big problem with solar and wind and everything is transmission lines connecting to the grid. It's not, you know, okay, keeping the grid and balance intermency, that's a challenge. But you can't even connect to a grid. That's a much bigger challenge because try to build a transmission line in the country. It'll get blocked and sued every which way. And that's my much bigger concern here is that we know what we need to do. We have the money in the products.

We can't physically. I mean, when I say can't, we can't do it in a reasonable period of time. You can build a solar project in six months. I'm talking about a big solar project, hundreds of megawatts. You can physically do it a matter of. months. It'll take you many years to get that project permitted and connected to the grid. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer.

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enormous investments in renewables through Berkshire Hathaway energy, where they're obviously doing a great deal to invest in clean power through wind and solar and the like. And then at the same time, this massive commitment to legacy energy sources like oil and gas through things like it's huge stick in Occidental Petroleum or Chevron, which I know is also doing a lot of very innovative stuff to do with direct air capture technology. There's a part of me that thinks, okay, so it's clear that we have to make a really dramatic shift towards renewables. And there's a part of me that thinks, well, there's clearly a pragmatic argument that people like Buffett, a Munger are tapping into that we are still tremendously dependent on fossil fuels. And then at the same time, I see the news

a few days ago that ExxonMobil announced that it's acquiring a shale giant for something like $60 billion, which again is deepening its reliance on fossil fuels. fossil fuel production at the same time as we're all talking about shifting to cleaner energy. And I'm just, I don't really know how to place this in context, how to think about the pragmatic tension between becoming cleaner and at the same time recognizing the fact that the economy is hugely dependent on these dirtier forms of energy. So first of all, I agree. We are hugely dependent and not dependent.

And as in, you know, if we just, you know, did the right thing, we wouldn't use this anymore. No, I mean, there's very few alternatives to flying today in terms of fuels a little bit. It's the same way that's tiny. Most automobiles still are powered by gasoline and so on. You know, if we suddenly just stop using fossil fuels, so we'd be back and, you know, living in caves. And just even just putting aside the ethical consideration, it's just totally impractical. So what does that mean?

First of all, it means, yes, we use a lot of fossil fuels and we will continue in some years ahead. If anything is more importantly, what are we doing about it? And my belief in the analysis that I've done is that pressuring companies either through a moral argument, it's the wrong thing to do, or even through financial, you know, divestment arguments, you know, we shouldn't finance these companies. Both of those are pretty ineffective. First of all, a moral argument, companies are designed.

to make profit. That's the way the market works. And so trying to convince them to do the right thing. The margin helps, but it's not going to complete cost someone to abandon the industry. And the second reason is, you know, trying to sort of turn off the capital tabs to fossil fuels. It's only little work because, first of all, 90% of fossil fuels in the world, the supply is controlled by nation states. So, you know, that's not going to work. And secondly, we tried it just recently with a big experiment, a horrible experiment, which was to turn off the chaps in Russia because they were in Ukraine. So we have a real life example where after the invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. government and the European governments have tried to essentially stop Russia from selling oil and gas,

to buy us the war. And, you know, buying large doesn't work because this stuff's fungible and someone else buys it. And they may buy a discount, but they still buy it. So what does all that mean? It means that if you want to, if you want to speed of the transition from fossil fuels, to non-polluting, we need to create substitutes. That's what people react to. When I say substitute, it means you need to give the ultimate end user of the product,

another product, and ideally a better product. That's the only thing that gets oil and gas companies to stop drilling for oil is when they see their customer base going away. And frankly, the IEA, which represents the international energy companies, really the fossil fuel companies, they do see that coming. They're predicting declining supply because they're seeing the, substitutes. So, for example, electricity generation, we will start to use less natural gas and power electricity because of renewables. In transportation, we're going to start using less

gasoline. We're doing these fossil fuels for petrochemicals and other issues. And so the real impact here is not the moral impact and it's not the capital impact. It's the product impact. I mean, Tesla, I don't even say, but whether Tesla is today a good investment, not a good investment, or how Elon Moss is spending his money. But I will tell you that what Tesla has done to change the hark of emissions is really incredible. And now BYD and other companies that they're certainly not alone anymore because now people are buying electric vehicles instead of internal combustion engine. And that's how you reduce fossil fuel reliance.

Yeah. And I think you pointed out in the book, the transportation accounts has something like 28% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. So actually having a great product there, like the Tesla, that you actually want to buy, not necessarily because it's a righteous thing to do, but because it's actually a cool car. It's a huge help. Yeah. Now, I don't want to say, William, that doesn't mean that I totally disagree with the idea of divestment.

Okay. In other words, if an investor feels that they do not want to invest in fossil fuel companies because their values are not aligned with that, then I say, Why would you make that investment? Don't hold those stocks, don't hold those companies. I mean, you know, William, I don't smoke. I'm not a huge fan of smoking. I, you know, it's really nice to go to bars or restaurants in New York City

when it shouldn't be no longer allowed smoking in them. I'd prefer that. And, you know, I don't really want to put my money into a knuckle company. It's not me. And so I'm perfectly fine with not investing in tobacco. And there's plenty of people who feel sort of the same way about fossil fuels. Now, false fuels are a little bit different because even after the divesting, they're almost certainly still using the property.

product because they don't have a substitute yet. And again, my example is flying. If you fly on a plane today, you're certainly burning jet fuel. But that doesn't mean you have to invest in the product. And if it aligns with your value is not to invest, you should go ahead and divest. But don't think by divesting, you're solving climate change because you're not. But there's nothing wrong with doing it. I think there's good reasons for it. Yeah, I was struck by a couple of arguments that you've made over the years, one of which when you quoted Yale's famous investment manager, David Swenson, who said, look, direct dialogue with corporate management is the most effective means of addressing climate change risk in the portfolio. And you pointed out that, yeah,

if you sell the stock, you kind of lose your ability to influence management. So it may actually be that divestment is in some ways counterproductive. But then on the other hand, you have this beautiful quote from the academic and activist, Bill McKibbon, who played a very key role in starting this divestment movement, who said, if it's wrong to recognize, the climate, then it's wrong to profit from that wreckage. And that's a really interesting line. What do you think of that as an insight from MacGibbon? Well, first I think a very powerful one, right? And it's pretty hard to disagree with that line. I agree with it. And so to me, it comes back to the values point. In other words, if you feel that your values are, I don't want

to be part of making a situation worse. In other words, I don't feel like money should be going in this direction. Then don't do that. You know, that's absolutely. I totally agree and I can see why people would feel, you know, profiting off of additional greenhouse gases, it can seem for many people is morally wrong. I support that. But the investment, I go through a book much, much more detail. I got time for you today doesn't really make any difference in terms of reducing emissions. You're not going to reduce emissions by not investing in oil and gas company. It can be counterproductive. As Swanson pointed out, you don't longer have a vote. It can no longer talk to managing. and you can no longer sway management. There's some reasons to think that

that Intract can work against you a little bit. I'm on the fence, but that only to be either way. But again, it's not a climate solution. It's a values-based decision. And as far as I'm concerned, that's it. Speaking of values, the third trend out of your five trends that are driving this massive shift of capital into climate change solutions is evolving social norms.

And you've taught thousands of students since you started teaching in, I think, 2004. I think you also have two children in their 20s. And I'm wondering what you see in terms of evolving attitudes and norms and how this is actually having a very practical impact on corporations and their behavior. So there's been a big evolution in norms, particularly among younger people. And I think a lot of that is recognition or climate change is real back to the physical manifestation. And we recognize that their generation is really going to have to deal with this for better or worse. And I've had an inaugural experience through teaching, you know, some teaching smaller class in this area to this year.

We're here in Columbia Business School, which, by the way, is a pretty traditional business school, right? You know, one of our many claims of fame is value investing. And, you know, this is far from a radical liberal business school. We're very, very major, a very large business school. we introduced a new business and climate change course this year and we'll probably have half the class take the course this year and we would have even more if I could just find more professors to teach it. I mean, it's massively oversubscribed and that's not because students say, oh, I have to

take this because it's, you know, it's a morally right thing to do. It's because they see the world as it is and where it's headed and they realize this can be a really important thing for them personally and for their careers and their businesses. So that's anecdotal. There's a lot of research showing a couple things. One is that employees looking to work for companies are show them our preference to work for companies they believe are sustainable. And there's a lot of reasons for that.

But at the end of the day, you know, getting the best employees is a big competitive advantage for companies. All companies compete for really good employees. And that's a big trend. And it suggests that. that, you know, that's not going to change anytime soon. It could be employees wanting to work sustainable companies, makes companies take more action to be more sustainable because they want to get the best people.

Similarly, you see that among consumers. You know, my consumers, you know, you walk in a coffee shop and there's, you know, these big things to the wall about how sustainable their coffee is and how much it's helping to address climate change and so on. And we ask yourself, you know, why do they put that on a roll? Like, what does that do with the taste of my coffee? And the answer is because consumers like it. They prefer. Now, the evidence is consumers,

are generally not willing to pay much more for it. My small number of consumers are really willing to pay up for sustainability or climate change. But most businesses sell a product that's kind of, you know, it's kind of fungible, kind of commoditized, you know, coffee. There's a lot of good coffee out there. And so you'll see companies more and more competing on sustainability attributes because it's what their consumers want, what the customer wants. And so, again, that's driving more investment and more change at a business level.

And then you've got investors themselves, right? And then we've had this this increasing, almost a wall of capital looking to invest in companies that do well on these issues. And part of that's the whole ESG movement, which is another whole issue. Happy to dive into it. Yeah, we'll definitely get to that. It's an important issue. Yeah.

And again, with a lot of misinformation, let's come back to that. But I think this question of how this shift in social norms is changing the behavior of companies is really interesting. We've seen a lot of these businesses, very prominent businesses, make really ambitious pledges that they're going to reach net zero in terms of their emissions. I think Apple said it would get to net zero by 2030, Verizon by 2040, American Airlines by 2050. Then you've seen companies like Ford and Starbucks and the like. And then you mentioned that Microsoft, I think, committed to removing all of the carbon emitted since it was founded back in 1975. And so I'm curious how these pledges actually help their competitive position. And to what

extent it's greenwashing and to what extent it's really sincere and to what extent it's even at all measurable, given that everybody defines these things very differently and it's all voluntary. It sounds like a really great way to claim that you're righteous while not actually doing that much. That's right. That's right. I taught a whole course on this, a whole class on this yesterday. It was pretty, pretty interesting three-hour discussion with my business school students. And all the issues you raise are correctly.

So in other words, you've got a lot of companies making these pledges. Why are they making these pledges? Because they're feeling pressured to do so in various ways from their various, you know, what we call stakeholders or employees or consumers. It seems to be, you know, it's just kind of smart strategic business. decision. Some of them in doing so have a pretty clear plan on how they're going to decarbonize. Generally speaking, because they're an industry where it's not so difficult to do it. So, you know, you look at a, you know, a meta or an Apple or companies like this. Most of their emissions are from electricity use. And the way to solve that is to invest in renewables.

In fact, they're even investing in 24-7 or nobles. So they're figuring on how to get power or 24 hours a day. And first of all, they know how to decarbonize. There's a clear path to doing so. And these are very, very profitable, wealthy companies. So they have a capital to do this, right? For them, it's pretty straightforward. Then you've got other companies, airlines, American Airlines, and so on, which are making these pledges. I got to go on the assumption that they want to meet the pledge. But there is no clear path for them to do so at this point in a way that's clearly going to reduce emissions. I mean, there's sort of work around using things like carbon credits, but those are all a raft of issues as to whether or not those are actually effective and so on.

And then there's companies, all the companies in between that are doing various amounts of greenwashing, you know, use that term. And it's rampant because, you know, there's no regulation around this net zero pledges. You know, if you make a promise and it's prolong the future and you don't read it, there's really no penalty. And there's, you know, it's just such a incentive to, at the very least exaggerate where you plan to do and in the worst lie. So there's a lot of that going on. And I also think there's a certain amount of accidental renawashing. What I mean by that is companies, they have a plan, but there's a lot of uncertainty

about how to decarbonize certain industries, things like steel and cement. These are very complex, actually, carbonized. They have a plan, and they get out there, and they start working on that plan, and they realize they made assumptions that weren't correct. And that's not because they're foolish. It's because there's a lot of complexity. to these technologies and there's innovation. And then they get out there and they realize the plan isn't going to work the way they thought

it was going to work. And so they made a pledge, you know, now is that greenwashing or they're trying to do the right thing and it's just not working out the way they'd hope? So you got a lot of that, I think a lot of that's going on as well. For some companies, this turns out to be harder than they realized are more complex. So I think what's going on with companies are doing it because of all the pressure they're seeing. Also, in certain parts of the world like Europe, there's a real regulatory pressure as well. And I think it's fantastic these companies are coming out with NET zero pledges.

Why? Not because I believe you're all going to make their pledges. Not because there is a lot of problems with them, but because it's forcing them to the very least try to understand what's going on in their business to reduce emissions and at the best actually take action that works to reduce their emissions. And there's a lot of examples in companies that have reduced emissions, truly reduce emissions pretty quickly. And you know, at the end of day, climate change emissions are mostly resulted.

business activity. Businesses emit most emissions and more importantly, business have the solutions to change it. You know, as this consumer, as we can change their behavior a little bit, you know, I can bike a little more. I'm a big bike here in New York City, but that's not going to make a difference. What's going to make a difference is companies coming up with products and changing their business methods, their supply change, doing things that reduce emissions. And so if a net zero pledge is what gets a company to really work on that and talk about it and report on it, I think that's absolutely fantastic. That's just what we There's clearly much more focus on analyzing factors like environmental performance, social performance, governance issues, ESG as it's known.

And I know you've been very involved in this movement. I know for one thing, you chair, I think Columbia University's advisory committee on socially responsible investing. So you're right there in the weeds advising the university trustees on these ethical and social issues. And I know that Columbia, the climate school where you work has partnered with Alliance Bernstein to try to figure out how to integrate climate risks in investment analysis. And I'm wondering in practical terms, beyond the noise and political bluster about EST, what you find in terms of the benefits of actually incorporating these sort of considerations when you're analyzing a company. I mean, when you're looking at a business. and you're actually deciding how resilient are the cash flows here. It seems to be pretty smart to be considering environmental issues, like way beyond the political issues involved. It's just, it just seems pragmatic. It's pragmatic.

So what's going on a issue that is both fasting because it's so bizarre and also a little depressing because it's so misunderstood. So let's first, again step back. What is the issue? The issue is simple, it's a very simple concept. So simple, it shouldn't really get much attention, which is, if you're an investor and you're considering making an investment, you're going to presumably do a certain amount of analysis. You're going to review the financials of whatever that asset is. It's just stock or a building. You're going to look at the quality of management. You're going to look at competition. You're going to look at growth trends, all that stuff. All the issue is, it says, in addition to the analysis, you should also consider what environmental factors are going to affect that asset value, what social, factors might affect that asset value and what government's issues affect your asset value. That's all.

I just do a little more analysis, do a little more work. And that's smart because in the world we're in today, the modern economy we're in today, those factors can really affect asset values. You know, 50 years ago, most shares traded based on book value, the actual physical value the assets. He just sort of added up, you know, all the buildings and everything. That's what the company's worth. you know, not a cash in a bank.

Today, most companies, the value is in intangibles. You know, if you look and see the SEP 550 or something like that. And the S&G factors can really affect intangibles. They can really affect brand value. They can really affect risk to businesses and the like. And so it's kind of a smart idea. Or to put in like really simplistic terms, you know, and if I'm going to buy a home, let's say a second home,

a vacation home. And let's say the place that's perhaps it's starting. potential flooding. You know, I should probably, while I'm checking out the house, go down, open the door, go down the basement, and does it ever flood down? How often is it a flood? How bad is the flooding?

What is it going to flood more in the future? Is there a sum pump to reduce my risk? You know, just, I need a fool not to check out the basement. And that's kind of what the concept of ESG is. Now, here's where it's misunderstood and a little bizarre. The idea of ESG has also been taken up by those who care about climate change. Other issues to say ESG is a way of helping us solve climate change because the whole

concept is to move capital into companies so we're going to address climate change. And that's not what it is. And so there's this idea that ESG somehow is going to put all a capital of where it needs to go. That's not ESG. And so there's a lot of people sort of on that side of the argument saying the problem of ESG is it's people aren't doing enough of it. they need to do it better and harder.

Well, that just misunderstands what the ESG is all about. And then there's another group who are saying, you know, the problem with ESG is taking money away from fossil fuels, and it's hurting the economy. And that's not sure either. It's really just the market. It's the investors trying to be a little bit smarter, recognizing that the world is more complex in the world as it was

because these factors really matter. They matter to business. They matter the economy. me they manage to society. And in the future, they're going to matter even more. Politically, it's now been politicized completely. And at this point, I think it's, you know, it wouldn't bother me if I never heard the letters ESG ever again.

I thought it was very interesting. I watched Larry Fink on CNBC back in 2020. I was rewatching it yesterday, and he's become a kind of punching bag for people who are very political about this. He doesn't want to hear the letters to ESG ever yet. No, exactly. And for people who don't know, he's the CEO of BlackRock, which is the biggest asset manager in the world,

and has made a huge move into this area. And he just said, climate risk is investment risk. And that seems to me just so obviously true that if you want to cut through the nonsense, you want to actually be saying, you want to include these factors. And then more outrageously, but very thought provokingly, I saw a colleague of yours at Columbia, Shiva Rajgopal, I hope.

I'm sure. Who wrote this very interesting analysis for Forbes about the negative social impact of Coca-Cola in terms of things like water use to produce sugar and carbon emissions and the generation of unproductive waste from things like unrecycled plastic bottles and the like, I guess. Not to mention diabetes cases caused by sugary drinks. And Shiva's argument was that actually the social, are greater than what was then, I think, the $235 billion market cap of Coca-Cola.

And I just thought that was a really interesting line of argument where you're starting to see people say, this company is much more vulnerable because it's not doing good to mankind. What do you think? What's your reaction to that? Well, exactly that's exactly right. And Shiva's analysis and his articles is a little bit, you know, he's pushing a point pretty hard. And that's his style. And I like working on what is she about. But I think fundamentally, I completely agree. And that's kind of what ESG comes down to is what are the risks to business because of these other factors that currently historically have not been priced in. And maybe we'll never be priced in. Maybe co-cola

companies that make these sugary drinks, well, you know, we'll never care for the fact that or really the health bill is associated with them is outrageous. But, you know, there's a pretty argument to say at some point, you know, the chickens are going to come home to the roost, so speak. Yeah, we shouldn't care about that. And one day that's going to affect that business. Now, if you think that's going to be decades in the future, you may say that you're right, but it doesn't matter to an investor perspective because anything decades in the future

does not affect really the value of an asset much today, maybe real estate. And that's where to come back to climate change, because up until pretty recently, everything was too far in the future. You know, Mark Carney, when he was governor of the bank of England, he made a famous speech where he talked about what he called the tragedy of the horizon. And when that is, a play on the words tragedy of the commons, which is to describe the climate change problem. The tragedy horizon was climate change was felt so far in the future at that point. But even if you were an investor, even if you had a lot of you think and go, look, this stuff is real and

serious and we've got to think about it and incorporate it into our analysis, you did the math. And it was so far away that doesn't really affect asset value today. So you go, not much to worry about. Well, that tragedy of the horizon, that horizon is now much. closer. And we're now starting to see the effect asset values. And we're starting to see how that risk is becoming real. And to your point, to quote from life, if any climate risk is investor risk. And now those numbers are starting to show up. Yeah, it was interesting to me. I went to London recently to speak at a BlackRock event about real estate. And one of the top people at BlackRock, their global strategist, was talking about the four mega forces that

drive a lot of their investments and one of them was decarbonization. So it's, it's a huge driver of what they're doing. But one of their money managers sort of mentioned in passing, he was like, well, for the first time you could actually see a property losing all of its value because you fail to take into account these, these factors. Just to be clear, you know, sometimes get people say to me, well, climate change, you know, it's going to wipe out all these values and I would never touch this sector or that sector and so that's not sure. We do have to put everything in the context of materiality. And so for some businesses, these factors aren't need that material at the moment.

You know, we talked about Apple before. Apple's not terribly exposed to climate change and they can afford to carbonize. Other companies are very exposed. And so we do need to, you know, make sure we understand the materiality of the problem, both today and in the future for different businesses. It's not all the same. And things can be great investments just because they're so cheap. So I have a couple of friends who are well-known hedge fund managers who've been looking

at coal stocks because they're like, yeah, I can get them at one times earnings, two-time earnings or whatever it is, like incredibly cheap. Totally get the acid value is really low or it's modest, but in the next several of years is not to make that much difference. You know, obviously I also depends what kind of an investor you are. If you're a day trader, it's a relevant. Yeah. Right?

If you're a typical, I would say fund manager, you know, a couple of year horizon, it starts to become relevant. And if you're someone in sort of planning your retirement or a pension funds, probably these factors are very relevant. And so timing is a big deal here. So this does get at this general topic that I want to explore with you of how to invest in this arena because there are some tremendous opportunities clearly. And you mention in your book that there are various different types.

of funds that you can use to play this stuff. So they're fossil fuel-free funds, right? I think State Street launched a very popular ETF that tracks an S&P fossil fuel-free index. So that's a kind of divestment approach where people can just say, yeah, I'm not going to invest in coal and crude oil and natural gas and shale gas and like. Then there are these thematic funds where you're looking for a few really powerful trends, whether it's electric cars or or reduce. renewables, climate solution funds, I guess you would call them. What's an investor to do for our listeners, regular, regular investors? I mean, we have clearly lots of our listeners are also very, very sophisticated professional

investors, but lots of us are not and we don't have access to venture capital funds and private equity funds. What do you do to position yourself so that you're not going to get crushed by legacy assets that suddenly becomes stranded? did, but you're also positioning yourself to benefit over the next 10, 15, 20 years as this major shift towards low carbon happens. Yeah. Yeah.

So when we first preface by saying that, you know, when it comes to predicting climate change, impacting economy, decarbonization, things like, you know, the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. Honestly, it's not too hard to do. I don't downplay my job, but it's not that hard of job. you know, picking investments, beating the market. This is hard to. Let me, let me be, you know, that's absolutely, I want people to think, well, obviously,

you know, this is easy stuff. It's challenging. What I would say is I would look at this sort of for three different ways. The first is for the investors, is look, I'm concerned about this. I'm thinking long term. I don't want, I like to minimize my risk. And also in mind feeling that I'm, you know, kind of avoiding. stuff that's going in the wrong direction over a long period of time.

And that's where we get into a little more of sort of divestment or ESG strategy. And there are plenty of ETFs or funds that do that. What I would say to investor is don't get wrapped up in some sort of marketing pitch about how this fund is clearly going to hope before the market. You know, a lot of ESG marketing is how we're going to, you know, this is wonderfully going to beat the market because of ESG or get wrapped up and they, you know, you've got to change the world through this. Neither of those is right and large correct.

But there's a lot of evidence research that shows that you can very easily reduce your exposure to companies that are very high in pollution, are very exposed to climate risks and still get a complete market exposure. So as SP 500 or broader, you know, all-rope index and the like. And I'm not going to pick a particularly ETF to suggest, but there's a bunch of them out there. You mentioned a state street, you know, fossil fuel free. It's the S&P 500. And it is tracked the S&B by 100 broad index almost exactly, but there's no fossil fuels in there. So over time, as you start to move away from fossil fuels,

that index should protect you a little bit. So that's one group. But it may not perform well because it may be the fossil fuel investments are so incredibly cheap that actually that's exactly what you, I mean, this just gets as being complicated. Yeah, but most of these, the more than most these alternative index funds are structured. is to perform the market and not underperform.

So what they're doing is they're picking stocks that very similar or beta to the fossil fuel stocks, similar performance characteristics, less exposure to emissions, best they're doing. And I think some of them are pretty cleverly structured. Now there's no guarantee it that could have eventually outperform. But I think there is some good cushioning there.

I do believe there's risk protection to decline. Also, you might just feel better morally doing it. So I was looking last night at this BlackRock. ETF that you mentioned somewhere, which is the BlackRock U.S. carbon transition readiness ETF, which I think was the biggest launch in the ETF industry is three-day decade history. It raised over a billion dollars instantly when it was launched in 2021. And I was just looking at, you know, that has a lot of companies that are judged based on their what they call sustainability characteristics.

And I was just looking at their top holdings, that things like Apple and Microsoft and Amazon, on an Nvidia and Alphabet and Tesla and meta. So some pretty expensive stocks, but at the same time, you are avoiding fossil fuels and companies that consume lots of water and generate toxic emissions and stuff. And so maybe that some of our listeners are like, well, yeah, I think I may be overloading my portfolio with expensive tech stocks, but on the other hand, I'm kind of happy in the long run. Of course, well, you might be happy anyway, given that way things have gone. But no, if you start to look at the entire, first off, you look at just a stock market,

you're highly exposed to these, you know, these tech stocks, these really expensive tech stocks, right? That's just the market that way today. So if you don't want to exposure that, you got to, you know, invest a different market, frankly, or really, you know, pay carefully. What they're doing is they're not saying, well, you know, and then the broad market index, you're getting this, and now these ATFs are you only exposed to half the market or really different exposure. They look an awful lot at the market.

They're just very, very carefully picked out the, the, you know, the, you know, the, the most polluting companies essentially and replaced them with similar beta companies. So it looks and acts a lot like the market. They really do. And yeah, with those, I'm much, I'm not concerned that, geez, you're going to have some sort of terrible underperformance, maybe a few basis points. So a few basis points down, I think, I think they're pretty, pretty solid. Which you're not going to get also as great outperformance.

It's going to perform roughly the market. And secondly, you're not changing the world by doing this. You just protect yourself a little bit, you're going to feel a little better, I think about what you're doing here investing. The second strategy is the one you touched on a few minutes go, a dramatic strategy. So this is where you're like, you know,

I see where the world's headed. And I want to put some capital work in climate solutions, stuff that it really is changing the world. And by the way, if I'm good at it, I might outperform the market because if the world's going to change that way, I'm going to pick some of the future winners, right? I'm going to figure out which companies are heading the right way.

I'm going to put money to them, and they're going to do really well. This is all we call thematic. So you can put, you can buy an ETF to, that buys the energy stocks. That's all they do. Or you can buy, you know,

specific company stocks. You know, if you invested obviously in Tesla years ago, you were done very well. You could also invest in the company that's much less well known like Next Arrow. It was a small, boring utility.

It's now the most valuable utility in America. It's also the biggest owner of renewable assets in America. And that's what certified finance goes on. So it's different to go now. The thing about the thematic investing is it's greater risk, right? In this case,

you're making a more concentrated it bets on specific factors either the market or specific companies. And with that concentration comes, you know, much greater risk and much greater potential to perform or underperform the market. I would also say that this is where you also have impact, though. So if you're comfortable with the risk and you feel comfortable making those decisions, that capital is what's changed in the world. It's that capital is backing companies that are going out and actually decarbonize an economy.

And so from an alignment of both trying to make an investor and feeling your impacting climate change, this is where you're really going to have that nice alignment there. So that's the second strategy. The third strategy, I was going to mention it, though. It probably isn't applied to too many folks, but I think it's just worth mentioning. We call us impact first. So this is a strategy mostly only for high net worth or ultra high net worth individuals. And this is putting capital to work into climate solution.

companies, products are often in venture capital world that are extremely high risk, extremely long term. They may never be commercial successes. But if they are, you know, these might be a next trillion dollar companies, so to speak. And the reason we call this impact first is that these investments are what could really move in need on climate change, things like you mentioned green hydrogen earlier on our talk, right? Green hydrogen is a very complex, very risky area of capital work, but it could turn to the

out to be, you know, this might be the next oil and gas industry, screen hygiene industry. By the way, a lot of oil and gas companies are pretty interested in that for that reason. It's pretty hard to know where to vet. And the reality is most of those investments, the risk adjusts the return is not acceptable. The timeframes too long. Most fiduciaries cannot put capital into impact first type investments.

So I put that as a special category, but for those investors who have the luxury of maybe being able to take on additional risk or shrink multi-degetable in terms of their returns, then so strategy they might want to consider as well. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business.

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Funds Perspectus at Fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. It's also a fascinating area of the market because you mentioned, I think, in your book that Bill Gates back in 2016 founded a fund called Breakthrough Energy Ventures. And the investors included people like Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Ray Dalio, and a dozen or so other billionaires. So there's something really interesting about these ultra-sophisticated people who are sort of philanthropists, right, who are, they're backing these big bets. I mean, I wasn't Gates betting on nuclear energy, and then they were doing very cutting-edge solar power and energy storage technology and clean fertilizers and like. So it gives you a sense

that in a way it kind of validates your case that this is, that there is a, there is a a tremendous opportunity both to make money in this area and to have a profound impact on the world. That's right. Now, I do want to caveat by saying, you know, Bill Gates put a billion dollars on a break your initial. I think he's put more into that, probably because he can't, right? Most of us cannot put a billion dollars into investments that may never return a penny, but I suspect some of those investments are going to do very, very well. And that's, that's to the impact first of that things all about. And it also speaks to the fact that this is area where you want to be long term.

And you're having ultra long term, ultra comfortable with risk. You have to have very sophisticated resources, whether yourself, expertise, and more often, you know, access to expertise to evaluate. And you imagine nuclear, a big investor in what's called SMR nuclear, small modular reactors. Very interesting new technologies coming into the nuclear space. But there's not just one type of SMR. There are many different types. And each one has tremendous complexity around it.

you know, how do you evaluate which of these make sense? And then most of the stuff, as I mentioned, is venture investing. It's private. So, first of all, you need access, but even if you have access, being able to judge these investments is very, very challenging. But I do think it's important. I think it's important to mention it, first of all, you know, if we understand what it's all about. And certainly because, yeah, these investments can really move the needles, so they are important. I'm curious about your own investment strategy, because I know that you've made a lot of investments in early stage companies. You also ran a couple of businesses that were bought out, one, I think, by J.P. Morgan. And so you've done a lot of business in this field of reducing

carbon emissions in many different countries. And so I'm curious how you've solved this puzzle yourself of thinking about how to invest in a vaguely intelligent manner in this area that you're luring us all into. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Don't, don't cheat on you all, I'm just trying to put us some information. Look, first of all, I'll say most of my investing in this space, have been early stage investing, so it's an adventure, business startup, started some companies, and that's always highly risky, right, no matter what you do, and some investments work out very well, and some have not. Here's why I learn, and a couple generalizations. They do think are really, and they'd help me and may help others. One is to be very wary of policy support. So many of these industries,

start with government policy or they accelerate with government policy. And there's a good reason for that because without the policy, there's never, they would ever would get started. By the way, that's not unique to climate change. You know, look at many tech industries. There's often some government initiative behind it. And that's really important. But there has to be clarity on how that business or that technology continues to be commercially successful when the government policy goes away. You can't rely on government policy for due to long because it'll change and often disappear and you politically change rapidly. So betting on politics, especially betting on political decisions that he yet to be made, like betting on government. The government's going to put a

price and cover. The government's going to. No, they may or may not, but don't, don't make an investment based on assumption about policy. The second thing is be careful to make any investment around assumptions around changing consumer behavior. Consumers just don't change it easily. Not of us do. I don't. And so the best products or businesses are those that present this consumer is something that they really like. It might be a little different than what they've had in the past, but it doesn't entirely change the way they do things. I think about the Ness thermostat. I don't know if you remember that thermostat that came out of a decade ago. You know, we've all had thermostat at Homs Street many years.

And, you know, it's these funny little devices, these are ugly little devices. The Ness is a very sophisticated device. but it's a thermostat. And yet it's a package in a way that's very, and it's more beautiful than it looks better on your wall, right? Consumers like that. They want it with something nice to look at it on their wall,

that's a thermostat. But embedded it is the technology that is more efficient how to use electricity in your house. So those sort of products, don't try to change, radically change concern behavior or you'll never get there.

Those sort of things are important. And the third, The last thing I say is important is, you know, climate business is a business. Cross flows should really matter. Funding cycles matter. Really strong management teams. That's all the prerequisite for success. The decarbonization part of it is the icing on the cake.

And if the business itself, the cake isn't really, really well-baked, you're making a huge mistake. just because it's got a positive for the climate does not make it a good business. Start with find a good business that's a positive for the climate, not the other way around. Yeah, so it's not like you can drop your emphasis on rational analysis of businesses, management, the future cash flows and the like. Yeah, and it's always easy, right? Because some of these technologies are pretty exciting. I think most investors, you know, they'd like to have impact on climate change and know they're doing the right thing.

And it's a little bit easier to cut up. And then managing teams themselves will stir it up. I mean, some of them are, you know, most CEOs, especially of, you know, early stage companies. They're pretty good evangelists about their business. And, you know, evangelizing about the business is great, evangelizing about climate change and the business, it gets a little, you know, these things get connected that can confuse people. What about your advice for consumers? Because I know that a lot of us are wrestling with these questions of what actually has. has an impact on what doesn't. So I had been deciding recently whether to buy a new car,

because I'm not a particularly good driver. And I'm like, I don't want my eight or 10 year old car that doesn't have really good safety features. And so I was thinking, well, I'll just do what Tom Gaynor did. I'll just, I'll just rip off his research and buy a, you know, a hybrid Toyota or a Honda, C.R.V or something like that. And then because I was doing my research before interviewing you, I was like, well, maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe I do need to buy. a Tesla that's, you know, not the super flashy one, but, you know, they have become kind of affordable with the subsidies and the like. And it is a more beautiful car. Like, how do you wrestle with these questions over what we should do as consumers, whether it's getting solar panels, buying a Tesla,

you know, what... Number one, I'd say the advice you gave is it's just being informed, like this conversation we're having. There's so much misinformation out there. And it's just an important to understand what's going on. Because if you understand what's going on, you'll make better decisions. It may the decision today is not to do something, but if you're informed, you know, a year, two years from now, you'll be ready to make a different decision. The thing that I would say is that as consumers, the two big decisions you can make that do with impact today are around how you source your power, your electricity, and your automobile. Unfortunately, it's how much you can do around flying

today. You can buy carbon credits, but it's probably not going to make much impact. So it's your power, you may not have much choice, but if you can use solar, where that's pounds near roof or community store, which is pretty popular here in the U.S., that's a good thing, that's an impactful thing to do. And again, I'm not saying you should go out there and spend more money than you would otherwise and increase your electricity bill.

You should be able to do it of essentially no cost. Because the key here is not to get consumers to, I'm not trying to convince consumers to go out and do things that are going to hurt them financially, or hurt them in the pocketbook, or make their lifestyle less enjoyable. What I'm saying is take the time and effort. And by the way, does take time and effort to educate yourself.

And ideally do things that you're no worse off and actually might turn out to even better off. And in the worst case, you're at least going to feel better about what you're doing. Right? So if you can get electricity from solar at the same costs or hopefully maybe less, you should do that. But it's going to take you a little bit of research and looking at that. And the same with these. Right. So if you are in the market for a new car, you can not take the time and go drive some.

EVs, check them out to do your research. And maybe at the end of the day, you're like, I'm not ready for this car yet. Next go around, so I'll be there. My guess is you drive a few EVs, particularly right now because the prices have come down a lot. You know, you walk in the showroom, you're going to spend just by the same dollars either way.

My bet is you're going to like the car a lot. So, they're fun cars to try. Has Tesla sort of won that game? Like, you've written a lot about Tesla. Can they be caught by all the GMs and the Ford's and the like, or are they just so far ahead? in terms of that sophistication and the elegance of the vehicle and the like. Yeah, such an interesting question.

It's so hard to answer. I think it's shocking how Tesla has managed to maintain its lead. They've made some very smart strategic decisions over the years, and the incumbent car companies have just been so slow to really enter the market. That being said, Tesla faces two problems. One is the incumbent car companies that we're familiar with, for GM BMW Mercedes, they are rolling out dozens and dozens of pretty attractive products, right? So I can't say if it necessarily better or not better, but there's now a serious

competition that Tesla didn't have before. And the second thing for Tesla is the international car companies that have not traditionally competed quite as much. And I'm thinking about BID, particularly the Chinese companies now, they may not compete much in the U.S. and not here in the U.S. yet. They might do one day. Conversely, Tesla is in China, and that's going to be tougher and tougher competition going forward. And then lastly, Tesla has a couple of things. They sell some upstarts like Rivian. I think at this point, just we're not going to see too many more, you know, disruptors trying to answer that the automobile market is now way too crowded. Maybe Rivian will be the last successful one. So a lot, the game is not the one that Cecil's playing, you know,

five, ten years ago. They've been awfully fortunate that has such a long run. to build and protect the, build the moats around their business. But it's going to be pretty brutal going forward. I wouldn't, I think Tess is going to continue to do well, though. They built such a good product and such a good strategy, but it's hard to know if they'll remain quite so dominant. That would be really something. Towards the end of your book, you write, the era of climate change is upon us. The key question, frankly, the only question that matters is whether humanity will avoid

catastrophic climate change. And I know that you're asked this question all the time by your students and others. And I'm wondering how you answer that question yourself. Yeah. So my response is to the full. First of all, we can avoid catastrophic climate change. I mentioned the beginning of our discussion. We have the technologies by and large. We bring on the ones we need and we have the capital. We have the ability to do this. That doesn't mean we will avoid catastrophic climate change. because as a species, we're not very good at telling with long-term challenges. Well, look at immediate challenges like COVID. We certainly didn't deal with that one too well until we finally did.

And in some ways, the way COVID played out over a couple of years, and some ways climate change, I think it's going to play out over multi-decade. In other words, we're going to do a really poor job of adjusting this because the human species, we don't cooperate well, has made cross-nations teeth within our countries. We're slow to invest because the uncertainty makes us. no risks and so on. There's other challenges and the political challenges. They are politics. It's just a very short term. And when I say we, by the way, I don't just mean American politics.

All politicians, everyone on the planet, we really only have one objective, which is to get power and to keep power in whether they're in democracy or an autocracy. It's the same strategy. And it's always short term. That's the world they have it. So these are all the big challenges. But I do believe we'll avoid catastrophic climate change because we are very smart, adaptable species and so we will eventually de-carbonized economy. We'll probably eventually have to do a lot of direct air capture just to pull to see what the geology atmosphere, which would be costly and challenging to do. So in other words, we'll do a really crappy job of adjusting this problem, but we'll eventually, we eventually will avoid a catastrophe, much as we do with COVID. We did not

do very well, but we eventually got our act together and it still exists, but we've managed to to live with it. And I should mention the trend four, which I, some, some of our eagle-eared listeners will be like, you never mentioned trend four was government action, which is that the government has started to get its act together to do stuff. And I mean, I know it's very controversial, and this isn't a political show, but, you know, the inflation reduction act was huge. And I, I was listening to Al Gore in an interview with David Remnick the other day and he said that actually the Inflation Reduction Act, which he described as really a climate bill, was, quote, the most extraordinary legislative achievement of any head of state in any country in history,

which has always quite a claim. Then it's quite a claim. Here's what I think of the inflation reduction. First of all, why is it more government policy? And it's not just the U.S. globally, we see more policy because of the other trends, right? When you start to see physical climate change, we start to see changing social norms and these innovations, you know, governments doesn't react very quickly, but it sees these changes.

Politicians see these changes. they see what's happening and they eventually start doing something about it. And that's what we see happening. In the Inflation Reduction Act's an example of that, what's really important in the Afflational Reduction Act is, yes, it is addressing climate change, but it's also an economic industrial policy bill. And on a scale, we haven't seen in a long time.

In other words, what it is, is the government saying, this is the way the world's going. The U.S. can either be a leader or a follower in this. And as we follow, it's going to hurt our economy. We're going to be behind on things like electric vehicles and energy storage and alike. And it's time that we invested so that we're in front, that we're protected, that our nation industries are protected, so they have time to grow up to get to scale. If people do build these businesses and assign products in the U.S. that they use U.S. manufacturing

and U.S. labor and that alike, it's a very protectionist policy based on the idea that this is the way the world's going. And so either we can get ahead of it or not. When I was first passed, of course, those here in the climate change myself are obviously very, very pleased to see it from the client perspective, also pleased to see it from the economic perspective because I'm American. And we also assume that the Europeans and others would also be thrilled to see it because finally the U.S. is stepping out to take real leadership on climate. And of course, there was a moment of happiness and then they kind of freaked out because what they realize is this is economic policy. This is competitive. This is how the U.S. is going. to accelerate its competitive positioning versus the rest of the world. And so the Europeans are now trying to implement a similar to all their own. There's something in the parliament that looks a little bit similar. And of course, China also is trying to understand how they continue to compete.

And this is the world that we're in the world. We're going to be in the future. So I think it's tremendous piece of legislation, not just because of the climate peace, but because it basically, this is the way we're headed. And does that mean, you know, government policy is tricky when it comes to economic policy because you can make a lot of mistakes and back industries that are wrong ones and money gets wasted? The other thing I like about the policy is they're not picking a winner in there. There's support for virtually anything, any technology, any industry that's far of these changes that are coming.

And they're kind of spreading it around. And I like, that's the right strategy because we don't know exactly what's going to dominate. Maybe it'll be small nuclear in the future. Maybe it'll be direct-jerkipater caption. Maybe it'll be green hydrogen. Maybe it'll be just be wind and solar is going to continue to be our main thing. There's support for all of that. And I think in a very clever design.

So, you know, I'll, of course, it may be a little bit hyperbolic, but I agree with the sentiment, for sure. I wanted to ask you one last thing because I'm aware that you've got to run and you've been very generous with your time. There's so much confusion around environmental issues and the policy issues it brings up and so much prejudice, so much bias, and it's very hard for people to think clearly about these topics. And they're hugely important. They'll affect all of us. And yet we really struggle to think impartially or rationally about this stuff. And you're a great educator.

And I'm wondering if you have any advice for us on actually how to think better about this stuff. Because I mean, you quote in the book, the Harvard psychology professor, Daniel Gilbert, saying we're not very good at dealing with clear and, sorry, we're very good at dealing with clear and present danger, but not with future stuff. And you quote Danny Kahneman saying, yeah, we're terrible at dealing with uncertainty and there's so much uncertainty. What, what have you learned about how actually, despite all of the glitches in our wiring, we can overcome our biases and stupidity and actually think clearly about this hugely important issue? Yeah. So, IFOs and climate change at the business.

school here. This is our home where I work because ultimately it's a business issue as opposed to some other environmental issues. I think it's important to sort of separate those a little bit. So there's a number of environmental issues that people care about greatly and I understand why. Maybe things like, for example, wildlife protection, right? And, you know, should we have protect, you know, regulations protect certain species and how strong should those be, are you allowed to build, things like that? I get all that. But that's a really different issue. That's really much more sort of an ethical issue, an environmental issue, what do we care about, and how do we, how do we deal with that? Climate change is different. Climate change at the end of the day,

it's just an economic problem. It's about how do we produce goods and resources and services without this unfortunate byproduct, these greenhouse gas emissions that come with it. And so if you look at it through economic or business or sort of financial lens, start to do the math, and think about the numbers and start to do on. A couple of things come to light. First of all, you start to make it much more objective than emotional. I think that's really important. Secondly, you start to understand what the problem is. You can frame the problem.

You can also start to frame and understand the solutions. What's going to cost us? How do we reduce those costs? How do we deal with it? And I think moving it from sort of the environmental realm and sort of the emotional subjectivity of it to the more objectivity of business, first of all, I just think that's much more practical to address the problem. But I also think it gets back.

better outcomes because this is the crazy thing about climate change. So the last point I'll make up. Is it shouldn't be a political issue. We shouldn't be debating about this. There's really very little to debate about. It's very clear what's going on. I use the example of physics, like gravity. We don't debate gravity.

We do debate, you know, maybe how we can prioritize how to address it. I get that. People who say, look, we can only, we can't spend so much money on X, now because we need more to unwind why because, you know, we have some short-term challenges. Those are worthwhile debates to have. That makes sense. Prioritization issues. But as to whether or not we should care and not care of this is real or not real, that's a waste of time.

And the biggest problem we have here is time. You know, if we just get on it, we're going to be in good shade. If we keep them in these ridiculous political and emotional debates and talk about the environment, I suppose, talking about the economy for another decade or two, then we'll have. you know, really, will really find yourselves in the best part. Bruce, thank you so much. This has been tremendously clarifying. I feel much better equipped, at least to stop understanding these issues and hopefully

align myself over the next 20, 20 years with these inexorable forces. Terrific. Well, I look forward to more conversations in the 20 years to come. And really excited to talk. It's terrific. Thank you. Me too. It's been great fun.

Thanks so much. Take care. Take care. Bye. Bye. All right, folks. Thanks a lot for listening to this. this conversation with Bruce Usher. I hope you found it as thought-provoking and illuminating as I did.

I think Bruce is a remarkably reasonable and rational and lucid thinker in a field where reason and rationality and lucidity are relatively scarce resources. If you'd like to learn more from Bruce, I'd definitely recommend reading his recent book, which is titled Investing in the Era of Climate Change. On a related note, it's also well worth going back and listening to a recent interview that I did with Brian Lawrence, a very smart hedge fund manager who's deeply knowledgeable about the world of energy investing, both in renewables and also fossil fuels. I'll include a link to that episode in the show notes to this episode. As I recall, Brian delivered a dazzling 15-minute monologue on energy in that conversation, and I somehow heroically managed to resist the temptation

to interrupt him. In any case, I'll be back very soon with some more terrific guests, including a fascinating conversation with an investor named Adam Shapiro, who manages billions of dollars for about eight ultra-rich families. Adam's clients have to pony up a minimum of a hundred million dollars to open an account with him. So this is a rare opportunity to get a glimpse inside a highly sophisticated niche of the investing world, one that's usually only accessible if you're a billionaire. In the meantime, please feel free to follow me on X at William Green 72, and to connect with me on LinkedIn if the spirit moves you. And as always, do let me know how you're enjoying the podcast. Of course, I'm always particularly pleased to hear positive comments and

effusive praise, but it also amused me recently to read a comment from a listener on YouTube who asked, why does this host talk so much? Ah, well, can't please everyone. Until next time, take good care and stay well. on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only, before making any decision consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.