Shomik Dutta Returns to the Show!

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to where they are today. Today, I have the opportunity to talk with Soumyk Dutta, cofounder and managing partner at Overture VC, a venture fund focused on startups working to transition our economy to a sustainable, decarbonized future.

After our conversation in 2023, I wanted to circle back with Shalmik to hear where he thinks we are now in terms of investing in the economic landscape, energy technology developments, and his thoughts on our country at this defining moment. Shamak Dutta, welcome back to the POC. You know, we had you on last spring. A lot has changed since then, and I'd love it if you could give our listeners your perspective and an overview of what has changed over the last eighteen months. Jim, it's nice to be with you again.

Thanks for having me. I would say that interest rates have been higher for longer than some folks expected. And as a result, venture capital has become a relatively unattractive asset to the tourists in venture capital. You were seeing a lot of ultra high net worth family offices, corporate venture arms and other sort of dabblers in venture realize that the liquid assets that return at best sometimes three to four x gross multiples on invested capital over ten year periods are not particularly exciting when you have really high interest rates and therefore higher opportunity costs. So I would say there's been a washout of those investors and as a result valuations have come down a bit.

You've seen a frozen public market that has caused a lot of growth investors to flee to seed as a sort of stage of investing in venture, which has created a sort of push pull in the tension I just mentioned. So you're seeing tourists wash out of venture, but you're seeing a lot of multi stage funds coming downhill for seed because of a frozen IPO market. And so as a result, you know, I think generally there has been a flight to safety, really good high quality deals are getting marked more competitively than we would like in valuation. But overall valuations are down, overall investing activity is down and you are seeing a lot of wait and see from series A, B and C investors. The length of a time it takes to get a deal done is longer and therefore the sort of amount of cash you need to load these startups up with before making an assumption to the next round is longer.

And so ultimately the old adages of discipline just apply, building responsibly, focusing on unit economics, getting profitable, listening to customers, building great product. All of that is more important than momentum at this time. How does that square then with the stock market and NVIDIA and and other, you know, indicators raging ahead? Our politicians are saying, you know, on on the one side, things are great. On the other side, they're saying things that are terrible.

Where do you see the political race? Where do you see the overall economy? Yeah. With respect to your public market question, I think that same flight to safety is probably observable as well. Like, for a handful of companies in the S and P 500 are really pulling that momentum.

And when we look under the hood to the rest, it doesn't seem to be the same story. And I sorry. I need to hear your second question again. Well, just in terms of how do you square how the American people are feeling about the economy in terms of how it's playing out in terms of the political climate right now? I mean, what's your perspective in terms of how what you're viewing in the venture market is playing out across the spectrum with the middle class and and just how Americans are feeling in general?

No. Inflation does have a really corrosive psychological impact, and you are seeing a kind of dislocation in some cases between the reality of a relatively strong jobs report over the last three years, relatively strong indicators of a soft landing over the last couple of years. And yet because inflation had remained stubbornly high for a long period of time, you are seeing some fragility in the consumer market and that certainly seems to be showing up in the way people are spending and the sort of inverted kind of savings that we're trying we're starting to see right now. And it does seem like we had been fueled on cheap credit for a long time and unraveling that cheap credit particularly with stimulus is gonna take some time to wash out. And so there's a feeling of some fragility, but I do think that sort of flight to safety that I mentioned earlier in venture investing is also true in global markets, you know, sort of broadening.

I heard Larry Summers say recently that Japan is a nursing home, China is a jail, and Europe is a museum. And so where, you know, it does feel like there is a flight to safety to US quality companies and The US still seems to be in my opinion the best place to invest in Compound over the next twenty five to fifty years. And if that's the case, you're going to continue to see a lot of foreign investors flock to US assets and in the venture asset class, I can tell you definitively, there is nobody faster, better, and more dangerous than a US founder, in my opinion. Oh, that makes sense. And in terms of clean tech and in terms of the money going into it and so forth, what type of progress do you think we're making in terms of creating jobs, creating momentum?

I mean, are things like the CHIP Act and the Inflation Reduction Act starting to have an impact? Yeah. The scope and scale of The US industrial policy in climate is hard to overstate. The Inflation Reduction Act, and as you said, the CHIPS Act and the infrastructure bill are together the most ambitious climate agenda than any government that we've ever put forward. And there are echoes of this in history.

You know, we I think we've over learned the Milton Friedman lines about free markets. It is just not the case if you look at most US domesticated industries. You have seen a considered industrial policy in place. As an example, when we built semiconductors in this country, the Intels and Fairchild Semiconductors of the world, 99% of their revenue in the early years came from the United States government. The United States government helped set up a lot of our supply chains and semiconductors that we benefit from today in places like South Korea and Taiwan.

And so a similar careful industrial policy is in place to be able to shepherd these green technologies to be able to hit the scale they need to, to hit our net zero emissions targets. As an example, we put this in place in the Obama administration in solar. Solar benefited from years of subsidies, but today without subsidy in some parts of the world and in some part times of the day, solar and wind are simply the cheapest form of electricity available anywhere. And so in a low constrained environment, you are finding renewables being able to win the market, not because it feels good and it's the right thing to do, but because it is simply the cheapest form of energy available to the buyers that are consuming that energy. And one of the interesting trends, Jim, that I'm spending a lot of time on, this probably most applies to your listeners, but we've lived in a flat load environment for the last twenty five years.

We have not needed more power to build all of the things we've built over the last twenty five years because of efficiency and a bunch of other a host of other reasons. But now we are reindustrializing and remanufacturing The United States. We are electrifying fleets of trucks and cars. AI demand and the electrification needs for that AI, I think just about everybody has read about already. And we are starting to electrify everything on top of that.

In addition, we're having intermittent renewables coming online rather than firm baseline load from places like coal or gas. All of that is putting a lot of tension on the available electricity. And so this thematic is gonna play out over the next twenty five years and is a very interesting place for everybody to start thinking about. How we build new generation, how we then wheel that power effectively over many, many miles rather than co located generation to load, which we've done for the last twenty years, how we're gonna be able to power AI data centers that are more energy intensive than just about any new technology we have ever seen. You know, just to give you a sense of this, data centers were about consistently about 1.5% of global emissions for the last fifteen years.

So all of the revolution in cloud, all of the sort of boom in in data centers has stayed flat as a percentage of global emissions. In the last two years, it jumped to 6%. You know, if you follow that compounding rate, we have a problem on our hands. And incidentally, these hyperscalers like Google and Amazon and Microsoft have made net zero emissions targets. And so we have to square all of this together over the next couple of years, and that'll be a very interesting place to invest.

Well, and as you're talking about that, you know, looking even at the political issue of fracking in Pennsylvania, and you look at the progressive wings of the Democratic Party and you look at the conservative wing of the Republican Party, there's a desire, obviously, for America to stay strong economically and to have a robust economy. And there seems to be a discussion taking place because of all the things you allude to that we need these, for instance, small nuclear power plants. We need other transition fuels, whether or not it's hydrogen or otherwise, but that we hear at least solar and wind is not gonna be enough. And when you look at all the money we've spent on solar and wind, that if we don't come up with these other alternative transition bridges, we're not gonna be able to keep up with the demand for two things. One, AI, as you pointed out, these huge data centers.

But also, as we transition to electric cars, we've gotta have enough capacity to charge all these cars. You know, as someone that's in the middle of the trenches on this, where do you see technology coming together to solve this, and are we gonna have to have these tough conversations about things like nuclear? I think you're absolutely right, Jim. And I don't think there is a serious analysis available anywhere that suggests that a 100% of our fuel mix can come from wind, solar, and batteries. It's simply not possible.

And so the need for nuclear fission, I think, is unmistakable. I think there is a clear consensus brewing amongst serious climate investors for it. And the sort of question is not if, but how. And just to give the listeners a sort of flavor of the different sizes of these new reactors coming on, you have traditional AP 1,000 several gigawatt size reactors, which are the things that we are all familiar with. There are also small modular nuclear reactors from companies like NuScale that you've alluded to.

And there are also even micro reactors now coming online for off grid mining and potentially even Bitcoin mining and other applications. The challenge is the regulatory environment in the NRC, but we are starting to see bipartisan consensus around the need to sort of ease the regulatory pathways in part because one, these AP 1,000 are unbelievably safe. The need for the load must be met as a national security priority. And the reality is that clean dispatchable baseline power, baseload power is the only way to get to a true net zero economy. And Fusion is, in my opinion too many decades away to be able to bring this to bear right now.

There are other technologies to be excited about too to be sure. Advanced geothermal has been unlocking clean base load power through exciting companies like Fervo who have cut deals with some of the hyperscalers to be able to provide that baseline power for their data centers. But we are taking a very close look at a bunch of different vision technologies and are particularly excited about development plays. There are a couple of close friends of mine have started a company called the nuclear company, for example, which is a development play to build fleets of AP one thousands and invite utilities in on the cap table and drive to big outcomes. I think things like that are extraordinarily exciting, and I think you should be on the lookout, all all the listeners should be on the lookout for interesting investment opportunities against all of these things.

As an example, there is an AI startup that is training on all of the Byzantine documentation that a lot of these old nuclear plants have. If you walk into most nuclear plants, some of them are operating with floppy disk drives. Imagine the unstructured data that an airline can learn on and help optimize some of those systems. So I think there's a whole booming economy to come from these things. One investment we just made is in a company called Hexium, h e x I u m, which is figured out a novel way to produce lithium six and lithium seven isotopes, which are both useful for all fusion reactions.

Every fusion company in in the world is gonna require a lot of lithium six and seven. And certainly, United States government banned the form of the technology pathway to producing those isotopes because it was so dirty. It involved heavy mercury, incredibly toxic to the environment. And so there is a whole booming economy coming around online for nuclear fusion and fission, and we're excited to be invested around it. You know, an area that I don't know much about in the smaller nuclear reactors is this issue of safety you just brought up.

It obviously when you're dealing with, you know, Chernobyl and things that people have been worried about in the past, can you take a minute and walk us through what has changed from a technological perspective that has allowed for these smaller plants to become so much safer? Yeah. No. I was surprised to learn in Japan, in the Fukushima incident, there were zero deaths related to the meltdown. Zero.

And so I think, you know, there are advances in being able to bury this deep underground. There are advances in being able to do this underwater in cement casing. There is a host of new safety protocols that have come online And I think the challenge is that it's interesting as you get closer to a nuclear plant, the public opinion of nuclear actually improves because they see the safety, they see the job potential, they are directly benefiting from the presence of those plants. I think the challenge is twofold in deployment of this. One is the sort of costs in The United States have bloomed out of control in part because we just haven't done this.

We haven't had enough reps in recent future. I mean, folks have seen the vocal sort of cost headaches and overruns in part because our labor force is aging. We have sort of largely stopped stamping out these large reactors while countries like South Korea and The UAE are stamping this out with remarkable success. And so folks are looking at small modularized reactors wondering whether we can mass manufacture and learn from nth of a kind, benefit from nth of the kind production, but we just haven't done it. And so small modular reactors in The United States, unfortunately, are neither small nor modular at this point, but they are reactors.

And the hope is that we can both train the workforce, stamp out many of these units, and learn from nth of a kind production to be able to drive these costs down as as the South Koreans have. Makes sense. So what else are you seeing, you know, whether or not it's the economy or politically or otherwise having an effect on where you see the investment climate going over the next few years? Well, it does look quite alarming that we're gonna overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius quite substantially. And I think, unsurprisingly, you are starting to see storms intensify.

You are starting to see wild mega fires from wildfires. You are starting to see intensifying hurricanes. You are starting to see catastrophic flooding. And all of that has costs to businesses that they are now bearing. You are seeing insurance companies flee from states like Florida and California.

And the sky turned orange in New York not long ago because of a mega fire in California. And just to put the what we'll we'll deal with the financial costs in a second, but just to put the emissions calculator in folks heads. One mega fire season in Canada wiped out the last twenty five years of decarbonization activity in Canada. And similarly, one mega fire, just one, not the season but one mega fire in California wiped out the last ten years of decarbonization activity in the state. So the burning of biomass creates something called carbon black, which is about a 100 times more warming than c o two.

And just to give you a sense of the it's kind of appalling the feedback loops that happen. There is a beetle that eats bark in near Canada, and this beetle eats bark. It gets hungrier as the as the climate warms. And when it eats this tree bark, it makes that tree bark more susceptible to mega fires. And when those mega fires happen, it spews this carbon black and a lot of that carbon black ends up on the North Pole, which in turn makes the ice less reflective.

It absorbs more heat, which in turn warms the climate, which in turn makes that beetle hungrier, which in turn makes that bark more susceptible to wildfire. And and for that example, there are a thousand others. And so these feedback loops are complicated, nuanced, and most scientists think we have not grappled with them or even underwritten them appropriately to the risk. As a result, I think you can expect over the next one hundred and fifty years, approximately 1,000,000,000 people will have to move from the global South to the global north. You know, we worry about the ability to self govern now with a lot of migrant movement.

How will we self govern when a billion people need to move from the global South to the global North? Where will we set up housing? How will we feed those folks in places where thermal limits sometimes will force photosynthesis to stop working? These are things we're gonna have to deal with in adaptation. And so I think the need to start shifting to start shifting our mindset to thinking about adaptation is right now as it relates to storms, as it relates to floods, as it relates to food systems, as it relates to housing.

You know, we've made now three wildfire bets, for example, to start helping deal with the 180,000,000 acres in The United States that are ripe for mega fires that need to have fuel reduction and landscape restoration today. We have a lot of new growth that is in those areas that is kindled for mega fires and actually need to effectively pull the new growth out. And that's a very hard challenge for the aging workforce we have. It's right for automation and and robotics. And so we have a company called Burnbot, for example, and a company called Earthforce that are helping to build the automation layer, the intelligence layer, and ultimately the machinery to go handle all of the fuel reduction work we need to do over the next five years to get ready for the mega fire seasons that are to come.

Unfortunately, with all of the disasters that you can read about in the press, whether it's flooding, whether it's a 155 degrees Fahrenheit in Tehran, which it did reach last year. We had twenty straight days in India above a 120 degrees Fahrenheit, twenty straight days. This will still be remembered as the best weather in our lifetimes. And so there is a very different world coming, and I think that businesses are waking up to it. Insurance companies are waking up to it.

Governments are waking up to it. And it is both, you know, in my mind, a more imperative to deal with, but I also see a software like scale up of opportunity of an investment thesis unfolding, and I intend to sort of deploy against it. When you look at the political climate and you look at, obviously, the differences between the Republicans and the Democrats on things like climate change, There does seem to be at least a recognition that we do have to do things to improve the environment and the fossil fuels, but that it's a matter of balancing the economic disruption, so that we balance out the winners and losers, and recognizing that we're part of a global community with 7,000,000,000 people, and that although we historically have been a major participant in this, that when you look at India, and you look at China, and you look at the rest of the world, that we can't do this alone. How do you see the geopolitical balancing of these issues coming together in a way where we can start to talk about this in a way without so much demonization? It's a great question, and I think my highest level answer is that we need to remove climate from the partisan negative polarization vortex where good ideas go to die.

You know, the negative polarization in this country is such that if I am for something as a Democrat, any Republican is reflexively gonna be against it. And that is so anti enlightenment. It's so tribal. It's so dangerous. And I agree with you the writing is on the wall.

Unfortunately, it does seem at the national level in national politics, Republicans don't agree that the climate emergency requires action today. HR one, which is the first bill that the Trump administration would propose to enact if it wins the White House and both chambers of Congress. HR one is a full repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act. I think it is the case for most analysts that if Trump were elected president, that China would not move forward with the pace of decolonization as it would with the Harris administration. There is a global consensus that it's brewing in the IPCC, but Trump walked away from that Paris Accord as, you know, famously and that created a permission structure for a lot of other countries to follow.

It is the case that a lot of these developing countries look to us and say, who the hell are you to tell us not to use these cheap abundant fossil fuels when you yourselves industrialized on the back of it? As a matter of historic budget, The United States is and Europe is the overwhelming owner of emissions. And yet if we allow China and India and Nigeria to industrialize the way we did, I think the estimate is when we allow four more planets of resources to be able to pull it off. So I think it's incumbent on Western nations and our allies around the world to innovate at hyperscale and then be able to provide the global South with technologies that are simply better, cheaper, faster, better. You know, a lot of Africa did not need wireline technology because four gs LTE came and was just better.

They did not need to be banked with traditional banking services because fintech offered something just better. And similarly, we need to provide new ways of producing fertilizer. We need to provide decarbonize pathways to cheap and abundant steel, cement, energy itself. If we are able to invent those products here and scale the manufacturing of it and actually just give them something better and sell them something better, it is both an unbelievable opportunity for The United States economy. It's also gonna be doing a great favor for global emissions.

But if we can't win on techno economics, Jim, it's my firm belief that we're not gonna be able to decarbonize in time. And that's why, like, markets have to be the disciplining factor, not hopes and dreams. And so as an investor, that's the guiding principle for us. Well, it seems to me one of the amazing things about America is that we do have Silicon Valley, and we do have a lot of creativity that goes into new technologies and otherwise. And it seems to me that if you balance people's dignity and right to work and ability to take care of their family with the notion of having a better environment and better jobs and better technology, we can find that win win.

And, again, it's the demonization of the other in this black and white, you know, you're all bad, you're all good, instead of kind of coming together and realizing that we need a middle approach, a balanced approach where we're using nuclear, where we're using new technologies, we're improving battery technologies. And I love what you said about that if we can lead on this, we can actually share that technology with the rest of the world, and it can become a win win. It's really important. And we are in what feels like a hot economic war and obviously a cold war with China. And the CCP has locked up the supply chains and has a complete choke hold on almost all the upstream minerals and metals, the batteries themselves and has been very focused on winning the decarbonisation technology race in part because it can literally hold the West hostage over a a lot of these critical inputs.

As an example, rare earth elements, which are critical in not just every form of electrification, every solar panel, wind turbine, electric vehicle, but also in almost every piece of advanced military hardware. China owns 99.9% of the global supply chain in rare earth elements. Similarly, in lithium production and then in the LFP batteries that are now popularized and ultra low cost companies like CATL are running away with the market. And so I think there's an interesting tension that is brewing between, are we going to reinvest and build the supply chain amongst our allies in The United States? There's an alternative argument that actually we can benefit from this cheap stuff that China is stamping out and countries that trade together tend not to war.

And so I think that's an interesting tension to watch. I think I would guess the Trump administration will be more bullish on tariffs, but I think the Harris administration also wants to protect American workers. And there is attention in deploying these, you know, green technologies and benefiting from them. And, you know, CATL batteries are used in Ford with electric vehicles, for example, or are we gonna redomesticate a whole supply chain and really invest in building that here? And that's something to watch.

And I'm curious as someone who is close to the political climate and looking at all the rhetoric, do you think that some of the rhetoric is worse than the reality in that? If you look back to, for instance, some of the tariffs that were put on during the Trump administration that have been continued, and you look at some of the investment in green technology, did it really dramatically go down in 2016 to 2020? I mean and and the reason I'm asking is because it seems to me both parties ultimately wanna have us win the technology race. Both parties want us to have a strong middle class at the end of the day, and have to deliver on better jobs and a strong economy at the end of the day. Now there's different ways to get there, but from the perspective of toning down the rhetoric and looking at how the parties either came together or didn't to pass some of the CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act and so forth.

Again, I'm not predicting who's gonna win the election, but it it seems to be, at least people are saying, it could go either way. I'm curious from your perspective, is it likely that the world is gonna come to an end as the Republicans say will happen if the Harris administration is successful or vice versa? Or or do you think looking at the years in government that you had and and what's going on, that ultimately will will come through this? What what's your perspective there? You know, there is a lot of hysteria, and we can talk about whether that how much of the hysteria comes from social media incentives, how much it comes from media companies that are dying to get more eyeballs, how much it comes from the negative polarization that we've discussed.

It does feel like we are at incredible crossroads right now as a country. I think most serious folks would agree that the American hegemony is either at the beginning of the end or is going to create a new beginning, but we are at that kind of a crossroads. When you think about artificial intelligence, when you think about climate change, when you think about a rise in China, when we think about mental health and loneliness and inequality, all of these challenges are coming to a boil. And I think dispassionate question is like who is the leader with the temperament and with the capability to carefully lead us through this challenging time? I'm not one of these hysterics who believes the American constitution goes into a shredder and this all ends if Trump is elected.

I think he's a very old man and would serve four years and that we will have other presidents. However, it is my conviction that you want a leader who you know without a shadow of a doubt is going to make the best decision on behalf of the American people and not on on behalf of themselves. One thought experiment I've been toying with, let's say we get to AGI and The United States Government decides to nationalize and sort of take over whatever company gets to AGI. I'm curious, like, honest question for you, Joe. Like, what percentage chance do you think if there's a Trump administration, that president Trump would deploy that AGI to benefit himself personally?

Where would you put that? Zero to a 100? Yeah. I'm a person that believes that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. God like power effectively.

I wouldn't wanna see that kind of power in any person's hands, and I don't think that there's a real debate in terms of narcissism. I mean, in terms of, I think, the American people, even the people I know who are very, very adamant that they wanna vote for Trump because he will he will be better for the economy and that his rhetoric is more talk than reality. I'm not aware of many people who don't see the narcissism. And so, again, I don't think I would like to see this technology in anybody's hands, and I think that one of the brilliance is of the American system is the checks and balances of having a supreme court and a legislature and an executive branch. And as you pointed out, whoever is in office, right, there it's a four year term.

And so I'm more optimistic that we do have these mechanisms in place to self correct, and I hear fear on both sides. I mean, that, you know, we we could have a one party system on the left, or we could have a one party system on the right, And so I think the brilliance of this country is our ability to come together, and I think that most people are good. We all wanna do what's best for our grandchildren, and so I hope that both parties come together Yeah. And that we as a people will create checks and balances so that whoever wins, we don't have to face that problem. Yeah.

You know, one of the things I think about a lot is the need to create a civic square in which American citizens feel an element of equality in the civic square that is divorced from how they feel in the private market. And our greatest thinkers like Tocqueville and these others have always said that is like the fabric and structure of American democracy. The ability for any American citizen to feel equal in the civic square. And it does feel like we have completely lost that thread in the last couple of decades. And the rage on the right and the left, I think, is kind of reflective of this fact.

You know, if you the incendiary rhetoric on both sides is like there are very powerful forces that are making all the decisions. And on the right, some of it is like tinged with antisemitism, some of it's tinged with conspiracy theory, on the left it's kind of some of it has gotten a little kind of on the far left kind of Marxist and about large corporate powers and some of that's gotten antisemitic too incidentally. But all of it has a grain of truth around concentrated power in this country and the inability of an American citizen from any stripe of background to feel equal in the public square. That's like a thing if we're gonna talk about how to sort of heal and find this common ground that I think is essential. It's a campaign finance conversation.

It's an economic power conversation. It's a media conversation. It's a loneliness and trust conversation because of the eroding trust and you know, increasing loneliness. Pew did this study I saw recently. 15% of Americans say you don't have one friend anymore, not one.

So all of these things need to get come together and that's a that's a place that I I'm very interested in spending some time. Yeah. And and listening to a lot of podcasts because I'm trying to always learn and see what's working and so forth. And spending time on TikTok and listening to other areas, whether or not it's Joe Rogan or Lex Fridman, and really seeing who does a really good job at getting a million people to listen to what they're talking about. When we look back historically, when there were in the in the early formation of the country, we had pamphlets that were incredibly inflammatory that each party would use that would spread lies.

And when you think about what happened when the printing press originally happened, you know, technology is disruptive, and we have to adapt. And these algorithms are being used to make us angry and afraid. And I spent a lot of time talking to people on the left and on the right. And it's absolutely amazing to me that their fear and anger is so easily tracked to where they get their information. And they're getting it from these extremes on the left or on the right.

What my goal is is to create and support the infrastructure where people can come together and have thoughtful conversations and get both sides of things. And look, we did it today. Solar is fantastic. Wind is fantastic. Nuclear scares people for a lot of reasons.

But if we don't have that discussion, we're not gonna solve these issues until some other technology comes around. Yeah. And to me, that's the issue. It's the demonization on the left and on the right that I think is avoiding and preventing us from having these conversations. I totally agree.

And and, you know, the Buddha says that you should have multiple identities because having multiple identities is actually very healthy. Keep makes you anti fragile, tending one identity collapsing. As an example, like, I'm a dad. My only identity cannot be being a dad. I should have other identities.

One of the things that's a little worrisome is in The United States, like, you wanna see people having a lot of identities. I'm a Chicago Bears fan. I love the Chicago Bears. I don't care if another Bears fan is a Trump supporter if we're watching the Bears together. And so thinking about that in the context of like what's happening in American community, you know, the more identities you have, the less sort of, leverage you are to this one thing, you know, red America, blue America, that kind of thing.

And so that's another place for us to all spend some time and thought. The one thing I just want to leave listeners with is that like we you could think of our emissions budget as a bathtub and the water level is full And every serious scientist agrees that the water level is full. And the question is, can we stop the faucet in the form of emissions or can we remove some water out of the bathtub cost effectively and permanently? And I think the answer is we have to do both and we have to do both now and we might have to get some floatable devices to also help us survive the water levels in the bathtub and all of that is coming to a head in the next fifty years. And so, you know, my my ask to listeners is to spend some time thinking about this.

If you're an investor, there are opportunities that I think are software like scale ups in these industries. Start paying some attention to it, start investing in it, start reading about it and, I think you'll go down a rabbit hole and won't be able to come back out because it's so interesting. I think this is the most interesting challenge of our generation. I think it is like the Apollo moon landing in World War two and, you know, World and One And we're gonna have to solve this and pass the baton to our kids who are then gonna have to pass the baton to our grandchildren. And the ability to feel purpose and connection and meaning and be able to make generational wealth is a really interesting place to be spending our time.

So I just encourage everyone to get involved. That's a wonderful, wonderful way to end. And what I like about it is that it's it's coming from a place of hope as opposed to a place from fear. Because look, at the end of the day, we can talk about the end of the world coming, and we know on our own lives, we are not here forever. But I'd love to see more discussion focusing on what we can do, what we can do to bring us together, and appeal to our better angels.

And using this technology to create jobs and a better environment and better world because we can do it as opposed to telling everybody the world's gonna come to an end. At the end of the day, yeah, there are certainly downsides to what's going on right now, but that just gets people angry and afraid if you can appeal to their better angels and say, look, there's a win win here. Right? We can bring people on and create good jobs and make the environment a better place at the same time. It's great to be with you, Jim.

Thanks for having me, man. It's been a great discussion. Okay. Have a wonderful, wonderful day. You too.

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