We're going to do something a little bit different. A couple of weeks ago, we did the interrogation of Colonel Russell Williams. And we were so taken by the interrogator, he did such a great job. We were flabbergasted. We decided we want to talk to him. So we sort of put the word out, we want to get a hold of him. And Greg got a hold of him on LinkedIn. And they talked back and forth. And now he's going to be our guest this week. So we're going to get to talk to him. Jim Smith, Master Interrogator. The Canadians in the Blazers. Yeah, what is it? Yeah, what is it? What is it with at least we don't wear ties anymore? At least we've given that up. I just took my tie off. I thought, oh, exactly. There you go. So, Jim, tell us about what do you think about all this? Getting you have geeks like us getting a hold of you. Go tell us about you. We know how does that be? Is it been pretty weird being internet famous from doing this? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's been it's been interesting. I mean, it's opened up a lot of opportunities in terms of law enforcement training. We've been we've been all over the world talking about not just this case, but interview strategies in general. So, you know, even with even with all the COVID issues, we're still working with the European Union right now with their policing mission in the Ukraine. So we're teaching Ukraine officers over Skype, so which is interesting. I mean, you got all the translation issues. But but yeah, it's it's been a little bit weird. But I mean, this this case happened 10 years ago. So gradually you kind of get used to it. So yeah. Yeah. So, Jim, what I'd like to know is your background. How did you get to there? What training? And, you know, we all get here from different ways and we'd love to hear your story. OK, so I started as a police officer back in 1989.  So I think that's really where I wanted to focus on honing my interview skills, because when you think about a case like that, a lot of them are, you know, the child comes forward to a teacher or somebody they know and they talk about something that happened to them could be months or years ago. So really what we're left with is we have a child telling us something happened to them and we have no other evidence other than their statement. So it became very critical in our view and our unit's view to focus on giving that interview of the suspect our best effort, obviously, and making sure that we conduct the interview in a way that it's going to be admissible. And hopefully we get the guy to tell us the truth so we can avoid this kid to happen to be in court. Testifying. So as a unit, we're really focused on our interview skills that way. And then after that, I developed an interest in the whole behavioral aspect of interviewing. And I ended up going into a behavioral sciences section within our organization. So we were closely with the FBI and a number of state police agencies. And I went through a certification process and then became a criminal profiler. And 2006, I completed our forensic polygraph examiner's course at the Canadian Police College in Ottawa. And so I kind of took those two skill sets and put them together and then focused on high-end, high-stakes interviews for lack of a better term, travel back and forth across the country, assisting mostly violent crime investigations with difficult interviews. And that's what I spent most of my time doing. And in the last 10 or so years, I've moved into more managing investigations and managing people. So right now, I look after a region, basically central Ontario, but 1,000 officers, criminal investigators and a number of different support teams. Well, yeah. Well, thanks for everything you're doing for starters. But yeah, all of that behavior stuff is what we all have a passion for. Chase, I know you're chomping at the bit to ask about specific training. Yeah. So, Jim, what was the specific methodology, I guess, for lack of a better term that you went through? Well, I got to tell you, my first real training, like a lot of police officers in my generation, was the re-technique. So that was my first real exposure back in the late 80s, early 90s, and then going on along those lines. And I'm sure you're all familiar with the re-technique. It's probably the most well-known interview technique out there. But we've certainly developed over the years. You look at when that technique was created and built, 70s, 80s, when really that technique was only really known and talked to law enforcement. So, there was no real awareness out in the general public about what was going on with that technique. But now you look at 2021 and you can watch crime documentaries and listen to podcasts 24 hours a day. So there's a real awareness about what the police do and how they do it. And so people are a lot more sophisticated now, I think, in terms of what to expect from a police interview. So the example I always use is, my first course that I took, they taught me, if somebody was making denials, I should put my hand up, almost right into their face, and that'll stop the denials. But you quickly learn that it doesn't just stop the denials, it stops the whole conversation. And the whole point of the interview is to keep people talking. Whether they're telling us the truth or not is often besides the point. We want that information flow and that conversation to happen. So there's certainly a lot of things that I learned 20, 25 years ago that I would never teach officers today. The reality is, in Canada, I think it's the same as in states, if we're going to interview somebody that we suspect of a crime, it has to be on video. There's no real excuse anymore for us going to a judge and saying, hey, I talked to this guy about something and he confessed. And well, where's the video? Well, he just told me off video. It doesn't fly anymore in Canada. And I don't think it flies in a lot of places anymore. So everything we do now is on video and available to be scrutinized and picked over by juries and judges and defense lawyers. So we're really focused on training officers to conduct an interview in the fairest way possible so that anybody watching can say, that officer was doing a fair job and giving the person a fair opportunity to have their say versus trying to control them and trying to control the interview with some of the techniques that we may have been taught 20 years ago. Yeah, I remember that hand technique. It was hand up and say, John, I know that's really important to you. And I promise we're going to get to that. But before we do, I'm going to keep going. It destroys your board. This is all your opportunities. And that does work. It does work with certain people and with certain officers. But sometimes what happens is you, you know, an officer takes the course and they just go in and they use the technique in a different way they were trained. And now that's an important statement that gets played in court and and then the technique gets attacked, right? I'm sure it's been attacked. It's like it has in Canada. So for sure. Yeah, big time. Scott, what is the way that Scott, what's the way that you do the denial handling? What I just always go, come on, man, hang on. I do sometimes when I say hang on, but it's more of a wave away than a stop, you know, not this, it's more of a wave than, you know, hang on, man, and then go for you can't see what hang on and then go from there. Yeah, I don't get stand, right? Yeah. Yeah, I never got to the I never did the whole stop thing. But that's the way they I don't think they're still doing it that way now, though. I think they've they've changed at this point. I believe I could be wrong because it just doesn't make any sense that I haven't been there in a while. But I've still got all the old books where they do say to do that. But I'm sure maybe they've changed that by now. I would assume, you know, yeah, I think they have refined things a bit too. So it's, but there's, you know, there's different methods out there. I mean, this this interview is a perfect example when this was in the media, you know, after his guilty plea, there was a lot of different articles and people contacting us because I'm sure you're familiar with you heard about the peace method. It's very popular in Britain, actually, it kind of started there and it's been brought to Canada and a lot of places in Europe. But it's it's it sort of bills itself as the anti read technique. But when when the Williams interview was in the media, we were reading articles that said, this is a perfect example of the peace method. And then a similar article would say, this is a perfect example to read technique. And I'm sure we all know those of us have been doing this for a long time. Is it, you know, we never walk into a room saying, okay, today I'm going to use this technique, because really exactly your direction where you're going to go is dictated by what that person is doing in the room. Yeah, it's like a surgeon. You never know what you're going to find once you once you get down in there. Now, I would say the intelligence because in intelligence interrogation, often we use something called source directed interview, which means you have no idea where you're going. You listen to what they say, you pick up on their source leads, and you follow it. And I watched you do that with him very effectively here, whether you call it that or something else, you picked up on his and followed his words and used what I would call approaches from my sharp intelligence background and beautifully. So nice job on all that. Always look at the read technique. I always explain it like it's, it's like a muscle car. You can put whatever wheels you want on it.  You can keep it really calm. You can make it look real mousy, or you can make it really loud and put all that one of the Greg's in the car, really junk, you put on the top that sucks in air and makes it do everything, flames coming out the side. So that's that's why I see it. I like it because you can, you can use it anywhere. But as long as you use your, you don't just go, I personally don't just use a strict go right down the, you know, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, you know, because you change things change in there.  God, it was beautiful, man. You did such a great job with that. It's really, God, that was impressive.  Because that's what Greg used to do. And I expect he would have been more of the challenges we had. And I think, I think you guys might have been under the impression we had a whole background on him, but we didn't. The challenge was that we first became aware of him on the Thursday night. And that was one week after Jessica Lloyd went missing. And the evidence from that crime, we knew that Jessica had walked out of her house with the offender under her own power. So there was a, there was a real concern that she may be still alive somewhere. We knew probably she wasn't just from our experience with violent crime, but we were still treating it as a fairly exigent investigation because of that. So when we found out about him on the Thursday night, we were actually already engaged with military investigators because of his first homicide he committed a few months earlier with Marie-France Comal, who was a corporal on his base. So they were assisting us with that investigation. They were great people, good investigators, but our case manager who was managing all this, Chris Nicholas, I think made a good call because his concern was we can ask these guys to go find out about Colonel Williams. But we knew his rank was so high. We just didn't know what information that would trigger. We thought, this guy is so high up that if people start asking questions and gathering information for us, he's going to become aware that something's happening. So the decision was made, we're just not going to go there. We're just going to assume that, you know, because of his rank, he's had some training along those lines, but we we actually didn't have a detailed background on him at the time of this interview. So when you did a great job of, I say we know all, we know all means stop short. That's an intelligence interrogation approach where we allude to what we know based on the security clearance. And then he made the mistake of saying that out loud about security clearance. Now you can allude to that. I did a great job of that. And in all my years of teaching, I would say it takes a lot of smarts not to just say the wrong one more piece of information and go from we know all to we don't know. So that was beautiful to watch. And Mark, we're interior ganking on here and I'm sure you got a question for John. Yeah, so, you know, as you well know, there was a lot of rank around Williams, not only within the forces, but the fact that, you know, the Trenton base is the start of the highway of heroes, essentially. And that's where the Canadian forces start to celebrate, you know, the unfortunate soldiers coming back who have made it all the way home. Essentially. So there's huge cultural deference around that base and him especially. And so when you talk about difficult interviews, there must have been that difficulty of status, which he immediately plays at the start of that. Did anything really surprise you about what happened with him? Was it surprised because he goes from this high status to somebody, you know, shaking your hand at the end for helping him out of this mess by confessing? What surprised you along that route? Well, I mean, after the portions that you guys watched, obviously he confesses. And one of the things that he did was he still viewed himself as a very respectable person, a proud military person. So once he said, I did it, he was an open book. We probably interviewed him for more than 40 hours over the next couple of weeks and months about a variety of issues. And so he made that commitment to me that he would tell us everything. And even once, I think it was about two days later at the behest of his wife, he retained a very accomplished lawyer in Ottawa. And you can imagine the lawyers going to tell him, as they all do, keep your mouth shut, moving forward. And what he told the lawyer, we believe, or he inferred to be anyway, was that I'll take your advice because you're my lawyer, but I've also made a commitment to the police to cooperate. So he would consult his lawyer. His lawyer would obviously tell him, stop talking. But he would come and talk to us anyway, because he wanted to be that person who kept this commitment. So I found that interesting that even after getting some very strong legal counsel, he continued to speak with us because he wanted to make sure, one, he wanted to make sure that this was over with as soon as possible. He played guilty to all of his charges as soon as he could. And he wanted to protect the military and he wanted to protect his wife as much as he possibly could. So he still saw himself as a man of honour, even though he'd done these terrible things. So I'm curious about that, because what do you think it is about the character or mindset of somebody that goes from that high status right at the start to by the very end, shaking you by the hand and thanking you for being part of this process of admitting to these crimes. And then I guess having more responsibility towards talking to you than maybe even his own lawyer. I find it hard to square what's happening there. So give us some insight into that. Well, I mean, I think that issue was he believes he's somebody who keeps his promises, right? So he promised me he would keep talking to me. He promised his lawyer, he would consult with him before deciding whether to talk to us again. So in his mind, he's keeping his promise to his lawyer. His lawyer is telling him, don't do it. He's saying, I get what you're saying, but I have to keep the promise to the police. So that's kind of his mindset. He took the legal advice, but he continued to speak with us. And I think really a lot of it was obviously the media attention was huge. Every time an article came out or TV news covered something about the case, it was another embarrassment to him and it was another embarrassment to his wife in the military. And I think he was trying his best to just get it over with. I'm not sure how much you guys know about the evidence that was discovered after this interview, but it was very dammy evidence, photographs and videos.  And from that point on, he was just trying to get it over with and get it out of the media spotlight. I think you did a great and beautiful job of, yes, there's a camera right there and then never mentioning it again. I always am amused and amazed that you can have people feel like it's an intimate sitting and there's cameras and everything everywhere. Do you want to talk for a minute about that? Because I think that's a beautiful one. Yeah, I mean, we obviously let people know that things are being recorded, but then we leave it alone after that. And I found over the years, even when cameras are pretty good now, they're pretty small, but years ago that camera was front and center in the room, right? It was hard to avoid. We used to have ones that you would actually wheel in on those big carts, you know, like the TVs, even watching school kind of thing. So it's right there in the room. But I mean, you guys hit on some of the things that he was going through, like anybody in his situation would be going through. He's so focused on what do I do? How do I handle this next question? How do I manage and keep all my lies straight to convince this person I'm not worth looking at? That camera becomes, I think, within a couple of minutes. People just forget about it. They're just so focused on the person they're trying to convince. They're not responsible for this. So let me ask you this. In your folder, when you came in with your notebook and the folder, we're showing those pictures, what all is in the folder? Not much. Not much. Really? You stacked it? There was a pad of paper. I mean, it was designed to look stacked to make him think that we had a lot. It was a good investigation and we were definitely moving towards him with or without this interview. He would have been caught and convicted. This interview was just really part of it that sped things up a lot for us, obviously. But the investigators were all over this thing. And the forensics were, they were all coming. They just weren't there yet. So we definitely had a lot of information to play with. And as you guys know, on a big case like this, I'm the face on the camera, but there was, I believe, a half-dozen, six or seven really experienced investigators on the other side of that camera, two of them that do the same job I do, another criminal profiler at the lead investigators there. And they're running through ideas and coming up with themes. And so to me, that gives me a lot of confidence. You're not there on your own. You're not trying to come up with ideas on your own all the time. You can step out of the room and they've got 10 things that they want you to hit on. So you can go back in there knowing you have a good hour or two of material if you need it. So that's huge for me. Chase, now that we talked that Jim brought up themes as well, why don't you explain what a theme is for the panelists watching this? So a theme has some essential stuff in there. And I categorize it into four things. We minimize, rationalize, project, and socialize. And maybe as a fifth thing, emphasize the truth. So those are kind of the five key elements we have for most interrogations. It doesn't matter what system you're looking at. We wanted to minimize the seriousness of the crime, project the blame. And that's as an interrogator, especially Jim, it didn't happen in the Williams interrogation. But that's one of those things as an interrogator where you're talking to people who've done some really bad stuff. And you may have to temporarily blame the victim to get that person to agree with you or to get on that person's side and say, well, she shouldn't have been wearing that.  And it is nauseating, especially when you're first starting out as an interrogator to say things like that. And then we're projecting like you're not responsible for this. You have a moral compass problem or you weren't in your right state of mind. You had 35 beers or all that kind of stuff. Then we're socializing it and say, how are people going to see this? I think your friends are going to understand. Your family is going to see you as an honest person, whatever this person is looking for and emphasizing the truth. And we're developing that report, maintaining rapport and saying, my only job here is to figure out either A, why this happened or I need to get the reason that this instance occurred. So that's what a theme would be. But it's kind of a monologue. And in interrogation schools, you'll hear the theme described as a monologue. But in reality, there's interruptions all throughout a theme because somebody's jumping in, somebody's chopping in there, and there's more denials coming in. But a theme is basically a monologue with some interspersed dialogue. And if you build a story around that theme, the theme is basically a story with all those things put in there. So coming back, dialing back a little bit, what are you going to say, Greg? Yeah, I have a question for you, Jim.  We all have been there where you get to a point where you go down a wrong path and you're like, oh, I hope he didn't catch it. Did you have one of those or more than one of those in your interrogation with him? You know, I think we're all our own worst critics. You know, as a police officer, you generally what will happen is, you know, just I'm sure most people are aware of this, but you'll take an interview like this and then two years later, you're getting ready for the trial. And you're watching that same interview. And now you have two more years experience under your belt. And you're watching that. Oh, why did I say that? Why did I put it that way? I mean, I tell people when I teach, I think I make a mistake about every five minutes on average in an interview. And the things that I pick up on, but maybe other people wouldn't, but or an area I start to go towards, but I realize it's premature or it's just not clicking the way I wanted it to. So you have to back off and divert to something else. But yeah, certainly with with him, you know, we had to be very careful because we didn't we didn't know a lot. We knew he had some kind of connection to all four of the victims that we were primarily concerned with. We knew he had the right make and model of tires on his truck, but thousands of people had those make and model of tires on his truck. So I was when I walked in the room with him, I was probably 50 50 on whether he was our guy or not. We've all been investigations like this, where, you know, things are looking really good. This looks like the right person, we're moving in the right direction. And then they say, Hey, last week, when that girl went missing, I was on the other side of the country. And here's all the evidence that proves it. And you're back to square one. So you just weren't sure you're 50 50 going in. Yeah. And I think maybe that calm me down a little bit, because you're thinking, you know, it's, it's one thing when they say, okay, this is definitely the guy and you got to get him to tell us that a lot of pressure, right? But when you're starting that sort of exploratory interview, let's just find out what he has to say.  But certainly when he started to make comments, you know, Jessica went missing the Thursday night previous. And he says to me, you know, about 20 minutes in, I think that that's Friday, the next day, he's at home with a stomach flu. So he's got no alibi. So things like that are starting to build where you're realizing, okay, this guy's not giving us anything to clear him right now. And most of what he's saying is starting to build towards us believing he's, he's probably the person responsible. So, so when did, when did it hit you? When did you say, okay, this is it. I got him. I got your ask. Okay. Oh, when I knew we had the right guy. Yeah. Where in the interview was that? Oh, I'd say probably the most glaring part was when we put the two, the footwear comparison in front of him. And when I said your boots went to the back of her house. And here's a girl in the military who I've now basically said, I believe you abducted a girl. If he was innocent, he should have been jumping out of his chair saying, how dare you accuse me of this? I came in to help you find this girl. And this is what you're, this is what you're saying to me. You know, he has that level of life experience and confidence that he'd be comfortable saying that to me. You know, some people, when they're talking to a detective, they may not have that level of confidence or self-esteem, but he certainly did. And for him to just look at that and say nothing. So those were real prints, Jim? Yep. Yep. He walked, he walked through some snow. It was February, so he walked through some snow. Now, when I say to him, these are identical, I think most people would look at those two because we basically just took the shoe off his foot maybe 15 minutes before that confrontation and, you know, put it on a photocopier. We didn't have anything more sophisticated than that available to us at the moment. And we just eyeballed it ourselves. But, but he knew he was, he knew those were the boots. And, you know, it's one of those things when you think about how people think, I had called him at two o'clock in the afternoon, he walks into the police station at three. He's got about a 25 minute drive from his house to the police station. So he had about 35 minutes once he hung up the phone to figure out what the heck he was going to do. And so his mind is racing. He's got to deal with this interview. He's got to convince me that I'm not, he's not worth looking at. And he just simply didn't think about the footwear he was putting on his feet. So in my world, I would call that giving him homework, right? You give him homework to work on on his way on the drive. Yeah. Yeah. No, he was spinning, right? And, you know, of course, he saw how he walked in the room, right? He's trying to be Mr. Helpful. I, you know, I just want to help the police find this girl because her disappearance was a very high profile. And he wants to set an example for all his troops that he's doing the right thing. And so, you know, that was an advantage for us with him is that quite often people say, well, why did he even come in and talk to you in the first place? Well, he's a colonel of a base. He's commanding 3000 people. And when the police ask him to help, he's got to set an example and say, yeah, we should be helping in this case.  It's a lot easier for them to say, talk to my lawyer. Yeah. But he's got to look like that upstanding citizen who just wants to help, right? So, if he's being Mr. Helpful, who are you being generally in an interview? Oh, it depends on who I'm sitting across from. For him, I think, you know, it was helpful for us. I think you saw with the interview is I'm one of, and I didn't really say how many other people, but I wanted him to believe that I'm just following up on a task. He's on my list of things to do, and I'm giving him a call because his names come on my list. And if he could meet up with me, I got some questions for him. And, you know, he basically said, sure, I'll do whatever I can to help. And so, yeah, I certainly generally don't put myself out there as the major decision maker or the lead investigator. I'm just somebody who's collecting information. And I'm going to pass information on to the decision makers, and they're going to come back and send me back to deliver the message they want me to deliver. So you're kind of a light bureaucrat of some sort, just collecting a little bit of info. Nobody particularly important, essentially. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I think that, you know, it sets people at ease, like even an innocent person. I find they're more comfortable believing that they're just speaking to a peripheral investigator on a case versus a lead investigator, because, you know, we do deal with innocent people quite often, and we're trying to set everybody at ease, not just Russell Williams, because we think he's responsible, but, you know, we need the innocent people to talk to us too, because quite often that they're willing to talk to us, even if their lawyers told them not to, the information they give us allows us to clear them and move on to somebody else. But you say this is situation dependent. So if you're not being kind of the pleasant bureaucrat who's just kind of getting through the day, what are the other situations you end up in that you maybe have to take a different role, and what would that role look like? Well, there's some videos out there, maybe a little bit more assertive. And they're dictated by the attitude of the person we're dealing with, right, and the level of crime we're dealing with. I think it was Scott was talking on the show that I watched there about the guys who want to grab that pad of paper and just get rid of it, because they just hate the fact that it's there. So we've been in those situations too. I've been one that I use for training where it's actually a laptop computer, where I'm playing an interview of a witness who's pointed the finger at a gang member for a murder, and he doesn't want to listen to it. So he just throws a computer off the desk, and I put it back on the desk, and it keeps playing. He throws it off the desk again. I put it back on the desk, the screen breaks, but you can still hear the voice. And it's sort of his last sort of tantrum to try and get me to just give up and leave. And it's a good trading radio for us, because it shows investigators that if you can work through that seemingly strong wall that this person's putting up, this particular guy, he has that tantrum. But he realizes that once he realizes that I'm not going anywhere, he puts his head down on the table, and 20, 25 minutes later, he's starting to tell the story and pinning on somebody else, which is what we want to do, keep talking.   And Cesar Milan had a quote, which I think is one of the best ever. He said, humans are the only creatures on earth that will follow an unstable leader, which really shows how powerful stability is, especially environments like that. And I have a quick assigned question for you, Jim, that I think our subscribers, which we refer to as panelists. So for the panelists watching this, have you had an unusual encounter where somebody recognized you from the internet, like out in public or something?  Yeah, a few of them. I'm a pretty non-descript looking guy. So I usually get away with not being recognized. But usually it's police officers that were recognized me because they've seen the videos, they've seen the training. But yeah, I can't think of one where just somebody's come up to me out of nowhere. But you know, I've got two young sons, well, they're not young anymore, they're in their 20s. And they both thought a lot of world traveling. And one guy talked about being in a bar in Chile and telling him from Canada. And the guy starts talking about watching the video of Russell Williams. And so that was kind of cool for him. He's going, well, that was my dad on that video. Of course, the guy didn't believe him. Have you ever walked into an interview room and the person there has gone, hang on, it's you. All right. I did it. I'll cut to the chase. Has that ever happened? You know, I don't think it's ever been that clean. But certainly the year or two after this, all the media hype around this case, I had other investigators say, well, you can talk to me or you can talk to the guy that interviewed Russell Williams. And it had a positive effect. It worked the way I wanted it to work. So yeah. Darth Vader suit. Jim, how do you think being an interrogator has helped you the most with your kids, like raising kids as they were growing up? Oh, man, I've always said that they're the only two that can probably get away with line to be in. I can't figure it out. But you know, they're good guys. And they've been, they were really exposed to all of this. You know, when they were only 12, 13 years old, this was all happening and out in the media.  So it certainly impacted them. And they've always kind of played me about maybe they would have had more friends come over to the house if I wasn't their dad. You're sort of the Justin Bieber of interrogation. That's what it looks like. Millions of views, fans. Both the Canadian. What I always find funny is that people think that you're going to be hard. It's going to be hard. Like you said, you can scream and yell and do all that. And then when you're not at home, especially when you meet new people, they're always afraid you're going to be doing this to them. How do you deal with that? Because I'm sure especially with your level of popularness at this point or renown that anybody you meet is going to be going, that's that guy. How are you doing? My friends are my friends, right? I mean, my neighbors. And so we joke a lot about it, right? If only people really knew what you were really like, because, you know, they talk to people and they say that they know me or they're my neighbor and what they know who I really am. And so it hasn't really affected my personal life that much. But yeah, it is a bit odd as a police officer to have your work out there in the public realm like that. In Canada, anyway, this was one of the first cases where a judge approved the release of this type of evidence to the public realm. So, you know, there was obviously a lot of media interest and so these clips that you see on YouTube were the same clips that were played in the sentencing hearing. And as a result of it being played in open court, the judge ruled that they're now public property and they can be given to the media and put out there. So it wasn't something we even expected to happen, because it was one of the first cases where there was enough interest that it got released. So yeah, it was odd to go from somebody who you're just kind of doing your thing and working away like tens of thousands of other police officers in the country. And then all of a sudden you're all over the front page and on new shows and over and over again. So that's, it's been hard to get used to. So here's an opportunity for us, Jim, to get some feedback, because you know, we're able to take that footage. We're able to do our analysis of it, make a show out of it. But when you watched our analysis, was there anything there that you kind of went, hang on? What is that English guy talking about? Is nonsense? Is there anything that we really got wrong? You can pick on me, because I'm asking the question. We don't have any idea about it. What did we get wrong if anything there? Nothing really significant, guys. I mean, I know you're obviously looking at it and trying to surmise what's happening. I think you had a lot of things that were going on in his mind, his body language was bang on. I got to tell you though, my conduct in that room, I think a lot of it is subconscious. When you've been doing it so long, you don't say, okay, now I'm going to roll closer to him. I'm going to back up. You don't have those conscious thoughts. You're just sort of doing it because it just feels right at the time. And I got to tell you, like I was three o'clock in the afternoon on Super Bowl Sunday when this interview started, but I was exhausted when the interview started, because I'd been called on the Friday morning, even stopped on the Thursday night. Obviously, the alarm bells went off. The major case manager said, we got to look at this guy, but they had been already going for a whole week looking for Jessica. So they're already exhausted. Now they've got me there. Now we're working through all the issues about how do we best approach this? So three long days, and when you're looking for somebody who you're worried is maybe still alive somewhere, even when you put your head down for a few minutes, you're not doing anything close to getting meaningful sleep. So when I offered him that coffee at the beginning of the interview, I really needed that coffee. But yeah, I didn't see anything you guys said that really set me off as far as, oh, they're way off base there. And really, I mean, that's primarily why I decided to reach out to you because I thought that you guys are doing a good service and you obviously have a lot of skill and knowledge yourselves. And I thought it'd be great to have a conversation with you. So I just want to follow up on that because it's interesting for me. You're saying it's hard to get sleep when you've got that pressure of there's somebody out there that you could still help discover. Just give me some insight into that because again, we're just analyzing a film that's over. You're living that moment. What is that kind of pressure like? And what does it do to you in the room? What are you having to handle in the room knowing that there's that pressure out there? Well, I guess you kind of get used to that kind of pressure. I mean, that's really what my job was at the time. I was almost 10 years into doing this kind of work. So most of the time when I'm going into a room, it's because I'm dealing with somebody who they just haven't been successful with yet. I mean, in this case, it was our first interview with him. They knew right off the bat that this is going to be a challenging interview. But quite often I'm called into interview people or my colleagues are called into people that have been interviewed two or three times already. And they just haven't gotten anywhere. And they don't have any other significant evidence to help them move their investigation forward. So there's quite often a lot of pressure on us to come through with something meaningful out of the interview. It doesn't always have to be a confession. But at least let's get this person talking so they can give us some information that we can go out and investigate and decide if it's true or not. So yeah, there's pressure there. But go back to what I said a couple of minutes ago, that pressure is really relieved by the fact that I know I have two, three, four, sometimes people that are just as highly trained as I am out there to come in and take the reins if I run out of things to say. And that happens quite often. There's times where I went from beginning to end with this guy. But there's times where I'm a few hours in and whatever's happening, the relationship's not building the way we think it should. We're just not making the headway we think we should.  When you as you're going through there, I said, this guy looks like an accountant. He looks like he's getting ready to hear taxes. You go, that did you or did that? I didn't mean to point you out of that as a respectful thing because you went in and it was like, you did not look aggressive at all with this guy.  He can, you know, he kills people for a hobby. So it's one of those things where you, or I hope you weren't offended by that because I didn't mean that to be mean. I mean, no, no, no, no, no, not at all. I mean, that's the goal, right? To keep him in the room. Yeah, exactly. Our job. I love the fact you went in with an approach, meaning in your mind how you're going to be in that whole demeanor and keeping that demeanor and, you know, giving him pressure. And I think I'd ask you to talk a little bit about when you run out of things to say to him, where did you hit? Because we could see a couple of times where you were just like, man, this guy needs, we could tell you right on the edge and you could feel it. What were those cues for you to tell you? I need just a little more pressure. Well, I mean, the, obviously, I think for all of us, we can understand how difficult it is to let those silences happen, right? You know, we, when we hire police officers, we hire people that we expect to do a number of different things. You know, one of the things we expect to do is to run into dangerous situations that everybody else is running away from. So you're looking for that type of personality in somebody. And when you, I'm a good example of it. It took me a long time to not feel those awkward silences when they happen. But again, when they're happening, you know, I'm trying to think of the next thing to say to him that's going to cause him to consider, you know, talking further to me. But I'm also not wanting to say the wrong thing. And I don't want to interrupt what his thought process is. And so it's tough for, you know, I think for most police officers to allow those silences to happen and to give him the time to think and mull over what his next step is or what he should be doing is difficult. So, yeah, there is definitely times during those silences where I'm like, should I say this thing now that I want to say, or should I just let it go a little bit longer? So it's their judgment calls, right? You're trying to figure out, you know, what's actually resonating with him.  So he just laid them out. These are the things that I'm worried about. And all I had to do was try and figure out how to help him mitigate those concerns and let him know that we were going to work with him on those issues. And I think- I like that you said that. I like that you said, what are we going to do, Russ? Yeah. And as a team, from a team perspective, I think that really maybe, I think that was one of the things that might have helped him start moving. I think so, yeah. Letting him know that I'm there to get him through this. And, you know, as much as we want to make sure he's convicted and held responsible for the horrible things he did, that is part of our role is to help him work through that process of telling us what happened. So, yeah, it is. You know, I would never want to think that I'm part of a team with Russell Williams. But when you're in those interviews, you are working together to try and get that information out there as succinctly as you can. Was there any point at all you thought this guy's a psychopath? How did you approach that with him from a person, from his personality type, from that perspective going in? Did you think he was a psychopath? Did you think he was just a malignant narcissist? Did you think he, what did you think when you were going in there? What was on your mind? We thought he probably wasn't a full-blown psychopath. He definitely has psychopathic traits to do what he did. So, we knew he had a side to him that wasn't purely selfish and psychopathic, that there was other issues going on there. And that's why I think the approach where you see on the video talking to him about, you don't want to be the next Bernardo. And I think Mark explained to everybody who pulled Bernardo was to Canada. Everybody knows who he is.  And that's what I wanted to make him aware of. I wasn't seeing him that way. We had an awareness that as bad as what he had done was, we knew he could have done worse. And he had opportunities to do more horrible things that he chose not to. So, I think letting him know that we had that awareness kind of continued to build that rapport that we were giving him a fair, you know, a fair shake that we weren't trying to make him even worse than he was. Excellent. Who's next? Well, I'm kind of interested in where you see yourself going now because, you know, here you are with us. We're not looking for a fifth member right now. But, you know, who knows? Who knows in the future? We'll let you know. This isn't an interview of any sort, but we'll let you know.  I don't know when you plan on retiring and what your world is at the moment, but where do you see yourself going? I'm just fascinated with that. Well, I do plan on retiring, actually. I'm probably going to retire in the fall. But I love teaching. I mean, the days that go fastest for me, you know, I do a lot of teaching to police officers now. And when you talk to police officers about what they want to learn more about, it's how do I communicate with people? How do I get that conversation going so I can get information to find out what happened, no matter what it is. It could be a shoplifting, a stolen car, whatever they're looking at. So, when we sit in a classroom and talk to police officers about the things we're talking about today, they can't get enough. And we end those days and they're saying, when can we come back and do this again? Because it's their bread and butter. That's what they do every day, trying to get people to talk to them and give them reliable, truthful information. So, it's pretty gratifying. So, that's an amazing thing for Canada. And I guess you'll travel elsewhere as well.  What would be your number one thing for getting somebody to talk to you? Just, you know, for the general watcher out there, the panelist out there, what's the number one thing for getting somebody to talk? Just respect. I mean, and showing genuine respect, right? No matter what you want them to talk to you about, everybody wants to be respected, right? And when it comes to my line of work, when you're dealing with people, you know, whether it's a victim, a witness, a suspect, you know, the suspects know, they've watched, you know, all the TV shows out there. They know what a stereotypical police interrogation looks like. So, you know, I've got tons of examples where people are just so surprised about how the interview actually went. You know, we talk about a case where, you know, it sort of died in the wall, hardcore street gang member that we believe was involved in a homicide and wasn't a coffee that time. It was, he was hungry. So, we got him a big Mac from McDonald's. And, you know, that's how we started off the conversation. And that was a very difficult interview. It went on for a long, long time, much different than Russell Williams.  And I always like to debrief him right after, you know, once they've got it off their chest and they've told us the truth, that I like to go into that conversation.  What about our interaction here? Did you decide to talk to us? And, you know, that guy, when I asked him that question, he said, nobody's ever bought me a big Mac before. And he's been interviewed by the police. Beautiful.  And, you know, even when we're dealing with people that have committed crimes like Williams has, at the time we're dealing with them, they're not convicted yet.  I mean, obviously, we're going to arrest them and he's not going to be free anymore. But, you know, we try and portray that as much as we can. That's funny. It's rather like you get a very high net promoter score, which is when somebody says, would you recommend me to a friend? It's like, would you, would you recommend Jim Smith to other perpetrators that you know, they're like, yeah, 10 out of 10.  It's a great experience. Everybody should have it. Greg, is there a book in your future? Because I'd love to have one on my shelf back there. Me too. I don't know. I don't know. I, you know, I think one of the things we talk about now is that, you know, when you look at technology that people have access to now that they can communicate with, I mean, back when I started in policing, you know, we didn't even have cell phones, right?  And now we're seeing more and more people in society in general that if they want to have words with somebody, if they're upset with somebody, they'll text them, you know, they'll email them. They'll, they'll, they'll choose that, that less personal conversation. So when we hire them as police officers, they may not have that life experience that allows them to be comfortable having those face to face difficult conversations. So we're really putting an emphasis on, you know, seeing those people and realizing that they may not have that life skill to the level that, you know, somebody their age may have had 20 years ago. You know, you add COVID into the mix. And just the fact that everybody's staying apart from each other, right?  And so we're, we're focusing on those issues to try and see how we can overcome that, because there's really no way you can interrogate somebody, you know, by a text message, you have to sit down with them face to face. And if they're not used to doing that, it can be challenging. Yeah. And Jim, I will tell you that it's not just police work. It's corporate America. It's you name it. It's the same problem because altercation is not a comfortable space for people that capability. So I think there's certainly room for a book in that today.  And some of them have, have never even been face to face with anybody yet that come straight from, you know, straight into their first job and no experience of being in the same location as somebody on in a professional manner. So I can, I can totally see what the force is up against there in terms of getting in the right material, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. And we're hiring a lot of smart people. They have all those other skills, but they just haven't had that exposure to, you know, and then as soon as they're a police officer, that's, that's, like I said, that's their majority of their time is speaking to people face to face and often difficult circumstances, right? It's, and they're, they're right into the fire. So Jason's disappeared somewhere. I'm not sure. Not sure. He'll be knocking on the door to try and come back in. But listen, seriously, thanks for being here with us. We really do appreciate man. We were so excited. We could hardly stand it. And we're, and so we really hope you'll come back and talk to us again. Well, I really had a great time guys. Appreciate it. Thank you. Do you think you'd want to be, you think you would be a guest panelist on here with us one time and do what we do with us? Oh yeah. That'd be good. Well, that's your call. I guess it would depend on what we're talking about. And yeah, I'm open to that for sure. You could pick what we talked about if you wanted to. You know, if it came down to it, well, well, whatever it is, we'll do it. I always say we cover, we cover murderers, politicians and other liars. So All right. Well, sounds good. Yeah. Well, we'll stay in touch for sure. Let me know what you're working on and maybe we can do something again. Okay. Thanks so much, man. Wonderful. All right guys. You guys take care. Thanks Jim.


Well, good morning. Energy's role in improving the state of the world, I can't think of a more inspiring topic to start today's sessions with. And I can't think of a more inspiring person to have speaking on this topic than Cheryl Martin. With a PhD in organic chemistry from MIT, Cheryl's technical credentials are impeccable. But what I find especially noteworthy is the range of experience that she brings to her current role as the managing is part of the managing, a member of the managing board at the World Economic Forum, where she's responsible for the Global Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Cheryl's experience includes a career at Roman Haas, serving as executive residence with the VC firm, Kleiner Perkins Clawfield & Byers, in various roles at startups, including CEO. I first met Cheryl when she was deputy director for commercialization at the Advanced Projects Research Agency, or RPE. Cheryl developed RPE's technology to market program before serving as the agency's acting director. If anyone here isn't familiar with the World Economic Forum, they have a conference every year too in Davos, Switzerland, where they convene inspiring individuals with a point of view to share and the drive and influence to make positive change. People like Cheryl Martin. So thank you and please join me in welcoming Dr. Cheryl Martin. Good morning. Can you hear me? I'm not good with podiums, so I think I'm just going to walk around a bit. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. I think the last time that I was at this conference was when I was still at ARPA-E, and we chatted a bit about what the progress was and what was the state of energy in the US on the innovation front. And so when I was asked to come in and address the group today on energy at a more global scale, I thought this would be kind of a fitting roundabout for this, because I think it's like anything. When you sit in the midst of something, you tend to take on the view from where you sit. It's your point of view. And I think there's a very privileged point of view here in Silicon Valley and in California and in the US, despite everything that we worry about, about what's possible in energy and the traction we're making in energy. And so what I'd like to do today is help you understand what are we seeing as we look at energy globally? And what do I think are some of the really important, hopeful pieces of movement that should really be the call to action? And so I'm going to walk through, wait a minute, I'm failing slides 101 already. Yeah, it's on. There we go. So driving, I want to talk about driving invention to impact, talk about the forum and what we actually do to think about dealing with very complex issues from a system and platform point of view, talk about the work that we've looked at on shaping the future of energy, and then talk a bit about a call to action. Because I can't help it when I get to think about energy that you've probably seen these slides when I gave any talk on at RPE is that ideas to impact in the world is a very low yield process. I think we all know that. And when we looked at it from an RPE perspective, we thought about it from three perspectives. We already knew about the technical risk, but often things fail because there's insufficient value, so market risk. Do you actually have a market that's available to you? It could be the policy risk that's affecting that market. Do you have the right team around you? Not just in the team that you've hired, but the advisors, you're bored if you actually have a company, the ecosystem, do you have the right network? Or it could simply be because of poor implementation. And so at RPE, when we talked about this, we said, well, if you take this and bring it all back to the beginning and have a conversation right from the beginning that I have an idea that I believe in, I've convinced RPE that they should fund my idea and we're gonna ask you up front before we hand you that check for $2 million for three years that you really want, what happens at month 37? What happens when the money is gone? Because we really wanna talk about the value, the team, and the implementation from the beginning. And that whole piece about talking about all these things on an individual project or an individual energy effort, like where we would put multiple project teams together, is about starting to create an ecosystem that can accelerate the impact in the market. And I think it was really successful. The most recent RPE statistics, I think, are $1.6 billion in grants awarded to date and about $2.8 billion in follow-on funding that's been publicly announced. And so if you think about it from a leveraged perspective, I have to say that that actually, I think, really does work. And there was a recent paper published looking at the work of RPE saying, what's the balance of patents and publications? And there's statistical difference in that compared to other parts of the energy funding ecosystem to say that this is working, this conversation up front and this focus both on market and knowledge is really working to accelerate. And so that's my point of view as I decided to go to the World Economic Forum was that this was super important, getting these conversations, getting this ecosystem set up around things that while they could still fail, we're setting them up to be best positioned to go. And that required a lot of conversations that don't normally happen. And in my mind, also have to be escalated up to the global scale. Like we'd often walk in to talk to project teams or I'd discover that they wrote a grant together but they'd actually never spoken. I'd be like, oh, well, how are you guys gonna set this up? What kind of metals are you using? And they would say whatever they say. And other members of their team would be like, you can't use that. I'm like, oh, I'm glad we're having this conversation today and not six months into this grant. So this whole idea of what it means to communicate with your team and whatever that extended team looks like so that you can move as fast as possible is hugely important, right? And so again, that's my perspective where I come from and I can't help but share that because I still think it's really relevant for all the work that you're doing and I'll come back to that at the end. But as I went to the World Economic Forum, I went there because I believed we had lost the ability in the world to have coherent discourse about things that matter when we didn't already have the same point of view or the same language or the same view of the outcome. And so I went there because the forum is known, a 48-year-old agency for actually brokering public-private cooperation. It was the model that our founder, Klaus Schwab, wrote about when he first founded the forum that in order to form complex problems, their multi-stakeholder discussions are essential. And as the forum has done its work over the years, we've touched on things from geopolitics to energy, to mobility, to humanitarian systems. It's always been about the multi-stakeholder conversation. And so this year in Davos, we had 70 heads of state together with about 1,500 CEOs from around the world in this conversation on what's going on in the world because they too actually wanna know and think about how they can take action. And I've been super excited to see the level of commitment of the private sector stepping up when there's so much political uncertainty in the world. And so the forum though has actually shifted just from highlighting issues to a new model of platform and systems thinking, really taking the world and saying, okay, what are the conversations we wanna have and how do we understand them in a systemic way? So we have 14 systems, future of health, the future of mobility, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of energy. And we bring together government, public and private sector players in order to have them sit down and talk about, well, what is true about this system? What are the bounds of what we wanna talk about and how do we map it? And then understand what are the acupuncture points? If we want it to be different in the future, where are the points that have to be changed? If we wanna have healthy, robust lives for 10 billion people in 2050, what has to be different about the healthcare system? What has to be different about epidemics? What has to be different about maternal healthcare? We've done the same thing as we go to all those other systems. And then really looked at, once you've identified the places that there needs to be radical change, who needs to come together in order to actually catalyze action and then what should be measured in order to know if we're going in the right direction? And so we've done that in many, many areas. And if you think about, okay, one of the first things, well, what are you measuring? What is impact? Currently, this clicker is designed for someone who stands at the podium. We define impact in three different ways. You could say maybe the first two are cheating, but I think that you need all three in order to get to the last one. You actually have to be able to define the problem. So build awareness and cooperation. You actually have to have people agree there is a problem. And so oftentimes we'll convene people just to actually get some agreement. So that was true on plastic in the oceans. We started that conversation several years ago when it was like, well, I don't know, is there data? Whose problem is it? Are we part of the problem or are we the solution? But we actually got a lot of coalescence in this. I think it has been a part of the dialogue that's become much more of a global movement in this. Then really getting into, once you've agreed there's a problem, well, what are the mindsets and agendas to have to solve it? So getting into agreeing on the criticality of acupuncture points. Is it global work that needs to be done? Is it frameworks that need to be translated locally? Is it a problem among stakeholder groups in parts of the world? And so how and why are we actually going to get the right people together? And so a lot of those outcomes may be meetings, reports, commitments of action, but then you really get into it when they drive collective action. And that's when the forum platform becomes real. The forum is 600 people spread around the globe. We can only do so much ourselves. We are not on the ground organization, so we need to act through others. It works super well when people see that there is a call to action and they move it forward. And so in again, adjacencies to the energy space on water, there's a global water initiative that has moved off the forum platform to be part of the UN water initiative today, a multi-stakeholder coalition looking at the water issues of the world. We have a coalition for epidemic preparedness where it formed two years ago, $700 million as a starting fund as a nonprofit to actually deal with the market failure with vaccines. So we're actually funding research to get the five most likely vaccines for the most likely epidemics ready. And those things take place totally separate than the forum. So you get this collective action going on. We saw it happen as the US was going to pull out of the climate agreement. All those signatures and letters that came out in the national newspapers were by the CEO Climate Action Coalition. It's a CEO-led group of CEOs committed to climate action. And they on themselves mobilized and acted really quickly to get all of that out in the news and again to mobilize across the world. And so these are the types of things we look at and follow across all the arrows that the forum works. And so if we step to energy now, I knew you were thinking, when's she ever going to get to energy? But I had to wait till you're all like, OK, pass your coffee, pass all of this, not talking about something you already know about. So our platform for public-private collaboration and energy, we have 25 stewards. They're about half and half public sector, private sector. Everybody from the CEOs of ABB and Hitachi, NL, NE, Floor, a number of other companies, not all energy companies, and a number of ministers and NGOs from around the world, from Latin America. We've got some from Africa, from Europe. Remember the EU sits on this. And they actually help guide us in what are the most important issues. And then guide the work and the efforts and the outreach. And we've taken this across five different areas most recently. And we looked at it from a spectrum of the energy transition, so where are you going? And how are you going to get there? And it always ends with humans. Much of what the forum is like, how do you keep things human-centered? It's about, ultimately, not about the governments, not about the companies. It really is about the people that in fact. As we think about that, we looked at, well, where could this group have the most impact? And it really is in, what are the energy transition imperatives? And where and how are the policy and market drivers going to play? And so this broad effort that we put together, fostering the effective energy transition, has actually resulted in an index that we're publishing annually now, showing by country, where are they in terms of energy effectiveness today, energy mix, infrastructure, economic ability to build infrastructure? And where are they prepared to go in the future? So it's both a current state and a forward look on all the countries. And it's the basis for a lot of dialogue with countries about what has to happen and how they may dig into other efforts that we have going on. And then we've taken these other four initiatives, which cover both the imperative as well as policy. And I'll talk about each of those in a minute. Let me start with one that I think perhaps doesn't get enough credit for what they're doing. Our work with the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative has gone on for a while. It was founded on the forum platform in 2014. It was coming together of the CEOs of the oil and gas industry to acknowledge that they are a huge part of the energy transition. And again, 81% of the energy today in the world is produced by fossil fuels. That is exactly the same number 30 years ago. So despite all that we see and all the movement and percentages of growth and all those things, which are all awesome, it's still 81% of the mix. And I don't see many forecasts that have it be any different of oil and gas in the mix, no matter what their slope is as it goes down and renewables grow. And so they have to be part of the discussion. And so they proactively have come together. They meet several times a year at the CEO level about what is it they need to be doing and how and why they need to act. And they have put up, it was announced a year and a half ago, Oil and Gas Climate Initiative fund. They actually have a billion-dollar commitment across the 10 of the major oil companies of the world to fund in four different areas, carbon captures and utilization storage, reducing transport emissions, methane reduction and energy efficiency. So they actually are based in London. They hired a woman who used to run one of GE Renewables businesses as their head and they are actively putting out and looking for things to fund in these spaces. And so if you have ideas in these spaces, there's not only fund, but there's the backup of these companies. And their view is that their CTOs sit as advisory group to this fund. And so that as ideas are coming in, you're starting to set up the ecosystem to help get the movement forward. And so if things can go to pilot scale and other pieces, they're willing to step in with other resources in order to move these things forward. And again, they're actively funding right now. And so we're super excited about these types of things because as you stand up efforts from industry around certain pieces of the innovation mix, you can get some real good leverage, partnering with governments, partnering with other like-minded agencies to accelerate innovation. One of the ones that I've been particularly interested in as part of the overall dialogue is also happening in the future of electricity. Again, this audience doesn't need any education in what's going on in energy, right? The decarbonization, the decentralization and the digitalization of the electric grid is happening, happening at varying degrees around the world. We started this work about three years ago in a different way. Again, we have the conversation about what happens like here in California, what happens in the United States. But when you start to go around the world, so we started by going to Juju Island in Korea where they're actually electrifying and creating a whole ecosystem of electric vehicles and microgrids to really drive the carbon footprint of that island down, worked with New York and what they've been doing with their Rev initiative, distributed energy and also in the UK and took a lot of the work and learnings and took it up to some archetypes and frameworks because one of the biggest problems we see in something as complex as the energy system is that we hear about somebody has done a test study, somebody has done a pilot, somebody has actually moved to policy but I don't know how to translate it into where I am. I have one policy but I really need five or I hear about that policy working and not working in different places. And so how do we translate energy policy into useful cases if I am the government? And so we started that work. We then partnered with our work on mobility where we had partnerships going on with Boston and a couple other cities on thinking about their mobility future and how was autonomous and shared gonna fit into this and you start to get to some really interesting use cases when you can balance the grid, go to shared mobility solutions on autonomous about total solutions for cities. And so we actually have published a number of pieces now around this multi-stakeholder framework of bringing together the government, the civil society and companies around these for infrastructure, customer, policy and business models. Again, if you're in the electricity side of energy today this is not new that this has to come together. The thing that I'm excited about is what's in the bottom box is after we started bringing this together as published frameworks and we had conversations with our stewards the energy minister from Columbia said, I wanna sit down and have multi-stakeholder workshops in Columbia that we can actually use these frameworks to change Columbia's energy system. And so over the past 18 months we've worked with him and his staff to actually bring together multi-stakeholder working groups around four areas that they prioritized around what business models would work for them on the electric grid based on where they were starting what technology developments could they act on so they've rolled out smart metering, they've rolled out demand response and actually put legislature through to enable these things to be market effective. They've been doing more to study electrification of their transport system, what would it mean? And also micro grids. And I mean, if you know Columbia at all it's got this big mountain range in the middle. So the whole idea of what are you gonna do to connect this is not only an access to energy question but it's actually fundamental about where and how does that country function and how does it actually be stay stable and generate the right employment and access to energy as it relates to accessing internet and funding growth models for their business. So we're super excited to see the traction and as that has come to bear there's a workshop in three weeks I think in Brazil in San Paulo that the energy minister there as well is driving the same sort of conversation. We're also having conversations with Argentina, India and Lithuania I believe, did I have them on the slide? Yes, Lithuania. And so again, places where the conversation wasn't happening because they didn't have a framework and a place to start the dialogue. And so again, we're not acting we're just actually bringing people together in order to help them have the right conversation. And sometimes the right conversations are among people who you'd think they talk all the time but they never speak. It's just they're always on the wrong side of things. Like it's the electric utility and their regulators never end up in the same room together except when they're having a discussion about and maybe discussion is the polite term about rates and those tensions. How do we actually get some common ground in a gray that we're really gonna have a closed door Chatham house rules conversation about what am I worried about? Am I worried about my business model? Am I worried about my employees? Am I worried about understanding enough technology? Am I worried about having the right workforce? Am I worried about if I'm the government figures? Well, what is it gonna mean if we don't have the right skilled workers to do this? So where and how do we actually share what really is in the way so that we can actually get on to figuring out how to move it forward? And so it becomes a really super important aspect of this that we have these conversations. So that's one aspect of key things that we're worried about in electricity. And then another one that I think is a different angle on the type of work that needs to be done is with looking at the global battery alliance. Again, I think we take it for granted. We talk about the need for batteries. We talk about cost curves. We're talking about what's happening with lithium ion. We talk about large-scale manufacturing. Rarely do we have the, and it's all good. It's, we're gonna have renewable energy. It's gonna flow through grids. It's gonna be in batteries. We're gonna fix the duct curve. We're gonna do all these things. We don't actually have the conversation about the issues with supply of the raw materials, some of the environmental issues, the whole circular economy problem. And so perhaps we should. And if we're really gonna have a truly sustainable system, we actually need to have this conversation. So how do you have it? Even for the largest members of this supply chain, it's a difficult conversation to start. Whether you're one of the automotive manufacturers or whether you're one of the big electronic suppliers, where do you start to have that conversation? You wanna say, well, I'd like to assemble the my supply chain. Well, it kinda, you get up to the battery guy, the guy who's making your battery and then it goes beyond them. It's the mining guys, it's the NGOs. It's the governments in all these countries. And so over the past year and a half, we actually have stood up a global battery alliance. It's 30 companies and a number of NGOs and countries coming together to say that we actually have to grapple with these big challenges in batteries to really be sustainable. And so the whole question about raw materials and batteries has become one of the primary areas. What does a circular economy for batteries look like? And how do we bring innovation in along the supply chain? And again, not saying that there's not innovation happening, but we're not actually looking at it in a holistic way. And so to bring this together, they've actually got a work plan that is driven to some extent as they try to tie it back to the sustainable development goals. So again, from a global government perspective, which problems are we trying to solve? And actually, if you look at it, some really important things are starting to happen. So in the cobalt supply, most of the cobalt comes from the Congo and a lot of issues there, but really starting to actually look at testing with local stakeholders, what would have to be different for the supply chain and how it works in the Congo to be different with cobalt in getting active in-country action on this cobalt action partnership set up and taking action. It really is a huge problem. And actually seeing that everybody's standing together to say we wanna help solve this is gonna be a really massive improvement for a lot of people's lives. Same thing with lithium. The lithium supply chain, how and why it's so critical to electrification today based on the current technologies and holding a round table event soon in Chile to have a conversation about what are these dynamics and what needs to happen in order to have more transparency, more discussion. And these on this side, on the mining side, could not have stood up without work over the years, multi-stakeholder work between the NGOs and the mining industry itself. A lot of times they were at loggerheads and if you cannot talk to people about both the sides of your concerns are, then we're not going anywhere. And I don't think this whole effort could have stood up without that year, multiple year commitment. Interestingly enough, in circular economy, really looking at some key action areas, accelerating the adoption of second use for batteries, which again, big conversation here, but not globally, has not been as active globally. So get them reused at least. Really looking at how and why do we do more with recycling of lithium batteries and how and why do we actually deal with a lot of the lead acid recycling issues that are out there. And so that is all taking action right now. And then unlocking innovation. Again, we have a lot of battery technologies at RPE, I don't know, we funded like $400 million worth of research on different battery technologies. But the whole conversation, if you're gonna look at it from this angle of circular economy and supply chain, would you design things differently? Are there certain technologies that you'd wanna think about accelerating because they have less of the negative issues and perhaps we have to think about how do we drive their cost down faster? How do we enable their manufacturing in better ways? And so it becomes perhaps a different conversation than just, okay, what's my energy density? What's my charge rate? All these different aspects of the technical side of things. And so super exciting to see that this kind of coalition could come together. And lest you think that everybody's just gonna meet and nothing happens, I can share with you one that I think is super important outside of energy, which was the Tropical Forest Alliance. Sustainable palm oil is now a given around the world. It was not a given five to seven years ago. Much of the deforestation was happening because of palm oil production. And so we got together the entire supply chain and as it started to come together from those who made palm oil, it never really coalesced to we got those who demanded palm oil. So the buyers, all the big consumer product companies together in this discussion just like this and got them to commit to sustainable palm oil, that they would buy sustainable palm oil only. And as soon as that started to happen, you watched countries in Africa commit to what it would take in their country to have sustainable palm oil production. And so we've seen a radical turnaround and a radically different conversation in the palm oil supply chain because everybody came together, everybody came together and agreed that we needed to do something and came up with how they were gonna get it done. So I think that this one is the jury's out. We don't have the results yet, but I think it's set up really well. And I think if people have ideas about what could happen here, if you're work for a company in this space, we'd love to plug you into this effort because it is a part of the forum platform and working as a separate entity just attached to where we are today. One of the last examples I'll give is the work that we've been doing most recently on innovation. I think, again, here, innovation's taken for granted. It's part of what we do, it's essential. But accelerating that and what accelerating innovation means is something that we didn't feel an energy had been well studied. And so we put a study together, looking at what are the effective ways that innovation's happening and what are some of the big gaps. We also started conversations with Mission Innovation and Hydrogen Council, which is 30 hydrogen value chain companies about what are the gaps in innovation and how do things come together. And we looked at innovation alliances, public funding programs and regulation and policies. And we just published in May as part of the Clean Energy Ministerial a bold ideas for accelerating energy innovation globally. And if you read through this report, again, I think some of these things are reasonably obvious to this group. Ideas like an ARPA-E, where public, private sector sharing risk, being able to have roadmaps, right? Department of Energy and other places here, we have roadmaps for technology, but they're not globally or even regionally shared roadmaps around the world. And so our suggestions were these six buckets, creating a national institutions for energy innovation, so something like ARPA-E's, right? Which Mexico is actually picking up and looking at what they can do in this space. Bring that together. Developing instruments for public-private cooperation, co-investment, the EU and the UK are both looking right now at putting together funds where this is actually possible. There are all kinds of questions and issues you have to grapple with, but recognizing that some of these problems are just too big for any one country to go after them alone and that we have to come together with the public and the private sector. To actually super transparency of energy R&D investment, we've been talking about the fact that you'll never get every country to agree on what their research priorities are. But why can't we make it more transparent so that if you're looking to fund or to be part of batteries or grids or fuel or one of these pieces, how do you actually get people around the world together? Where are the funding priorities? Mainstreaming public procurement. Again, a lot of ministers will tell you we don't want startups in our procurement because there's too much risk. And I was like, okay, but strategically, there's a lot of interesting ideas about how you work into having new ideas in your procurement. They may start with pre-procurement funding. We did some of those with the Navy where they funded alongside of us in order to get things ready in four or five years to be able to be procured by them. So some really interesting pieces here that we were advocating for to be considered by these global governments. And so how many people are familiar with mission innovation? All right, you guys gotta check out the website. So at the Paris Accord, 22 countries plus the EU came together with a commitment that by 2021, they would double their renewable energy spending, clean energy R&D spending, and that their commitment was to reinvigorate and accelerate global energy innovation. And ultimately, it's not just about the spending on R&D, it's about that fourth line down, partnering with the private sector. So to actually marry up the work that they could fund with the work that businesses and the private sector can come in on. And they picked eight focus areas. Each of these areas is co-led by a couple of countries. And while it's still early, we're two and a half years into this, there's some really interesting things starting to come out. So on the clean energy materials, it's hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico, I believe. And they're actually Lawrence Berkeley, the Canada Institute for Advanced Research are coming together to do rapid prototyping of advanced materials key for energy development with using shared robotics, shared databases and algorithms. And so they've already started to stand this up and work on what needs to happen in this space. But the idea that you have multiple governments sitting down and marshaling the conversation forward is really important. Because you start to get crossover of ideas. So if I'm one country in this cohort and I wanna fund something and I'm in a discussion with the private sector and other governments, if we wanna fund it together, can we actually think about how to do that? That's really hard and really essential for countries, especially smaller ones. And so we were brought into the discussion last year at the China meeting, the second clean energy ministerial to actually, we signed an MOU in Mission Innovation to help them walk alongside the private sector and to have better conversations about what's going on. Because if you go to academic, you can't have a conversation with the businesses. If it's all about just funding research and not about how it's gonna get to market, you can't have academia show up and tell business, if you just give us some more money, we got it, right? It won't, it doesn't work, right? So how and why could we facilitate conversations about what needs to happen in this space? And so we were really pleased to see the evolution of the conversations over the past year. And we were just in Denmark on the 3rd of May for the ministerial and across these countries an increase of over $4 billion in the actual amount of R&D being moved into clean energy. And I think it's a 38% increase from the baseline of two years ago, they're on track to actually double, which is fine, except you could say, okay, is there a good outcome for that investment or not? But I think that improved transparency on their country strategies, on outcomes, on pilot projects was very much highlighted. If you go to the Mission Innovation website, you can see these country level strategies being laid out. They've actually gotten a lot of engagement with IEA and IRENA on measuring this, is recognizing that if we're not measuring progress and we're not being honest about what's going on, then we're really not getting there. And if IEA presented some data that says there's 38 critical areas that's necessary to keep to the climate Paris Accords that we need progress on innovation, we're only on track globally on four of them. Solar PV, data centers, electric vehicles, and lighting. Everything else is off track from what's estimated to be necessary in order to deal with the commitments of Paris, so the 2% climate goals. And so really coming up with how and why do we have more traction around these spaces is absolutely essential, and so this MOU that they signed with both of these agencies, we're excited about because that gives us the tracking and the knowledge that we need to actually continue to buoy partnerships. I already mentioned the new EU instruments that they're considering for public-private investment. The new challenge on hydrogen was launched, they started with only seven, they added hydrogen. And this one's being designed right from the beginning as a public-private cooperation. It's not, we as governments are committing to those other seven and we wanna get the private sector on board, but we're actually designing this with the hydrogen council and governments in order to be able to move this forward. So hopefully as you look at what are the developments happening in hydrogen, it will be much more a public-private sector conversation. Cross-border partnerships, very significant number of them announced, and again, there's sometimes where I was like, I don't get it, why can't you guys are both interested in funding carbon capture, why can't you get together?  Right, there's a lot of rules and public perception about how you do that. But we are seeing motion that I think is super important. We saw that Mexico put out a call for carbon capture technologies where anyone among the mission innovation countries can apply. Sweden put out some as well and Denmark where anybody can apply. There's joint funding going on among many of the Danish countries where it's open to any mission innovation nation. And so you all could apply to the Mexico challenge if you have a carbon capture idea that needs to be funded. And in addition, there's also some pieces around challenge spaces where people like Sweden, it's called gross Sweden I think, Innovate Sweden, where they actually are putting out procurement challenges to the globe to say innovators, we want you to come in, we want to be able to drive our agenda and among the Nordics, they're among the most progressive in the world on driving a clean energy agenda. But really trying to take the chance and demonstrate that we can do something more globally, more holistically than every nation alone. And so we're excited to be part of it and Canada is hosting the next clean energy ministerial in Vancouver next spring. And they are already in the planning stages about how do you drive commitments with everyone in order for action. And so this is my last slide before we go to questions but the energy transition is an imperative. I don't think anybody here doubts that. You probably wouldn't be at this meeting if you didn't already believe that. But it has both challenges and opportunities. And I think one of the biggest ones is that you have to translate things from a global level or a national level to a regional implementation. And the translation and the communication of those things is still not very good. I think we have a lot of issue just with information moving. But I am encouraged that there's more cross region, more cross border understanding cooperation either at least in road mapping if not in shared financing happening. There's more partnerships going on and there's more emphasis on metrics and tracking. And so if that's the encouraging part then what are you all gonna do about it? I think that that's the call to action is we have tremendous work being done both on the research side, on the business model side, on the growth of businesses side that needs to actually get though translated and out to the rest of the world. And so take advantage of opportunities on funding. I really do urge you to look at the mission innovation and the Clean Energy Ministerial websites. The countries are showing what's going on if you're a company thinking about going to other places. If you wanna be part of a partnership is let's look at that. Follow the developments on the mission innovation website, see what's happening in different places around the world. And consider how the work you're doing could be translated for use by somebody else. I mean it's enough sometimes to translate between technologists and business folks. How do we translate from one jurisdiction to another? Perhaps some of you have insights, perhaps there's coalitions already forming that might wanna help with that translation because I think that that's where we can provide the most good. And I have written here, you talk to people and ask questions but I would urge you to listen to people and see what their problems are. Where are the language different than yours? What's the barrier that keeps us from moving things forward? And think about what commitment you can make in order to help this transition move forward. We need to be in a different place than 81% fossil fuel in order to meet these commitments. And I am quite hopeful that we can do this but it is about everybody thinking about what can you do beyond your day to day focus that can actually help others move to this next phase. And given what I've seen in these dialogues around the world, people want to do the right thing. They need help translating some things where they actually know what to do with it. And so we know how to do that. We've done it in the communities here in California, in the US. And so I urge you to be inspired to take action because energy is key. There really isn't, we can't have any other conversation about what to do about the good inclusive growth of the world if we don't have energy in this. And that's a really important place, I think that I should leave it and maybe invite Barbara up to have some questions. So thank you very much.